Church and State
stcynic | September 23, 2005A new curriculum for a public school bible course elective has been released by the Bible Literacy Project. Unlike the NCBCPS curriculum, this one was actually written by scholars. It's endorsed by respectable and reasonable legal analysts like Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center and Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress, which is far more credible than the ADF hacks who would endorse a pile of shit if they thought it supported Christianity. I haven't actually seen this curriculum yet, but I have high hopes for it, as does Mark Chancey, the SMU professor of religious studies who…
stcynic | September 19, 2005I've been trying to find out what was said at that press conference called by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools - you know, the one with Chuck Norris - earlier this month. As it turns out, after savaging Mark Chancey's scathing report on the suitability of their curriculum as the efforts of "far left, anti-religion extremists", the NCBCPS has actually incorporated those criticisms into new revisions to that curriculum and they announced those revisions at the press conference:
At the time, National Council officials lambasted Chancey's report and the Texas Freedom…
stcynic | September 14, 2005Well round 1 of round 2 has gone to Michael Newdow. Newdow is the doctor/lawyer from California who filed a case to have the words "under God" struck from the pledge of allegiance. His first suit went all the way to the Supreme Court but was dismissed there because they ruled that he lacked standing to bring the suit (because he did not have custody of his daughter). So now Newdow has refiled the suit on behalf of several other parents who do have standing and it has to start the process back up the legal ladder. The first round of that process just ended with a Federal judge declaring that…
stcynic | September 10, 2005Over the last year or so, Jon Rowe has written a series of posts about the founding fathers and religion, a subject which has always fascinated me and that I've written on a lot as well. In the course of that series of posts, Jon has evoked the notion of "theistic rationalism", an excellent description of the beliefs of the leading lights among the founders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin). The key distinction, the absolute touchstone of the distinction between orthodox Christianity on the one hand and deistic or unitarian ways of thinking, is the notion that what we can…
stcynic | September 8, 2005The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, publishers of the horrid bible curriculum that I've discussed so much recently, has scheduled a press conference in Washington tomorrow to defend its curriculum against Mike Chancey's scathing criticisms. Their press release announcing the conference is titled:
Chuck Norris and his Wife Gena to Speak at Press Conference on Bible Course in Public Schools
Well that should be exciting. Maybe we'll get lucky and the guy who played Screech will stop by to lend his expertise to the subject.
stcynic | August 28, 2005This is an interesting case. In Okemos, a town I lived in for 2 years as a child and then coached debate in for 3 years during college, there has been an ongoing battle over the Okemos Christian Center. They wanted to expand their facilities to add a 35,000 square foot school and the township said no. A Federal judge has just ruled in favor of the church on the basis of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which says that local land use regulations cannot impose a substantial burden on religious entities without a compelling government interest (a law I support). I think…
stcynic | August 18, 2005I reported a few months ago about Judge Cale Bradford, of the Marion Superior Court in Indiana, placing a restriction in a divorce decree that said that neither parent could expose a child to their Wiccan beliefs. Both parents were Wiccan, but they send their son to a private Catholic school. The judge decided that because there are potential conflicts between what the parents teach him at home about Wicca and what he is learning in school about Catholicism, the parents should be prevented from speaking to the child about their beliefs. At the time, I called this one of the most disturbing…
stcynic | August 11, 2005Okay, this is a hilarious response from the attorney who represents the group that wrote the outrageously bad bible curriculum I've been writing so much about lately.
Hiram Sasser, Liberty Legal: Everyone's come to the same conclusion, that this curriculum was perfectly fine. It meshes well with the educational environment of a school, and it's beneficial, and the Supreme Court has always said it's beneficial for the kids to learn about the Bible. So anyone who's against this has just got to be French.
Just got to be French? Did he seriously say that, like with a straight face? Wow.
