Category Archives: Religious Liberty

Coming Out

Coming Out Day is today, October 11th.

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.

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Random Thoughts and a Great Video

Yesterday, I spoke to the Northern Ohio Chapter of CFI–the Center for Inquiry. It was refreshing to be in a group where science and empirical evidence are respected–especially on a day when yet another embarrassing Congressman (on the Science subcommittee, no less!) makes a fool of himself.

One of the highlights of the program was this video created by one of the members, Mark Tiborsky. It’s a bit long, but really funny.

For me, another highlight was meeting lots of bright, nice people–all of whom seemed to have more than a nodding acquaintence with the Constitution!–and finally getting to meet Ed Brayton, whose blog–Dispatches from the Culture Wars–has been a favorite of mine. (If that isn’t on your personal blogroll, it should be.)

Me with the rest of the panel--Ed Tabash, Ed Brayton and Michael De Dora

Watch the video!

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Pulpit “Freedom”

A couple of nights ago, Stephen Colbert took on “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” a protest being mounted by hundreds of pastors against the IRS’ “political activity” regulations.

Here’s the deal: the IRS allows people to deduct contributions to charitable and religious organizations, effectively subsidizing those contributions. If I give 100.00 to my synagogue or church, that gift doesn’t really cost me 100.00. Depending upon my tax bracket, the effective cost to me can be significantly less. In return for that subsidy, the charitable/religious recipients promise–among other things–to refrain from partisan politicking. They can still take positions on the issues of the day; what they are not supposed to do is endorse specific candidates.

The pastor who came on the Colbert Report didn’t see this as a mutually beneficial agreement–he saw it as some form of spiritual slavery,  and kept talking about “freeing” the church. On Sunday, he and the other aggrieved clergy will defy the law (as they evidently have on a similar “Freedom Sunday” for the past five years) by issuing a partisan endorsement from the pulpit. According to him, the IRS regulation means the church is being “controlled” by government, and he thundered against any effort to “tax the church,” by which he evidently meant the elimination of this highly preferential tax treatment.

I’m all for giving the churches freedom. Complete freedom. Clergy should be able to say whatever they like, and the IRS should eliminate the current tax policy that allows parishioners to deduct contributions. The church would then be free of the “special rights” and tax benefits that evidently keep it enslaved.

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Separation of Church and State and Buddhists

Dispatches from the Culture Wars has an interesting report on the removal of a Buddhist stupa from a national park in New Mexico. He quotes the local public radio explanation:

The National Park Service said Monday that park service will remove the ten-foot structure containing Buddhist relics from the park this week after getting an opinion from the Department of Interior’s solicitor general. The solicitor general ruled last month that keeping the Buddhist stupa violates the Constitution on established religion.

If this is actually the gist of the ruling, the lawyer with the solicitor general’s office must be one of the stupider people to actually make it through law school.

The Establishment Clause prohibits government from sponsoring or endorsing religious beliefs or observances. In determining whether there has been a breach of the rule, the Court considers whether a person of average intelligence, observing the display or incident, would assume that endorsement or sponsorship was present. So in the case of graduation prayer, for example, an invitation by the school to a clergyman and the inclusion of the prayer in the formal program is pretty clearly sponsorship. A group of students gathering spontaneously at the school flagpole to pray, without prompting or participation from teachers or school administrators, is not.

If a person of normal intelligence (perhaps that’s the problem!) encountered a Christian devotional display in a park, that person could reasonably assume it was government endorsement of the country’s majority religion.  No one in her right mind, however, would leap to the conclusion that a display of Buddhist artifacts was intended as anything other than an educational or artistic experience. (I can imagine the testimony of the New Mexico parks official now: “Yes, your honor, I placed that Buddhist stupa in the park in order to elevate Buddhist beliefs and send a message that Christians and Jews and Muslims worship false gods and are second-class citizens…”)

The really interesting question here is: who complained? And why?

I have my suspicions, and they revolve around the folks who believe the government should privilege their religion.

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Letters, They Get Letters…

Sometimes, the Letters to the Editor are just jaw-dropping excursions into the depths of illogic. This morning’s entrant into the “it ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so” sweepstakes is a prime example.

The writer says there is no “war on women,” rather, it is a war for “immorality, secularism and the destruction of Christianity.” And what is the weapon being deployed in this war? The requirement that health insurance include coverage for birth control.

Where to begin?

Perhaps we might question the writer’s assumption that use of birth control equates to “immorality.”  (“Procreation is a gift from God. It is not a form of recreation.”) Evidently, only participants in “recreational” sex use birth control. We probably should tell that to the doctors who prescribe contraceptives to treat a variety of medical conditions, including but not limited to menorrhagia.

We might also note that the writer’s defense of  this position by Catholics who believe in the “sanctity of life” conveniently ignores the lack of Church outrage over the use of its tax dollars to fund capital punishment and war.

Finally, we might gently note that the First Amendment religion clauses are not violated when taxes paid by “Christians and people of faith”  are spent for purposes of which they disapprove. If that were the case, every dollar spent on war and weaponry would violate the religious liberty of Quakers. Money spent to enforce “blue laws” would violate the rights of Jews and Seventh Day Adventists. Taxes supporting high schools would violate the religious liberty of the Amish. In a religiously diverse nation, there are hundreds of other examples.

Religious liberty does not mean government must impose your religious beliefs on your neighbors. Catholics, who not so long ago struggled against state imposition of Protestant norms, should be particularly sensitive to that bit of legal revisionism.

That, of course, would require the use of logic.

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