Is Pete Buttigieg Too Young to Be President?

America currently finds itself with an occupant of the White House who is a malignant narcissist, who doesn't read, disregards the wisdom of experts, and acts on impulse and Twitter rants. It would seem almost anyone would be more fit to occupy the White House rather than Trump. Of the leading Democrat candidates for the presidential nomination, three - Biden, Sanders and Warren - are at an age where many people begin to fail physically in terms of stamina and cognition.  The fourth, Pete Buttigieg, is at the other end of the spectrum age wise and the persistent question of his critics is whether he is too young, despite his high education (Trump will not even allow his academic grades to be released) and poise. Buttigieg points out - as Virginians who know history - the Founders were very young, Jefferson being a mere 33 when he authored the Declaration of Independence.  A column in the New York Times looks at this question of age.  It doesn't answer the question, but give much to think about, including the crucial need to remove Donald Trump from the White House.  Here are excerpts:

Finland just elected the world’s youngest prime minister, Sanna Marin, who’s 34. Time magazine named Greta Thunberg, 16, its youngest-ever “Person of the Year.”

Even before I could mention their names to Pete Buttigieg, who’s vying to become the youngest American president, he brought them up. He also brought up Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, who was 37 when she took office, and Emmanuel Macron, who became the president of France at 39.

That’s how old Buttigieg, now 37, would be at his inauguration.

“This country was founded by 20-somethings,” he added, referring to the fact that Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, were in their 20s on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson was 33. John Hancock was 39.

Donald Trump is 73, meaning that he has more than a half-century of life lessons on some of them. How does that show? Well, an hour before I connected with Buttigieg, the president saw fit to tweet that Time’s choice of Thunberg, a Swedish climate-change activist, was “so ridiculous” and that she should “work on her Anger Management problem.” Facing imminent impeachment, he started a Twitter spat with a teenage girl.

Trump is the “most extreme example of the fact that while wisdom and age may be related, they’re very much not the same thing,” Buttigieg said.

Still. Age isn’t irrelevant. America is much, much bigger than Finland and much, much more complicated than it was during the Revolutionary War. In a country so powerful, at such a perilous time, is Buttigieg simply too young and too green to lead the way?

It’s the question that hovers over a presidential campaign whose success has stunned the political world.

And even now, after first-place finishes in some recent polls of Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’s pressed about whether someone with his short résumé, capped by two terms as the mayor of a city of just 100,000 people, could possibly be up to the presidency and pass muster with enough Americans to get elected. So we spent most of a nearly hourlong car ride between campaign stops in the New York City area talking about it. He conceded that the longer you’re alive, “the more you learn,” and that there are lessons and life passages still in the offing for him. He’d like to be a parent, but if he succeeds on his current quest, he’d become the leader of the free world first.

“A lot of things in my life have been out of sequence,” he said. “I was a mayor before I got married. I was a war veteran before I had dated.” He was referring to his seven months in Afghanistan and recognizing that while he has been precociously ahead of the game in many regards, he was behind in others. It was only four years ago, at 33, that he finally had a serious romantic relationship — with the man, Chasten, who is now his husband.

Age has played out in surprising ways in the Democratic primary. While Buttigieg is unusually young, the other three candidates grouped with him at the head of the pack — Joe Biden, 77; Elizabeth Warren, 70; and Bernie Sanders, 78 — are unusually old. The oldest candidate, Sanders, is by far the most popular among the youngest Democratic voters, getting the support of 52 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 in a national Quinnipiac poll released on Tuesday. Buttigieg got just 2 percent of that group, in contrast with 12 percent of Democratic voters between 35 and 49, 12 percent of those between 50 and 64 and 11 percent of those 65 and older. He attributed that to younger voters’ attraction to Sanders’s less pragmatic, more ideologically pure vision. It’s certainly not because Buttigieg hasn’t courted them. In this “O.K. Boomer” moment of younger Americans’ disgust with the income inequality, social injustices and climate change that older Americans have bequeathed them, he has claimed a generational perspective that separates him from his rivals for the Democratic nomination. He also makes the case that people of Biden’s, Warren’s and Sanders’s age have had their chance to fix things. Shouldn’t someone with an arguably fresher outlook — someone from outside Washington — take a turn? With that reasoning he frames political vulnerabilities as political virtues. . . . “It means that one generation has been in charge for a very long time.”

Buttigieg has to muster extra poise, extra confidence, lest any deficit be interpreted as immaturity. But then that poise and confidence, in the context of his age, are interpreted as arrogance. His detractors constantly tell me that he’s cocky — or robotic.

“One of the things I get is, ‘Why aren’t you more passionate?’” he said. “I’m very passionate. But I’m also very disciplined. If I weren’t, it would be harder to be taken seriously.”

The Constitution decrees that a House member must be at least 25, a senator at least 30, a president at least 35. No American president has been under 40, and only two took office before the age of 45: Teddy Roosevelt, who was 42, and John F. Kennedy, who was 43.

Shouldn’t and doesn’t that give Buttigieg pause?

“Of course you have those moments,” he acknowledged. “We’re talking about a role of unbelievable importance and complexity and challenge. And yet every person who’s done it has been a mortal, a human being — and of course so much depends not just on the individual but on how you build a team.”

He repeated something that he has said scores if not hundreds of times on the campaign trail: As mayor of South Bend, Ind., for the past eight years, he has had a kind of executive experience that someone who has served in Congress for that long or longer hasn’t. Besides, he said, experience isn’t the only font of wisdom. Education matters. Intuition, too.

He comes armed with historical examples beyond the founders of people who made remarkable contributions early on. “I’m not going to compare myself to Martin Luther King,” he said, “but he’s certainly an example of somebody who had a huge impact, mainly in his 30s.” King died at 39.

Maybe he’d match up well against Trump. I’m not sure, and how I wish I were, because the likeliest Trump slayer is the Democratic nominee I want and America needs. Both substantively and in terms of electability, Buttigieg would be better off if he were older, with higher positions under his belt, but then all of the leading Democrats have worrying shortcomings. His youth is a concern. It shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

What Thomas Jefferson Could Not Teach at UVA

A view of Thomas Jefferson's "Academical Village."

