Residents of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, have spent the last four years fighting to prevent construction of mosque. According to a story in Religion News,
Hundreds marched in protest after Rutherford County officials approved plans for the mosque in 2010. Televangelist Pat Robertson labeled the Islamic center a “mega mosque” and claimed Muslims were taking over Murfreesboro. An arsonist set fire to construction equipment on the building site.
Mosque opponents eventually filed a suit against Rutherford County, seeking to block construction of the worship space.
What reports have called a “thriving anti-Muslim movement” in Tennessee fueled the fight, with opponents of the Mosque asserting that the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantees don’t apply to Muslims–that they only apply to Christians.
Joe Brandon Jr., a lawyer for mosque opponents, went so far as to claim that Islam is not a religion, and that the mosque would be a threat to the community.
I guess the residents of Murfreesboro define “liberty” as “rights for folks like me.”
Think about Murfreesboro the next time a pious apologist claims that religion is a force for good.
Perhaps Jesus was all about love, but a significant percentage of his followers are all about fear and hate.
Sometimes, the only reason I see things is that former students send them to me. Unfortunately, the things they send tend to be infinitely depressing.
A few days ago, a former student sent me a link to a story about crazy Alabama Judge Roy Moore. You’ll remember Moore from his previous term as Chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court (note to self: never, ever move to Alabama), when he commissioned a five-ton stone engraved with the Ten Commandments and had it installed at the Courthouse door. It was removed after the Federal Courts ruled it a gross and obvious violation of the First Amendment religion clauses–something you’d expect a judge to know.
Moore subsequently ran unsuccessfully for President on a Christian-Theocrat ticket of some sort. Most recently, he ran for–and won–his old seat on Alabama’s high court. (Note to self: remember this example of why we should not elect judges).
So, like Jaws (only more scary), he’s baaack.
Speaking at the Pastors for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.
Moore had more:
Discussing Thomas Jefferson’s use of “life” in the Declaration of Independence, he said that “when [Jefferson] put ‘life’ in there, it was in the womb — we know it begins at conception.”
He later said the “pursuit of happiness” meant following God’s law, because “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law, and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy.”
And I bet Roy Moore will be happy to explain exactly what God wants. Which just happens to be what Roy Moore–in his twisted little mind–wants.
(Note to self: uncurl from fetal position–it’s bad for the back.)
In the wake of Mike Delph’s bizarre meltdown, and his obvious inability to distinguish between his personal (and idiosyncratic) religious commitments and his civic and constitutional responsibilities, I couldn’t help thinking of The Book of Mormon.
Bear with me here.
For those of you who have yet to see the musical, Book of Mormon is both a delightful comic entertainment and a meditation on the role of religion in human society, for good or ill. While the ostensible subject is Mormonism, the real subject is the uses to which religious commitments are put, and the various harms done by unquestioning adherence to dogma.
When youthful “Elders” from Salt Lake City are sent to Uganda to convert the villagers, they find horrific conditions: widespread AIDS, hunger, poverty and hopelessness. The blond, blue-eyed, privileged Americans are steadfast in their beliefs; they sing of the “spooky Mormon hell dreams” that follow even minor indiscretions, of the “little Mormon trick” of “turning off” and denying unapproved sexual impulses, and–in my favorite, a song called “I Believe”– they affirm all manner of (implausible) doctrinal beliefs, including the belief that “in 1978, God changed his mind about black people.”
Elder Cunningham, one of the missionaries and the play’s comic relief, is a reluctant apostate: when a member of the tribe announces his belief that he can cure his AIDS by raping a baby, the appropriately appalled Cunningham invents a scriptural passage about AIDS that forbids such behavior (and substitutes a frog…you really need to see the show.)
This spontaneous invention–and many others that follow, including a divine prohibition against genital mutilation and commanded reverence for the clitoris–is clearly not consistent with Mormon doctrine. But it’s just as clearly humane and socially useful. And in fact, Cunningham’s version of Mormonism (which owes a considerable debt to Star Wars) is wildly successful with the Ugandans.
This musical morality tale brings us back to what I am going to call the Delph Dilemma.
Every religion has its doctrinal fundamentalists, a minority of believers for whom (their version of) the letter is far more important than the original spirit or purpose of religious law. And that’s fine, so long as we all recognize the wisdom of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, which essentially say “Okay folks, you have a right to believe what you want, and to live in accordance with those beliefs (at least until you start sacrificing small children or violating other basic laws of society). But you don’t get to make the rest of us live by your rules, especially when those rules require marginalizing those who are different.”
People like Mike Delph and Eric Miller and Micah Clark have an absolute right to their belief in a God who doesn’t want gay people to get married. They have an absolute right to throw a hissy fit (on twitter or elsewhere) when they lose a legislative battle. Those of us who see religion as one of many ways humans approach questions of ethics and morality, one of many way we try to understand our obligations to the other humans with whom we share this planet–have a right to think and live differently, and in our system, the government doesn’t get to make anyone’s religious doctrine the law of the land.
Although none of us has the right to impose our preferred religious doctrines on others, we do each have a right–perhaps even a duty–to assess whether any particular belief system ultimately encourages loving-kindness or abets mean-spiritedness– whether any particular worldview promotes amity or enmity.
We get to decide which is better: the dogma that sacrifices the baby, or the modification that targets the frog.
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.
Joe Carr believes a day is fast approaching when pastors will be charged with hate crimes for preaching that homosexuality is a sin and churches will face lawsuits for refusing to host same-sex weddings.
“It’s just a matter of time,” said Carr, the pastor of Waynesville Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia. “What’s happening in Europe – we’re going to see happen here and we’re going to see it happen sooner rather than later I’m afraid.”
And that’s why the congregation will be voting next month to change their church bylaws – to officially ban the usage of their facilities for gay marriages.
“We needed to have a clear statement,” Carr told Fox News. “It’s to protect us from being forced to allow someone to use our facilities who does not believe what we believe the Bible teaches.”
In how many ways is this unbelievably stupid?
First–and most important–the U.S. Constitution has this provision called the First Amendment. The First Amendment includes something called the Free Exercise Clause–and that Clause absolutely prohibits government from telling churches what to preach or who to marry. Your church can preach hate, it can ban gays, blacks, unwed mothers or smart-ass bloggers–your church can refuse to conduct same-sex marriages, interfaith marriages, or marriages between ducks and drakes…whatever your doctrinal pleasure, no matter how unwelcoming or bizarre.
READ MY LIPS: the government can’t make you change your theology or your practices. You are safe from the assaults of the homosexual hordes.
Feel better?
On the other hand, if the government actually could impose its will on your church–if there was no Free Exercise Clause, and if (as you seem to believe) a Supreme Court decision mandating equality could be applied to churches and religious bodies–do you seriously think that changing your bylaws would protect you? Try to think (I know it’s hard). If your church changed its rules and declared its church van would no longer observe the speed limit, do you really think that would protect you from getting a ticket?
And by the way–if you own your church, you get to say who uses it. Even if your bylaws don’t spell that out.
