U.S. Air Force Recognizes Rights of Pagan Service Members

Recently the U.S. Air Force Academy in recognition that freedom of religion is not reserved to only certain approved Christian denominations and Air Force Academy officials in Colorado Springs approved the construction of an outdoor space for the worship of pagan deities. Not surprisingly the Christo-fascist elements went berserk. Illustrative of the foaming at the mouth that ensued are the remarks of Robert Jeffress, Pastor First Baptist Church of Dallas who stated that such action "is an open invitation for God to send His harshest judgments against our nation." Pastor Jeffress then launched into a Bible quoting tirade (I will spare readers the details) to justify his obvious belief that only Christian beliefs should be officially recognized. If you are not a Christian, it's a case of too bad, you have no rights. Jeffress' mindset is all to prevalent among the far right and is one of the reasons LGBT citizens are targeted for punishment. In a response column in the Washington Post, the true concept of religious freedom is set forth. Here are some highlights:

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I'd like to point out to Pastor Jeffress that when the Air Force respects and safeguards the religious rights of minorities, we are all safer. Patrick McCollum, who has fought many of the key legal battles for the rights of Pagan soldiers and prisoners, says, "When Pagans get our rights, everyone gets their rights."
Rights are inconvenient things.
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Problem is, who decides? And by what criteria? And how do we know the bad guys are truly bad, or that the accused are truly guilty? Those sorts of sticky questions got us the Bill of Rights and the concept of due process, for saints and sinners, for the accused who are innocent and those who turn out to be guilty. For if we deny due process to the guilty, we risk convicting the innocent.
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And if we deny equal right to Pagans, because Pastor Jeffress interprets his Bible as saying his version of God doesn't like our religion--we put him and his church at risk as well. For tomorrow, some other pastor, priest, rabbi or imam might decide that the First Baptist Church of Dallas is anathema to their version of God, and drive him and his flock into hiding.
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The framers of the Constitution may or may not have been thinking of broad, religious tolerance--nonetheless, the First Amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Not "Christian religion", but religion, plain and simple. Only if Jews, Muslims, Pagans and infidels of all sorts can worship freely can Christians of all denominations rest secure that their rights, too are safeguarded.
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Different faiths, different names for Goddess and God are like different doorways into the mysteries that go beyond words. When we honor and respect the great diversity of faiths, we assure that our own doorway, too, will remain open.

NYT: Strike Down Proposition 8

I recently stated that if the California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8 it will further enshrine a very dangerous precedent for the elimination of minority rights by a bare majority of voters. Two articles have made me think even more about the dangers posed as well as a possible counter offensive against the Christianists and Mormons. The first is a an editorial in the New York Times that supports the striking down of Proposition 8 based on the use of the wrong process to amend the California Constitution. The second is a column in the New Republic that rightly argues that RELIGION is not immutable and, therefore, applying the Christianists own anti-gay arguments, religion should not be a protected classification. First, here are highlights from the NYT:

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The approval of Proposition 8 in California, a constitutional change designed to prohibit marriage between couples of the same sex, was not just a defeat for fairness. It raised serious legal questions about the validity of using the Election Day initiative process to obliterate an existing right for a targeted minority.

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These deeper questions were largely lost during the expensive campaign by proponents of Proposition 8. Essentially, in their rush to enshrine bigotry in the State Constitution, they circumvented the procedure specified in that same document for making such a serious change. Now, the state’s top court, which has agreed to hear the legal challenge to Proposition 8, has the unpleasant duty of tossing out a voter-approved ballot measure.

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The court has correctly determined that the equal protection clause prohibits governmental discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which extends the right of marriage to same-sex couples. But the issue goes well beyond gay rights. Allowing Proposition 8 to stand would greatly limit the court’s ability to uphold the basic rights of all Californians and preclude the Legislature from performing its constitutional duty to weigh such monumental changes before they go to voters.

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The justices’ job is to protect minority rights and the State Constitution — even when, for the moment at least, it may not be the popular thing to do.

