Two Posts On Taxes and the Constitution

One is scary and slightly tyrranical -- a Contract From America? -- and the other, by Mark Engler, brings us back to earth. Read them in succession and the stark lunacy of the first will be evident.

Religious Freedom or More God in Foreign Policy?

At the Washington Posts "On Faith" blog, David Waters looks at a recent independent study on religion and foreign affairs by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He reports:

The 99-page report was issued Tuesday and delivered to the White House, which is studying the issue, said Thomas Wright, the council's executive director of studies. Some members of the independent task force also are working with the White House commission and they have been trading notes, Wright said. "We're confident that everyone agrees this is a priority for this administration, not a matter of if we need to do this but how. We hope this report will give them a framework for how," Wright said.

American foreign policy's God gap has been noted by others in recent years, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "Diplomats trained in my era were taught not to invite trouble. And no subjects seemed more inherently treacherous than religion," she said in 2006.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment's reluctance to engage religion continues today, the task force says. "The role of nationalism and decolonization was not widely understood in the U.S. until after the Vietnam War, despite considerable supporting evidence in the 1950s. Such is the case with religion today," says the task force's report, released at a conference at Georgetown University'sBerkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs."

Religion has been rapidly increasing as a factor in world affairs, for good and for ill, for the past two decades. Yet the U.S. government still tends to view it primarily through the lens of counterterrorism policy. The success of American diplomacy in the next decade will not simply be measured by government-to-government contacts, but also by its ability to connect with the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world whose identity is defined by religion."

Scott Appleby, a professor at Notre Dame and the task force's lead writes at SSRC's The Immanent Frame:

Those who were most uncomfortable with making religious freedom the headline tended to imagine the term in ironic scare quotes. “Religious freedom” is perceived by many peoples around the world, not least Muslims of the Middle East, they argued, not as a universal human right, but as a superpower-charged means of advancing hegemonic U.S. (read: Christian or, worse from their perspective, Judeo-Christian) interests. This particular strain of anti-Americanism is inflamed by isolated episodes of Christian missionaries proselytizing defiantly (or clumsily) in settings where they were manifestly unwelcome, and thereby igniting riots and sometimes deadly violence. More broadly, some suspect that missionaries, preachers, or U.S. government agents (sometimes conflated in the anti-American imagination) seek to impose on vulnerable populations “The American Way of Religion”—i.e., voluntarism, church-state separation, a free marketplace of religious ideas—which foreign opponents of U.S. influence believe to be anything but a universal human good.

and

Through reasoned debate in an open public square, the Chicago Council task force members on both sides of this divide were able to identify and embrace common ground. Thus, the TFR calls for the appointment of a new ambassador-at-large with detailed knowledge of the challenges facing both majority and minority religious groups around the world—a person, further, who possesses the communications skills necessary to explain that “religious freedom” is not a hollow shell masking U.S. religious or economic ambitions, but a universal human right that applies to every religion, whether it be a majority or a minority in any given state. The oppression, persecution, or restriction of religious groups by their respective governments, the ambassador should proclaim, is an enormous impediment to the development of religious pluralism and participatory democracy everywhere. Ensuring a public square in which all religions may compete peacefully and lawfully for a hearing and influence is one way of tempering religious groups driven to extremism by exclusion and persecution, and of undercutting those religious cells that exploit state repression by recruiting young, disaffected believers to their ranks.

If our separation of church and state is to be a model to the world of how to foster religious tolerance, our domestic policies may need a little brushing up for credibility's sake. I look forward to watching how the Obama administration receives the Chicago Council's report - and how the current factionalized Republican party receives it as well.

UPDATE: Susan Jacoby takes a swing at the report here.

Proposition 8: How Many Souls Have You Saved?

Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal's "Law Blog" quips that while little should be happening in the Proposition 8 case in California at the moment - the trial has ended, the post-trial brief isn't due until the end of the month - there's still a lot happening in the case.

