Speedkill

This is an interesting separation of church and state case:

In 2001, Excelsior Middle School in Byron, 40 miles east of San Francisco, advised a classroom of twelve-year olds that, “[for the next three weeks], you and your classmates will become Muslims.” Thereafter, the students memorized portions of the Koran, chose Islamic names, wore tags bearing their new Islamic names alongside the Star and Crescent Moon—the symbol of Muslims, completed the Five Pillars of Faith, and recited Muslim prayers. Ironically, the teacher’s edition of the course textbook warned: “Recreating religious practices or ceremonies through role playing activities should not take place in a public school classroom.”

The Ninth Circuit ruled that this was ok:

Nonetheless, a California federal district court judge appointed by Clinton ruled the course lacked “any devotional or religious intent” and was only educational. Notwithstanding a double standard between how the district court treated Islam and how federal courts have treated other religions in the classroom, the Ninth Circuit agreed.

So, was this alright? The site I linked says no:

In particular, the school district’s actions fail every Supreme Court test; they: lack a secular purpose; primarily advance religion; excessively entangle government with religion; endorse a particular religious belief; and coerce students to participate in religion.

Now, I don’t think they’re quite correct. There’s an obvious secular purpose: to educate children about Islam, a religion that many people haven’t encountered and one that plays a large role in global politics. Does it primarily advance religion? That seems murky. I doubt there was any religious intent behind it, as the Ninth Circuit is quoted as ruling (apparently the whole opinion is unpublished). Depending on the context, it could be construed as endorsing Islam. It doesn’t seem that it’s primary effect is to advance religion, in the end. It seems to me that it advances the understanding of religion, specifically Islam. Finally, does it unnecessarily entangle church and state? There’s no question that we could teach about Islam without the roleplaying. However, I don’t think you can question the fact that this is a way of teaching that’s going to leave more of an impact on the students. I think that it’s this clause that the class fails, however. Given that it’s pretty easy to see how this offends people and that the purpose can be advanced in other ways, I think it’s probably better to keep on the safe side and not do the roleplaying activity. The author of the book that said not to do such roleplaying activities was probably thinking along that line. As for the last two criteria the site lists, they aren’t explicitly part of the Lemon Test but are accounted for in it.

It is, however, a borderline case and is worth a bit more than a dismissive remark.

(via MTPolitics)

I realize the religious right often get in a tizzy over minor issues or issues that have zero effect on them. I think this one, though, is on a whole ‘nother plane:

The Kentucky Board of Education has voted to take the first step in redefining how America dates time. The board voted to include a new secular system of dating the calendar, BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era), and added it to the BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, Latin for “in the year of our Lord”) method.

The new secular system of time dating will appear in the curriculum and other materials used by Kentucky educators. This new system is already being included in textbooks across the nation.

The new method will replace the birth of Christ as the dividing point in history. For example, the new system would change 2006 AD (Anno Domini) to 2006 CE (Common Era).

It also opens the door for the ACLU to find a liberal activist judge who will forcefully remove the use of BC and AD. The ACLU types will claim that the use of BC and AD are a violation of the First Amendment because it dates history based on the birth of Christ.

Results will be shared with members of Congress.[their emphasis]

First off, CE and BCE are not that new. I have a book from 1982 which uses that system. Second, using it does make sense to me from an even-handed, scholarly perspective, but it’s not a huge deal. Third, it’s not replacing the birth of Jesus as the dividing point for history. If we were changing that, 2006 would change. Fourth, how does this open the door for anything? The ACLU can sue them right now over this. They won’t, because this is nothing more than a scare tactic by the AFA, but they could. But you can’t scare your followers into giving you a bit more money without some sort of enemy, right?

This is at the top of their webpage. Apparently, it’s really important. Unlike, say, caring for the poor or doing something about Darfur. It’s even above the article about Ford and the gay rodeo. Sheesh.

I’m sort of surprised AgapePress put this up:

Canadian Student Newspaper in Hot Water Over Controversial Cartoon of Christ

(AgapePress) – Canadian Christians are calling on the University of Saskatchewan to shut down its student newspaper after it published a pornographic cartoon blaspheming Jesus.

It sounds so familiar. The author addresses this starting in the third paragraph:

Randy Donauer, a spokesman for the Christian Centre, says The Sheaf controversy cannot be compared to the news story involving Muhammad cartoons and the ensuing Muslim violence.

“This is not a news story at all,” says Donauer. “This was not pertaining to a current event in Saskatoon, Canada, or the world. This was not pertaining to a religious event, or political event, or any event on campus.”