As a double graduate of the University of Virginia (both as an undergraduate and law school) I have a strong allegiance to what Thomas Jefferson envisioned as his "academical village" - a village that on the 200th anniversary of its founding has grown beyond Jefferson's wildest dreams and gained the stature that he had so hoped for.  Thus, it was with great interest that I read a long article in The Atlantic that looks at Jefferson's efforts to found the University of Virginia ("UVA") and how in the shorter term it failed to achieve his goals of equaling the North's leading universities and educating a future generation that would do what Jefferson's generation had failed to do: end slavery. There are a number of ironies, not the least of which is that it was slave labor that built UVA - and most colleges in the South - and that many of the university's graduates took up the cause of the Confederacy to protect the institution of slavery.  Nonetheless, the article is an interesting read (okay, perhaps not for some Virginia Tech alumni such as one "RL" who knows who he is and seemingly resents UVA with a passion - my reply: an inferiority complex can be such sad thing to witness) and give further insights to the always intriguing and very contradictory Jefferson.  Here are article highlights:

Thomas Jefferson had a severe case of New England envy. Though that region had formed the most consistent bloc of opposition to him and his political party, almost from the beginning of his time on the national stage, he admired many things about the place. First and foremost, he looked with longing toward New England’s system of town meetings, which gathered citizens together to discuss and make decisions about their local communities. Jefferson considered this form of participatory democracy crucial to building and maintaining a healthy republican society.
 And then there was the region’s profusion of educational institutions. Jefferson admired those as well—even if he did not always agree with what was being taught there. The hard work of democracy, including well-ordered community decision making, required an educated populace. That is why he waged a campaign for a system of publicly supported education in Virginia for many years. The Revolution and the creation of the United States of America broadened Jefferson’s vision in many ways, and by his mid-40s, he had taken to insisting that the job of reforming Virginia—above all, ending slavery, a system in which he participated—would fall to “the rising generation.” He and his fellows in the revolutionary generation had done their service by founding a new country. It was now up to the young people who inherited that legacy to carry the torch and continue the advancement of what he considered Enlightenment values. But Jefferson could not totally bow out of the quest to transform the place he was born and had long thought of as his “country.” Improving Virginia’s system of education, Jefferson believed, was the foundation upon which progress would be built, and the foundation had to be laid properly. If publicly supported primary and secondary schooling was not possible, he would shift his focus. He filled his time in retirement writing and answering letters, and playing host to the hordes of visitors who came up the mountain to see him. But his main mission was planning for a university that would rival the great universities in the North. In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, Alan Taylor—the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia—probes that ambitious mission in clear prose and with great insight and erudition. He explains why Jefferson found those educational choices so intolerable, what he planned to do about the situation, and how his concerns and plans mapped onto a growing sectional conflict that would eventually lead to the breakup of the Union that Jefferson had helped create. Taylor demonstrates that Jefferson, who had begged to enroll at “the College” at age 16, nurtured an ambivalence about William & Mary that eventually hardened into distaste. His late-in-life accounts of his time there almost invariably cast the school in a negative light. The campus was full of rowdy and haughty young men who looked down on the townspeople of Williamsburg and were given to drink, debauchery, and violence. Jefferson, elected governor of Virginia in 1779, included improving William & Mary in his plans for reform. At first, he was optimistic that the college could “train a new generation of young men better than their elders, who had grown up under British rule,” Taylor writes. Animated by the new spirit of republicanism and by Enlightenment values, the young men would see the importance of science, question orthodoxies—even religious ones—and work for greater participation by white men of all classes in the governance of Virginia.  . . . When his law teacher and friend, George Wythe, resigned from his post at the college in 1789, Jefferson declared the place dead to him: “It is over with the college.” Only a new university could carry out the plans he had for Virginia. Taylor suggests that Jefferson may have wanted not simply to replace William & Mary, but to destroy it. Jefferson’s sense of urgency about creating a progressive institution of higher education in Virginia—one free from religious orthodoxy and steeped in republican principles—grew stronger as a deep political divide in the country formed along regional lines in the 1790s. The Federalists, who endorsed a strong central government, were largely from the North. Jefferson’s Republicans, defenders of states’ rights and yeoman farmers against what they saw as monarchical centralizers and predatory banking practices, were largely from the South. Northern universities, in Jefferson’s view, were hotbeds of Federalist influence. He wanted Virginia in the vanguard of the new American nation.
 Jefferson’s pursuit of his educational vision was intensified and complicated by the heightening tensions over western expansion in the first two decades of the 19th century. Northerners, in the main, thought that any new states entering the Union should be free states, while Southerners fully expected to move west with their system of plantation-based slavery fully intact. This conflict posed a dilemma for Jefferson, whose self-identity and reputation included being ardently antislavery. . . . Northerners’ charge that Southerners were “hypocrites who preached democracy, while keeping slaves,” hit the author of the Declaration of Independence and the master of Monticello particularly hard. The volatile topic had to be left to some point in the future when the bulk of the white population could muster the will to do away with it. That outsiders would deign to tell Virginians what to do about this “domestic” institution was a bridge too far, even for a well-known critic of slavery. The young men trained at his university would help prepare their fellow Virginians to do what needed to be done.

Fearing that a dynamic North would eventually overtake his home state, which had been the most populous and powerful in the Union but began to slip in the 19th century, Jefferson was convinced that he was the perfect model for the new-age republican citizen needed to preserve its ascendancy.

