The Founding Fathers set out to establish a secular government and a nation where there was no established religion and where church and state were to remain separate. This vision is constantly under attack by the Christofascists as evidenced by everything from David Barton's fantasy rewriting of history, claims that America is a "Christian nation" to attempts to inject far right Christian belief into the civil laws. Aiding and abetting this process are American law makers, especially Republicans who are only to happy to trample on the religious freedom rights of other Americans if it will bring them votes from the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging Christofascists. A piece in Salon republished from Alternet looks at four of the ways in which the members of the GOP continue to prostitute themselves to the Christian Right. Here are highlights:
The proportion of conservative Christians is declining in the U.S., yet right-wing lawmakers are flipping out. Legislatures everywhere are passing religious-minded bills likely to be struck down after costly legal battles, merely to prove their allegiance to the Christian right. From Bibles to vouchers to school prayer, here’s how they’re signaling their religious stripes, even as the electorate scurries away.
1. The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments has long been the fighting symbol of those who try to join state and religion—perhaps because its Old Testament roots makes it slightly more inclusive. The most public example is Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was evicted from the bench in 2003 for refusing to remove his Ten Commandments display from his courtroom under federal court order.
But some states tried to go further than Moore. Last month the Arkansas Senate did just that, passing a bill, almost unanimously, that would allow the state to officially erect Ten Commandments monument on government property. The bill claims the monument would be constitutional, but the funds it provides for legal defense suggest they’re not too sure about that.
2. Prayer
As Kentucky’s attempt to get the Bible into classrooms demonstrated, schools often become the arena for religious pandering. And there’s no pandering like school prayer, which is perfectly constitutional as long as the state doesn’t endorse it — which, of course, is exactly what legislators want.
The most egregious example in recent years was Alabama’s 2014 bill requiring prayer in public schools.
School prayer bills are often struck down, largely because they protect a right already guaranteed by the Constitution in a manner that seems to entail the state endorsement of a particular religion. In response, lawmakers have located a crafty workaround: school religious anti-discrimination laws. The bills take as their impetus cases, often anecdotal, of students being told they can’t make god the subject of assignments. The bills ostensibly would protect students’ ability to make explicitly religious material their subject matter.
Or so they claim. But critics argue the bills are simply school prayer mandates in disguise, and those who sponsor them don’t exactly dissuade anybody from that theory.
3. Vouchers
Another backend way to intertwine religion and schooling is to reverse the process: rather than force religion onto students, export students into religion. That’s been the path of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who’s overseen a massive voucher program, essentially privatizing—and pietizing—his state’s education system.
Many of the private schools endorsed under the program would effectively be delivering religious education (read: creationism) paid for by Louisiana taxpayer funds.
This plan backfired hysterically when Rep. Valarie Hodges discovered that, though the voucher plan mostly supports Christian organizations as it was intended, it could also end up supporting a private Muslim school. She voted for Jindal’s bill but “mistakenly assumed ‘religious’ meant ‘Christian.’ ”
Lest anybody mistake the obvious purpose of these bills, Hodges spelled it out. “I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools, or private schools,” she told the paper. “[But] we need to ensure that [the new law] does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools.
4. Religious Freedom Bills
Thanks to the unexpected pushback against Indiana’s so-called religious freedom bill last month, which caught everybody, especially Indiana Governor Mike Pence, by surprise, religious freedom restoration acts are now the subject of public scrutiny.
It was almost too late. The federal RFRA was signed into law in 1993 by then-President Bill Clinton, in response to a Supreme Court decision leaving religious minorities vulnerable to federal laws. The RFRA was an example of Clinton’s patented triangulation, which also gave us the Defense of Marriage Act and don’t ask, don’t tell, though this one has been arguably less damaging.
But in recent years the RFRAs have gotten nastier (see Kansas) as right-wing lawmakers have realized that “religious freedom” laws could be used as cover for discrimination against gays and lesbians. . . . When the RFRAs pass in states that don’t have anti-discrimination protections for gays and lesbians (as, for instance, Connecticut does), they become effectively weaponized. For instance, earlier this year in Michigan the state considered a bill that would allow doctors and EMTs to refuse to treat gay patients over religious objections.
Not learning the lesson, Louisiana is still considering a similar bill that would allow someone in the wedding industry carte blanche to refuse service to gay couples. IBM is now warning the state to make similar changes to the bill as Arkansas and Indiana did, or risk losing business and investment—which, as you could probably tell from the desperation over its school system, is all the state has going for it.
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