In fact, he says, “this was just an editorial cartoon that really serves no other purpose but to take a jab at the Christian community in our city and to do it in the most perverse, vulgar manner possible.”

Was that supposed to be convincing? The Danish cartoons were unnecessary provocations. The story could have been written without the cartoons, which they knew would cause an uproar.

Donauer says tax dollars should[sic] be used to fund a newspaper that is so offensive. But a spokeswoman for the university claims The Sheaf is an “independent” publication and is not publicly funded. Donauer contests that statement.

He says even though the school may not receive tax dollars in the form of a “straight check” from the government, “there is an agreement where they give a certain percentage of that over to The Sheaf for its operation.” In reality, says Donauer, the whole university is publicly subsidized. “It’s a government-owned institution, government-owned buildings, government-run everything.”

In other words, they want the government to exert its influence on public universities. What’s next, firing professors who publish something the government finds offensive? Maybe student newspapers should publish only news that reflects positively on the current administration? I’m sure they’d say they don’t want to go that far, but it’s essentially what they’re asking for. At least they’re in Canada (not that I wish them on Canada).

But hey, they aren’t rioting over it. Excuse me for not congratulating them.

I probably spend too much time reading Agape Press and the AFA‘s website, but it’s just so damn fun. If you haven’t been paying attention, a school district in California tried to teach a class promoting creationism. Not intelligent design, even, but creationism. The twist was that they did it in a philosophy class. There’s some background here and here. The one interesting thing is that the Discovery Institute advised the school to cancel the class. They’ve now canceled the class.

The AFA has now weighed in with a news report of their own:

As a result of the settlement, Americans United has announced that Frazier Mountain High School will be dropping a philosophy class that discusses the highly debated origins theory known as intelligent design, or ID. That same organization was also involved in a case that resulted in Pennsylvania schools being barred from teaching the idea that evolutionary theory cannot explain life’s complexity.

There’s a subtle error here. They weren’t “discussing” ID, they were promoting creationism. Continuing:

Brian Fahling with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy says the court settlement filed yesterday indicates the “tyrannical nature” of people like Barry Lynn, who heads Americans United. Members of that group talk a lot and also talk “a good game about free thought and pluralism in our culture,” the attorney notes, but he feels their actions do not suggest genuine commitment to these ideals.

This is a bizarre canard that we see constantly from groups like the AFA. Not promoting religion in school is not “tyrannical” or suppression of free speech. It simply isn’t.

“The idea that they would go in and strong-arm an agreement from a school district, essentially, to not teach, for instance, intelligent design in the future, is beyond the pale,” Fahling says. Moreover, he contends, it is questionable “whether or not the school district actually has the authority to agree not to provide a course that is otherwise well within constitutional bounds.”

Of course, he’s completely wrong. The promotion of creationism has been ruled unconstitutional. Fahling has to know this. Teaching ID has recently been ruled unconstitutional as well. Any way you slice it, promoting either of them (of course, they’re hardly that different) is not going to survive a lawsuit. AU secured an agreement from the school district not to do that:

Under the terms of the settlement, the course will terminate one week early. The district’s board of trustees has also agreed to language stating, “No school over which the School District has authority, including the High School, shall offer, presently or in the future, the course entitled ‘Philosophy of Design’ or ‘Philosophy of Intelligent Design’ or any other course that promotes or endorses creationism, creation science, or intelligent design.”

Fahling has no clue what he’s talking about. It gets worse, though:

The AFA Law Center spokesman says the school district overreacted to pressure from Americans United and its leader. The zealous church-state separationist Lynn, the pro-family lawyer remarks, “can sniff out a religious purpose in a grape.”

Yeah, because there’s absolutely no religious content in creationism. Nope, none at all.

However, Fahling feels the school district should not have caved in to the liberal activist group’s pressure. He notes, “It was another colossal mistake by the school district to allow Americans United to portray the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in a philosophy course as being the equivalent of teaching it in a science course when, in fact, it is not.”

And again, Fahling is completely wrong. The AU’s position is that intelligent design or creationism can not be promoted in a public school. In any class. This is backed up by the courts. Fahling has to know this.

Intelligent design can be taught constitutionally in classrooms as science, Fahling asserts. And, he adds, the AFA Law Center is willing to defend any school that chooses to do so.

Except, according to the Dover ruling, it can’t. Fahling may want it to be constitutional, but it simply isn’t, according to the courts.

The idea that this guy can be the head of any group or department with “Law Center” in its name is mind-boggling.