What he believed, one day every enlightened person would believe: that republicanism was inherently good, that organized religion should be viewed with skepticism, that Jesus was not divine, that slavery was wrong. Given access to education, people could learn to embrace all these views, thanks to their powers of rationality and openness to new discoveries. As he explained to a correspondent, his university would “be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind, for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” It was a Jeffersonian project all the way. He designed the buildings of what he called the “Academical Village” and determined the curriculum. The idea was audacious—that a great university could be built in a rural location, drawing professors from across the United States and Europe. “Mine, after all, may be an Utopian dream,” he wrote, but it was one that he would “indulge in till I go to the land of dreams, and sleep there with the dreamers of all past and future times.” The University of Virginia, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, was controversial from the start. Was it really needed? Should the state pay money for what was, at base, an elitist enterprise? Many were also upset that the university embodied what they saw as Jefferson’s hostility to religion. It employed no professor of religion or divinity. Where a chapel would normally stand was a rotunda, a showcase of classical architecture, leading some to refer to the school as Jefferson’s “infidel” university.
 There was a problem. A revolution had taken place since he had attended college, but the students who came to Jefferson’s new university were just as violent, lazy, and contemptuous of their supposed inferiors as his college peers had been. Jefferson said that the institution would be based on the “illimitable freedom of the human mind,” but his everyone-should-be-like-me approach did not take into account the upbringings of the young men who would attend the university. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he had written of slavery as a school for “despotism” for white people, and he later blamed slavery for the social and intellectual backwardness of Virginia. But the Revolution had left slavery in place. It remained a training ground for despots. Jefferson apparently believed that taking these young men out of their homes and placing them away from a town or city, with professors as mentors, would turn them into open-minded citizens—just what he thought had happened to him in his college days. In reality, gathering a group of young despots in one place brought a predictable outcome: They became obstreperous and used their power to hurt the most vulnerable people in their midst. Taylor is superb on the mistreatment of the enslaved who worked at the university. Enslaved people had helped build the school. Once it opened, they maintained the physical structures—repairing and cleaning them—and served the professors, some of whom bought or hired their own slaves from local slave owners. Jefferson forbade the students to do so. But the young men had internalized the idea that they were “masters” and should be able to hit or punish black people at will, whether or not those people “belonged” to them. In the end, the elite among the generation on which Jefferson pinned so much hope were as impervious to their professors’ teachings as many of Jefferson’s classmates had been. The lack of a chapel did not make them religious skeptics. . . . . nstead of viewing slavery as a necessary evil that would die out, they came to openly espouse the belief that slavery was a positive good, as the prices of slaves rose with the nascent increase in cotton production in the South. In these and other ways, the young men deviated far from the direction in which Jefferson was certain “progress” inevitably would take them. Only after many years, and much struggle, did the institution Jefferson created take its place among the great universities of the nation and of the world. Much had to be broken to get there: the slaveholders’ Union that existed before 1865; the institution of slavery; the regime of Jim Crow, which kept black students out of the school; and the principle of sex-segregated education. Ironically, given Jefferson’s hopes for a regional resurgence, the transformation of the nation at large was what helped his state-based dream of educational excellence come true.

200 years after the University's founding, Virginia is again ascendant; it is once again among the wealthier states; and as of last week, it went "blue" and embraced progressive government and leadership and rejected the racism and religious extremism (in the form of the Virginia GOP) Jefferson so disliked.  As for the University itself, it has made much progress in facing its past history entwined with slavery and then Jim Crow and is making sure this less than flattering legacy is not swept under the rug.  Jefferson would likely be pleased. As for myself, I count myself lucky to have experienced UVA.  Thus I quote - to the horror of Hokie friends such as RL the last part of the 1903 poem, The Honor Men:

If you live a long time and, keeping the faith in all these things hours by hour, still see that the sun gilds your path with real gold and that the moon floats in dream silver; Then…Remembering the purple shadows of the lawn, the majesty of the colonnades, and the dream of your youth, you may say in your reverence and thankfulness:  “I have worn the honors of Honors. I graduated from Virginia.” 

Trump is a Threat to Religious Liberty

Donald Trump is many things, but a defender of the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment protecting freedom of religion, he is not.  Indeed, he is a threat to constitutional government and the religious freedom of except strident, far right Christian extremists who seek to totally subvert the concept as laid down by the Founding Fathers. Indeed, they want a de facto established religion that only upholds their own toxic and perverted version of Christianity.  Playing on the self-centered hypocrisy of the Christofascists and "Christian leaders" like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Pat Robertson and a host of similar scam artists, Trump has set about depriving others of their religious freedom and, hopefully in time, a major backlash against right wing Christians where their nonsensical claims of persecution might become a reality as they find themselves being treated as they have treated others for so much of history. A piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump and the Christofascists destruction of true religious freedom.  Here are highlights:

A central pillar of Donald Trump’s compact with conservative Christians, which has been immensely useful for him and is critical to his reelection prospects, is his much-professed concern for “religious liberty.” There’s a whole fact sheet about the topic on the White House website. It was the alleged subject of a major executive order early in his presidency.

But as Steven Waldman (founder of Beliefnet, a web portal for all things religious) observes in Sacred Liberty, his recently published comprehensive history of America’s tradition of religious freedom, Trump’s actual record is not so positive:

Donald Trump’s legacy on this issue can seem confusing. He talks about defending religious freedom more than almost any other president. His administration has taken a few positive steps, such as deciding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could give disaster relief to houses of worship and raising concerns about persecution of Christians overseas. . . . But much of his religious liberty agenda involves efforts, focused largely on helping conservative Christians, that are minor, symbolic, or actually damaging.

Most obvious, Trump is the first president since the virulently anti-Mormon Rutherford B. Hayes to publicly single out a religious community for opprobrium and (attempted) discrimination. . . . . he has violated most of the principles that have sustained religious freedom by favoring one religion over another; ignoring First Amendment protections; blurring the distinctions between Americans practicing their faith and extremists overseas; and proposing that practitioners of one faith should have second-class citizenship. He has made the concept of religious freedom partisan instead of universal, a way to divide rather than unite.

Trump is a friend to religion only if your religion happens to be the same as that of his conservative Evangelical and traditionalist Catholic allies, who have a mutually exploitative and very transactional relationship with the 45th president.

[M]uch of Trump’s talk about religious liberty involves reinforcing the fatuous paranoia of some conservative Christians who believe state neutrality toward their faith, as well as the spread of nonbelief or religious heterodoxy, actually represents persecution.

The many thousands of Christian martyrs over the centuries (and those still suffering in other countries) must be laughing or crying at the idea that being disrespected by retailers and seasonal-card senders is some sort of crucifixion. But it reflects Trump’s close identification with the Christian right’s claim that the liberty to practice one’s faith “in the public square” is so absolute that it excludes counter-concerns ranging from simple courtesy (the main problem with shouting “Merry Christmas” at non-Christians) to anti-discrimination laws. Again, Waldman explains how efforts to accommodate religious practice have degenerated into demands for plenary exemptions from norms the rest of society observes, to the point at which conservative Christians began to distort and politicize their own faith traditions . . . .

