Church and State
stcynic | February 28, 2004On Wednesday, Judge Moore's attorneys tried to convince a special session of the Alabama State Supreme Court to overturn his removal from office and return him to his position as Chief Justice. He was removed for malfeasance after refusing to follow a federal court order that he remove the 5000 pound monument that he had moved in to the Supreme Court building in the middle of the night of his own accord. In the process, his attorney seems to have invented an entirely new reason to justify Moore's flouting of the court order:Phillip Jauregui (Moore's attorney - ed. note) agreed Thompson had…
stcynic | February 23, 2004Tim Sandefur has responded to my post on Bill Federer and his simplistic version of American history. However, I think he misunderstands the point I was trying to make. He writes,But I must disagree with his response to Federer on the issue of the deity-based belief system of the founding fathers. Most of the founding fathers did, indeed, have a deity-based belief system, including such notable skeptics as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
But this is not something I ever even implied. I didn't question the fact that they had a deity-based belief system. To a man, they certainly did,…
stcynic | February 21, 2004My news aggregator sometimes comes up with fascinating links. This morning one popped up that just left me shaking my head. Someone named Stephen Erwin on GOPUSA, a conservative political website, wrote what has to be one of the most ridiculous arguments on separation of church and state I've ever read. He begins:With the Supreme Court considering the Ninth Circuit Court ban on "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and refusing to hear the case about Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments Monument, perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at the First Amendment.
If the First Amendment read…
stcynic | February 20, 2004The Washington Times is reporting that conservative evangelical Christians are upset at President Bush for a wide variety of supposed offenses. Such religious right luminaries as Gary Bauer and Donald Wildmon are sending up warning signals that evangelicals may just decide to stay home on election day because Bush hasn't inspired their faith in him. The mind absolutely boggles, doesn't it? Supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, virtually ending stem cell research in the US, pushing through faith-based initiatives (by executive order in some cases), ranting in his state of…
stcynic | February 15, 2004On March 24th, the US Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments on Elk Grove Unified School District v Newdow, the pledge of allegiance case. The 9th circuit court of appeals ruled against the school district in 2003 and the school district appealed to the Supreme Court. Goldstein Howe's indispensible SCOTUS blog has links to a number of briefs filed on behalf of Newdow, the respondent in the case, and on behalf of the school district as well. This is an absolutely wonderful resource for those interested in constitutional law and the cases before the court.
Follow up: Thanks to Eon for…
stcynic | February 13, 2004This story just keeps getting worse. In New Delhi on Friday, French Foreign Minister Dominique De Villepin said that the French government would consider exempting Sikhs from the new law banning religious clothing and symbols:After meeting a delegation led by chairman of the National Minorities Commission Tirlochan Singh, Villepin said: "We understand perfectly that we need to solve this problem taking into account the specificity of Sikh community, which is very well respected in France. There are traditions between France and the Sikh community. We know the price the Sikh community paid…
stcynic | February 12, 2004Just another note on the whole French ban on religious clothing or symbols. For all of France's screaming about following international norms and international law in the debate over war in Iraq, have they given no thought to the Universal Declartion on Human Rights, which they signed in 1948? Article 18 of that document states:"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching,…
stcynic | January 24, 2004I haven't written much about the (former) Judge Roy Moore situation in Alabama, but as an interesting postscript, I find this incredible. Judge Moore's supporters are now asking President Bush to withdraw the nomination of Mark Pryor for the federal bench. Pryor is the Alabama Attorney General who enforced the federal court ruling taking Moore's monument out of the courthouse. Now mind you, Pryor is a prominent religious right supporter and publicly favored Moore's position - until Moore defied a binding federal court order to remove it. Then, as state attorney general, he simply had to take…
stcynic | January 23, 2004The Great Separation recently posted an article with the headline "A New Hero Emerges and Plants Another 10 Commandments Monument". It then links to a Worldnetdaily article about Vernon Robinson, the Winston-Salem city council member who placed a 2000 pound monument with the Ten Commandments on it in front of city hall on Monday while it was closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. The monument was removed the next day at the city's expense because, obviously, Robinson didn't have the authority to put it there in the first place.