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In their various briefs opposing the striking down of the sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and many other cases concerning gay rights, the Christianists ALWAYS argue that sexual orientation is a choice - hence why the fraudulent "ex-gay" programs are so important to Focus on the Family and similar dishonest organizations - and not immutable and, therefore, not worthy of being a protected class under the equal protection provisions of the state and U. S. constitutions. In his column, Richard Just in the New Republic correctly argues in part as follows:
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[Y]ou raise what I think is really the core of our disagreement: whether gays and lesbians are entitled to constitutional protections similar to those for racial minorities and women--and whether laws that discriminate against them should therefore be subject to heightened scrutiny by courts. This was the main legal basis for the Connecticut and California decisions. You are correct that the immutability of a trait is not sufficient for showing that a group deserves heightened protection. But neither court treated it that way. In fact, both courts downplayed this factor in their decisions, focusing instead on other criteria for determining whether a group is entitled to heightened protection: Has there been historical discrimination against the group? Does sexual orientation affect a person's ability to contribute to society? And (in the case of Connecticut's court, though not California's) does the group lack political power? The answers to the first two questions are obvious, and, as for the third, . . . If gays were indeed politically powerful, we wouldn't be having this conversation. . .

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As for immutability: Neither court found that homosexuality was immutable, even though most people who study the subject believe that it is. Instead the justices reasoned that--to quote the California court--"[b]ecause a person's sexual orientation is so integral an aspect of one's identity, it is not appropriate to require a person to repudiate or change his or her sexual orientation in order to avoid discriminatory treatment." In other words, the justices treated it much like religion--which, as you note, is considered a suspect classification, and therefore invites heightened scrutiny from courts.

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Since the Christianists want only immutable traits to justify special protections, let's pass amendments to state constitutions removing protections for say the Mormons. Or maybe evangelical denominations. After all, these folks can easily change their denominations - far more easily that us gays can change our orientations. Thus, under THEIR own arguments, they are not entitled to constitutional protections. True, the passage of such amendments would likely never happen, but nonetheless the argument needs to be increasing thrown back in the faces of the homophobic religious denominations. We seriously need to put the bigots on the defensive so that they cannot be aiming sustained attacks on us.

Google Publicly Opposes Proposition 8

In a somewhat unusual move, Google has announced that it opposes California Proposition 8 and hopes that voters will defeat the discriminatory measure. In a larger sense, Proposition 8 represents a battle between knowledge and reason on the one hand and ignorance and bigotry on the other. The Christianists and the Mormons who are disproportionately funding the effort to pass Proposition 8 reject (1) modern medical and mental health knowledge on homosexuality, (2) equal application of all Bible passages and instead pick and chose what they will apply literally and ignore the ones that condemn them, and (3) the separation of church and state which traces back to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the preamble of which rips apart those who would seek to impose a test of compliance with a set of religious beliefs as a precondition to civil legal rights. Here are highlights from Google's statement:

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As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay -- we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

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However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

Romney’s America: No Room for Non-Believers

I consider both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee to be serious threats to freedom of (and from) religion for US citizens with differing faiths and/or levels of belief. It seems that these men and Christianists like them are incapable of grasping the concept that freedom of religion means THEY CANNOT FORCE THEIR BELIEFS ON OTHERS. This inability to understand this critical concept shows both to be utterly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States. They and those like them are a clear and present danger to the Constitution. Why more Americans cannot open their eyes and see this is most disturbing. Ryan Sager has an interesting take on Romney following his speech about his Mormon beliefs yesterday(http://www.ryansager.com/blog/index.php/2007/12/06/romneys-america-no-room-for-non-believers/) Here are some highlights:

In short, if we didn’t know it before, we now know that in Mitt Romney’s America, there is no room for those without “faith.” What’s more — and this we already did know — Mitt Romney is willing to mislead people about his religion, while categorizing all follow-up questions about his religion as a form of “religious test.” The most remarkable thing about Romney’s address — and even folks at National Review picked this out, notably Ramesh Ponnuru — is that is wrote atheists and agnostics out of the American nation.

Got that? Those of us who don’t believe in Christianity, those of us who don’t believe in God, those of us who don’t believe in the divinity of human-written holy books have no place in the American experiment, can’t be relied on to uphold the principles of our Constitution, and don’t have the morality necessary to keep a Republic. Marginalizing non-believers is too central to Romney’s primary strategy for him to speak one word on their behalf. Romney may say that, “A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.” But his vision of who constitutes “the people” includes only the faithful.

As to Romney’s disingenuousness about his own religion, one need only note that the word “Mormon” appeared but once in his speech. (Kennedy mentioned the word Catholic roughly 20 times.) What’s more, he pulled this little number. On the one hand, he declared: There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.

There was at least one line from Romney, though, that was worth the price of admission: “Americans do not respect believers of convenience.”