Millions of Americans (most notably Catholics, but many Evangelicals, too) go to church regularly without for a moment sharing the hostility to homosexuality (or, for that matter, legalized abortion) that their leaders increasingly treat as fundamental to their beliefs. Such distortion of an ancient faith is a lot more dangerous than any threats to the tender conscience of the occasional aggrieved baker.

Not that long ago, conservative Evangelicals typically regarded church-state separation as the central principle of religious liberty. Most Christian-right leaders have abandoned or even inverted that position. When Thomas Jefferson referred to religious liberty as requiring a “wall of separation” between church and state (a precedent today’s Christian-right leaders either ignore or attack in making the case that the Founders wanted a Christian nation), he was siding with Connecticut Baptists fighting a government that was hostile to minority religious communities. Similarly, James Madison’s commitment to total state neutrality on matters of religion was informed by his relationships with Virginia Evangelicals. . . . All that has changed radically.

In this transformation of conservative Christianity’s political arm from the self-confident advocacy of pluralism in matters of faith to a narrow, sex-obsessed movement fighting to bring back the imagined paradise of the 1950s, Trump was perhaps an inevitable figure. If ever there were a complete product of the most de-Christianized traits of secular culture, it’s Donald Trump. Yet he offers his religious supporters unconditional backing in their wars against abortion, LGBTQ rights, secular public education, and, yes, believers in what they consider false gods.

In 20th-century Europe, authoritarian movements exploited conservative Christians eager to fight socialism and secularism and regain their old power over cultural life. These politicized believers were ultimately corrupted and betrayed. Trump may serve the short-term purposes of those who have convinced themselves he is a modern-day Cyrus the Great, a “nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.” But he is no friend of liberty and, in the longer view, represents a threat to America’s great tradition of religious pluralism.

Virginia's Long, Messy, and Contradictory History on Race

The last two weeks in Virginia politics have been tumultuous. Interestingly, while national news outlets continue to stir the pot and take shots at Governor Northam and Virginia, it seems most Virginians are moving on, especially the 58% of blacks who are comfortable with Northam remaining in office.  Perhaps part of this seemingly huge disconnect is that those from outside of Virginia - and the South in general - do not have the perspective on the positive changes that have occurred in Virginia, at least over the 45 plus years that I have counted myself a Virginia.  In May, I have my 45th college reunion of the class of 1974, the University of Virginia's first co-ed undergraduate class. When I first arrived at UVA and moved to Charlottesville (I went on to attend law school at UVA as well), having grown up until then in New York State, it was a major state of culture shock, especially on racial matters.  One needs to recall that my undergraduate class started college a little more than 2 years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Loving V. Virginia.  Many public buildings -including many court houses - had two sets of rest rooms from when rest rooms were segregated. 

Over the years things have changed remarkably, but there is is still room for much improvement.  Ironically, Northam, in my view, is one of those pushing to make Virginia more racially tolerant despite the year book fiasco.  A piece in Salon looks at the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, black and white, who represent Virginia bi-polar racial history.  The piece was written by one of Jefferson's white descendants.  Here are highlights:

The man on the left is Shannon Lanier. He is my cousin. We are standing on our great-grandfather’s grave at Monticello. The man buried beneath that obelisk fathered two children with his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and six children with his slave, Sally Hemings. My fifth great grandmother is Martha Jefferson. Shannon’s fifth great grandmother is Sally Hemings. We talk all the time about the “founding fathers” of this nation, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, who attended the Constitutional Convention. Well, this nation had founding mothers, as well. One of our founding mothers was a slave, Sally Hemings.

Just as the early citizens of the United States and the descendants of its founders helped to build this country, so did the enslaved humans they owned, and their children, and their descendants. If Thomas Jefferson had not owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime, we would not have Monticello to visit today. Slaves built every inch of Monticello. They felled the trees and put them through a saw mill to make the lumber. They forged the nails to hammer that lumber into walls and floors and doors and windows. They made every brick with their hands — in fact, you can see the fingerprints of slave children in some of the bricks in the walls of Monticello today.

Slaves built the nation’s Capitol building. They built the White House. They built countless state and county buildings throughout the south, including state capitol buildings. The labor of slaves was used to build the roads and bridges that forged our way west into the unexplored territories of the Louisiana Purchase. Slaves harvested the cotton crops in the south that put shirts on the backs of early white Americans. They harvested the wheat that put bread in their bellies. Slaves tended the cows that produced milk for white children to drink. In many cases, slave women nursed the babies of their white owners. There is a photograph in the new exhibit of Sally Hemings’ slave quarters at Monticello that shows the black arms of a female slave holding a white baby.

In fact, if Thomas Jefferson had not owned slaves, he probably wouldn’t have had the time to write the Declaration of Independence, in which he famously declared that “all men are created equal.”

That’s our national tragedy, isn’t it? That so many years have gone by, and still Thomas Jefferson’s dream has not been realized. Before the photograph of my cousin and me was taken last weekend at Monticello, there were other photographs taken in the state of Virginia published all over the place, shown again and again on cable news. They were photographs of the governor of Virginia in blackface, or someone in blackface anyway, standing next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan white robe and peaked hat. Whoever was shown in the photos, they appeared on the personal page of the governor of Virginia’s medical school yearbook. Later, the attorney general of Virginia admitted that he, too, had put on blackface for Halloween costume when he was in college.

Today, I’m a writer of novels and movies and journalism, and Shannon is the host of a morning television show in Houston, Texas. You could say that we are among the lucky ones in this country, and you would certainly be correct that we are lucky as an accident of birth. But we had to fight to get to stand together on the grave of Thomas Jefferson. We had just finished an interview with CBS This Morning, which will air tomorrow morning on that show. Finally the day came when we sat together in the new exhibit of Sally Hemings’ slave quarters, and we were interviewed as cousins, as acknowledged descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

It wasn’t always that way for Shannon Lanier. He knew from his family history that he was descended from Madison Hemings, the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He told the story of being in the second grade during a class on the American presidents when he stood up and announced to the class that he was a great grandson of Thomas Jefferson, the third president. He was told by the teacher to sit down and stop telling lies. In order to get him out of trouble with his teacher, Shannon’s mother had to go to the principal the following day and tell him that what Shannon had said in class was true.