Not only have supporters of the law gone bonkers over reports that the judge is gay (perhaps threatening any public support gains the case could have made 'cause, you know, those gays stick together) but the Alliance Defense Fund is now screaming that supporters of "traditional" marriage are being discriminated against for their religion:

One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop. 8) sent us a note recently attacking the plaintiffs’ approach in the case. Specifically, Brian Raum, the head of marriage litigation for the Alliance Defense Fund, has accused the plaintiffs and their lead lawyers, David Boies and Ted Olson, of unfairly attacking religion.

In an email, Raum wrote to us:

As one of the attorneys defending California’s marriage amendment, I’ve been uniquely privileged to be at trial in federal court over [recent] weeks. As the proceedings unfolded, though, something became perfectly clear that can only be described as outrageous. This lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the voter-enacted state amendment protecting marriage. But the plaintiffs, who want to redefine marriage, have focused unabashedly on a systematic attack of orthodox religious beliefs.

The defenders of Prop 8 have been standing on two feeble legs, really: they claim that the vote to define marriage as only between a man and a woman was a democratic process; and that the state has an interest in protecting "traditional" marriage. While the first premise may be true, huge amounts of church money (protected from disclosure by the government's lobbying laws and tax-exempt status for churches) ensured that the proposition passed by 52%. That "traditional" ideas of marriage are defensible has proven a more difficult case to make. Everything from the need for procreation to arguments that homosexuals are not monogamous has been thrown up as justification for a "defense" of heterosexual marriage.

What the defendants tried hard to stay away from during the trial were overtly religious arguments for same sex marriage, fearing that the Establishment Clause could be called on to disprove their arguments. Same sex marriage, they claimed, is a moral wrong, not a religious one.

Yet the overtly Christian Alliance Defense Fund was started in 1994 by the likes of Campus Crusade's Bill Bright and Focus on the Family's James Dobson in order to inhibit the legal rights of non-Fundamentalist Christians. They've made an art out of claiming that individual rights are "religious opression," even if those rights in no way impact the lives of others.

As the cornerstone of what I call the Legal Right (similar in purpose to the Religious Right and the Medical Right), ADF is a well-funded, savvy, highly effective force in law today. Their founding principle, that religious freedom is defined as tolerance by society of their particular religious proselytizing, is neither sweet nor benign.

When you define religious freedom as a one-sided demand that all others tolerate your proselytizing (because your faith is right and others need to be converted), any resistant non-believer becomes opposition to your goal of saving souls. Theologically, fundamentalism is designed to measure a believer's chances at heavenly afterlife by how he's lived (though a little deathbed salvation can fix that) and how many he has converted. It's this work to convert - to "reform" the gay, to make chaste the whore, to assert God's laws on society - that ADF is after.

From abstinence education to school prayer, from ahistorical text books to ten commandments statues in court houses, the primary goal is to teach the word of God - a very specific God - and to win all of society into that faith. Religious freedom, in this frame, doesn't mean freedom to believe as one's conscience dictates - no Christian then would need the ten commandments in a courthouse or to be kept from condoms - but freedom to spread that view either by conversion or imposition of laws unchecked.

It is the intolerance demonstrated by religious forces and their desire to convert and govern that Proposition 8 most highlights, not a greater need for tolerance of religion.

The Vatican's Guidelines for Mideast Synod Released.

Fantastic Howard Friedman at ReligionClause notes that the Catholic Church has released its Guidelines for Mideast Synod. And he pulls out some of the points the Vatican wishes to focus on in October.

The Vatican yesterday released a document titled Guidelines for Mideast Synod. The synod, scheduled for Oct. 10-24, is expected to attract some 150 bishops, mostly from Eastern rite churches. Haaretz reports that there are some 17 million Christians in the Middle East from Iran to Egypt. Many Christians have fled, but many others (primarily from Philippines, India and Pakistan) have arrived in Arab lands in recent years to work in domestic or manual labor. Here are some excerpts from the lengthy Guidelines:

18. Political conflicts in the region have a direct influence on the lives of Christians, both as citizens and as Christians. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories makes daily life difficult with regard to freedom of movement, the economy and religious life (access to the Holy Places is dependent on military permission which is granted to some and denied to others on security grounds). Moreover, certain Christian fundamentalist theologies use Sacred Scripture to justify Israel's occupation of Palestine, making the position of Christian Arabs even more sensitive.

