Category Archives: Religious Liberty

Public Duties, Private Rights

It’s a bitch having to share the country with other people. Especially when so many of them are so wrong about everything.

A friend of mine just sent me the most recent tantrum (excuse me, newsletter) from the Indiana Family Institute’s Micah Clark, and that’s pretty much the message. According to Micah, those of us who don’t share his belief that “kids do best with a mom and dad”–that is, those of us who oppose a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and civil unions –are thereby labeling people like him “bigots.”

I realize that needs a bit of deconstructing. Or, perhaps, psychiatry.

Here’s what Micah and his fellow “victims” don’t get: we live in a society with a lot of other people, many of whom have political opinions, backgrounds, holy books, and perspectives that differ significantly from our own. The only way to govern such a society–the only “social contract” that allows us to coexist in reasonable harmony–is by respecting those differences to the greatest extent possible. That requires treating everyone equally within the public/civic sphere, while respecting the right of individuals to embrace different values and pursue different ends in their private lives.

I know this is hard for you to understand, Micah, but a refusal to make everyone live by your particular interpretation of your particular holy book is not an attack on you; it is recognition that we live in a diverse society where other people have the same rights to respect and moral autonomy that you claim for yourself.  Ironically, a legal system that refuses to take sides in your religious war is also the only system that can safeguard your own religious liberty. I know you don’t want to believe it, but most Americans really don’t share your religious certainty and belief in your own moral superiority. If your right to live in accordance with that certainty had to be put to majority vote, you might find your own “lifestyle” legally marginalized.

As I’ve noted previously, poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts.

As to your accusation that those of us who support marriage equality are calling you a bigot–well, here’s the dictionary definition of the term: “a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group.”

If the shoe fits…..

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Good Stuff!

I frequently think of that old Tom Lehrer lyric: “Remember why the good Lord made your eyes. So don’t shade your eyes–plagiarize! But always call it research.”

In that spirit…Don Knebel is a local attorney who blogs for the Center for Civic Literacy, and his most recent submission is so good, I have to call it “research,” and share it. (By the way, those of you who read this blog should check out CCL’s….we have a number of thought-provoking bloggers contributing to the conversation there.)

Don takes a look at the most recent in a long line of public prayer cases, and hazards a prediction or two:

On November 6, 2013, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments on one of the most vexing issues under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution —  When does the Constitutionally required governmental allowance of religious practices cross the line into Constitutionally prohibited governmental endorsement of religion?  The specific issue in the case is whether the town council of Greece, New York, should be allowed to continue opening its sessions with prayers having a distinctly Christian point of view.  The decision in the case won’t come for months, but I am going to predict the outcome of that case, something I have never done before.  When the decision is released, I will review how close I came to predicting the actual result.

During the arguments, the attorney for the two citizens of Greece who complained about the Christian prayers asked the Court to declare that Greece can only offer prayers that are acceptable to everyone but atheists and polytheists.  I predict the Court will not determine what should be in a public prayer.  First, parsing prayers to see whether they pass muster with persons of disparate faiths would put the government directly into the business of regulating both speech and a person’s practice of his or her religion, both of which the First Amendment says its cannot do.  More important, no conceivable prayer is acceptable to all the world’s believers, even if for some reason we were to leave out atheists and polytheists.  Even a prayer to a generic “creator” is contrary to the beliefs of many Buddhists that the universe was never created and that there is no God.  A prayer to a “Heavenly Father” won’t cut it for someone who believes in the Mother Goddess or denies the existence of heaven.   So we aren’t going to have prayer guidelines as a result of this case.

I also predict that the Supreme Court will not bar town councils from opening their sessions with prayer.  Such a result would be contrary to a long tradition in this country, predating the Constitution, of seeking divine guidance when doing the people’s business.  In prior cases, the Court has recognized that history.  The current Court, which opens its own sessions with a prayer that “God save the United States and this honorable court,” is not about to reverse itself on that issue.

So if the Supreme Court will not outlaw prayers and will not mandate acceptable prayers, how will it resolve the claim that sectarian governmental prayers are effectively endorsing a particular religion, in violation of the First Amendment?  I predict that Court will say that governmental bodies can open (or close) their sessions with prayer so long as they provide realistic opportunities to pray for citizens holding a variety of religious beliefs, including none at all.  So, if a citizen believing in the redemptive power of mushrooms wants to invoke the spirit of the Great Mushroom at a meeting of the town council, that person will have to be given a reasonable opportunity to do just that.  That is what it means to live in a pluralistic country, founded on religious tolerance and personal freedom.

Perhaps when members of the Church of Satan, professed atheists and others with non-traditional beliefs begin opening governmental meetings we will all start to recognize how truly diverse we have become and begin to curb our urge to pray aloud in public, something Jesus recommended a long time ago.  Matthew 6:5-6.  Eventually we may come to see that for governmental meetings and other public occasions, a respectful moment of silence, during which we can call upon whatever power is most meaningful to each of us, will do just fine.  Stay tuned.