But for years before and afterward, few people — white people, anyway — believed that Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemings children. Not until a DNA test was released in 1998 did historians come around to accept the oral history of the Hemings family that had existed for more than a century.

It was then that I met Shannon for the first time. In 1999, I invited about 50 of my Hemings cousins to the family reunion of Jefferson descendants at Monticello. It did not go well. At that time Monticello was just beginning to come to grips with the legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s owning slaves. You could still take a tour of the house and never hear the word “slave” uttered by one of the docents. As for the white descendants of Jefferson, they were not happy with the Sally Hemings descendants crashing their reunion. They were especially unhappy with me because I invited the Hemmings.

For the next three years we kept going back. I was trying to convince the white descendants of Jefferson to accept our Hemings cousins into the family. In 2002, they held a vote, and it went 95 to 6 against the Hemings family. Five of the six voting yes, that the Hemings were indeed our cousins, were me and my brother and sisters.
Twenty years have passed since I first invited my cousins in the Hemings family to Monticello. It’s a different place now. They uncovered the slave quarters where Sally and one of her brothers lived. They found and have preserved one slave graveyard, and they are actively looking for more.  Today if you take a tour, you learn as much about slave life at Monticello as you to about Thomas Jefferson himself.

More than 240 years after Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, we still see too many overt acts of racism, and not nearly enough acts of equality.

Monticello is committing an act of equality by telling the story of slave life there, and by extension, slave life in America. When my cousins in the Hemings family stand up and proudly say, we are descendants of Thomas Jefferson, they are committing an act of equality. I guess I committed my own act of equality when I invited them to come with me to the family reunion at Monticello. I was saying, and they were saying, here we are. We are all from the same family. We are all Jefferson’s children.

The photograph you see here is a picture of who we are as Americans. One day, a photograph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusual. One day, acts of equality will outweigh acts of racism. Until that day, however, Shannon and I will keep fighting for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

The Proper Understanding of "Religious Freedom"

Being at the inaugural events this past weekend, including the the inaugural ceremony itself which is held on the south portico of the Virginia Capitol, it is hard not to feel the history of the ceremonies and, of course, the role of the Founding Fathers from Virginia.   Among those is Thomas Jefferson who designed the Capitol building, founded the University of Virginia, and authored the Declaration of Independence.  But Jefferson was equally proud of his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which in many ways lay the ground work for the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.  As evangelical Christians - the Christofascists - seek to exempt themselves from laws binding on the citizenry on the duplicitous claim that to do otherwise deprives them of "religious freedom," it is important to understand what Jefferson and his fellows understood religious freedom to be and that it is the exact opposite of what is now being put forth by Christofascists whom I suspect Jefferson would have loathed.  Indeed, the exemplify some of the evils of religion that Jefferson and the Founders decried.  A piece in Religion Dispatches by a legitimate historian (as opposed to faux historians favored by the "godly folk") reminds us of what religious freedom means and that it does not grant licences to discriminate.  Here are excerpts:

To listen to the Christian Right, which has been busy seeking religious exemptions from laws governing reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights, one might think that armies of secularists are swarming like locusts over the land, seeking to snuff out the light of religious freedom and ultimately, of faith itself.

Informed people on all sides also tend to agree that the taproot of religious freedom in the United States is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786. The following year, Madison served as the principal (but certainly not the only) author of the Constitution, and in 1789, as the principal author of the First Amendment.

Historian John Ragosta, author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed (University of Virginia Press, 2013), has been writing about the origins of the U.S. approach to religious freedom, particularly the Virginia Statute, the circumstances that gave rise to it and what it means for understanding religion, law and politics in our time.

What exactly is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and how did it come to be?

The Virginia Statute is probably the most robust and certainly the most poetic statement of religious freedom in our history.  . . . . it played a critical role in development of the First Amendment and in the way the states defined religious freedom. It was far better known in the nineteenth century when historians, students, newspaper editors and politicians regularly turned to the Statute to understand religious liberty.

Its history is equally important: After the American Revolution there was an effort to impose taxes to support all Christian religions; this was seen as an improvement over colonial laws which had favored specific Christian sects, e.g. Anglican or Congregational. If that effort had succeeded, we could say that America was somehow officially or legally a “Christian Nation.” Fortunately, James Madison and a broad coalition of evangelicals rose up to oppose state interference with religion, even support for religion, and instead managed to have Jefferson’s Statute enacted. 

Thomas Jefferson . . . wanted to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence, “Father of the University of Virginia,” and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Jefferson saw these three things as the great accomplishments of his life: political freedom, religious freedom, and educational freedom and opportunity. Of the three, he thought religious freedom was the foundation because without freedom to think and believe, you could not have the other two. A republic could not work if government and church officials (what Jefferson referred to as an alliance of “kings, nobles, and priests”) were trying to control what we think or prescribe what was the “best” religion or which people were the “best” citizens based upon their religious beliefs. If people were to make informed political choices themselves, they had to be free to think for themselves, especially about religion. For Jefferson and his supporters, religious freedom for all was central to our democracy.

Jefferson emphasized that the bill was meant to protect everyone, including as he later wrote, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” This idea–that one’s religious identity should be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage under the law–seems to be as relevant today as it was then.

The Statute was intended to create a free market of ideas, including religious ideas. Religion would thrive based not on government decisions but on what people believed and chose to support–the “voluntary principle.” The result was an explosion in religious ideas and denominations, and religious leaders were held responsible to their congregants rather than the government.

At the same time, while belief is completely free from government regulation and government cannot directly regulate the free exercise of religion, government can pass “neutral” laws (not targeted at religion) which may happen to be inconsistent with a person’s beliefs.

The best modern example is laws against racial discrimination: While many people insisted that interracial dating or marriage violated their religion, the Supreme Court, in the 1983 case of Bob Jones University v. United States, rightly refused to grant an exemption to anti-discrimination laws based on religion.

