Press-release, Dec. 25, 1999

During the last month in Italy, news appeared on daily press and TV, that tended to include our Association in a "Alarm against Terrorism". On behalf of this, we remark:

1) The Association for Baptism Removal was founded on dec. 25, 1985, and ever since its activity was public and outspoken (in the case some editing staff is not informed of this, it probably depends on their scarce capacity of assuming information in their own activity), organizing yearly anticlerical meetings, several gatherings and conferences with the object of criticizing papal interference in social and political life of our country.

2) ABR is organizing, with utmost publicity, an international manifestation that will take place in Rome on Feb. 19, 2000, in the fourth hundredth of the assassination of Giordano Bruno, put to stake in the Campo de' Fiori square by the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Inquisition. The event will represent one of the few public criticisms to jubilean self-celebrations, that already meant to the Italian tax payer the cost of 6.000 billion liras (approx. 3 billion US$).

3) Slander and misinformation campaign against ABR, originates in the police-like forbids to every form of dissent toward the Obligatory Religious Treatment we and all citizens in our country have to endure. The Vatican and the Italian State wish us devoted and obeying pilgrims. The ORT consists in: everlasting religious celebrations on major TV networks; ubiquitous presence of catholic hierarchies; religious (catholic) symbols in public buildings; obligatory catechism in schools, beginning with the 3 years of the child, unless the parents state otherwise; intrusion in crucial moments of the individual's life (birth, marriage, death); blackmail towards abortist doctors, sacking of state finances, etc.

ABR invites journalists to refrain from becoming instruments of such anti-libertarian deeds and, sticking to professional ethics, give in future equal rights in their reports to initiatives that criticize bigotism, claim liberty of thought, denounce the waste of public wealth to glorify the Vatican monarch.

ABR warns anyone from suggesting the Association has anything to do with palace or international intrigues, scrambles for power as those that historically see as major actors the state secret services, clerical organizations, or the political class.

ASSOCIAZIONE PER LO SBATTEZZO

VIA GARIBALDI 47

61032 FANO (PS)

ITALY

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