BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This past week (November 9) the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it’s constitutional to sentence juveniles who commit crimes other than murder to life in prison without parole. Tim O’Brien reports.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young had just turned 15 when he committed a string of hotel robberies in the Tampa area, acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record.  Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money.

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN:  What tapes?

YOUNG:  Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security camera?

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN:  And you did that?

YOUNG:  Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

YOUNG: Kill her.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along.

YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother blames herself for her son’s problems.

STEPHANIE YOUNG:  Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, I mean …

O’BRIEN: But that didn’t keep Kenneth from being sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

JUDGE J. ROGERS PADGETT: What we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge J. Rogers Padgett

PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him, so we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Florida, like many states, allows prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults for serious crimes, and the state legislature did away with all parole in 1995. As a result, there are now 77 inmates in the state serving life without parole for non-homicides committed when they were under 18, more than in all other states combined. Paolo Annino runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University:

PAOLO ANNINO: This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions?

O’BRIEN: This week (November 9) the U.S. Supreme Court took up that question in two separate cases involving Terrence Graham, who at age 17 committed armed burglaries while on parole for a previous armed robbery, and Joe Sullivan, who was convicted of raping and robbing a 72-year-old woman when he was only 13.

BRYAN STEVENSON: We don’t think there’s any dispute that sentencing a 13-year-old to life in prison without parole is unusual. It’s happened only twice for non-homicides. We also think that to say to any child of 13 that you’re only fit to die in prison is cruel.

O’BRIEN: But Stevenson ran into some skeptical justices, including Antonin Scalia: “I don’t see why it is any crueler to an adolescent that it is to an adult… Where do you draw the line?” Justice Sam Alito: “What about …brutal rapes, assaults that render the victim paraplegic but not dead …the person shows no remorse… the worst case you could possibly imagine? That person must at some point be made eligible for parole? “You are correct, your honor,” answered Brian Gowdy, the attorney for Terrence Graham.

BRIAN GOWDY: If the court rules in Terrence’s favor, about one hundred persons who committed crimes as adolescents will benefit by getting a chance to show some day that they have changed, and that’s all we’re asking for. Not for immediate release, but a chance to show that the kid has changed.

Brian Gowdy

O’BRIEN: In court, Gowdy pointed to a landmark Supreme Court ruling four years ago in which the justices rejected the death penalty for juvenile offenders, relying heavily on evidence showing that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do. Several justices observed that that was a death penalty case, and death is different.

GOWDY: Death is different, but not in any critical respects when you’re talking about an adolescent. Both sentences condemn the adolescent to die in prison, both give up on the kid, both determine that the adolescent can’t be changed,  and both say that, based on an adolescent mistake, you can never live in civil society.

O’BRIEN: The attorney for Florida said the state’s sentencing practices were aimed at addressing a serious crime problem and that such policy decisions should not be second-guessed by federal judges.

SCOTT MAKAR (Florida Solicitor General): That’s a quintessential states’ judgment, and 21 states have said no to parole and our position is that the court shouldn’t impose something on the states that the states themselves have rejected.

O’BRIEN: Chief Justice John Roberts proposed a compromise requiring judges and juries to consider a defendant’s youth, but allowing life without parole in extreme cases. Defense lawyers dismissed the idea as too little.

STEVENSON: Because poor kids and minority kids and disadvantaged kids are always the ones who end up with these harsh sentence.

O’BRIEN: Conservatives on the court dismissed it as too much. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Kenneth Young and more than a hundred other prison inmates nationwide serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children got some support from what might seem to be an unlikely source. The judge who sentenced Young, J. Rogers Padgett, has come out against laws that deny parole to juveniles in non-homicide cases.

PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing I’m doing a snapshot, so what do I know?

O’BRIEN: The justices appeared sharply divided, making any decision unlikely before the end of the term next June. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

ABERNETHY: Among those who have filed briefs with the court are 20 religious groups that argued that the values of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion are central to their faiths. They said judges have a responsibility to consider those values, along with the possibility of rehabilitation, especially for juveniles. They urged what they call “restorative justice.”

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Another gay rights issue that has divided people of faith is hate crime legislation. President Obama signed an expansion of the hate crime law that makes it a federal offense to attack people because of their sexual orientation. Some faith leaders welcomed the hate crime expansion, calling it a human rights victory. But others fear it would inhibit religious speech, even though the law explicitly says no one will be prosecuted for their beliefs or speech.

Here to examine the issue is David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times who has covered religious liberty questions. David, welcome. Why do what appear to be a fair number of religious conservatives think this new law or this extension of the law is wrong?

DAVID KIRKPATRICK (New York Times Staff Writer): Well, if you believe yourself to be engaged in a culture war, a part of which is about the nature of sexuality and homosexuality, then you want to convey to your children, you want to teach your children that homosexuality is a sin. It’s something to be avoided. It’s not a natural kind of behavior. And now comes along a statute that is going to say homosexuals are a kind of person worthy of not only special respect but special protection. You’re going to see that as a defeat.

ABERNETHY: But what about seeing it as a threat to free speech, even to what a pastor might say in the pulpit? Some people have said pastors could be prosecuted for preaching the biblical view of homosexuality and other things like that. What about that?

KIRKPATRICK: That’s overblown. Okay, I mean, clearly this does not suspend the First Amendment, and there’s nobody, I think, on either side of the US Senate or House of Representatives that intends to see preachers locked in jail. But we get overblown rhetoric on the left and the right, and the reason why this particular overblown rhetoric finds some purchase in the minds of people out there is because there is an element of thought involved. You know, what a hate crime does is it adds to the penalty to an aggressive or criminal act if the person who perpetrated it was motivated by a special disdain for the person they’re hitting. You know, if someone is standing outside of a bar saying “I hate gay people” and then slugs a gay person, that’s a hate crime, and it does have something to do with their reasoning and their thinking, so it’s not ludicrous to think that a kind of thought is being penalized here.

ABERNETHY: And even that it might apply to a sermon?

KIRKPATRICK: Well, that goes a little bit far, but, you know, suppose a pastor gave a sermon about how terrible sodomy is, and then later that day he happened to get into a fight with a gay man. Well, he could be in trouble.

ABERNETHY: But what about just a parishioner who heard a sermon and then went out and did something? Would that, then—would the pastor then be held responsible for that?

KIRKPATRICK: I’m not a lawyer, but that seems pretty far-fetched to me. However, on the other hand, you know, if you’re an active participant in a congregation that spends a lot of time talking about what a sin sodomy is, and then you happen to get in an altercation with a gay man, I think that that could plausibly raise questions, and if you want to, you know, if we’re going to try to be as sympathetic as we can to the people who are concerned about this, let’s look at college campuses. You know, that’s a place where, within the context of the campus, people do regulate free speech, and they do regulate hate speech, and I think that there are some people who think, well, goodness, I don’t want my son or daughter to end up at a secular college where by reading certain passages of the Bible they’re going to trigger, you know, speech codes. So they’re not—it’s not completely irrational to feel like there’s something at stake here.

ABERNETHY: David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times. Many thanks.

Audio from ad: “All five committees defeated amendments that would have stopped an abortion mandate…”

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Abortion opponents have already launched an aggressive lobbying campaign. This new ad is from the group Americans United for Life.

CHARMAINE YOEST (President, Americans United for Life): Polling shows over 70 percent of Americans don’t want to see their tax dollars going for it, so that’s what this debate is over, is not whether or not you agree or disagree with abortion, but whether or not at the federal level we’re going to pay for it.