This is exactly what is at issue in the claims for exemptions from laws dealing with LGBTQ rights. Government cannot tell a church that it must marry gay people (that would be a direct regulation of religion), but government can say that if you want to run a business (using public streets, public utilities, police and fire protection, etc.), you cannot discriminate against customers based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Of course, if people don’t like particular laws, they can be changed, but Jefferson was very clear that you can’t use religion or religious freedom to claim an exemption from an otherwise valid law.

During a crisis, President Jefferson was asked to make an official proclamation calling on people to pray for the country; he refused, saying that it would violate the Constitution. Even if there was no criminal penalty or fine for not praying, Jefferson said that he believed the proclamation would give the erroneous idea that “good” citizens would join in prayer. This was the “tyranny over the mind of man” that Jefferson fought against.

The Declaration of Independence includes very broad and general language about a “creator,” but it is telling that the only reference to God or religion in the Constitution is Article VI which mandates that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.” This was not a mistake. These religious people decided that it would be better for the country, for both government and religion, to keep them separated.

Jefferson once suggested that perhaps the only thing that we should require of anyone to be tolerated in our society is their commitment to tolerate others.

Eighteenth century Presbyterians and Baptists would often note that if government could discriminate in favor of any religion, even all Christian religions, it also had the authority to attack a particular religion or all religions. They realized that complete separation of church and state was the best way to promote true religion.

ABC Anchor Trashes Trump Lies About the Media

In my view, Der Trumpenführer is rapidly pushing America towards a crossroads where either authoritarianism and propaganda based on lies will be rejected or the nation will go down the ugly road that has overtaken other nations in the past, with Germany and Italy being but two examples. Which path is taken will depend in large part on whether or not the media relentlessly confronts a would be autocrat and his enablers and insists on reporting the truth notwithstanding attacks and lies directed at it.  On This Week, Jonathan Karl laid into Donald Trump for his tweet attacking the “fake news media” and calling it an enemy of the American people, explaining that criticism of the press has a long and storied history involving U.S. presidents. Here is Karl’s full statement (transcript):

There’s been no shortage of outrage over the president’s statements on the press. But I’d like to close with a little perspective. There is nothing new about a President of the United States criticizing or even vilifying the press. Even Thomas Jefferson, the same Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence and who, ten years after that, wrote, “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press” — even Thomas Jefferson, when he was a few years into his own presidency, was so upset about what was being written about his administration that he flatly declared, “Nothing can now be believed that is seen in a newspaper.”

Teddy Roosevelt, who now is next to Jefferson on Mt. Rushmore, once wrote, “To announce there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand with the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

I couldn’t agree more. But I also know that T.R. wrote that nearly a decade after he left office. When he was still in the White House, he coined the term “muckrakers” to denounce investigative journalists who he felt were so obsessed with the negative that they were missing the good in the world, including the good he was doing as president. Such negativity in the press, Roosevelt said, is one of the most potent forms of evil.

And that brings me to President Donald Trump, who has taken presidential criticism of the news media to yet another level. In a way, it surprised me. The Donald Trump I knew as a young reporter in New York was nothing if not media friendly. And for most of the past Republican primary, he was the most accessible major candidate. No one else was close.

At Thursday’s press conference, we saw flashes of that — seventeen reporters called on, many that he knew would ask tough questions. But now the president has declared the press the enemy of the American people.

I’ve reported in countries where leaders not only complain about a critical press, but also try to shut it down, throwing reporters in prison or worse. I’ve seen my colleagues risk their lives and, with increasing frequency, lose their lives in their pursuit of the truth. We are not about to stop doing our jobs because yet another president is unhappy with what he reads or hears or sees on TV news. There is a reason the founders put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution.

As long as American democracy remains healthy, there will be reporters willing to pursue the truth, even if that means incurring the wrath of the most powerful person in the world. A free press isn’t the enemy of America; it’s a big part of why makes America great.

The media - or at least the honest media (which excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News) - MUST keep reporting on Trump and his henchmen and enablers in Congress.  The free press is in some ways all that stands between us and a dictatorship. 

The Right's Perversion of "Religious Freedom"

Nowadays, the Republican and Christofascist view of "religious freedom" equates to the Christofascists being allowed to force their beliefs on all of society or, if that fails, then being to use claimed religious belief to ignore laws that they don't like and to discriminate against other citizens at will.   Perhaps the most ominous example of this effort to stamp out the religious freedom of others is the farcically entitled "First Amendment Protection Act" which Congressional Republicans have promised to pass and which Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, has promised to sign.  If this act becomes law Christofascists - including corporations and businesses run by them and even medical providers - will granted license to discriminate against LGBT citizens and those who do not subscribe to Christofascists religious belief on abortion, contraception and cohabitation.  Frighteningly, most Americans are not even paying attention. I suspect many believe the act only attacks the LGBT community and, therefore are indifferent.  The act, however, goes much further and rather than protecting the First Amendment seeks to undermine and destroy it.  Here are highlights from a piece in Salon that looks at this insidious and dangerous agenda of the GOP and Christofascists: 

Forget the “War on Christmas.” Although far less known to the general public, Religious Freedom Day, which falls on Jan. 16 — coinciding this year with the Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance — has become one of America’s most-contested commemorative days. In most ways that’s a good thing, because of the need to shed light on what’s at stake: the very foundations of our most cherished freedoms.

Since 1992, Religious Freedom Day publicly celebrates the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and passed into law by his protégé, James Madison, in 1786. It disestablished the state power of the Anglican Church, and ensured religious freedom for all.

For Jefferson, and progressives today, the statute — which paved the way for the First Amendment — was a revolutionary break with theocratic rule, a fundamental precondition for all the freedoms we enjoy today, or are still struggling to secure.  Jefferson saw it as a crowning lifetime achievement, so important it is inscribed on his tombstone.

But for the Christian right, “religious freedom” means almost exactly the opposite: the “freedom” to impose their will on everyone else, precisely the sort of power over others that Jefferson fought so hard against.

