Church and State

Jon Rowe has another excellent post fisking the commonly heard argument that the Ten Commandments are the basis of the US legal system. This in light of the impending oral arguments in the McCreary case by the Supreme Court on the question of a Ten Commandments display in McCreary County, Kentucky. The county has been almost obsessive about getting that display into the county courthouse, changing it three different times to try to get around a judicial ruling against the county on the matter. Here is the county's explanation for why they want the Ten Commandments display there: The Ten…
No, that's not a pyramid setup of the sort done at cheerleading camps or Iraqi prisons. One of the good things about blogs is the ability for response and counter response. In this case, Barry Lynn wrote an op-ed piece about ID; Darrick Dean wrote a critique of Lynn's article; and Jason Rosenhouse wrote a critique of Dean's critique. And now I'm writing a follow up to Rosenhouse's critique of Dean's critique of Lynn's article. Got it? Good. But I want to focus on this statement made by Dean: The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is executive director of the far left, anti-religion, anti-constitution - yet…
The Virginia assembly is considering a bill, HJ537, which would amend the Virginia constitution's provisions concerning religious liberty and disestablishment, provisions that were taken directly from Thomas Jefferson's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. Currently the Virginia Constitution, in Article 1, Section 16, contains the following language: That religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion,…
A couple days ago, I received an email from a correspondent named Nick, a man I've encountered in a political chat room before as well. He's one of those really hardcore religious right types who, as you will see, absolutely glories in his ignorance, and he was bound and determined to "educate" me. His initial e-mail simply said this: I know you are smarter than all of these folks but maybe you can learn something And then it had a link to this article on someone else's webpage. There's nothing original in the article. It is the same article that has been emailed around a million times, so…
Feddie has a follow up on the story I referred to yesterday, where Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker had said that Clarence Thomas had told him that judges should be evaluated on their oath to God rather than their oath to the people or the Constitution. His follow up includes the actual transcript of what Parker attributed to Thomas: PARKER: Just moments before I placed my hand on the Holy Scripture, Justice Thomas soberly addressed me and those in attendance. He admonished us to remember that the worth of a justice should be evaluated by one thing, and by one thing alone: whether or…
Jon Rowe has a new post hammering yet another badly reasoned article against church/state separation. The article in question is written by Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. As is very common for such articles, it includes a number of quotes that have been falsely attributed to the founding fathers. Such quotes are passed around among the religious right like fruitcakes at Christmas, and most of them simply do not exist. Of the four quotations he has in his article, 3 are completely fictitious, but traced to William…
A friend sent me a link to this horrible article on church/state separation written by someone named Michael Tremoglie. It's so badly reasoned that even with the straw man he constructs of his opponents' position on separation, he still has to resort to other logical fallacies and outright falsehoods to defeat it. He begins: According to the Washington Times, "The California lawyer who tried to have the phrase "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance now wants to legally prevent President Bush from placing his hand on a Bible while being sworn in at his inauguration." This is just…
Jon Rowe has an excellent post up about religion and the founding fathers, stemming from a book review at the Claremont website. I very much like the phrase "theistic rationalism", which he quotes the book review as coining. That's an excellent description of the religious views of men like Jefferson, Washington and Franklin. On the religion law listserve a few weeks ago, the question of the founders and deism came up and Eugene Volokh said that he didn't think the language of the Declaration was deistic because deism, by the modern definition, requires a non-intervening God and the language…
I am obviously one of the more staunch advocates of church/state separation one is ever likely to encounter, as volumes of my writing can easily attest. But let me say this: it's time for Michael Newdow to go away. He is the father who filed the lawsuit to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, a lawsuit he won on the merits at the appeals court level only to have the Supreme Court overturn that decision due to a lack of standing. He has since refiled that suit on behalf of other parents and the whole process has begun anew. I think he's correct on the Pledge case,…
Contrary to the hysterically overblown view so common on the religious right (a view intentionally planted there by frauds and hucksters like Pat Robertson), the ACLU regularly goes to court to defend Christian churches and organizations. I've mentioned in the past their work on behalf of Jerry Falwell (himself a fraud and a huckster, but the Constitution covers his right to be one as well) against the City of Lynchburg to overturn a city ordinance limiting the amount of property a church could own within the city limits. They also defended Falwell in a case that overturned the state of…
Jon Rowe is guesting on Sandefur's blog this week and has this essay on the dual influence of Christian and Pagan sources in American history. I think he nails the issue almost completely. Like him, I thought the ACLU's lawsuit threat against LA County over their seal was pretty silly. But in most cases, the ACLU is right on church and state issues, despite the often hysterical overreactions from the religious right.