LAWTON: Meanwhile, an interfaith group called the Religious Institute gathered signatures of more than a thousand clergy affirming access to abortion.

REV. DEBRA HAFFNER (Executive Director, Religious Institute): We believe that abortion should be safe, legal, rare, and accessible, and that a health care reform should not make it more difficult for women to get abortions in this country.

LAWTON: In his address to a joint session of Congress last month, President Obama made a clear promise.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (speaking to Congress): Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.

LAWTON: But working that out legislatively has been complicated. The current House and Senate proposals do not explicitly prohibit abortion coverage. Congressional leaders say the bills would comply with the so-called Hyde Amendment, which restricts most abortion funding in Medicaid. Abortion opponents say that’s not good enough.

YOEST: Unless there’s an explicit exclusion of abortion, abortion will be in health care reform.

LAWTON: Yoest and her fellow activists also object to proposed compromises that would require insurance plans offering abortion coverage to keep public and private funds separate and use only the private funds to pay for abortions.

YOEST: A lot of the solutions that we see involve a lot of really fancy accounting gimmicks, and that’s exactly what it is, is it’s just moving money around from pot to pot in order to try to promote this fiction that somehow we’re not paying for it just because the money is being funneled through a particular channel.

LAWTON: But pro-choice activists say, given the legal right to abortion, that compromise is the very least Congress owes women.

HAFFNER: There may be a lot of medical services that I might disagree with that I wouldn’t want a member of my family to have, but that’s not up to me. If we care about the very difficult situations that women and families find themselves in, then out of that compassion we would make sure that women would have access to all options.

LAWTON: Faith-based moderates and liberals have been actively pushing for health care reform as a moral issue. Many are worried that abortion debates will derail their efforts.

REV. ANDREW GENSZLER (Director of Advocacy, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America): We think that in some sense it’s a distraction. I mean, it’s an important issue, a very important issue, but in the context of a country where a growing number, millions and millions of people, don’t have insurance, health insurance, we feel that’s more the main issue for this particular debate.

LAWTON: The issue has already become a rallying point for religious conservatives.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-IN): The American people will not stand for government-run insurance that uses taxpayer money to fund abortions in this country.

HAFFNER: I’m really disappointed that, once again, women’s lives, the desperate situation that so many women find themselves in, the desperate situation that so many poor women face is being used as a political football. I think it’s morally unconscionable that we are segregating some health services. Abortion’s a health service.

LAWTON: But abortion opponents say that’s precisely the view they’re fighting against.

YOEST: It’s really troubling to us that we face a future where we might not be able to make a fundamental difference between abortion and a tonsillectomy. For millions of Americans across this country, abortion is a morally objectionable activity, and so for us to lose the ability to differentiate with a tonsillectomy would be a real, real tragedy.

LAWTON: Activists on both sides of the abortion issue are mobilizing for some key battles in the next few weeks. Both the House and the Senate are expected to begin floor debates on health care reform by the end of the month, and the Obama administration hopes a final bill will be passed by the end of the year.

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

TIM O’BRIEN, correspondent: If you ever wondered where the middle of nowhere really is, it just might be right here: the Mojave Preserve in southern California. At 1.6 million acres, it is vast. Some find it beautiful, some even sacred. Slightly more than 90 percent of the preserve is owned by the federal government and maintained by the National Park Service. In 1934, the Death Valley chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars put up a cross here to honor American soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. But the cross is now encased in a plywood box as a result of a lawsuit brought by Frank Buono, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Frank Buono

FRANK BUONO: I want the cross on every Catholic church. I want the cross in my home. But I don’t want the cross to be permanently placed on federal government public lands or any other public lands for that matter.

O’BRIEN: Seventy-year-old Henry Sandoz has been taking care of the cross for the last 26 years. His best friend, a World War I medic on his death bed had exacted a promise from Sandoz back in 1983 to do so.

(to Henry Sandoz): Wy is it so important?

HENRY SANDOZ: Well, because of my word to my friend that I would maintain it. To me it means a whole lot.

O’BRIEN: Buono persuaded federal courts in California that the cross unconstitutionally promotes the Christian faith, a claim Henry Sandoz says he just doesn’t get.

HENRY SANDOZ: It shouldn’t mean no more than a memorial to the veterans, and also, when you see a cross on the highway you don’t necessarily—and I don’t either—think about that cross aspect, like you’re saying, well, somebody died there. That’s the meaning I think most people have out of it, or should have.

O’BRIEN: The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, found putting the display on public land violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from advancing religion. The decision outraged many veterans and triggered a public relations campaign on their behalf by the Dallas-based Liberty Legal Institute:

(Video produced by Liberty Legal Institute): “Our veterans stood for us. Now that their memorials are under attack around the country, are you willing to stand with them?”

O’BRIEN: Attorney Kelly Shackelford, who runs the Liberty Legal Institute, says the cross is all about honoring the nation’s war dead and has nothing to do with promoting religion:

KELL SHACKELFORD (Liberty Legal Institute): Well, I mean, if this cross goes down, because it’s a memorial in the middle of the desert, if you have to tear down a seven-foot cross in the middle of 1.6 million acres of desert, what do you have to do at Arlington Memorial Cemetery with a 24-foot-tall cross? This would literally affect almost every community in our country, because they all have veterans’ memorials, and a lot of those have religious imagery that’s attached to those.

O’BRIEN (to Frank Buono): What about Arlington National Cemetery?

FRANK BUONO: Oh, wonderful. You know, there’s probably no better place to express one’s religious beliefs than in a cemetery. This is not a cemetery.

Henry Sandoz

O’BRIEN: At least on the surface Frank Buono, a transplanted New Yorker, would appear to be an unlikely plaintiff in such a case. He helped run the Mojave Preserve in the mid-nineties as an assistant superintendent, and he is a practicing Catholic. The walls of his home are lined with crucifixes and other religious symbols, and Buono rankles at the suggestion that the purpose of the Mojave cross is solely to remember the nation’s war dead.

FRANK BUONO: What really disturbs me is the argument that somehow the cross is a secular symbol. I can’t think of anything more offensive to a Christian, to a Catholic, that the cross is a secular symbol. They say, well, it’s a secular symbol of death and sacrifice, and I say, well, only to the extent that it symbolizes the death and sacrifices of Jesus Christ. That is why the cross is a symbol of death and sacrifice, and believe me, I think to a Muslim, to a Jew, to a Hindu, to a Buddhist the cross is no such symbol of death and sacrifice.

O’BRIEN: The furor, if not the rage, the case has generated has not been lost on Buono.

(to Frank Buono): We’ve seen interviews with the people in that little town.

BUONO: Yeah.

O’BRIEN: They want to string you up.

BUONO: Oh, I have been told, though I try to avoid the sites, that if you go on the Internet and put my name in you’ll get people saying incredible things about me. Even within my own family I’ve had some people say, what are you doing? This is the cross, you’re a Catholic, and what are you…

O’BRIEN: Buono’s case also got the attention of the U.S. Congress and Representative Jerry Lewis, whose 41st congressional district includes the Mojave Preserve. Lewis introduced legislation that would have transferred the land on which the cross was located to a private veterans group in hopes of circumventing the constitutional question the cross raised.