19. In Iraq, the war has unleashed evil forces within the country, religious confessions and political movements, making all Iraqis victims. However, because Christians represent the smallest and weakest part of Iraqi communities, they are among the principal victims, with world politics taking no notice.

20. In Lebanon, Christians are deeply divided at a political and confessional level, without a commonly acceptable plan of action. In Egypt, the rise of political Islam, on the one hand, and the disengagement of Christians from civil society on the other, lead to intolerance, inequality and injustice in their lives. Moreover, this Islamisation also penetrates families through the media and school.... In many countries, authoritarianism or dictatorships force the population - Christians included - to bear everything in silence....

22. In the Middle East, freedom of religion customarily means freedom of worship and not freedom of conscience, i.e., the freedom to change one's religion for belief in another. Generally speaking, religion in the Middle East is a social and even a national choice, and not an individual one. To change religion is perceived as betraying a society, culture and nation, founded largely on a religious tradition.

23. Conversion is seen as the fruit of a proselytism with personal interests attached and not arising from authentic religious conviction. Oftentimes, the conversion of Jews and Muslims is forbidden by State laws. Christians, though also subjected to pressure and opposition from families and tribes - even if less severely - remain free to change their religion. Many times, the conversion of Christians results not from religious conviction but personal interests or under pressure from Muslim proselytism, particularly to be relieved from obligations related to family difficulties.

Religious Freedom Day.

Howard Friedman at Religion Clause notes Obama's marking of Religious Freedom Day. Please click through to read the comments and to make your own. (Now if only this administration would address faith-based initiatives accordingly!)

Today is Religious Freedom Day marking the anniversary of Virginia’s 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom. Yesterday President Obama issued a Proclamation (full text) officially designating the observance. It said in part:

The Virginia Statute was more than a law. It was a statement of principle, declaring freedom of religion as the natural right of all humanity -- not a privilege for any government to give or take away. Penned by Thomas Jefferson and championed in the Virginia legislature by James Madison, it barred compulsory support of any church and ensured the freedom of all people to profess their faith openly, without fear of persecution. Five years later, the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights followed the Virginia Statute's model, stating, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .".

Religious Tolerance and Separation of Church and State.

Marv Knox at Associated Baptist Press applies a little logic and gravity to the Christian claims of religious persecution in the US:

Claims of persecution always deliver a jolt. That’s especially true when a Christian in the United States aspires to be the persecutee. In this context, “persecution” typically means one of three things: Either somebody disagreed with this particular Christian’s beliefs and said so. (What godless rudeness!) Somebody snickered at her religious behavior. (How mean!) Or someone with authority refused to allow him to exert his religious will upon others. (What’s this country coming to?)

Such protests of persecution might appear perplexing or peculiar. Primarily they’re paranoid and provincial. The latest collaborative New Voice Media feature package published today by ABP and its print-media partners presents a broader perspective on persecution. Almost 70 percent of the planet’s population live where religion is highly restricted. Shocking as it may sound, zoning ordinances in American suburbs, banned Scripture signs at public-school ballgames and store clerks who say, “Happy Holidays” don’t make the list. We’re talking about places where people are beaten, imprisoned, banned from the marketplace, denied education and even killed because of their faith. Beside them, U.S. Christians’ claims of persecution are pathetic.

As you might expect, one of the worst perpetrators is China, whose government is atheistic. Interestingly, however, the vast majority of religious persecution takes place in countries that are overtly religious. They’re all for practicing religion -- but only their religion, observed only their way. The most strident are countries politically and/or socially dominated by Islam or some strains of Orthodox Christianity.

Counterintuitively, U.S. Christians who play the persecution card often argue against the policies and principles that ensure not only their religious freedom, but the dream that their great-great grandchildren will have the opportunity to worship and live out faith as they do today.

