We’re seeing multiple tantrums from self-styled religious folks these days, and it isn’t likely to abate in the coming new year.
Huffington Post recently reported on a lawsuit brought against the Kansas State Board of Education.
An anti-evolution group is suing the Kansas State Board of Education for instituting a science curriculum that teaches evolution.
The nonprofit Citizens for Objective Public Education filed a lawsuit Thursday to block the board, education commissioner and Department of Education from teaching science classes consistent with new educational benchmarks developed by 26 states to align school systems across the U.S. These Next Generation Science Standards, which Kansas adopted in June, have seen fierce opposition from critics opposed to the teaching of climate change and evolution.
Citizens for Objective Public Education argues in its lawsuit that the standards promote atheism and therefore violate the separation of church and state.
I wish the theocrats would make up their minds! Texas textbook reviewers insist that there isn’t any separation of church and state. Marco Rubio agrees with them (which tells you that denying separation is a litmus test for the GOP base). Something called the Jeremiah Project says the theory of Church-State separation is a nefarious plot by those who deny that America is a “Christian Nation.”
Apparently, interpretation of the First Amendment is a matter of convenience, to be changed when a different understanding is required in order to reach one’s desired outcome.
I must have missed that part of scripture where it teaches us that “the ends justify the means.”
Speaking of religion and government–as I have been for the past couple of days–it might be well to consider just how much the pious victims of religious persecution are suffering financially in our (ostensibly) secular culture. An article in the Washington Post recently considered the fiscal relationship of church to state.
Well, sort of. The article actually reported on a study detailing the various tax benefits our religiously “neutral,” government extends to religious organizations, the vast majority of which are Christian.
When people donate to religious groups, it’s tax-deductible. Churches don’t pay property taxes on their land or buildings. When they buy stuff, they don’t pay sales taxes. When they sell stuff at a profit, they don’t pay capital gains tax. If they spend less than they take in, they don’t pay corporate income taxes. Priests, ministers, rabbis and the like get “parsonage exemptions” that let them deduct mortgage payments, rent and other living expenses when they’re doing their income taxes. They also are the only group allowed to opt out of Social Security taxes (and benefits).
What is the value of all this preferential treatment?
The article quotes the authors of the original study, who calculated the total subsidy at $71 billion. But the original study didn’t include the cost of a number of subsidies, like local income and property tax exemptions, the sales tax exemption, and — most importantly — the charitable deduction for religious donations.
The charitable deduction for all groups cost the government approximately $39 billion dollars in 2014, according to the CBO. Since some 32 percent of all charitable donations are made to religious groups, the value of just those exemptions is around $12.5 billion.If you add that to the amounts reported in the original study, you get a religious subsidy of about $83.5 billion.
Next time someone whines about the war on religion or Christmas, or complains that government is insufficiently protective of “people of faith,” think about that.
I’d love to be “victimized” to the tune of 80+ billion dollars…
Americans haven’t talked this much about religious liberty since the Puritans defined it as worshiping the right God (and making sure their neighbors did too). A few examples:
“They feel that it will be a great tourist attraction. Who knows? People go to Dollyworld. Need I say more?
So, they set themselves up as a non-profit and applied for $18 million in tax incentives from the good people of Kentucky.
One problem. They will only hire you to work there if you are a fundamentalist Christian.
It turns out that the state will not grant incentives to companies that discriminate in hiring. Ken Hamm, the creationist applying for Kentucky tax dollars, says the state’s refusal to fund him is persecution–that the governor is attacking his religious freedom and persecuting his organization “because of our Christian message.”
Meanwhile, in Ohio, there’s a guy facing legal action if he doesn’t take down the Nativity scene he erected at his own expense on his own property, because it features zombies instead of traditional biblical characters.
Jasen Dixon told WXIX that he manages 13 Rooms of Doom haunted house, so he already had the zombies, including one resembling the baby Jesus.
“I wanted a Nativity scene and I worked with what I had,” he explained.
Town officials claimed that Dixon was breaking rules that limited displays to no more than 35 percent of the yard. Needless to say, more traditional displays with equal proportions have not been cited, and Dixon had displayed the same size installation at Halloween on the same property with no problems.
And back home again in Indiana, State Senator Scott Schneider intends to “shore up gaps in Indiana’s religious liberty framework.”
“The focus has been on same-sex marriage because that’s the hot topic right now, but it goes far beyond that,” he said. “It’s important to have some religious freedom and protection.”
The “freedom” Schneider wants to protect is the freedom to discriminate against gay customers and citizens on the basis of (his preferred) religious doctrine.
Let’s cut the pretense. What people like Schneider and Hamm want is preferential treatment by government for their particular beliefs.