REP. JERRY LEWIS (R-Calif.): We’ve attempted by way of the amendments and the appropriations process to first allow there to be a property exchange. Because we were fighting a battle with endless lawyers of ACLU, it seemed to us it was important to set aside the question as early as possible to preserve the cross itself.

O’BRIEN: Lewis’s bill allowed the Interior Department to take the land back should the cross ever be removed, prompting the lower courts to find the transaction a “sham.” Buono has now moved away from the Mojave Preserve—almost 500 miles away—to a small town in Arizona not far from the Mexican border, so far away that the Interior Department says Buono no longer has a real stake in the case. The department has asked the Supreme Court to throw out Buono’s complaint because his only real injury is that “he must observe government conduct with which he disagrees.”

(to Frank Buono): What’s it to you? You live 500 miles away.

FRANK BUONO: Whether I’m 500 miles away or five feet away from it, the fact of the matter is that that land is land that I own, that’s land that you own; that’s federal public lands. It belongs to everyone, and so it matters to me that the lands that are held in common by the United States do not become the venues for sectarian religious expressions, even of my own religious expressions.

O’BRIEN: Legal scholars say this case has at least the potential to be the most important religion case to reach the Supreme Court in decades. But there have been many cases involving religious displays on public property. What makes this case so different may have less to do with the case itself than with the court that will decide it. The justices have long been sharply split on religion questions, often dividing 5-4. The addition of three new justices in the last four years could change everything. Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine.

PROFESSOR ERWIN CHEMERINSKY: I think there are five votes on the current court that want to dramatically change the law with regard to the wall that separates church and state. These five justices—Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito—don’t believe that there’s a wall that separates church and state.

O’BRIEN: No decision is likely from the High Court for several months in a case that could have momentous consequences for the country, notwithstanding its simple beginnings arising out of Henry Sandoz’s pledge to a dying friend 26 years ago.

HENRY SANDOZ: You know, to me—I guess it’s really great, but I’m just kind of a hick, I guess you’d say, a country person, and it’s really out of the ordinary for me.

O’BRIEN: The words “separation of church and state” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment ban on government establishment of religion would surely require at least some separation—but how much? This reconstituted Supreme Court today appears poised to reconsider that crucial question.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: As we mentioned earlier, another presidential nominee is in the spotlight this week, Sonia Sotomayor. The news of her nomination to the Supreme Court has dominated headlines, along with the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on same-sex marriages. Joining us now to discuss those stories are Dan Gilgoff, senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, and Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Welcome to both of you. Dan, you’ve described the nominee’s record on abortion as “inscrutable.” What do we know about her record on that particular issue?

DAN GILGOFF (Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report): Not much. She’s ruled on a handful of cases related to abortion, but none of them directly related to Roe v. Wade. The one case that some in the pro-life community are citing as a hopeful sign for their cause is that she ruled against plaintiffs who are seeking to overturn the Mexico City policy, which bans federal funds from going to family-planning providers abroad that either endorse or promote abortion. Other than that she seems to be, you know, a black box on this issue, which is kind of fitting, because David Souter, the justice who she’s replacing, was also promised to be a conservative when George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Court in 1990, then of course voted to uphold Roe v. Wade a couple of years later. And so what’s happening this week is that some abortion rights groups are getting rather nervous. That’s kind of unexpected.

Dan Gilgoff

POTTER: Well, Tod, is this actually good news for conservatives who may have been concerned that the president would nominate a true liberal to the Court?

TOD LINDBERG (Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Washington, DC): Well, I think that it’s still very much up in the air. It’s hard to see at this point. We all know that people who are hoping to be nominated to the Supreme Court are very cautious about what they say in their private lives and in their public writings, apart from what they are doing on the bench with regard to the abortion issue. I know people who aspire to be judges who would tell you, “I would absolutely never discuss that with you” for that precise reason. You want to be opaque, because if you have a position, I mean a discernable position, then you put yourself at substantially greater political risk. It’s kind of kabuki drama in its own way, but it’s one that we’ve been playing in Washington for a long time.

POTTER: And yet Hispanic voters traditionally are sort of much more anti-abortion than the rest of, say, the Democratic electorate. Is that — does that give you any clues, that fact that she’s Hispanic?

Mr. LINDBERG: You know, you’re talking about making a conclusion based on statistical evidence, polling, etc. and applying it to a particular person. It’s just not going to work for us. We’re not going to be able to know that. The test will be once she’s confirmed, and I think everybody assumes that she will be, when the cases arrive.

POTTER: Dan, what do we know about her record on issues of religious freedom, separation of church and state — other issues that really matter to voters of faith groups?

Mr. GILGOFF: Well, we know that she has a record of siding with those who are alleging violations of their religious liberty. And I think that’s been another bright spot for conservatives. It’s interesting in that conservatives came out roundly against her as soon as her nomination was announced this week, and at the same time, I mean, in the analysis that they were releasing before Obama made his choice, she kind of received the warmest treatment. And I think some of that was because of her rulings over the religious liberty cases.

Mr. LINDBERG: I think you’d also have to draw the distinction between the conservative commentary crowd and actually the members of the Senate, who have taken a very cautious view of this. I mean they promised, the Republicans promised full scrutiny, full assessment, but certainly no one has leapt out to be an opposition figure. Certainly no one has said this nominee is unacceptable where it really matters, which is in the Senate.

POTTER: So the presumption at this point is that she will be confirmed?

Tod Lindberg

Mr. LINDBERG: I think the presumption is exactly that, in the absence of some unknown, unexpected revelation or disclosure.

POTTER: And that would leave us with six justices out of the nine being Catholics for the very first time. Is that important? Does that have significance?

Mr. GILGOFF: I think that it really speaks to the diversity ideologically of the Catholic community in this country. I mean, you talk as though, or people talk as though there’s a Catholic voting bloc, for instance. But Catholics really have voted for every winning president going back to Richard Nixon, and so it’s hard to see them — you know, they’re conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics — as a distinct bloc. But so far on the Court they’ve supplied the conservative side — the [five] Catholics are voting with the conservatives on the Court. So what I think this will do is kind of reflect more broadly the Catholic diversity that exists in the country on the Court. I also think it tells us something important about the administration politically in that they’ve taken the Catholic community very seriously. This is really a nod — Sotomayor — to the new Latino complexion of the United States. I mean, the Catholic Church is losing, you know, four Catholics for every person that’s signing up for the Church, and if it wasn’t for this huge infusion of immigration, the Church would have a real problem on its hands, and I think they’re really acknowledging that in this pick.

Mr. LINDBERG: I think the conclusion that we have to draw from this six-out-of-nine thing is that Catholic is always a plus in terms of your political calculation of who you are going to put on the Court.

POTTER: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the ruling in California that upheld a ban on same-sex marriage there.The Republicans, I gather, put out some talking points this week on Sotomayor, and one of their talking points was that she could impose a federal right to same-sex marriage. Does that have the chance of holding water, that argument, or no?

Mr. GILGOFF: I don’t think so, and I also think that the timing of this is actually very serendipitous for the White House. There was even some speculation that the White House expedited the announcement of Sotomayor to get ahead of the California Supreme Court ruling, because had the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 8 you would have had this conservative uproar, largely directed at the Court, saying this is really the threat. The threat is that there will be Court-imposed same-sex marriage.

POTTER: Activist judges?

Mr. GILGOFF: Exactly. And so I think that the California Supreme Court ruling was really a lucky break for the Obama Administration in getting, you know, in sort of clearing a path for Sotomayor.