He goes on to examine the laws that protect separation of church and state and therefore religious freedom. I can't say how refreshing it is to hear the religious left decry some of the challenges to separation and state that we've seen in the past 10 months. Just yesterday I came across about a half dozen blogs that claimed there was no separation of church and state in the constitution and shouldn't be. US law comes from God, I read again and again.

The sheer ignorance of the fact that believers are only allowed such freedoms because of separation of church and state is astounding. It's no secret that the Fundamentalist and Evangelical denominations in the country are out for theocracy. But they forget that they must be careful what they wish for. Theocracy is great so long as the theocrats belong to your denomination.

Only a willful ignorance of this country's history allows such (organized and influential groups) to deny the importance of separation of church and state to their existence. The US was a refuge to those escaping religious persecution in Europe. Our freedoms here rely on the protections established at the time. But those protections have been warped by ignorance of history and unreasonable challenges to secular governance.

As Susan Jacoby writes in The Age of American Unreason, comparing the first and second "Great Awakenings" of fundamentalist faith in the US to the current one, signaled by the rise of the Reagan administration and the claims by the Bush administration that its foreign policy was a "third [Great] Awakening:

Another critical difference between the fundamentalist revivals of the past and the present is the political engagement of modern fundamentalists on the side of one party and their belief that it is both a right and a religious duty to institutionalize their moral values. (pp. 190)

This threat is down-played by both secular and moderate Americans, seen as less of a threat than it actually is. Yet as the past few months have shown with regard to health care reform - and all that I blog about every day! - fundamentalist influence over government is at an all time high and the direct effects on general social welfare are astoundingly profound. From the woman in Kansas who can't find a doctor to perform a tubal ligation after her childbirth to the female soldier who is forced to leave her duties - and career - for an abortion, to the dying patient in Montana forced to be put on artificial nutrition and hydration to the rape victim in Ohio who is denied emergency contraception.

Discrimination is spreading and not only against patients' rights. Discrimination against science and factual analysis of the world around us is part of the Fundamentalist agenda too. History text books are written by Fundamentalists in Texas. Social services are provided by missionizing faith-based organizations which trade food for prayer. Denial of science-based facts, facts which can be proven, is made in favor of pseudoscience and junk science. Our education system places us squarely in the middle of the scale of other Westernized countries, leaving our advancement in the future in question. Our foreign policy ignores dangerous challenges in Christian countries in favor of rebuke - and invasion -of those who do not abide by Fundamental Christianity.

That the religious left is speaking out against this marching and incremental loss of freedom is good. I wish their voices were louder.

An example of Christian claims of persecution.

Church-State Separation, at Top 10 2009 List.

From the fantastic Howard Friedman at Religion Clause, his top ten list of Church-State Separation/Free Exercise:

Here are my nominations for the 2009 Top Ten Developments in Church-State Separation/ Free-Exercise of Religion. The choices are based on the long-range implications of the developments on legal doctrines and on future of relations between government and religion. Some of this year's top picks continue trends selected last year. (2008 Top 10.) Others reflect new concerns. I am sure that some readers will disagree with the picks, so I invite your comments. Most of these developments were reflected in a number of Religion Clause postings over the year. Links are to representative posts on the issue.

1. U.S. Catholic bishops are at increasing odds with President Obama over abortion. Very public disputes, sometimes splitting the Catholic community, erupted over Notre Dame's award of an honorary degree to Obama and over the USCCB's insistence on strict language in health care reform bills to limit abortion coverage.

2. Conservative Christian groups mount extensive but unsuccessful attempt to prevent passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

3. The Freedom From Religion Foundation becomes a major player in pressing for church-state separation by challenging a wide variety of practices, from sectarian prayers at city council meetings, to the tax code's parsonage allowance, to engravings at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

4. The Rifqa Bary case requires Florida and Ohio courts to become involved in run-away teenager's claim that her Muslim father threatens her life because of her conversion to Christianity.

5. U.S. Supreme Court rules that a Utah city can refuse to allow the religious group, Summum, to put up a monument containing its "Seven Aphorisms" in a public park, even though a 10 Commandments monument and other monuments are already there.

6. Britain's new Supreme Court holds that a Jewish school's admissions policy using the traditional Orthodox definition of who is a Jew amounts to ethnic, and therefore racial, discrimination.