The religious right has been organizing intensively around its Orwellian redefinition of the term since the beginning of the Obama era. It was laid out in detail in a report by Frederick Clarkson of Political Research Associates, entitled  “When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right.” I summarized that report last year:

The title highlights a key aspect of the religious right’s long-term strategy, taking the time-honored principle of religious exemption, intended to protect the individual right of conscience, and expanding it recklessly to apply to whole institutions, even for-profit businesses — as seen in the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, in a process designed to fragment the common public sphere and carve out vast segments of American life where civil rights, labor law and other core protections simply do not apply.

This strategy was kicked into high gear back in 2009 with the “Manhattan Declaration,” a widely endorsed manifesto linking “freedom of religion” specifically to “sanctity of life” and “dignity of marriage,” which religious progressives are just beginning to effectively counter-organize against.

As recently as the 1980s, Christian Right activists defended racial segregation by claiming that restrictions on their ability to discriminate violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. …

Instead of African Americans being discriminated against by Bob Jones, the university argued it was the party being discriminated against in being prevented from executing its First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed.

“Six months after authoring the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson joined with several others in January 1777 to discuss what would later become the Virginia statute,” Clarkson said. “It was an urgent committee meeting because the success of the Revolution depended in part on the cobbling together of a coalition of stakeholders, and religious dissenters of Virginia —the Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists — were necessary if there would be any chance of defeating what was at the time the greatest military power in the history of the world.”

If that sounds eerily familiar, there’s a good reason. As with the Democratic Party of today, the popular foundation of the American revolution came from a diverse array of socially subjugated out-groups. But they weren’t brought together through quid-pro-quo backroom deals, they were brought together with a liberationist vision.

“Attendance at an Anglican church on Sunday was compulsory,” Clarkson explained. “Failure to attend was one of the most prosecuted crimes in colonial Virginia in the years before the revolution.” Legally, members of local Anglican church vestries “were also empowered to report crimes like heresy and blasphemy to local grand juries. Violators were dealt with harshly,” But that’s not all. “Baptists were often victims of vigilante violence,” since practicing their faith made them publicly vulnerable.

“This was all in recent memory of such abuses that helped to create the political moment that made Virginia the first government in the history of the world to self-impose complete religious freedom and equality. This actually effectively disestablished the Anglican church as the state church of Virginia, curtailing its extraordinary powers and privileges. It also decreed that citizens were  free to believe as they will, and that this — and this is the key phrase in the legislation — that ‘this shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.’ Put another way, one’s religious identity was irrelevant to one’s standing as a citizen.”

The same political situation Jefferson dealt with in Virginia was replicated throughout colonial America, and persisted through the formation of the United States, bringing other leaders to embrace a similar outlook as well. Case in point: George Washington.

In part, Washington wrote: The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

The strongest opposition to it came from those who opposed the Revolution, the Anglican establishment and their supporters, whose power and influence were greatly diminished as the new nation formed.

Though that opposition persists to this very day, it has never regained anything like the power it had previously had, prior to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. This is the true history of religious freedom in America. It’s not a battle between the godly and the heathen, but between the tolerant and the intolerant, the inclusive and exclusive, the forward-looking and the backward-looking. But it takes an accurate look backward to see the true way forward. 

Why Bernie Sanders Doesn't Participate in Organized Religion

As regular readers know, I deem religion to be a toxic and divisive force in the world and history tells us that countless numbers of people have died over the centuries because of the hate and bigotry religion fosters.  In the political arena, religion is equally toxic.  Despite this reality, most American politicians prostitute themselves to the "godly folk."  The exception to this rule?  Bernie Sanders.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why Bernie Sanders does not participate in the toxicity of organized religion.  Here are highlights:

Growing up, Bernie Sanders followed the path of many young American Jews. He went to Hebrew school, was bar mitzvahed and traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz.

But as an adult, Sanders drifted away from Jewish customs. And as his bid for the White House gains momentum, he has the chance to make history. Not just as the first Jewish president — but as one of the few modern presidents to present himself as not religious. 

“I am not actively involved with organized religion,” Sanders said in a recent interview.
Sanders said he believes in God, though not necessarily in a traditional manner.

“I think everyone believes in God in their own ways, “ he said. “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

Sanders’s religious views, which he has rarely discussed, set him apart from the norm in modern American politics, in which voters have come to expect candidates from both parties to hold traditional views about God and to speak about their faith journeys.

Every president since James Madison has made the pilgrimage across Lafayette Square to worship at St. John’s Church at least once, according to the White House Historical Association. Only three presidents, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, have been unaffiliated with a specific religious tradition,. . .

For Sanders, rejecting the formal trappings of religion adds to the unconventional nature of a candidacy that has energized many liberals but could prove problematic in a general election. He is a self-described “democratic socialist” who has refused to shy away from policy positions that would expand government and increase taxes.

Sanders often presents his support for curbing Wall Street banks and ending economic inequality in values-laden terms. He recently described it as “immoral and wrong” that the highest earners in the country own the vast majority of the nation’s wealth.

In the interview with The Post, Sanders sought to explain how his approach to political issues, from climate change to income inequality, is grounded in a moral understanding that transcends religious and political partisanship.

“In terms of climate change, you have people as conservative as the evangelicals, many evangelicals, who understand that you cannot destroy God’s planet. And you have Pope Francis, who as you know, I admire very, very much, talking about this planet and the suicidal direction regarding climate.”

 I applaud Sanders' disconnect from organized religion.  Religion is a toxic evil, plain and simple.

"Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner" - Another Christofascist Lie

In the wake of Friday's historic marriage ruling, some of the Christofascists are consumed with spittle flecked rants threatening civil disobedience and other forms of resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling.  Others are trying to appear less extreme and are repeating a standard Christofascist lie that they hate the sin - ie., homosexuality - but love the sinner.  Frankly, it's a lie and a crock of horseshit in my view.  You do not "love" someone when you try to deprive someone of civil rights and equality under the law.  Or when you depict gays as not much better than diseased vermin and/or would be child molesters.  