POTTER: What do you make of the next steps for the opponents of same-sex marriage? What do they do now? Where is their next step?

Mr. LINDBERG: Well, you know, I think there will be a continuation of initiative kind of processes. It is also interesting to look at what, you know, the next steps for the proponents are going to be. I think there’s a pretty strong indication that they do not want this matter, really, in the federal courts at this point. They would rather spend some time building up a case both politically and in terms of kind of the state court rulings that they’re able to obtain with the hope that California is more of an outlier than an indication of the trend, and take that then eventually into the federal courts. So I think, you know, conservatives will be looking to try to win in state courts where possible to show, however strongly, you know, the emotions run on this issue, that there is a principled case for defense of marriage as between a man and a woman, and that that is where most of the American people are.

POTTER: Are the statutes in the 29 states that have already banned same-sex marriage basically safe, because you’d have to go after them through some kind of referendum process, which is really hard to do?

Mr. LINDBERG: Well, safe is — no. I mean, I think if there’s ever a majority on the Supreme Court that wants to change the law on this then those statutes are precisely not safe, and I think that everybody’s aware of that and what the stakes are. But, you know, what I don’t see is a quick resolution of this issue. I think it’s one that unfolds over possibly ten years or maybe longer.

POTTER: Alright, thank you both very much. Thank you to Tod and thank you to Dan for joining us for that conversation.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: California’s gay marriage law remains in legal limbo. The state’s Supreme Court judges have less than two weeks to either uphold or strike down the gay marriage ban known as Proposition 8. Prop 8 passed last Election Day, in large part because Mormon churches mobilized for it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints withstood blistering criticism from outside the faith. Now resentments are festering inside the Mormon community. Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Dr. Pam Chan is an OB/GYN and a lifelong Mormon living in San Francisco. She found herself deeply conflicted when she got the message that her church was going all out in support of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California.

Dr. PAM CHAN (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): There would be little announcements made here and there, announcements about how we might be able to volunteer our time to, you know, go door-to-door, to hand out flyers, to stand on street corners with signs, and these little announcements, you know, I’d hear and I’d look around and wonder, “Is everyone okay with this? Does anyone besides me see a problem with this?”

Pam Chan

SEVERSON: Ron Packard is a lawyer, a former Mormon bishop and former mayor of Los Altos, California. He is now a councilman who supported Proposition 8 and says it’s extremely rare for the church to get involved in ballot issues.

RON PACKARD (Former Mormon Bishop): I think that they made an exception to their general policy of not getting involved because they have a core concern about the protection of families and the possible disintegration of families in modern society.

SEVERSON: The church’s official position is that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for his children. Mormons believe they are led by a modern-day prophet who receives revelations from God, and when the prophet speaks members usually follow. But with this issue Dr. Chan discovered that other active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were also strongly opposed to the church’s position on gay marriage.

Dr. CHAN: Our church is the church of Jesus Christ, first and foremost, and my understanding of the Gospel of Christ is that it’s a Gospel of love and acceptance. So it seems like a policy that’s about discrimination, which often goes hand in hand with fear and hatred, not about love and acceptance, and that for me is really troublesome.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees is a retired professor of literature at UCLA, a former Mormon bishop and a church scholar.

BOB REES (Former Mormon Bishop): In reality, this is an issue which has divided our society. It’s divided churches. It’s divided families, and some individuals are divided within themselves.

LISA FAHEY (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So during the rallies I had some signs that said “Straight and Active Mormon for Marriage Equality” because I wanted to let people know, and I got a lot of attention for that. People came up and shook my hand and hugged me and told me, “Thank you very much.”

SEVERSON: Lisa Fahey and Kim McCall are also active Mormons, also conflicted.

Ms. FAHEY: That’s my whole point for speaking out — letting other people know that you can vote “no” or you can be for gay marriage and still be an active Mormon.

Ron Packard

Mr. PACKARD: The church has a long tradition of encouraging thinking members to not be afraid to speak up — beginning with Brigham Young. He said doesn’t want blind allegiance. He wants people to pray about it, think about it, and come to their own conclusions.

SEVERSON: In the year 2000, a majority of California voters approved a proposition stating that only a marriage between a man and a woman was valid. Eight years later, the California Supreme Court ruled that the ban on gay marriage violated the state’s constitution, and that’s when the drive began to amend the constitution with Proposition 8, and that’s when church leaders sent out a letter to its members calling on them to donate their time and money to an unequivocal moral cause. Although many churches and a majority of Californian’s supported Proposition 8, Mormons were probably the most organized and donated almost half the $19 million generated for the campaign.

Mr. REES: And I think there’s no question that the church’s involvement in this was determinative. Many people were unprepared for the effectiveness of the church in doing what it does. I think the church was probably unprepared for such a strong negative response to its involvement.

SEVERSON: The church may also have been unprepared for the number of members who opposed the church’s proclamation. Members who are still active like Laura Compton, a church organist and mother of two, who operates a Web site called Mormonsformarriage.com. She says the site still gets lots of attention and in the run-up to Proposition 8 was getting thousands of hits a day.

LAURA COMPTON (Mormonsformarriage.com): The comments that we have gotten are a lot of members who say, “Thank you so much for creating this community. I felt so alone.” A lot who said, “Because you have this site, I’m able to continue going to church.” A lot of people who have called us to repentance for what we have been doing, and a lot of outside people who’ve said, “Thank you for showing us that not all Mormons, you know, want to take away our rights to marriage.”

Ms. FAHEY: It’s been really difficult to be a member of the church during this time. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that possibly I should be excommunicated, and that’s really hurt me, because I feel like I’m really a very loving, forgiving person.

Kim McCall and Lisa Fahey

Mr. REES: The most unfortunate thing for me in all of this thing that happened over Proposition 8 was the divisiveness, the acrimony. Each side began in some sense emotionally and spiritually dis-fellowshipping or excommunicating the other side.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the most fierce opposition has come from gay rights advocates that have rallied against the church around the nation. He’s says he on a blacklist because he supported Proposition 8.

Mr. PACKARD: There’s some people who’ve lost their jobs because they supported Proposition 8.

SEVERSON (to Mr. Packard): Really?

Mr. PACKARD: Yeah.

KIM MCCALL (Member, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): So one of the dynamics of the church over the last hundred years is to move more and more mainstream. Okay, we looked very sort of un-American. You know, Brigham Young was opposed to the Pledge of Allegiance [Editor's Note: Mr. McCall's statement about Brigham Young is in error. Brigham Young died in 1877. The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892], and we looked really outside the mainstream, and there’s been a, you know, more American than thou now we’re the most patriotic people. Okay, we weren’t very monogamous. Now we’re more monogamous than everybody else. You know, we’ve got to be. You know, we’re so worried about polygamy in our history and how odd it makes us look that maybe we need to overreact.

Mr. REES: I think there is little question that a from a public relations point of view the church has suffered over its involvement in Proposition 8, and I know of people who have had second thoughts about joining the church over this issue. I know some of our missionaries have had a difficult time finding open doors and open hearts because of this.

Mr. PACKARD: A majority of the people of the United States don’t want same-sex marriages. So for the majority we may have, instead of getting a hit we get a halo. Whenever any organization gets involved in the political process, there’s going to be some who consider it a hit and others who feel that they’re a hero.

SEVERSON: Ron Packard says the church does not discriminate against gays, that his niece and some of his friends are gay, and that the church does not have a policy of denying the sacrament to homosexual members. But Lisa Fahey says there are still members who don’t understand what it means to be gay.