And here's the part that really amuses me...it turns out…
stcynic | January 21, 2004In today's Carnival of the Vanities is a link to an article on this blog about a strange church/state ruling. The facts of the case are that the Byron, California school district has a very controversial 3 week unit in their World History class for middle school students in which, in order to teach them about the history of Islam, they have students memorize and recite Muslim prayers from the Quran, simulate Muslim worship and even participate in some sort of Jihad game that simulates the Crusades. This naturally got some parents quite irate and they filed a lawsuit to stop it, assisted by…
stcynic | January 8, 2004In the midst of a flap over Howard Dean's sudden conversion to the summonings of the spirit, Sandra Jacoby has an op-ed piece in the Times that includes something I've long said about the secular nature of the Constitution. She writes,The 18th-century public's understanding of the Constitution as a secular document can perhaps best be gauged by the reaction of religious conservatives at the time. For example, the Rev. John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York City minister, denounced the absence of God in the preamble as "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate." He warned that "we…
stcynic | January 7, 2004The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Hewlett-Packard's right to fire an employee who insisted on posting anti-gay bible verses on his office cubicle in response to the company having posters encouraging respect for diversity in the office building he worked in. The diversity campaign, as the Chronicle reports, was the sort of empty sloganeering that anyone in the corporate world is used to seeing:The conflict started in 2000 after the company began implementing a diversity policy that was developed at staff meetings and put up workplace posters showing different employees, with labels…
stcynic | January 6, 2004Salon.com has an article today on Howard Ahmanson, the reclusive savings and loan heir who has spent millions to promote religious right causes in America. In addition to his enormous support of seemingly any anti-gay organizations he can find, Ahmanson is well known to those of us who are active in the evolution/creationism battle because he is the primary money man behind the Discovery Institute (DI), the Seattle-based think tank at the forefront of advocating Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC). The DI's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture is where you will find such IDC…
stcynic | December 11, 2003I'll quote just the first part of this article:Groups of students, teachers and administrators from five Oakland County school districts are taking part in the Religious Diversity Initiative - a program funded by the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan and sponsored by the Oakland County Superintendents Association, the Michigan Region of the National Conference for Community and Justice, and the Jewish Community Council.
As part of the voluntary, nontaxpayer funded program, participants from the Berkley, Bloomfield Hills, Clarkston, Walled Lake and West Bloomfield school districts…
stcynic | December 11, 2003I've long been active in the battle over the teaching of evolution in public schools. One of the arguments that we hear quite often is the "Fairness Argument". It goes like this: There are two explanations for the existence of life on earth, either life evolved by "random chance" (evolution) or it was put here by a creator (creationism or "intelligent design theory"); since neither has been "proven", it's only fair that if you're going to teach one, you should teach them both and let the kids decide. To the average person, this argument sounds eminently reasonable. Who, after all, could argue…
stcynic | December 7, 2003There is an e-mail making the rounds with a set of arguments alleging to prove that the US is a "Christian Nation." The entire e-mail was taken directly, word for word, from this webpage: http://www.errantskeptics.org/hold_quotes_2.htm, which was in turn taken from an article in Worldnetdaily, and which is quoted verbatim on what seems like hundreds of other webpages. I've put the original in italics and my responses in normal text.
We are a Christian nation.
A loaded beginning right off the bat. This statement could mean two very different things, and has been used to mean both things…
stcynic | December 5, 2003Continuing the theme from the last essay, we often hear this argument - "Separation of church and state isn't in the constitution". It's a rather silly argument, but it's very popular. Some people really do look at the first amendment and think, "Gee, those words really aren't in there. I guess that settles it." Well, no it doesn't. A little knowledge of history and a little thought will suffice to dispel this argument.
Of course it's true that the actual phrase "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution. But then neither are the phrases "separation of powers" or "checks and…
stcynic | December 2, 2003One of the arguments heard often, especially lately in light of the situation with Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, is that the US was "founded on Christian principles". Whenever I hear this argument, I counter with this challenge - point to specific provisions within the constitution, the founding documents of the United State, the basis for the entire American system of government, that have an analog in the bible or in standard Christian theology. The response is usually silence. The major principles found in the constitution - separation of powers, checks and balances, limited government,…
stcynic | November 28, 2003No idea in science is as controversial as the theory of evolution. The controversy comes not from within science, but in that grey area where science and religion intersect. This is an issue I've been involved with for many years. Since my late teen years, in fact. I'm part of a group that administers the Talk.Origins Archive, which is probably the largest repository of information about the evolution vs creationism battle on the web. I'm also a founder and advisory board member of Michigan Citizens for Science and have worked closely with the National Center for Science Education for many…