July 15, 1998

Each day’s newspaper seems to carry yet another story about a shooting by or of children, whether by accident or intention, on the street or at school, from gang violence or by a lone gunman. We understand some of the reasons behind these events: the pervasive and extreme violence which is constantly portrayed in the mass media, and the easy availability of weapons. We also know that in almost all of the recent school shootings, the family of the perpetrator either tacitly condoned or actively supported the child’s use of firearms.

When an ethnic group is being persecuted, it is often hard to determine whether people’s religious or human rights are being violated. This is certainly true of the Nagas, a group of 2 million people living in India’s northeast. This tribal group, once headhunters, is now more than 90 percent Christian. The majority are Baptists.

Experts estimate that nearly 300,000 Nagas have been killed during their 50-year struggle with India, in what one journalist calls “India’s dirty little war.” Today the Nagas feel they are battling with India for their cultural and religious survival.

“The time has come,” the lawyer said,
“To talk of many things,
Of Gods, and gaps, and miracles,
Of lots of missing links,
And why we can’t be Darwinists,
And whether matter thinks.”
        --with apologies to Lewis Carroll

Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national child advocacy organization. CDF monitors federal and state policies concerning children and provides information and assistance to state and local child advocates and to providers of services to children. The organization will mark its 25th anniversary with a November celebration in Washington, D.C.

In June Congress held hearings on the Religious Liberty Protection Act of 1998 (RLPA). The new bill represents an attempt to breathe new life into the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court a year ago. Like RFRA, RLPA aims to correct the Supreme Court’s 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith, which critics believe rendered an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution’s free-exercise-of-religion clause.