Hamm wants to use public money to promote his religious literalism; Schneider wants to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT patrons. At the same time, they and other “religious freedom” theocrats want to use the authority of the state to shut down private religious displays or observances of which they disapprove.
Here’s the deal: thanks to separation of church and state (and yes, Virginia, the First Amendment may not use those words, but separation is what the religion clauses do) you have a right to believe anything you want. You also have a right to practice much–but not all–of what you believe. (You can’t sacrifice your firstborn, or beat your children senseless, or use illegal drugs in the name of your particular God).
Religious liberty does not mean you have the right to use other citizens’ tax dollars to promote your religious beliefs.
And Scott Schneider’s definition of “religious liberty” to the contrary, the First Amendment does not give businesses that rely on publicly-supported roads, sidewalks, transport, snow removal, garbage collection and the like the right to pick and choose which members of that public it will serve.
We Americans believe in magic bullets, in bumper-sticker solutions to complex problems.
Quick-and-easy.
Need to spur job creation? Pass “Right to Work” (for less) laws. Want to address poverty? Make the lives of poor people intolerable, so they’ll take one of those (non-existent) jobs. Want to make government more efficient? Outsource government functions to unaccountable for-profit vendors.
Are our public schools struggling? Let’s take their resources and create a parallel system.
How is that working out?
A story that appeared at Forbes in late 2013 foretold a lot of what would emerge in 2014. That post “Charter School Gravy Train Runs Express To Fat City” brought to light for the first time in a mainstream source the financial rewards that were being mined from charter schools. As author Addison Wiggin explained, a mixture of tax incentives, government programs, and Wall St. investors eager to make money were coming together to deliver a charter school bonanza – especially if the charter operation could “escape scrutiny” behind the veil of being privately held or if the charter operation could mix its business in “with other ventures that have nothing to do with education.”
As 2014 began, more stories about charter schools scandals continued to drip out from local press outlets – a chain of charter schools teaching creationism, a charter school closing abruptly for mysterious reasons, a charter high school operating as a for-profit “basketball factory,” recruiting players from around the world while delivering a sub-par education.
Does all of this prove that Charter schools are a bad idea? Absolutely not. Many charters are doing exactly what they were established to do–trying new and innovative education models, focusing on particular or at-risk populations, or otherwise offering creative alternatives from which public systems can borrow.
What it does mean is that there is no quick and easy “fix” for what ails education. No panacea.
The mere fact that a school is not part of the traditional public school system is not evidence that it is a good school, or even an acceptable one. Just as there are great public schools, there are great charter schools, but charter schools are not magic bullets. Charters and (especially) voucher programs require careful supervision and oversight–and they aren’t getting that oversight, because Americans think we can outsource all our civic responsibilities.
We can’t.
At some point, that hated government must exercise responsibility.
Yesterday’s New York Times had an editorial that began
Over the last several years, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has shown utter contempt for the State Supreme Court’s three-decades-old ruling in the Mount Laurel housing case, which bars wealthy towns from excluding affordable housing and requires them to write zoning laws that permit a reasonable amount of such housing to be built.
The editorial went on to describe Christie’s persistent refusal to comply with the court’s orders. It’s hard to believe that Christie was once a lawyer–a profession rooted in respect for the rule of law.
Of course, even ignoring “Bridgegate,” this is hardly the first time Christie has privileged his personal political interests over the common good. When he was first elected, he killed a much-needed, long-planned tunnel into Manhattan. As a New Jersey paper recently noted,
The ARC tunnel would have doubled cross-Hudson rail capacity – helping commuters get to high-paying Manhattan jobs and increasing property values back home in New Jersey. When Christie killed the plan – he didn’t have a Plan B. Instead, Christie grabbed the billions of dollars set aside by Gov. Jon Corzine and spent it on in-state transportation projects – which allowed him to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising the gas tax. By pulling out of the ARC tunnel and spending the money, Christie left billions in federal dollars on the table and has nothing left to contribute to a new tunnel project – rail capacity that is still desperately needed.
Christie justified that decision by saying that the project faced cost overruns; the General Accounting Office said otherwise.
I wish Christie were an anomaly, but he isn’t. In fact, Christie’s is the face of far too much of today’s politics: officeholders who are contemptuous of the government that pays them and the interests of the voters who elect them, power-hungry, self-absorbed lackeys of special interests willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of their patrons, no matter who gets hurt in the process.
What I don’t get is why these people–who appear to have no concept at all of the common good, or respect for the purpose of government–choose political life in the first place. Surely in a capitalist economy there are more appropriate venues for their narrowly-focused ambitions.
Might it be that these pompous preachers of the virtues of the market lack the ability to succeed in the real-life marketplace? Why else go into a line of work for which they are so clearly unsuited?