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It’s Inherited, Evidently

While I was hanging around my favorite beauty parlor–Juanita Jean’s, the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.–I came across a description of a sermon delivered by Ted Cruz’s father, a pastor and a Dominionist.

It explains a lot.

In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz’ father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as “kings” to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the “Seven Mountains” mandate, and “bring the spoils of war to the priests”, thus helping to bring about a prophesied “great transfer of wealth”, from the “wicked” to righteous gentile believers. There is a link to the video of Rafael Cruz describing the “great transfer of wealth” and the role of anointed “kings” in various sectors of society, including government, who are to “bring the spoils of war to the priests”.

Dominionists get their name from their theology: they believe that conservative Christians should have dominion over all others. In other words, they’re theocrats.

Not being one of those “righteous gentile believers” over whom Cruz Junior is evidently anointed to rule, I find this worldview pretty alarming–not to mention inconsistent with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, modernity and sanity.

Apples evidently don’t fall far from the trees they grow on…..

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Making Other People Live By Your Interpretation of the Bible is NOT Religious Liberty

These are the times that try men’s souls…..Okay, that’s a bit much. But there are definitely letters to the editor that try both my woman’s soul and my (very limited)store of patience. One of them was in the Sunday Indianapolis Star.

It was the all-too-typical complaint that, by requiring “religous-based ministries” to offer birth control coverage, the hated Obamacare was violating the writer’s “right to practice our faith and not be persecuted with onerous fines if we won’t deny our faith and worship the national religion of casual sex.”

The profoundly misinformed woman who signed this letter got nearly everything wrong. For one thing, “ministries” aka churches are not subject to the regulation she so completely misunderstands. The First Amendment Free Exercise Clause exempts churches from all manner of secular law–no matter how reasonable–that those institutions deem inconsistent with their beliefs.

The Affordable Care Act does require that other religiously affiliated institutions–hospitals, universities and the like– include birth control coverage as part of their comprehensive health insurance policies. Despite the letter writer’s assertion, this is not a mandate to worship Mammon, nor does the inclusion of an option allowing female employees to get reimbursed for the costs of contraception equate to a requirement that they use it.

What we have here is a longstanding dispute about the nature of liberty and the definition of discrimination. The letter writer and other shrill moralists–the ones who believe they know precisely what their version of God wants–define liberty as freedom to do the “right” thing.  And that they should get to define what the “right thing” is.

Furthermore, they believe that if government isn’t imposing their definition of right behavior on the rest of us, it’s discriminating against them. (Think I’m exaggerating? Read one of Micah Clark’s newsletters some time. Bet you didn’t know that government recognition of civil marriage equality is really a war on Christians, Western Civilization and (probably) helpless puppies.)

Unfortunately for the Puritans, and fortunately for the rest of us, that pre-Enlightenment view of liberty isn’t the definition  that informed the Bill of Rights.  In the system bequeathed to us by the nation’s founders, liberty means personal autonomy–the right of each of us to make our own moral and ethical decisions, free of interference by government or our neighbors, so long as we aren’t thereby causing harm to others.

There can be genuine and difficult disagreements about what constitutes “harm to others,” but it takes real chutzpah to claim that covering the costs of birth control for those women who freely choose to use it constitutes an attack on religious liberty.

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Creating God in Our Own Image

I am perpetually bemused by people who know exactly what God thinks–and are  immensely comforted by the discovery that God thinks just exactly the way they do. 

Wow–who’d have guessed!?

The most recent example I’ve stumbled upon comes from American Family Association’s Sandy Rios, who delivered this truly jaw-dropping diatribe on her radio program:

I would not want to be in the shoes of any of the left right now. I would not want to be in Barack Obama’s shoes. I would not want to be in the shoes of homosexual activists. I say that with humility and with fear for them because God will even the score, he will sort things out, he will be God and he will not be mocked. Whereas they think they are getting away with breaking all kinds of moral laws and mocking everyone in the process, they just don’t know God, they don’t know who they are up against and we do. And that should bring out some mercy in us because I wouldn’t want to be—what did that old evangelist say: ‘it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God.’
Unlike all us sinners, you see, Sandy Rios knows God. 
The monumental arrogance and self-delusion displayed by those who purport to know the mind of a deity they themselves describe as all-knowing and all-powerful is certainly mind-blowing.  But what really gets to me is the nature of the God these people have created in their own image: small-minded, vengeful and partisan. Hardly the sort of God worth worshipping.
I don’t mean to be snarky or dismissive, but if God exists, I’m pretty confident she will reward charity, inclusiveness and loving-kindness rather than prejudice and hate. But then,  I must hasten to say that I can’t really know.
Unlike Sandy Rios, I haven’t chatted with God lately.
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