I apparently missed this church and state flap from about a week and a half ago. Rev. Barry Lynn of AU is complaining about Jeb Bush’s promotion of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe:

As part of Governor Jeb Bush’s “Just Read, Florida!” program, students are being encouraged to read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe in conjunction with the December release of a Disney movie based on the book. The director of the program, Mary Laura Openshaw, tells the Palm Beach Post that the goal of the program is “to get kids reading” — and that state officials did not approach the reading program to help Disney or the promoter of the film, Walden Media.

But it is not the commercial aspect of the venture that bothers the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is arguing that the contest violates the First Amendment because it promotes a “religious story.” Barry Lynn, director of Americans United (AU), tells the Post that the Florida contest is “just totally inappropriate” because of the themes of the book. “It is simply a retelling of the story of Christ,” says Lynn.

Why AgapePress is bringing up the cronyism issue here I don’t know, but I’ll discuss that in a minute. First, is Lynn right?

Doesn’t look like it. Lewis’s Narnia series may have religious overtones, but as far as I can tell (I haven’t read any of the books, though I did see a cartoon of one when I was little) it has significant literary value. It’s certainly something that could be argued about, but it seems pretty subjective. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read the book. But it’s not like Bush is promoting Mere Christianity. On the other hand, Lynn is the minister here, and has said that he loves the books, so his opinion that they’re overtly religious is probably worth something. I’m inclined to let Bush use the book in the contest, though. Simply disagreement with Lynn is not a possibility for the religious right, however. No, they have to go one absolutely absurd step more:

Gary McCaleb, senior counsel with ADF, calls AU’s attempt to censor the book “classic left-wing activism.”

“When I see the far-left coming out of the bunch of book-banners, as they are in this case, I just shake my head,” McCaleb says. “The amazing thing to me is they focus on Narnia — and really the only way you can understand Narnia to be a ‘Christian book’ [series] is to know a lot about Christianity to begin with to see that there are some analogies there.”

AU is calling on Governor Bush to replace The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe with what it calls an “alternative non-religious book.” McCaleb contends Americans United is clearly exhibiting that it is trying to stifle speech it does not like.

First off, I put that little “Rev.” thing in front of Lynn’s name to make a point. Barry Lynn is a reverend. Get it? How in the hell can a Christian book be speech his group doesn’t like? It’s patently absurd. And book banning? There’s probably no point in explaining the difference between government promotion of religion and free speech again. It they don’t get it by now they never will. They’re brainwashed fundamentalist assholes who think it’s their God-given right to run our government according to their fucked up religious beliefs.

I really can’t express how much this kind of thing pisses me off without stringing a lot expletives together, which is hardly useful, so let’s look at the cronyism thing. It’s actually not really a huge deal, but it seems fairly obvious. Walden Media is owned by a man who’s contributed around $100k to Republican candidates and causes in the past several years. The first two books chosen for the “Just Read, Florida!” program? Hoot and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Guess who’s making those two books into movies? Walden Media. That’s really not much in the scheme of things, but it’s somewhat amusing.

So, in conclusion, even when the religious right gets something right, they can’t do it without being flaming morons about it. Sheesh.

Forget about “it’s not even Thanksgiving and the stores have Christmas decorations out,” it’s now “it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and right-wing fanatics are starting their ‘war on Christmas’ nonsense.”

It’s incredible. John Gibson has a book out with the heartwarming title, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. He also fingers “professional atheists” on the inside flap, which seems like a strange phrase.

It’s easy to figure out why Christmas has become a favorite cause of the right-wing fanatics. They get to attack three causes at once: secularism, multiculturalism, and liberalism. And everybody likes Christmas, so defending it (or appearing to, in this case) seems like the right side to take.

These attacks do a pretty good job of encapsulating the faults of the current conservative movement. They don’t want to argue for their ideas, they want to demonize the other side and impose their beliefs on everyone. Tolerance is a weakness. Inclusiveness lets those weird other people near me. Advice from a liberal probably doesn’t mean much, but ridding conservatism of these fundamentalist demagogues would be a step forward for conservatism, wouldn’t it?

As you’ve probably seen, Newdow is back again with his campaign to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. Newdow may be something of a prick, but he does appear to be correct (but misguided) in this instance.

The Pledge has always had one fairly decent argument in favor of it’s current form: you can simply not recite it, or simply recite the parts that are unobjectionable to you. The argument is the same as for school prayer, but I the fact that the general thrust of the Pledge isn’t religious makes it a more reasonable argument here. Still, reciting the Pledge in school is coercive in the same way as teacher-led prayer, albeit not to the same degree. It’s much less coercive than school prayer, but coercive nonetheless.

