Don’t pollute. (via Too Many Tribbles and Astrazoic)

Since the fundies have been mostly failing at their attempts to teach creationism in the schools, some of them are trying a different tactic to impose their religion on the rest of us. If they can’t get the Bible in through the back door, they’ll try the front door!

The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has developed a curriculum that teaches the Bible as history and literature. I have no problems with the Bible being taught as part of a comparative religion course, but their curriculum isn’t comparative. It just presents the Bible on its own. Furthermore, even if the Bible is significant enough of a historical document that it is worth teaching, the curriculum should be developed by neutral parties, such as historians and anthropologists, not ministers and preachers. As it stands now, their course appears to be a thinly-veiled attempt at religious indoctrination.

I hope to have time in the near future to examine their devious efforts in more detail. In the meantime, “enjoy” this commercial from fundie doofus, Chuck Norris.

(YouTube page is here)

ParrotLover reminded me how good this video is, so I’m going to post it again this year.

(YouTube page is here)

Here are four short videos straight from Mike Huckabee’s official YouTube site. This is just so you know what Republicans value in a front-runner. (If you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit the YouTube pages directly.)

Jesus ♥ Huckabee

(YouTube page)

Legislate Christian Values

(YouTube page)

Marriage Discrimination Belongs in the Constitution

(YouTube page)

Every Sperm is Sacred

(YouTube page)

By way of the Libcom.org forum, we have this:

I’ve been researching church/state separation, and I came across the case of Abington School Dist. v. Schempp from 1963. I’ve been aware of this case for a while, but I didn’t know much of the details. This is the famous case where Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the most-hated woman in America™, allegedly got prayer kicked out of every public school in all 50 states. The reality is actually more nuanced than that.

Two of the books I’m referencing here are The Living U.S. Constitution (by Padover and Landynski) and Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Separation of Church and State (by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State).

(Buy Living Constitution or Religious Right is Wrong at Powell’s)

The first thing that jumped out at me is that I’ve been fighting this battle with only half an arsenal. I’ve been fixated on the Establishment Clause, but I’ve been ignoring the Free Exercise Clause.

First, here’s the entire First Amendment, to provide context:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s a very sweeping amendment. Many of the most important rights are all included in just that one paragraph. That’s why it was placed first (unless you’re Charlton Heston, in which case I guess this one was placed first as a diversionary tactic).

The Establishment Clause is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

The Free Exercise Clause is:

…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

These two clauses are two sides of the same coin. The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing, endorsing, or favoring one particular religion. The Free Exercise Clause protects your religion from government interference.

Abington v. Schempp

Now let’s dig into the court case. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s role was important, but not nearly as great as both she and her detractors claimed. As Rob Boston puts it:

As history indicates, several states had already removed school-sponsored devotional exercises, some as early as 1890, long before O’Hair arrived on the scene. Secondly, O’Hair’s case was only one of three cases heard by the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 concerning school prayer.

Boston continues:

O’Hair … filed her case to block the mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Baltimore public schools at the start of the school day. At the same time, Pennsylvania resident Ed Schempp was pursuing litigation to stop mandatory devotional Bible reading in Philadelphia-area public schools….

The Supreme Court agreed to hear both cases, under the combined name Abington Township School District v. Schempp. With a vote of 8 to 1, the Court struck down both religious exercises in their 1963 decision.

The Fundies are Revolting!

The right-wing reaction to this decision was (and continues to be) massive outrage. As Boston says:

Newspaper editorials denounced the ruling, and politicians across the country took up the cause of “restoring” prayer to public schools.

This is the same rhetoric we hear today every time the fundies perceive a slight against them, real or imaginary. The most disturbing thing about their reaction was their frequent claim that they had to “restore” prayer to the public schools. You can only use that word if prayer belonged there in the first place. It clearly does not. It’s like telling a cancer survivor that you need to restore the cancer to their body.

After this ruling, there were numerous attempts at a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. Fortunately, these attempts failed. I wish I could be equally confident that such attempts would fail today.

The Ruling

Now I want to examine the decision itself, to see what we can learn from it. The Supreme Court always looks at precedent, so the text of this decision can influence future separation cases.

Justice Thomas C. Clark wrote the majority opinion. He started off, quite ominously, with:

It is true that religion has been closely identified with our history and government. … In Zorach v. Clauson, … we gave specific recognition to the proposition that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” The fact that the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself.

This isn’t too bad, yet. I have no quibble with the claim that most of the Founders had a god-belief. But Justice Clark continues:

This background is evidenced today in our public life through the continuance in our oaths of office from the Presidency to the Alderman of the final supplication, “So help me God.” Likewise each House of the Congress provides through its Chaplain an opening prayer, and the sessions of this Court are declared open by the crier in a short ceremony, the final phrase of which invokes the grace of God.

His inclusion of this text implies that this form of ceremonial deism is acceptable. This bodes ill for any attempts to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance or our money. I contend that just because something has been done that way for a hundred years doesn’t make it right.

Further on, we read (citing the earlier case Zorach v. Clauson):

It is insisted that unless these religious exercises are permitted a “religion of secularism” is established in the schools. We agree of course that the State may not establish a “religion of secularism” in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus “preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.… We do not agree, however, that this decision in any sense has that effect.”

This is an important distinction. Fundies claim that various groups (virtually any group that they are not members of) are demanding “special privileges”. The Court is saying here that they will not favor no-religion over religion. That is a fair application of the First Amendment. It allows religion to exist in public. Just where do you draw the line, though?

Later in that same paragraph, Justice Clark writes:

Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.

There is a move afoot by fundies to teach the Bible in the public schools (as “history” or some other silly notion). I’m planning an article on that sometime soon. The Court’s statement here shows their willingness to allow such behavior. (I think there was a court case that specifically addressed it. Anyone know the details?)

One of my favorite lines in the entire decision comes in the next paragraph:

While the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs.

Bingo! That nails, right there, what the fundies have been trying for quite a while now. Just like a virus invades a cell and takes over its machinery to produce more copies of itself, radical Christians are trying to take over the machinery of the State to produce more of themselves.

I was checking StumbleUpon to see what people were saying about some of my articles that they were flagging. Most comments were positive, which I guess you’d expect if people are flagging it as a favorite. Some people leave negative comments. That’s fine, too. I’m not trying to please everyone, just the people in my target audience. I would prefer it if people came here to leave their negative comments, so I could respond, but I guess that’s not the way StumbleUpon works.

What’s funny is the occasional comment that is so extremely negative that I have a hard time imagining that somebody could really have such a distorted reaction. Do some people really go through life having such violent reactions to things they see? Apparently so. I guess these are the sorts of people who insist on censoring everything they disagree with.

A case in point is the reaction by a woman calling herself “ddoll”. Specifically, she was reacting to my article about the AIG Research Paper Winner, but she seems to be directing her comments to the site as a whole. (The StumbleUpon page of comments is here.)

And now for your enjoyment, here is ddoll’s review of the Bay of Fundie:

This is a hate site. Pure and simple. Why is it bothering this guy so much that Creationists believe what THEY want to believe and he can believe what HE wants to believe? There is no scientific proof either way on this theory and that is why both sides are still freely able to be taught. GET THE @#$% OVER IT ALREADY! Can’t believe this moron dedicates a whole site to mean-spirited slams against a certain group of people for their beliefs. How do people go through life being so volatile against anything that differs from their belief system? The world does not revolve around him because he’s atheist. Live and let live.

Yes, ddoll, how does someone go through life being so volatile against anything that differs from her belief system?