Laura Compton

Ms. FAHEY: I even had some friends say that they still think that homosexuality is a choice. I don’t think the church leadership feels that way but members — some members feel that way, wrongly of course.

SEVERSON: Bob Rees says as a bishop he counseled gay and lesbian members who felt they were not wanted in the church.

Mr. REES: We have congregations who are not inclusive of the homosexual members of their congregations. We have families in which brothers and sisters don’t speak to one another over these issues, and I as a Christian, I can’t understand that. It breaks my heart.

SEVERSON: Laura Compton says since Proposition 8 the church leadership has become more flexible, making it known that members can still be in good standing even if they oppose the church’s position.

Ms. COMPTON: This has not challenged my faith, no. My faith is independent of the morality or the politics of gay marriage. It’s deeper. My faith is in a Christ who loves everybody and wants everyone to come to him, and a God that loves the world no matter whether they are Mormon or Muslim or Jewish or Catholic, and wants all of us to be there and all of us to treat each other like we’re brothers and sisters and not like we’re them and us.

Mr. REES: The function of faith communities is to make a home a for us, and I think that many of our Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters feel homeless, because we haven’t created a home for them. But I see that changing. I think there is much more understanding.

SEVERSON: As other states take up the issue of gay marriage, Mormon church leaders this time around have not asked members to get involved. Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court is once again considering the constitutionality of the ban on gay marriage. Their decision is expected soon.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: In inner cities across the US high numbers of African-American men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s costly to keep them in prison. It’s also costly to the communities they leave behind — and return to. Phil Jones reports.

PHIL JONES: Welcome to Brownsville — a pocket of poverty inside Brooklyn, New York, a place where crime and prison often are a way of life.

RONALD HERRON: Both my parents were drug addicts. My father wasn’t at home.

Ronald Herron

DEJUAN SMITH: I went to prison for murder in the second degree.

NATHANEL RICE: The first time for robbery — two years; second time for robbery —12 years; third time for drug possession.

VINCE MATTOS (Community Activist): I was out hustling narcotics. What I would have to tell Mom is, “Look, I found a whole bunch of money!” I would see Mom crying because she was behind on bills or something like that. I would come in and say, “Mom, look I found x, y and z.” You know, she was like, oh, you know, “God is good” — this and that.

JONES: But Vincent Mattos’s mother is proud of her 42-year-old son.

Mr. MATTOS (speaking to men): Hey brothers. How you doing?

JONES: He now roams these troubled streets as a community activist. He knows the turf.

Mr. MATTOS: Young men that’s out on the corner from sun-up to sundown, falling back to do what they know to do to earn a living because there’s no jobs for them. There’s no helpful reentry program that’s in place right now. Whatever you want, you can get it on this strip. Drugs, sex, and guns, that’s what’s major out here.

JONES: What else is major — the pervasive presence of police with the task of arresting the bad guys and putting them behind bars. There is no doubt that police activity decreases crime. But is there a tipping point, when legitimate law enforcement, designed to protect the public, may have unintended consequences: promotion poverty, even more crime?

ERIC CADORA (Director, Justice Mapping Center): The current overuse and overdependence on criminal justice is a complete failure. It’s having no impact on these issues of public safety and crime. That’s not to say there isn’t a need for a level of criminal justice. But this radical overuse is not accomplishing those goals.

Eric Cadora

JONES: In the 1970s, there were about 200,000 inmates in US prisons. Today there are about two million. For years law enforcement used crime mapping to target places where the crimes were being committed. Eric Cadora, director of an organization called the Justice Mapping Center, is an advocate for sentencing reform and prison alternatives. He proposed another use for mapping.

Mr. CADORA: I said, “Well, what if we don’t do crime mapping? What if, instead, we mapped where people lived who are going into jail and prison every year?” When we started doing maps of where people lived, we found hugely concentrated neighborhoods where vast majorities of people were going to prison and jail and coming back, and other neighborhoods where nearly none were.

This is New York City. The brightest red show the highest rate per thousand adults, male adults, admitted to prison for a single year. Let’s say there are about 100,000 people living in Brownsville — about half of them are male, that’s about 50,000. About — between 10 and 13 percent are going to prison and jail every year.

JONES: This increased prison population has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Mr. CADORA: We can now calculate, block by block, how much we’re spending to remove and return people en masse from and back to that block.

JONES: This cluster of housing projects is what Caldora calls a “Million Dollar Block.”

Mr. CADORA: We found about 150 individual blocks in New York City for which we were spending more than $1 million a year to remove and return people to prison and jail.

Vince Mattos

JONES: Cadora uses dark red to show the concentrations in other states. They are maps that call for new directions.

Mr. CADORA: What these maps have done is accumulate the effect over the course of a year of a criminal justice and imprisonment system. What’s heated up here is a mass migration with the costs of having to move back and forth from this neighborhood to prisons upstate and back. So what we’re seeing here is constant grappling with resettlement, with disruption, cost of split families, tough health care.

JONES: Greg Jackson, another civic activist and a life-long resident of Brownsville, doesn’t need a map. He’s seen his own community imprisoned.

GREG JACKSON (Community Activist): Incarceration is not just the individual going to jail, but it’s the whole family going to jail, for Brownsville. Everybody’s suffering from it.

JONES: How’s that?

Mr. JACKSON: Because when this individual comes out of jail he still can’t find employment. And that person, the kids he left behind, the parents he left behind, the wife he left behind, they all suffer in the interim. So, when he comes out you think, “Wow, it’s a good time, my father’s coming out of jail, my mother’s coming out of jail.” There’s nothing good about it.

JONES: For one thing, felons aren’t allowed to live in these public housing projects, although some do. Others end up homeless, and most are jobless. Ask Dejaun Smith, still struggling eight years after his release.

Mr. SMITH: I’ve done odd jobs like — I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many. I went to an interview several months ago, and once they learned about my conviction they looked at me like, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

JONES: After decades of hard-line policies on crime — tough justice — more and more communities are looking into what is called Justice Reinvestment.

Mr. CADORA: Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

Matoka Belton

JONES: Most of the crimes are connected to violence, drugs, and alcohol. But researchers found another culprit for the increased prison populations.

Mr. CALDORA: We found states where 60 to 65 percent of everyone entering prison each year were entering as a result of a revocation of parole and probation.

JONES: That was the case in Kansas, so legislators passed a new law — a new direction —committing taxpayer dollars to cities and communities that change parole and probation regulations that’ll reduce the prison population by 20 percent.

Mr. CALDORA: That’s kind of what the reinvestment project is about. It’s about saying, “Look, if you can reduce it, we’ll give you the money to keep reducing it.”

JONES: According to Caldora, states are being forced to rethink their hard line throw-the-criminals-in-jail attitude because, especially in these hard economic times, the criminal justice system is too costly, both financially and psychologically.

Mr. CALDORA: They realize that this overwhelming overuse of criminal justice is one of the greatest threats to sort of civil society.

JONES: This threat to society, this impact on communities in prison, can be felt on the streets and inside the crowded housing projects. We met Matoka Belton. She didn’t want us to see her three children. Their father went to prison.

(to Ms. Belton): What was he in prison for?

MATOKA BELTON: A number of things, and it was due to survival.

JONES: What was impact on the children of him being away?