Thus, "hate the sin, love the sinner" is merely how Christian bigots try to (i) avoid facing the fact that they are deliberately discriminating against and harming others, and (ii) convince others that they are not foul bigots. It's the height of hypocrisy, something that I believe sadly is the number one hallmark of self-styled conservative Christians. It also ignores several realities, the first being that "deeply held religious belief" has been used for centuries to justify/excuse hate, bigotry, discrimination against others and far worse horrors.  A piece in Religion Dispatches lays blame at the feet of anti-gay Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

LGBTQ homelessness and suicide are natural consequences of the perpetuation of views denying the full humanity of lesbian, gay, bi, pan, trans, queer, and all non-heteronormative individuals. Any theology rejecting their full affirmation is clearly tantamount to such denial, as we now have a wealth of testimony that the vast majority of LGBTQ individuals do not experience their sexual orientation or gender identity as a choice. If you like, you can believe in a tyrannical god who creates some people only to condemn them for something innate to their created personhood. I will not.

Those who are celebrating the “tipping point,” it seems to me, are failing to hold their co-religionists accountable for the harm they have done to all of us who could not conform to the demands of the fundamentalist evangelical worldview—particularly to members of the LGBTQ community. They are also de facto refusing to acknowledge their own complicity in that harm.

There are calls to drop the hurtful and condescending “love the sinner, hate the sin” rhetoric, which is surely an improvement, but it’s also an attempt to square the circle. As long as the belief persists that same-sex partnerships and transgender identities are inherently sinful, this belief will do psychological harm to LGBTQ people born into evangelical communities.

I appreciate the Christians, including evangelicals, who are trying to do better, those who are living up to Christ’s example of radical inclusivity that I see as the spirit of the Gospel. The problem is that an awful lot of Christians, particularly in evangelical culture, continue to fetishize the letter and lose sight of the spirit. And not only that, but instead of accepting that we live in a pluralist society, too many of these evangelicals, with a huge assist from conservative Catholics, go off in the name of “religious freedom” to fight tooth and nail to keep members of the LGBTQ community from enjoying the same rights and freedoms they do.

The second is that the United States of America was founded as a SECULAR nation with no established religion. One's religious beliefs or lack thereof should have ZERO bearing on one's civil legal rights. For those who have not done so, read the preamble of Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (which predates the U.S. Constitution) and see how Jefferson tears apart those who would link one's civil rights to one's compliance with particular religious beliefs. Stated another way, Jefferson - and other Founding Fathers did so as well - eloquently condemned the very behavior we see virtually daily from the so-called Christian Right (who are neither Christian or right) - i,e, those whom I refer to as the Christofascists:

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

I remain convinced that if one wants to know why 34% of Millennials have walked away from organized religion, look no farther than those "godly Christians" who are condemning yesterday's marriage ruling. These "Christians" truly make the Pharisees in the Gospels look like nice decent folk in comparison.

The other thing that the Supreme Court noted in yesterday's ruling is that sexual orientation is something that is immutable. It's a part of you that you cannot change. You can try to deny it and try to pretend it's not an unchangeable part of you, but that is only an exercise in self-delusion. In contrast, religion and religious belief are 100% a choice and can be changed simply by walking away from past indoctrination and thinking for one self.

Is Utah's LGBT Rights Bill A Trojan Horse For Religious Right?

There has been much hoopla in certain circles over Utah's passage of a LGBT non-discrimination bill that was backed by the Mormon Church - not exactly the most gay friendly of organizations.  The law is being called a "model" for other red states and, while it contains positive measures, many fear that it is a Trojan Horse for the Christofascists due to the religious exemptions in the bill.  Yes, gays have increased rights, except when "religious belief" trumps the law.  While perhaps the exemption was needed to secure passage, the reality is that non-discrimination protections for other protected classes contain no such exemptions.  Gays in the end remain in a second class status.  A piece in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the valid concerns.  Here are highlights:

While there is much to be happy with in the legislation, and the protections it offers to some of the most vulnerable citizens in the Beehive State, the law also contains a tiny Trojan Horse individual religious exemptions clause. 

The Utah bill is being called a “model” to be used in states around the nation, but we must be forewarned. The individual religious exemption in the law, as small and seemingly noninvasive as it is, could put the civil liberties of everyone at stake for decades to come.

Religious freedom is important, and as a principle has existed since before the writing of the U.S. Constitution. The 13 original colonies were a fractured bunch of near-theocracies, with various Christian sects dominating different colonies—to the detriment of anyone not a member of the particular sect in power locally. Thanks to the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the principle of religious freedom in the Constitution set in motion of the disestablishment of the state churches, and the advantages they held in the public sphere. Jefferson's famous Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which predated the Constitution and was the first such law to be enacted in the world, said one's beliefs or non-beliefs cannot “enhance, diminish, or impact” one's “civil capacity.”

But the Religious Right has launched a campaign to redefine the meaning of religious liberty, stripping away those protections and once again giving religions the power to circumscribe the rights of individual conscience. 

This coalition, led by right-wing groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as Alliance Defense Fund), the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Liberty Counsel, is systematically working the courts and state legislatures to enact religious exemptions—essentially a right of religious institutions and individuals to decide which laws they will or will not follow.

In practical terms, this could play out as a business owner invoking faith to deny service to a LGBTQ couple, or refusing to hire Jewish employees. Or a man refusing to promote women to managerial positions because he doesn't believe men should be subservient to women. We cannot allow such freedom of conscience to become a legal sanction for these and other forms of discrimination.

The bill does indeed ban workplace and housing discrimination against LGBTQ people in Utah. But buried underneath those important protections, is a small clause guaranteeing the right of individuals to express faith-based anti-LGBTQ views at work.

It’s a small exemption. Seemingly inconsequential in comparison to the benefits the new law could bring. Viewed purely as a standalone piece of legislation, SB296 does a lot more good than bad and it’s unsurprising to see so many social justice-minded people supporting it.

But the equality movement cannot survive if we view legislation through a short-term and narrow lens. To do so is to ignore the context of the long-term consequences of the Religious Right’s national agenda—which only needs to get a foot in the door to get the ball rolling.

[T]he Religious Right's goal of codifying their redefined version of religious freedom into law has taken a giant step forward. Once Pandora’s Box is opened, there’s no shutting it.

Freedom of religion was envisioned by the Founding Fathers as meaning (i) no one had to pay taxes to support an established church, (ii) no one could be forced to hold a particular set of beliefs, and (iii) individuals were free to attend the house of worship of their choice.  It was never intended to grant the right to ignore civil laws because of one's religious belief.  This is a very, very dangerous precedent.