My opinion then, is this: “under God” shouldn’t be in the Pledge, but there are bigger things to worry about. It seems to me that “In God We Trust” on our currency is worse. It’s only symbolic, which isn’t as offensive as coercion, but I think it trumps the Pledge’s small degree of coercion. I’m a bit uncertain as to how one would challenge it, though.

The wingnuts are out in full force, of course. Jerry Fallwell sees the country as being taken over by “militant secularists”:

America is experiencing a hostile takeover, an advancing conquest by abject secularists who believe – and demand – that our nation should be a religion-free zone that stifles all public religious expression. That movement experienced a surge this week when a San Francisco Federal District Court declared that the phrase “under God” in our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional.

…

If the militant secularists want to redefine this nation in their own Godless imagine, they should at least be honest with the American people and admit that they are contradicting our nation’s extensive history of government-endorsed public religious expression, including National Days of Prayer, “In God We Trust” on our coinage, acknowledgment of the Creator in our Constitution and in countless other areas.

Fallwell really should do something about those hallucinations – there’s no acknowledgment of a creator in the Constitution.

David Limbaugh marks the occasion with a misleading quote:

Like it or not, the Constitution, rightly interpreted, allows the federal government (and the states) to “encourage” the Christian religion. As Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845) wrote, “Probably, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution … the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State, so far as such encouragement was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship.”

Anyone who reads the quote can see the flaw: the general sentiment in America doesn’t say anything about the intent of our founders. Story seems to be something of a separationist, actually.

Like I said, Newdow is probably right, but there are more important things to worry about. Then again, irritating the hell out of fundamentalists has to count for something.

Court: Some Ten Commandments Displays OK

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court struggled in a pair of 5-4 rulings Monday to define how much blending of church and state is constitutionally permissible, allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed outside the Texas state capitol but not inside Kentucky courthouses.

…

But framed copies in two Kentucky courthouses went too far in endorsing religion, the court held. Those courthouse displays are unconstitutional, the justices said, because their religious content is overemphasized.

Not surprisingly, I agree with that one. It seems painfully obvious when you read exactly what they did:

As directed by the resolutions, the Counties expanded the displays of the Ten Commandments in their locations, presumably along with copies of the resolution, which instructed that it, too, be posted, id., at 9. In addition to the first display’s large framed copy of the edited King James version of the Commandments, the second included eight other documents in smaller frames, each either having a religious theme or excerpted to highlight a religious element. The documents were the “endowed by their Creator” passage from the Declaration of Independence; the Preamble to the Constitution of Kentucky; the national motto, “In God We Trust”; a page from the Congressional Record of February 2, 1983, proclaiming the Year of the Bible and including a statement of the Ten Commandments; a proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln designating April 30, 1863, a National Day of Prayer and Humiliation; an excerpt from President Lincoln’s “Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible,” reading that “”[t]he Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man””; a proclamation by President Reagan marking 1983 the Year of the Bible; and the Mayflower Compact.

Gee, I think we’re seeing a pattern.

Scalia lets loose on the decision and on Stevens’s dissent in the Texas case in his dissent. Some of it is plainly bizarre: he apparently failed to read Stevens’s citation for an argument he made (Stevens dissent in Van Orden, footnote 32) before attacking him and he attacks Stevens for making a nonsensical argument:

JUSTICE STEVENS also appeals to the undoubted fact that some in the founding generation thought that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment should have a narrower meaning, protecting only the Christian religion or perhaps only Protestantism. See Van Orden, ante, at 20–22. I am at a loss to see how this helps his case, except by providing a cloud of obfuscating smoke. (Since most thought the Clause permitted government invocation of monotheism, and some others thought it permitted government invocation of Christianity, he proposes that it be construed not to permit any government invocation of religion at all.)

Oddly, Scalia seems to understand the point of his argument a bit later:

JUSTICE STEVENS argues that original meaning should not be the touchstone anyway, but that we should rather “expoun[d] the meaning of constitutional provisions with one eye towards our Nation’s history and the other fixed on its democratic aspirations.” Van Orden, ante, at 27–28 (dissenting opinion). This is not the place to debate the merits of the “living Constitution,” though I must observe that JUSTICE STEVENS’ quotation from McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 407 (1819), refutes rather than supports that approach.