Mr. MATOKA: It’s hard because they’re like, you know, what “school” is this, because you try not to say he’s in prison. “What school is this that they don’t come home? College?” But then it comes to the point where they’re a certain age and you can’t lie anymore. I was once an inmate myself. I know what it was like for my children to feel like, “Wow, my mother’s not here. Why can’t mommy come home with us?” It’s hard to leave a visit.

JONES: It’s a cruel cycle — poverty, crime, prison — passed from one generation to the next. A child whose parent went to prison is likely to end up behind bars too.

Mr. MATTOS: When you look at a kid and you say, “How could that kid, you know, have done such a crime like that?” Because he was never really told that was something wrong to do. He never celebrated Christmas with the family or sat down at the dinner table with the family.

JONES: About 700,000 inmates come back home every year. Most are unprepared for re-entry, and their communities are unprepared for their return. As the US government is making huge investments in industries and businesses, it is now being forced to also address a broken justice system, a system in desperate need of a stimulus package of sorts — justice reinvestment.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Phil Jones in Brooklyn, New York.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This week (May 14) in Wausau, Wisconsin, jury selection began in the trial of a mother charged with reckless homicide. She relied only on God, not a doctor, to heal her sick daughter. The girl died. The mother was a member of a sect that teaches reliance on faith and prayer alone to heal. She was not a Christian Scientist, which does not forbid medical treatment. Christian Scientists are also active in trying to create legislation that balances the state’s duty to protect children with parents’ trust in God. But should there be any exemptions from prosecution because of religious faith? Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: The 911 call was from Kara Neumann’s mom, by Kara’s bedside at home in Wisconsin.

911 OPERATOR: Just feel by her nose and see if she’s breathing.

LEILANI NEUMANN: Okay. Is she breathing? Is she breathing? Is she breathing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

Ms. NEUMANN: No, she’s not.

SEVERSON: It was too late to save the 11-year-old girl suffering from juvenile diabetes. Dr. Norman Fost, a pediatrician and ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, says her death could have been prevented.

“Criminal prosecution is a way of the state saying that we care about our children.”

Dr. NORMAN FOST (Pediatrician and Ethicist, University of Wisconsin): Millions of Americans have diabetes, and most children with diabetes are living reasonably normal lives. There are complications later in life, so that life expectancy may be curtailed. But Kara Neumann had many, many decades of happy life ahead of her.

SEVERSON: Dr. Fost says he has seen many kids, like Kara, often suffer and die needlessly because their parents refused to take them to a doctor and instead put their faith in the healing power of prayer. The Neumanns reportedly subscribed to the teachings of Unleavened Bread Ministries, an online religion.

University of Wisconsin religion professor Shawn Peters says there are a surprising number of religious groups that preach faith healing based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and a fervent belief in the power of a loving God. Peters authored a book called “When Prayer Fails.”

Dr. SHAWN PETERS (Professor of Religion, University of Wisconsin and Author, “When Prayer Fails.”): They look to passages from books of the Bible such as the Epistle of James. The fifth chapter of James has this passage that begins, “Are any among you sick?” and then it seems to spell out treatment — and it’s treatment that doesn’t include secular medicine. It’s treatment that includes prayer and anointment with oil.

SEVERSON: In a small, private graveyard in a Portland, Oregon suburb there are at least 75 tombstones of children whose parents belonged to a small church called the Followers of Christ that relied on faith healing in lieu of medical treatment. Russ Briggs left the church after he buried two baby sons in this cemetery.

RUSS BRIGGS: There’s something about holding your child in your arms while it dies. It’s — it’s just — it’s terrible.

SEVERSON: Professor Peters says the cases we hear about are only the tip of the iceberg.

Dr. PETERS: It’s sort of a hidden tragedy in communities that are not part of mainstream America. We just don’t know what’s happening to the kids in those church communities.

SEVERSON: Until 1999, parents of kids buried here were not prosecuted because Oregon law had a religious faith-healing exemption. Oregon closed the exception, but more than 30 states, including Wisconsin, still allow them. But that didn’t stop the district attorney in Wisconsin from charging Kara Neumann’s parents with reckless homicide, and that’s when Joe Farkas with the Christian Science church stepped in. The church helped write the first law, which after the Neumann arrest was viewed as protecting reckless parents. Now the church is proposing new legislation which Farkas says will give children more protection.

Russ Briggs

JOE FARKAS (Christian Science Church): We never intended it to be in any way perceived as a shield for reckless behavior. So as people very much involved in that law we always had wanted to protect children, and we felt we had to step in with a solution.

SEVERSON: Christian Science may be the largest and best known of all the faith-healing traditions. The church has full-time paid practitioners who pray for the sick. Joe Farkas is one of them. He says healing represents a fundamental connection Christian Scientists have with God.

Mr. FARKAS: We expect a good outcome because we’re praying to an all-good God. We don’t believe that suffering is ever the will of God or that someone should die because it’s God’s will. We see that the outcome from successful prayer is always good.

SEVERSON: Farkas says the legislation the church proposes is designed first to protect kids, but it also outlines a number of factors for a jury to consider, including the length of the illness. But Dr. Fost says the proposed changes only serve to protect the parents.

Dr. FOST: So if a child has been ill for a long time, then the prosecutor should say, “Well, let’s see. He/she was ill for a long time. Maybe that gave the parents reason to think that this wasn’t very serious, because she hadn’t died yet.” The point is that there should be no criteria — no special criteria — based on religious beliefs.

SEVERSON: The bottom line, according to Rita Swan, is that the proposed law would actually make it more difficult to prosecute faith healers. Swan is the founder of Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty.

RITA SWAN (Founder, Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty): There is one condition about the child’s age. Well, what does that mean? Does it mean that parents have no legal duty to get medical care for a teenager? The conditions are vague. They’re contradictory. They’re confusing to the jury. There’s no state in the country that has a law like this.

SEVERSON: Joe Farkas insists that the church would never dictate that Christian Science parents shouldn’t seek medical care.

Mr. FARKAS: Our church does not have any strictures against seeking medical treatment, and it also does not shun any of the members that do seek medical attention.

Rita Swan

Mrs. SWAN: I’m not saying that the officials come and threaten you with a gun or with some terrible punishment, but the theology itself says that Christian Science is the only method that really heals disease.

SEVERSON: But Rita’s sixteen-month-old son Matthew died. Matthew had meningitis that was not diagnosed until it was too late and, she says, not until her Christian Scientist practitioner finally told her to go see a doctor under the pretense that Matthew might have a broken bone. Rita and her husband ended up leaving the church, disillusioned about its teachings—the same teaching that continue to inspire Joe Farkas.

Mr. FARKAS: We have studied and read about the healings of Jesus, and Jesus demonstrated that all sorts of illnesses could be healed. I’m not walking on water, but I have seen things that have been quite dramatic, and I have read cases of things that have been dramatic.

SEVERSON: Farkas says he has witnessed his own wife’s dramatic healing.

Mr. FARKAS: The doctor she went back to recommended that she have her uterus removed now. We didn’t have any kids at the time and that was quite a blow to hear that we couldn’t have kids. One night when my wife was praying, a sense of divine love was felt by her and some words came to her consciousness. When she woke up in the morning, she was completely healed.

SEVERSON: Farkas says Christian Scientists love their kids and would never be reckless with their health, but the church is opposed to another law the Wisconsin legislature will also be voting on this session that removes all religious faith-healing exemptions — a law that Rita Swan supports.