7. Courts around the country decide disputes over ownership of property after numerous conservative Episcopal parishes move to Anglican affiliations.

8. South Carolina's attempt to issue state-sponsored "I Believe" license plates is ruled a violation of the Establishment Clause.

9. France convicts Scientology and its leaders of fraud while German court limits tactics of German government against Scientology.

10. A Utah trial court rejects a settlement proposed by Utah's Attorney General in the complicated attempt to reform the FLDS United Effort Plan Trust, while the estate of a deceased leader of the polygamous FLDS Church seeks control of the $120 million trust.

There are at least two other Top 10 lists published this month on religion related stories. You may find it interesting to compare their picks, many of which differ a good deal from mine, though they were using somewhat different criteria. They are Don Byrds' Top 10 Religious Liberty Stories of 2009; and Religion Newswriters Top 10 Religion Stories.

Abstinence-Only Education and the Establishment Clause.

Yeah! Legal Theory Blog points out a new paper by Naomi Shatz that argues abstinence-only education should be challenged on the Establishment Clause!

I damn well hope someone gets the balls to challenge faith-based sex education and health care by separation of church and state issues and not just privacy. I would like my religious freedom some day.

Won't that be a righteous day!

The abstract:

This article argues that current federal funding for abstinence-only sex education violates the Establishment Clause. Previous establishment clause challenges to the abstinence-only education system focused either on overt religious messages included in curricula or on federal funding going to religious groups to teach abstinence-only education. These challenges have ignored the religious history of abstinence-only education and the particular religious values that are endorsed by even the allegedly "secular" curricula. This article demonstrates that the current funding of abstinence-only education violates the Supreme Court's test for religious neutrality as set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzmann.

The Separation of the Religious Right and State.

Kevin Duewel's take on the wall between state and religion:

The Separation of Church and State is understood to prohibit the mingling of government in religious affairs, and likewise prohibits the interference of institutionalized religion mingling in government affairs. What is not understood is that the Separation of Church and State isn’t actually prohibitive: it’s doctrinal. The difference is that a doctrine can only be upheld by practice. A prohibition, on the other hand, is institutional, and enforceable. The Separation of Church and State, in other words, does not necessarily prohibit religious leaders from being elected to office, or organized religion from petitioning government.

The doctrine of the Separation of Church and State comes from a 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association by Thomas Jefferson, not from the Constitution, or from English common law — one of the bases of our written Constitution. An excerpt of the letter is as follows:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

For reference, the section of the First Amendment of the Constitution that concerns religion reads, “Congress will make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

The First Amendment protects organized religion from government intervention; however, it does not shield government from the melding of organized religion — and I am not suggesting that government needs protection for that matter.

Jefferson’s notion of the Separation of Church and State, as we see in re-examining his words above, did not explicitly concern the involvement of men of faith in politics; it warned of the overreach of government in religious matters — and rightfully so. Alone the phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State” could be interpreted as a great wall, separating two volatile agents, or as a fortress, protecting the free practice of religion from the reach of the state. In the context of the letter and its addressee — the Danbury Baptist Association — it seems that Jefferson’s idea of the Separation of Church and State was more concerned with later than the former interpretation.

My point is that so long as men of faith keep their faith out of their politics, there is no conflict, neither constitutionally or in practice with the election of religious leaders to office. When men of faith make religion partisan or political, however, we have a problem. When religiousness becomes a partisan issue, one party becomes the political defender of the faith, and the other, the political opponent of the faith, and religious questions become policy questions — religion is politicized. Which is exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned of in his letter!

With an in-context re-reading of Thomas Jefferson’s letter, it becomes clear that Jefferson’s notion of a “wall of separation between Church & State”, means that ” religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God”. Religion is not supposed to be a matter between Man and his politics. With the country divided over social issues like Gay Marriage, Abortion, and prayer in school, somebody needs to remind the Religious Right that “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions”. What we need is not a separation of individual men of faith from office, but a separation of religious coalitions from state; i.e., a Separation of the Religious Right and State.