Religious Liberty – Page 38

Thus Spake the Profits

We do seem to live in the Age of Hypocrisy.

A Facebook friend posted a comment about Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain headquartered in Oklahoma. Like Chik-fil-A, the chain makes much of its Christian values, closing on Sundays and, most recently, suing the Obama Administration over the mandate to include contraceptive coverage as part of the health insurance offered to employees.

“Next time you hear someone defend Hobby Lobby’s extremist stance on birth control and health insurance law, try this little thought exercise. Go to a Hobby Lobby and make a small inventory of every item they sell that’s made in China. Yes, the same China that has MANDATORY FORCED ABORTIONS. Then ask a salesperson why Hobby Lobby’s commitment to Christianity extends to how their employees live their lives but not to where they get their inventory from.”

Seems like a reasonable question to me.

Comments

I Think We Need Truth in Labeling

My best friend called me yesterday, fuming about a solicitation call she’d just received.

The woman caller identified herself as a volunteer for the Republican Party. She began by thanking my friend for her past, generous support of the GOP–and indeed, my friend was an active Republican voter and donor for many years. Her husband served two terms in the General Assembly as a Republican State Senator. However, like so many of my friends and family, she no longer supports the party, and when the woman at the other end of the phone asked whether she would consider a contribution, she said so.

“I’m a Democrat now,” she informed the volunteer. The volunteer (predictably) asked if she would share why she had left the GOP; my friend responded that she strongly disagreed with the party’s positions on social issues, especially abortion and homosexuality. It is not government’s job to decide whether you procreate, or who you love; the party used to understand that “limited” government meant limited to matters that are properly the province of the state.

There was a pause. The woman on the phone then asked “Don’t you think we should consider the will of god? Shouldn’t the government have a role in ensuring that we live by what’s written in the bible?” to which my friend responded “Whose bible? Whose god?” Another pause, then the question: “are you a Christian?” When my friend said she was not, the woman evidently had an “ah ha” moment, because she ended the conversation by saying “Oh, that explains it.” According to my friend, she might just as well have said, “Now I understand–you are not one of us.”

The conversation made it quite clear that, to this volunteer (and presumably others like her), the Republican party is no longer a political enterprise. It’s a religious movement, a party by and for Christians. Not just any Christian, either–it’s the party for what they call “bible-believing” Christians, the party of Rick Santorum and Mike Pence. If there are still those in the party who take a more traditional approach, who understand the purpose of politics to be participation in secular governance and political outreach to be the building of a bigger, more inclusive tent, they presumably hadn’t communicated that to this particular foot soldier.

The conversation simply confirmed the reality of today’s Republican party–a party consisting of what has been described as “a shrinking base of aging, ethnically monolithic, and geographically isolated voters.” Christian voters. Perhaps we could achieve more clarity in our political discourse if the GOP stopped trying to be coy, and just renamed itself the Christian Party. In its current iteration, it certainly isn’t the Republican Party that my friend and I used to support. That party disappeared a long time ago.

The volunteer on the other end of line simply confirmed its transformation.

Comments

Spawn of Citizens United

During my six years as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, if my youngest son called the office when I was out, he’d leave a message: “just tell her Satan’s spawn called.” (He found the popular caricature of the ACLU endlessly amusing.)

I thought about “spawn” when a Facebook friend pointed me to a recent, truly bizarre ruling from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

When the Supreme Court decided, in Citizens United, that corporations have a right to free speech, it drew a dangerous equivalence between individual human beings and the legal constructs created to simplify the transaction of business and commercial transactions. In the immortal words of Mitt Romney, the Court ruled that for purposes of free speech, “corporations are people, my friend.”

Citizens United was itself the spawn of a series of unfortunate Supreme Court rulings that effectively equated money with speech. It thus had the effect of handing a huge megaphone to corporate entities able to outspend–and thus “out-shout”–individual voters. The ruling has been exploited to allow for the creation of so-called “SuperPacs,” and it has raised a number of thorny issues, among them: what happens when shareholders don’t agree with the corporate “message”? What if they don’t agree that money should be spent for such arguably non-business-related purposes?

The problems and questions that have emerged in the wake of Citizens United point to the essential absurdity of treating artificial constructs as if they were people. And now the ruling is spawning even more nonsensical progeny. If you have had trouble getting your head around the nature of a corporate right to “free speech,” try this one: the Seventh Circuit says corporations have a right to the free exercise of religion.

The court came to this bizarre conclusion in a case brought by K & L Contractors, a secular, for-profit company that is challenging the Obama Administration’s mandate that contraception coverage must be provided by employers as part of their health insurance coverage. The court ruled that the fact “that the Kortes’ [the majority shareholders] operate their business in the corporate form is not dispositive of their claim,” a proposition for which it cited Citizens United.

The result in this case is clearly contrary to the law prior to Citizens United. For decades, the law has essentially recognized a trade-off: if you opt to do business in corporate form, you get to take advantage of the benefits that status confers, especially the ability to limit your personal liability for debts the corporation incurs. In return, you follow the rules that apply to corporations, including loss of the right to impose your religious faith on your employees.

Even for individuals, asserting a religious objection to a law of general application is seldom seen as justification for ignoring that law. If my religion requires that I use cocaine, or sacrifice my first-born, or chain up my spouse, the courts are unlikely to give me a pass from the rules against those behaviors.