That was exactly Stevens’s point with that argument:

A reading of the First Amendment dependent on either of the purported original meanings expressed above would eviscerate the heart of the Establishment Clause. It would replace Jefferson’s “wall of separation” with a perverse wall of exclusion—Christians inside, non-Christians out. It would permit States to construct walls of their own choosing Baptists inside, Mormons out; Jewish Orthodox inside, Jewish Reform out. A Clause so understood might be faithful to the expectations of some of our Founders, but it is plainly not worthy of a society whose enviable hallmark over the course of two centuries has been the continuing expansion of religious pluralism and tolerance.

…

It is our duty, therefore, to interpret the First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” not by merely asking what those words meant to observers at the time of the founding, but instead by deriving from the Clause’s text and history the broad principles that remain valid today. As we have said in the context of statutory interpretation, legislation “”often [goes] beyond the principal evil [at which the statute was aimed] to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”” Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U. S. 75, 79 (1998). In similar fashion, we have construed the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit segregated schools, see Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294 (1955), even though those who drafted that Amendment evidently thought that separate was not unequal. We have held that the same Amendment prohibits discrimination against individuals on account of their gender, Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U. S. 677 (1973), despite the fact that the contemporaries of the Amendment “”doubt[ed] very much whether any action of a State not directed by way of discrimination
against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision,”” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 81 (1873). And we have construed “”evolving standards of decency”” to make impermissible practices that were not considered “cruel and unusual”” at the founding. See Roper v. Simmons, 543 U. S. ___, ___ (2005) (slip op., at 1) (STEVENS, J., concurring).

To reason from the broad principles contained in the Constitution does not, as JUSTICE SCALIA suggests, require us to abandon our heritage in favor of unprincipled expressions of personal preference. The task of applying the broad principles that the Framers wrote into the text of the First Amendment is, in any event, no more a matter of personal preference than is one’s selection between two (or more) sides in a heated historical debate. We serve our constitutional mandate by expounding the meaning of constitutional provisions with one eye towards our Nation’s history and the other fixed on its democratic aspirations.

Sorry for the long quote, but it seemed necessary. The Texas case decision I don’t agree with:

In contrast, a 6-foot-granite monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol — one of 17 historical displays on the 22-acre lot — was determined to be a legitimate tribute to the nation’s legal and religious history.

A legitimate tribute where all the monuments surrounding it have something to do with specific Texas history? Stevens puts it best (again):

The sole function of the monument on the grounds of Texas’ State Capitol is to display the full text of one version of the Ten Commandments. The monument is not a work of art and does not refer to any event in the history of the State. It is significant because, and only because, it communicates the following message:

[Ten Commandments]

…The message transmitted by Texas’ chosen display is quite plain: This State endorses the divine code of the “Judeo-Christian” God.

Well, one out of two isn’t terrible, I guess.

UPDATE: There are more intelligent commentaries here and here.

The Americans United blog has a post up about the Ten Commandments arguments. Apparently, Scalia made the same stupid remark Kennedy did:

Take Justice Antonin Scalia, for example. I have to say, I’ve heard Scalia say some pretty callous things about separation of church and state over the years, but today he hit a new low. According to Scalia, government-sponsored Ten Commandments displays are only intended to reinforce the idea that our government flows from God. He had an easy remedy for those who might be offended: “Look away if you don’t like it.”

Not that unexpected, I guess, but sheesh.

The AU blog, The Wall of Separation, is pretty good, go read.

The Supreme Court is debating Ten Commandment displays today.

“If an atheist walks by, he can avert his eyes,” Justice Anthony Kennedy (news – web sites) said in a courtroom filled with spectators, many of whom could be seen glancing at the court’s frieze of Moses carrying the tablets.

Wow. This opens up some avenues, doesn’t it? Public decency laws are out; if someone flashes some kids on the steet it’s not a crime, they can avert their eyes! The FCC can’t regulate the content of broadcast TV, because you can just turn it off. Vandalism is ok now, just don’t look at your graffiti covered window and it isn’t there!

I propose we put a statue of Bertrand Russell holding a sign saying “Christianity is wrong” in a courthouse. The Christians can just avert their eyes.

Banning the Texas display might “show hostility to religion,” he said.

Riiiiight. When did neutrality become hostility?

“It’s a profoundly religious message, but it’s a profoundly religious message believed in by a vast majority of the American people,” Scalia said.

It seems to me that statement should scare the hell out of anyone who believes in republican principles. I’m fairly sure the majority isn’t supposed to be able to trample the rights of the minority. That statement is awfully close to that idea.