From the Washington Post: On the Christmas fight, the American Civil Liberties Union, the group most often cited as the enemy of traditionalists, says it has not filed a single case blocking Christmas displays this year and cites half a dozen instances over the past year in which it has fought on the side of more religious expression. "This is the winter equivalent of those summer stories about shark attacks being on the increase," says Barry Lynn, who heads the liberal group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The conservative groups, he said, "think they can make…
Julian Sanchez has a new column that is so devestatingly on the mark concerning the myth of Christian persecution that it makes me want to create an award to balance off the Robert O'Brien Trophy. In particular, he beautifully nails this bit of pure demagoguery: Even when genuine cases of religious speech's being squelched lead to a more prolonged battle, the narrative favored by the martyrs manqué doesn't always quite fit. When a Massachusetts high school attempted to punish Bible club members for distributing candy canes with religious messages affixed, Rev. Jerry Falwell justly fumed,…
The judge who has begun wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments stitched into it is finding support in his own home town of Andalusia, where his district court is found. I doubt anyone could be surprised. But here's what I find amusing about it. Look at this quote:Elizabeth Shine, also of Andalusia, has no problem with the Pleasant Home native's judicial robe, and the fact that it is emblazoned with Old Testament scriptural verses. "It's his robe," Shine commented. "So, if it's the way he feels, he should have every right to put it on his robe." Is there really any doubt that if,…
Following in the footsteps of the endlessly self-aggrandizing Judge Moore, yet another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, has jumped into the Ten Commandments fray. McKathan took Moore's nonsense even further, actually embroidering the ten commandments onto his judicial robe. My first reaction was that this had to be a parody, but it's not. He's actually serious: Covington County Presiding Circuit Court Judge Ashley McKathan said he ordered the robe and had it embroidered using his own money. He said he did it because he felt strongly that he should stand up for his personal religious…
NPR did a story yesterday on the Steven Williams lawsuit. That story said that there were in fact multiple complaints to the principal by multiple parents. The story interviewed several parents who said that Mr. Williams talked about Jesus constantly, during math lessons or science lessons or, as one put it, "a hundred times a day". They also interviewed several other teachers from the school, according to the reporter, and not one of them took Williams' side in the dispute. It also pointed out that the 5th grade textbook that he uses in his 5th grade class contains a full copy of the…
I noted in my last post on the Steve Williams lawsuit that I had contacted a Washington scholar to confirm that the "George Washington Prayer Journal" was indeed known to be fraudulent. That scholar is Frank Grizzard of the University Virginia, a senior associate editor of the George Washington Papers collection housed there. Here is his response:The so-called prayer journal is not in GW's writing, although I'm not sure it's actually a forgery. The manuscript dealer (Burk I think) who first sold it when it came to light in the 19th century printed a facsimile edition in which he admits that…
It turns out that our suspicions were entirely correct and Steven Williams, the teacher in Cupertino, California who is suing the school district because the principal requires him to get her approval before handing out any supplemental material to his class, is one hell of a proselytizer. Here is a picture of one of his supplemental handouts, dealing with Easter. There is only one thing on it that is in any way relevant to teaching American history, and that is highly distorted. The rest is pure proselytizing. A public school teacher cannot assign his students to read the bible, interview a…
I recently joined the religion law listserv, administered by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (archive here). I joined it because, obviously, I'm very fascinated by constitutional law, especially by the jurisprudence that has grown up around the religion clauses of the first amendment, and because the list includes many of the most prominent legal scholars writing on that subject. I don't post much there, I mostly just read the posts because I am not a legal scholar myself. But yesterday I sent a message to the list asking for opinions on the Steven Williams case in Cupertino,…
Joseph Farah has already won an Idiot of the Month Award (now called the Robert O'Brien Trophy) for his hypocritical and absurd arguments about the Boy Scouts and the ACLU. Now Hans Zeiger, intrepid Hillsdale College student and So-Con columnist-in-training (you can find his columns on about a half a dozen webpages that I've fisked in the past) seems to be bucking for his own award with this article in the WorldNutDaily. While Farah was up in arms over the decision by the Pentagon not to allow military bases to sponsor Scout troops, Zeiger is frothing at the mouth over a school district's…