Mrs. SWAN: I know in many cases parents are relieved. It takes the moral burden of decision-making off of the parents’ shoulders. They no longer have broken a law of the church.

Professor Shawn Peters

SEVERSON: Dr. Fost says he would never discourage spiritual healing — that prayer plus medical care is probably better than either one alone. But the law, he says, needs to be there to protect helpless kids.

Dr. FOST: I don’t think the point is to punish the Neumanns, and I’m not in favor of sending them to jail if they are prosecuted. But I think criminal prosecution is a way of the state saying that we will — we care about our children. We’ll protect them.

Prof. PETERS: There is no criminal intent. I mean, in all of the hundreds of these cases that I have looked at, part of what makes them so tragic is that the parents are doing what they think is best for their children. The punishment that they care about would be the punishment in the hereafter. That is what is significant.

SEVERSON: If convicted the Neumanns could go to jail for 25 years, but faith-healing parents are seldom put behind bars.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWS WEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Madison, Wisconsin.

LUCKY SEVERSON:  Some think Tim DeChristopher committed a crime and should be punished. Others think breaking the law was the right thing to do. This University of Utah student, whose only previous brush with the law consisted of two speeding tickets, hardly seems like someone who would purposely break the law.  But here he is facing prison time for committing a felony deliberately.

Tim DeChristopher

TIM DECHRISTOPHER (Student, University of Utah): Jail is certainly a scary thing, but I’ve been scared for my future for a long time. I think that the scariest thing for my whole generation is that we stay on the path that we’re on now. Jail is not nearly as scary as dealing with the real consequences of climate change that we’re expected to see in my lifetime.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher is a devoted environmentalist—has been since he was a kid. He’s especially worried about what man is doing to hasten global warming. He was moved to tears after speaking with noted Stanford University environmentalist Terry Root at a conference a few months ago.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: She said there were things we could have done in the ’80s and things we could have done in the ’90s, but I’m sorry, I think it’s too late. It shook me to the core. I literally went outside the hotel where the conference was being held, and I just cried. And I went through a very — a period of really deep despair, where it was almost like I was mourning for my future; that I was mourning for the future of us all.

SEVERSON: He was convinced the Bush administration was auctioning off too much of the West to drilling companies. So when he heard the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, was conducting an auction in December of last year offering leases for over 350,000 acres of public land in Utah, some of it in pristine red rock country, he decided to attend, expecting to disrupt the auction and then get kicked out.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And instead I went inside. And as soon as I got inside the door an official said, “Hi.  Are you here for the auction?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And she said, “Are you here as a bidder?” And I said, “Well, yes I am.”

SEVERSON: Dressed like a student and carrying a backpack, DeChristopher started bidding simply to drive up the prices, but before long he was winning bids.

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I figured I probably would go to prison, and so I had to ask myself if I could live with that. But on the other hand seeing this opportunity to protect some of this land, keep some of this oil in the ground and give us a better chance of a livable future, if I turn my back on that opportunity can I live with that? And I thought, “No.”

SEVERSON: He ended up purchasing 13 lease parcels — over 22,000 acres — for about $1.7 million until the auction was abruptly stopped.

Ron Yengich

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: And then a BLM agent came straight over to me and showed his badge and said, “Lets go speak outside.” And then he asked me what my intentions were — whether or not I intended to pay. And I told him very clearly that my intent was to disrupt the auction, that this was an act of civil disobedience.

RON YENGICH (Attorney): If you’re charged with a federal felony you’re in serious trouble.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher’s attorney, Ron Yengich, acknowledges his client committed an act of civil disobedience, but because it’s against federal law to bid without the intention or means of paying, his client is facing three to five years in prison.

Mr. YENGICH: The idea that he is a good kid — he’s a nonviolent kid. He did it, if not on the spur of the moment, he certainly did it because of a deep-seeded belief that this country should be green.

KATHLEEN SGAMMA (Director, Government Affairs, Independent Petroleum Association): Right, I think he should be prosecuted.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma is director of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association. She says the industry has a good record when it comes to the environment, and DeChristopher did wrong and should be punished.

Ms. SGAMMA: I don’t think this rises to the level of a case where civil disobedience really is warranted. We reclaim the land. We are very protective of the environment with out activity, despite what you hear in the press and despite the rhetoric of environmental groups. So unfortunately in this case I believe the perception that oil and gas is going to come in and destroy the land has caused this person perhaps to do something to break the law.

Kathleen Sgamma

Dr. DAVID KELLER (Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for the Study of Ethics, Utah Valley University): Civil disobedience is ethical because the law and morality are not always the same.

SEVERSON: David Keller is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University.

Dr. KELLER: We have the responsibility to be civil-disobedient where in situations where our complacency emboldens the power and those laws which are unjust.

SEVERSON: Pat Shea is a former director of the BLM in the Clinton administration and is also a lawyer defending DeChristopher. He says DeChristopher’s behavior may have been illegal, but it was patterned after the actions of some of the world’s great leaders.

PAT SHEA (Attorney and Former Director, Bureau of Land Management): Just as with Thoreau or Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, he had this ability to look at this situation, deal with it in an existential way, and then come through with his actions on a principled manner, a nd that’s something that I think most people would love to see in their children and maybe in themselves.

SEVERSON: Attorney Yengich says civil disobedience in and of itself it not a defense.

Mr. YENGICH: But the primary defense would be what lawyers would call the “choice of evils” defense, and that’s an historic defense about someone who is basically protesting a government action, and they are saying that I did this, even if it may be technically against the law, because there is a greater evil out there.

SEVERSON: One of the concerns expressed by critics was how near some of the leases were to national parks. In fact, national park officials were so concerned they had asked the BLM to delay the auction. Ten of the parcels DeChristopher won were located near Arches National Park in southern Utah.

Former BLM director Pat Shea:

Mr. SHEA: I think that they were trying to push through in the Bush administration as many energy leases as they possibly could. So there were a number of commercial energy companies that had an interest to get as much as they could before the curtain came down and there was a new administration.

SEVERSON: Kathleen Sgamma’s association represents many of those energy companies, and she says they are performing a valuable service with little impact on the environment.

David Keller

Ms. SGAMMA:  In Utah less than one percent of public lands — much less than one percent of public lands — is disturbed for oil and gas so that we can provide people heat for their homes. That’s a basic human necessity. We can’t go back to freezing in the dark or back to burning, you know, firewood in the fireplace or shoveling coal like we had to do 100 years ago.

Mr. KELLER: That’s certainly one of the benefits of civil disobedience — bringing attention and stimulating public discourse, and in the case of Tim DeChristopher, I do think that it is beneficial that we are having a discussion in Utah about whether he is a terrorist or not, a saboteur, an exemplary citizen, a criminal — or the charges should be brought against him or not. All this is healthy for a democracy.

SEVERSON: What makes civil disobedience ethically acceptable and when is it not?

Mr. DECHRISTOPHER: I think when it’s nonviolent, first off, and non-destructive is one of the things that make it ethical.

SEVERSON: DeChristopher says he would never think of destroying property or vandalizing equipment to stop actions he thinks are illegal. Attorney Yengich says that, above all, civil disobedience must be done in a civil way.

Mr. YENGICH: We’ve got to be careful, and I guess this is why we say when we talk about doing acts of civil disobedience that they’ve got to be done with respect to everyone. And maybe, maybe if the government rules against you, then you have to take the punishment as part of the process, yeah.