stcynic | August 8, 2005I've written quite a bit about the French law forbidding students from wearing "visible religious symbols" or clothing. Howard Friedman is reporting that the French government has now decided, after much lobbying, that Sikhs can wear patkas (an under-turban) or headscarves, but not turbans, in school. Meanwhile, no other religious group has gotten such a dispensation from the government. Muslims are forbidden from wearing headscarves or burkas, Jews from wearing yarmulkes and Christians from wearing visible crosses. The current French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, said several months…
stcynic | August 2, 2005The deeper I dig into this, the more astonished I am at just how shoddy this bible curriculum is. I spent much of the afternoon exchanging emails on the ReligionLaw listserv with Jim Henderson, senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, Pat Robertson's legal group that has endorsed the NCBCPS curriculum. He just said that they support the notion that it's possible to teach a bible course that is constitutinal. I fully agree, but this one isn't the one and he seems entirely unconcerned about the fact that the curriculum is riddled with lies and nonsense. I want to look a…
stcynic | August 1, 2005The full report on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' Bible course curriculum is now available from the Texas Freedom Network. The report was written by Mark Chancey, a professor of Biblical studies at Southern Methodist University. As Chancey notes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has quite a select group of supporters and they've managed to compile an entire curriculum on how to teach about the Bible without a single Biblical scholar on either their 8 member Board of Directors or their 50+ member Advisory Committee. They do, however, have…
stcynic | August 1, 2005One of the growing trends around the country is school boards allowing schools to teach an elective course on the bible. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) has been very active in lobbyign school boards to do so and selling them their textbooks for such a class in the process. Such courses are legal as long as they are, in the words of first amendment scholar Charles Haynes, "taught academically, not devotionally." Schools can teach about the bible, about what people believe about it, but they may not endorse biblical teachings or any particular religious…
stcynic | July 19, 2005The Federal Election Commission has unanimously voted in favor of Jerry Falwell in a complaint that was filed against him by the Campaign Legal Center. The complaint said that he had violated election laws by endorsing President Bush because he is the head of a non-profit religious organization:
Falwell, founder of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and the defunct Moral Majority, told religious conservatives in his July 1, 2004, "Falwell Confidential" Internet newsletter that "voting for principle this year means voting for the re-election of George W. Bush. The alternative, in my mind,…
stcynic | June 30, 2005Howard Friedman has a post on his excellent Religion Clause blog about Roy Moore's address to the Southern Baptist Convention's Pastor's Conference recently. He cites the Florida Baptist Witness' report on Moore's speech, which contains this bizarre statement:
"There are consequences to what is happening in America today," he said. The separation of church and state, a concept that has no basis in any U.S. founding documents - including the Constitution - does not mean a "separation of God and government," Moore said.
In fact, the doctrine is "biblically based," he continued, noting that in…
stcynic | June 29, 2005Jon Rowe has yet another excellent post on the subject of the founders and religion. This one looks at how at least two of them, Jefferson and Adams, felt about the Ten Commandments.
stcynic | June 28, 2005The Washington Post reports that in the aftermath of yesterday's split decision, some prominent religious right leaders are planning a massive campaign to put Ten Commandments monuments at public buildings around the country. Their reasoning is rather bizarre:
Within hours of yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, Christian groups announced a nationwide campaign to install similar displays in 100 cities and towns within a year.
"We see this as an historic opening, and we're going to pursue it aggressively," said the Rev.…
stcynic | June 28, 2005In his first post on the SCOTUSblog's Ten Commandments mini-blog, Marty Lederman suggests that the Ten Commandments cases are of dubious importance and perhaps even damage the cause of separation. I think the arguments are plausible. First, quoting Ann Althouse:
"I think it's very bizarre of us to regard the Ten Commandments case as the big case...[I]t really just isn't that important whether there's a monument amid other monuments somewhere on the state capitol grounds or a framed text amid other framed texts on a courthouse wall...There are ideologues who want to purge religion from the…
stcynic | June 28, 2005While reading Jack Balkin's excellent analysis of Scalia's dissent in McCreary, I noticed something about Scalia's reasoning that I find disturbing. Take the following passage from his dissenting opinion, for example:
Today's opinion suggests that the posting of the Ten Commandments violates the principle that the government cannot favor one religion over another. That is indeed a valid principle where public aid or assistance to religion is concerned, or where the free exercise of religion is at issue, but it necessarily applies in a more limited sense to public acknowledgement of the…
stcynic | June 27, 2005As they did with the Raich and Kelo decisions, SCOTUSBlog has put together a group of eminent scholars to discuss today's Ten Commandments decisions. The list includes Doug Laycock (Texas), Sanford Levinson (Texas), Marty Lederman, Rick Garnett (Notre Dame), Jack Balkin (Yale) and several others. Well worth reading for us court watchers.
stcynic | June 27, 2005I haven't seen the actual rulings yet, but it appears that my prediction has come true - the Supreme Court has split on the two Ten Commandments cases, ruling against the Kentucky display in the McCreary case and upholding the Texas display in the Van Orden case. According to Lyle Denniston at the SCOTUSBlog, the McCreary case was a fairly predictable 5-4 decision with the court's 4 more liberal justices joined by O'Connor to make up the majority and it was decided primarily on the purpose prong of the Lemon test:Splitting 5-4 in the first of two rulings on government displays of the Ten…