Let’s hope Citizens United hasn’t changed that result.

In fact, let’s hope the Supreme Court comes to recognize how reckless that decision really was, and limits or overrules it.

Comments

The Real Blasphemy

The horrific shootings at Sandy Hook have given all the usual political opportunists an opening. It isn’t just the gun culture apologists, either–Mike Huckabee and his fellow theocrats have seized the moment to renew their attacks on separation of church and state. According to Huckabee (and a number of people posting to Facebook) this tragedy occurred because we’ve taken God out of the classroom.

Not only is this sentiment unseemly, it’s demonstrably stupid, on multiple levels.

In this particular case, it’s wrong on its face–the deranged young man responsible for this tragedy turns out to be a product of Catholic School. A number of media outlets have used a photo of him taken when he was a student at St. Rose Middle School.

More significantly, the “cutesy” sayings that have been posted to Facebook in the wake of the tragedy betray an embarrassing lack of understanding of the First Amendment religious liberty clauses. (A sample: “God, why didn’t you stop this shooting and save those babies? ‘I would have, but I’m not allowed in school.’) God and “his” bible have not been “ejected” from public schools, as these pithy sayings suggest: students who wish to pray over the cafeteria meatloaf or before a math quiz, to read their bibles during study hall, or to “meet at the flagpole to pray” before classes are not only free to do so, that conduct is constitutionally protected under the Free Exercise Clause. What is forbidden is the imposition of religion by public school employees–the Establishment Clause prohibits teachers from proselytizing–from preaching or otherwise religiously indoctrinating the captive audience of children in their classes.

Despite the resolute obtuseness of the theocrats among us, truly voluntary prayer has not been removed from the public schools. What has been removed (imperfectly, given the number of school officials who simply ignore the constitution) is involuntary religious devotions imposed by school personnel.

Okay–so the whining here is doubly wrong: this kid didn’t go to one of those “godless” schools, and the schools aren’t quite as godless as the extremists would like us to believe. But there’s a deeper and far more troubling aspect to this recurring complaint, and it goes to the smallness of the God these people evidently worship.

Theologians and clerics who believe in a personal, intentional God are fond of describing Him (most ascribe gender–almost always male–to deity) as omnipotent, unknowable. God works in mysterious ways, etc. Yet despite giving lip service to His greatness and mystery, we have people thanking God for letting them win football games (God evidently didn’t like the players on the other team); we have starlets thanking God for giving them talent (!), and preachers on my flat-screen TV promising that God will make me rich if I just follow His ways–beginning, usually, with a nice contribution to that preacher. We have ostentatiously pious scolds who assure us that they know what God wants, and we’d better fall in line or suffer God’s vengeance.

We have Mike Huckabee telling us that this senseless human tragedy occurred because America didn’t do things God’s way.

The arrogance is overwhelming.

I have no idea whether God exists, but if She does, those who anthropomorphize Her have to be the ultimate blasphemers.

Comments

Coming Out

Coming Out Day is today, October 11^th.

These days—four states are preparing to vote on same-sex marriage, with victory likely in at least one, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell headed for the dustbin of history, and progress being made on a wide variety of civil rights issues affecting lesbians and gay men—the incredible importance of coming out to the struggle for gay civil rights sometimes escapes notice.

I thought about this last weekend, when I spoke at a conference sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry. The Center for Inquiry is a national secularist organization, promoting (gasp!) science and reason over supernaturalism. There were four speakers at the all-day conference, and we all took different topics. Not surprisingly, my own presentation focused upon the lack of understanding of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and the ways in which Americans’ abysmal lack of civic literacy fostered misconceptions, and enabled revisionists determined to rewrite the country’s history.

The last speaker of the day was a lawyer from Los Angeles named Edward Tabash, and it was his talk that made me sit up and take notice.

Tabash’s talk was titled “Taking Atheism to the General Public,” and his message was simple: “We need to emulate the gay community. We need to Come Out.” As he noted, atheists and gays are two communities targeted primarily by religion. Not all religions, certainly—to suggest otherwise would be to engage in the same sort of stereotyping that we decry—but a fundamentalist, literalist “brand” of belief. Tabash urged secularists to emulate the political activism tactics of GLBT folks; as he pointed out, those tactics have resulted in impressive gains, and those gains all began with the deceptively simple act of coming out.

Last Tuesday, I had the honor of emceeing (is that a word?) IUPUI’s third annual Harvey Milk dinner. The dinner draws the campus GLBT faculty and staff and allies, and it has grown steadily since the first dinner. Two hundred and twenty people attended this year’s event; they filled a sizeable space in the Campus Center. An event like that—with that sort of attendance in that sort of venue—would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. It was possible because people took deep breaths, risked families and friendships and livlihoods, and demanded social recognition. They came out.

They took those risks in order to honor their deepest natures, in order to live honestly.

It took guts.

The local CFI has lots of members, but a significant number of them are “lurkers,” on the organization’s website, but unwilling to be identified. Many of them live in small Indiana communities, and rightly fear the reaction of their employers and neighbors. Still, as Tabash noted, the prejudice against secularists won’t change until more of us come out.

Comments