Church and State
stcynic | June 13, 2005Harvey Wasserman is a well known liberal activist. He's an adviser to Greenpeace, founder of the Liberation News Service and the Free Press and many other causes. He also demonstrates perfectly now not to respond to the religious right in this essay filled with invective and falsehoods. When he writes:
It is not the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that form the bedrock of American values. It is the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. If anything should be chiseled in stone on our public buildings, it's the Bill of Rights.
I stand up and cheer. I agree 100%. Unfortunately, the essay is…
stcynic | May 26, 2005I can't imagine what on earth he's thinking, but Cale Bradford, Chief Judge of the Marion Superior Court in Indiana, has issued the most blatantly unconstitutional opinion I've ever heard of. In a divorce in which both of the parents are Wiccan, the judge placed a provision in the divorce decree forbidding them from exposing their son to "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals." The parents have filed an appeal to have this provision struck from the decree, and I cannot imagine they could possibly lose that appeal. I had the same reaction upon reading this as their attorney did:
"When…
stcynic | May 12, 2005The Worldnutdaily is reporting on a potential lawsuit against a school principal who allegedly told a group of students they could not read their bible during recess on the school grounds. The school is in Knox County, Tennessee and the Alliance Defense Fund has sent a letter to the principal threatening a lawsuit if the ban is not lifted:
According to ADF, 10-year-old student Luke Whitson used his regularly scheduled recess time to read the Bible with a few friends on his school's playground. After receiving a complaint from a parent, the principal reportedly ordered the students to stop…
stcynic | May 9, 2005Christopher Hitchens has an interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal about the danger posed by the theocon takeover of the Republican party. It's not a complete takeover, of course, there are still big splits in the party and other factions that balance them out, but their degree of influence is quite frightening. Hitchens quotes conservative icon Barry Goldwater, who famously opposed the growth in power of the religious right within the party. Best quote from the essay:
Then again, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in…
stcynic | April 18, 2005The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling in Simpson v. Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors involving prayers of invocation offered at the beginning of that board's meetings. Most such cases involve challenges to the constitutionality of holding such prayers, but in this case a woman was asking to be allowed to give a Wiccan invocation before one of the board meetings. The board refused to allow her to do so because, as they put it, their invocation prayers "are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition." Christopher Lund sums…
stcynic | April 16, 2005More evidence that Jon Rowe and I were separated at birth: he wrote an essay on the very same fake Jefferson quote, mentioning both Christian Hartsock and Devvy Kidd's use of it, this morning. Someone else had sent me a link to it and I wrote about it too, but without any knowledge that the other person was doing so. He goes further to hammer Kidd for several other ridiculous claims and use of at least 3 other fake quotes. The punchline is that Devvy Kidd, while presenting the fake quote from Jefferson, actually provides a link to the text of the letter in which the quote she uses does NOT…
stcynic | April 16, 2005My friend David sent me a link to the webpage of one Christian Hartsock, suggesting him as a Robert O'Brien Trophy nominee. Turns out the lad is only 18 and still in high school, so I'll be more gentle than usual. I'm not even going to bother to fisk the entire essay found on the front page. But I can't let this one statement go by without pointing out that it is completely fictional. He writes:
To the contrary, however, the left's beloved "separation of church and state" mantra originated not in the Constitution, but in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in…
stcynic | April 12, 2005Tom Ambrose is the commentary editor of the Worldnutdaily. Given the extraordinary number of awful commentary pieces WND publishes, especially the "exclusive commentaries" which are generally so bad that one assumes they are "exclusive" because no one else would publish them, he's not very good at his job. But now he's joining in the absurdity himself with his own "exclusive" commentary. Homosexual Nazis are Savaging the Church, screams the headline, with the subtitle Tom Ambrose on Episcopal preists denied their 1st Amendment rights. Now let's see if the facts support this breathless…
stcynic | April 4, 2005I find this highly amusing. Lyle Denniston of the SCOTUSblog is reporting:
The Supreme Court on Monday gave two Kentucky counties permission to make a new attempt to rescue their courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments from being struck down as a move motivated by religious objectives. The Court allowed McCreary and Pulaski Counties to file a new brief, even though the case was argued a month ago.