SEVERSON: As of now, the Obama administration has withdrawn those leases offered in December. Now Tim DeChristopher is waiting to find out how this will affect the case against him.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a powerful story today about punishment for juveniles who commit crimes. The Supreme Court has thrown out the death penalty for such young people, but in 44 states they can still be sentenced to life in prison without parole.  Is that just for children – even for the worst crimes? Tim O’Brien reports from Tampa, Florida.

TIM O’BRIEN: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young is serving life in prison with no possibility of parole for a series of hotel robberies in and around Tampa, Florida. It was June of 2000. Young had just turned 15 and was acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record. Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money:

Kenneth Young is serving life in prison.

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN: What tapes?

Mr. YOUNG: Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security cameras?

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: And you did that?

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

Mr. YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

Mr. YOUNG: Kill her.

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother, who says she’s been off drugs for more than three years, blames herself for the fix her son is in.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along?

STEPHANIE YOUNG: Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, me being on drugs, then my son wouldn’t be where he’s at today.

Stephanie Young

O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes — like armed robbery — can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.

Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So what we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him. So we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.

(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?

Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions? I mean, we do have Western traditions, and one part of our Western traditions is called redemption, and for many people in our culture redemption is an important value.

Judge PADGETT: There are some crimes that these people have committed that simply have no redemption. The victim and the public in general who know about the crime are looking for retribution.

O’BRIEN: It’s all about retribution.

Judge J. Rogers Padgett

Judge PADGETT: Retribution, right.

O’BRIEN: According to Human Rights Watch, the United States is the only country in the world that regularly sentences juvenile offenders to life in prison without parole. There are now more than 2,500. Pennsylvania has the most with 444. All but these six states allow life without parole for those under 18 at the time of their crimes.

Most of the crimes that bring life in prison without parole are far worse than Kenneth Young’s armed robberies. Most involved murder, often the murder of other children — crimes that shock the conscience and break the heart.

DAWN ROMIG (testifying): Good morning. My name is Dawn Romig.

O’BRIEN: In Pennsylvania, a Senate committee held hearings last October to consider doing away with life sentences for juvenile offenders. Lawmakers got an earful from opponents like Dawn Romig, whose 12-year-old daughter had been murdered by 17-year-old Brian Bahr.

Ms. ROMIG (testifying): We learned that Brian had made a list. It was called 23 things to do to a girl in the woods: “Beat her, check; rape her, check; kill her, check.” Everything on that list was carried out. It was an adult act he planned and executed. Why should these juveniles not get life in prison? Age cannot excuse what they have done.

JODI DOTTS (testifying): I never got to say goodbye to Kimmie. I never got to see her in a casket. I now talk to her at her grave still, 10 years later, on Mother’s Day. I’d also like to add, as I was sitting here listening to people saying they need second chances, my daughter didn’t have a second chance. She wasn’t given that choice whether to live or to die and I’m here to fight to make sure that these juveniles do not get released. Thank you.

Professor Paolo Annino

O’BRIEN: What do you say to the parents of a child — whose child is murdered?

Prof. ANNINO: Well, it’s tragic and it’s very difficult, and I turn to a group that I’m associated with, and it’s called Mothers Against Murderers Association — and their children have been killed

O’BRIEN: MAMA Inc., a remarkable support group in West Palm Beach. Seventy-three women, all of whom have lost a child to murder, meet at this storefront office every other Thursday. The walls are lined with the photographs—the mother with her lost child.

On this day, Paula Bowe will be joining MAMA’s poignant photo gallery. Her daughter was shot to death by an ex-boyfriend—

PAULA BOWE: And he shot her. He shot her twice at point blank—once in the face, once in the neck.

O’BRIEN: What makes this association so remarkable is that, despite their grief, members do not seek retribution. Instead, they speak out against it.

ANGELA WILLIAMS (Founder, MAMA Inc): That’s one thing I tell my moms all the time: the only way they’re going to move on, they’re going to have to learn to forgive, you know, and if they don’t learn to forgive, then they’ll never be able to move on to the next step.

O’BRIEN: And Angela Williams should know.

Ms. WILLIAMS: I lost seven. I lost five nephews and two nieces in my family, and that motivates me to keep going to help others. Gun violence — all killed by guns.

O’BRIEN: MAMA is supporting Kenneth Young’s petition for clemency on the premise that any child should be given a second chance, even for murder.

What do you say to the parents of a child whose child is murdered?

O’BRIEN: Sylvia Manning is a preacher whose son was shot to death. She believes there’s hope for his killer, who has yet to be apprehended.

Reverend SYLVIA MANNING: I feel as though whoever did this to my son, they can be redeemed. I mean, if they know Jesus they can be redeemed.

O’BRIEN: It’s a religious issue to you?

Rev. MANNING: Not really religious. It’s what my heart says.

O’BRIEN: Linda Battle is a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose son Eric was run down and killed by a drug dealer.

LINDA BATTLE (Deputy Sheriff, Palm Beach County, FL): I worked in the jails, and I see the juveniles come in there for major crimes, and they’re just babies, and I don’t know what got them to that point.

O’BRIEN: What got them to that point? The U.S. Supreme Court, in rejecting the death penalty for juvenile offenders four years ago, relied in part on the growing body of psychiatric evidence that shows why children often fail to act as responsibly as adults,

Dr. RICHARD RATNER (American Psychiatric Association): In a nutshell, it is that the brain has not really matured. You do not really have an adult brain until you are in your early 20s.

O’BRIEN: You have actual, empirical evidence of that?

Dr. RATNER: We do.

O’BRIEN: Ratner says that magnetic resonance imaging — MRIs like this one — show that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process than adults, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do.

Roughly 25 percent of the juvenile offenders serving life with no parole for murder never murdered anyone; rather, they were following the lead of an older adult. But under what’s known in the law as the felony murder rule, they are just as guilty as those who pull the trigger and often sentenced just as harshly.

Despite their grief, mothers do not seek retribution. Instead, they speak out against it.

Prof. ANNINO: They follow these older adults, and then the adults commit a murder. So the kid never has the gun in his hand. The kid never touches the gun. Many times—

O’BRIEN: But he’s still charged with murder?

Prof. ANNINO: He is charged with murder and gets the exact same sentence.

O’BRIEN: An accessory is as guilty as the principal?

Prof. ANNINO: In the state of Florida it is exactly the same, and that’s the felony murder rule, and we have it not just in Florida, but around the country, and the felony murder rules denies the individuality of the child. It ignores the fact that you have a child here, and you’re treating the child just like an adult.

O’BRIEN: Among those who have problems with that, we were surprised to find the judge who had sentenced Kenneth Young to four consecutive life terms. Judge J. Rogers Padgett said judges have no way of knowing what might become of the children who appear before them and, at least where the victim doesn’t die, their fate should be left to the Department of Corrections.

Judge PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing, I’m doing a snapshot. So what do I know?

O’BRIEN: But in Florida, as in most states, it’s too late to turn back the clock. Even the sentencing judge cannot reopen this case decided more than seven years ago.

Ms. YOUNG: It’s hard. It’s so hard — the sleepless nights that I have had. And every time I go to see my child, and I have to leave that prison without my baby, it just takes something out of me. It hurts. It hurts so bad.

O’BRIEN: Unless Florida changes its law, or the governor commutes the sentence, Kenneth Young will die in prison. He will never get out.

For RELIGION AND ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Tim O’Brien in Tampa, Florida.