The supplemental brief notified the Court that the two counties' local governing bodies had "repealed and repudiated" their 1999 resolutions that gave an explicit religious justification for…
stcynic | March 22, 2005Jason Kuznicki has written what he terms a respectful disagreement with my post yesterday advocating that we change the IRS rules to allow churches to endorse candidates without losing their tax exemption. All disagreements between the two of us, rare as they may be, will of course be respectful on both parts. Jason is a first rate thinker and his views on any subject should be taken seriously and given all due consideration. Having said that, I don't think he's quite convinced me. Let's take a look at the arguments. Jason writes:
If a church holds a pre-election forum, it is required to…
stcynic | March 21, 2005This is probably going to come as a shock to my regular readers, but I'm going to agree with Pat Buchanan and the Worldnutdaily. In Pat's most recent column, he endorses a bill in front of Congress called the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005. The bill would change the Internal Revenue Code to allow ministers and other church officials to endorse candidates and take positions on partisan political issues without risking their tax exempt status. I agree with this and think the bill should pass, for several reasons.
First, the rules as written currently are so vague that…
stcynic | March 20, 2005A public elementary school teacher in North Carolina has triggered a lawsuit from parents who are, quite rightly, opposed to the Christian proselytizing she did in her classroom. And the lesson she was teaching is so ridiculous, you couldn't possibly make it up:
Scents Make Sense
"God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have. 'For we are unto God a sweet savor of Christ ...' (2 Corinthians 2:15). Paul goes on to say that Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him.
"Could someone find Christ by the…
stcynic | March 17, 2005The ten commandments monument that Roy Moore famously refused to remove from the Alabama Supreme Court building continues its world tour, stopping this week in my home state. Like all good tours, the monument has an opening act, but the act changes at every stop as state and local politicians take their turn primping and preening and shaking their head over this sad state of affairs. In Michigan, the opening act is a duo made up of Republican state representatives Bob Gosselin and Jack Hoogendyk - the Hall and Oates of the self-righteous set. They're traveling with the monument as it makes…
stcynic | March 10, 2005In a discussion on the religion law listserv last week, in an exchange with Jim Henderson, senior counsel with Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, the issue of constitutional law and original intent came up. Mr. Henderson was arguing that the original intent of the framers was the primary tool for constitutional interpretation and I, while agreeing with him that it is a very important tool, made the argument that it was not quite as simple as he seemed to think. The most obvious reason is because the framers themselves often disagreed on the meaning of various provisions. In…
stcynic | March 4, 2005The AP has now made available the full transcript of the oral arguments of the McCreary case, the second of the two Ten Commandments cases heard by the Supreme Court yesterday. I haven't had time to read it yet, but thought some of my readers might like to do so.
stcynic | March 4, 2005I'm pleased to announce that Thomas Van Orden, the plaintiff in Van Orden v. Perry, the Texas ten commandments case that was heard this week by the Supreme Court, has agreed to be interviewed next week for this blog. The interview will be conducted via email and hopefully posted within the next couple weeks. If anyone has any suggestions for questions they would like to have answered, please email them to me.
stcynic | March 3, 2005So most reports are saying that the justices appeared fairly hostile to the idea of removing the Ten Commandments displays. Judge for yourself by reading the transcript of the oral arguments. I was right that Douglas Laycock did not argue the Van Orden case, it was Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke University Law School. One statement sticks out to me, from Scalia:
You know, I think probably 90 percent of the American people believe in the Ten Commandments, and I'll bet you that 85 percent of them couldn't tell you what the ten are. And when somebody goes by that monument, I don't think they're…
stcynic | March 2, 2005The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life held a public discussion of the Ten Commandments cases to be heard by the Supreme Court this week. That discussion featured Douglas Laycock, one of the foremost church/state scholars in the nation and the associate dean of the University of Texas Law School, and Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice. Laycock, as always, presented a devestating case and really nailed the essential dishonesty at the heart of the opposition's argument. After noting that the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the…
stcynic | February 28, 2005On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on two cases involving the Ten Commandments being posted in government buildings and courthouses, one in Kentucky (McCreary) and one in Texas (Van Orden). Linda Greenhouse, the excellent legal reporter for the NY Times, had an article yesterday on the cases. One of the fascinating things to me about the case is how eager so many Christians are to void the essential religious meaning from the Ten Commandments and declare them to be merely symbolic of the rule of law, or to be of purely historical importance:
At the same event, Jay…
stcynic | February 23, 2005A Virginia Assembly committee has soundly rejected Charles Carrico's proposal to amend the state constitution, which was written by Thomas Jefferson himself. Thankfully there was some sanity, with 4 Republicans on the committee joining 6 Democrats to reject the bill.
"Having survived 219 years of honored Virginia tradition, can we really improve on the language of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison?" asked Sen. John S. Edwards (D-Roanoke).
Indeed not. Looks like Alabama's title as the looniest state is safe for now.