Louis wrote:
> Rick, if you mean that we in the U.S. are not perfect. Guilty. If you
> mean that there are no legal protections, recourses to law, rights of
> dissent. Not guilty.
There are definitely protections and recourse to law--but unfortunately
most of those are not easily accessible to religious (versus racial or
ethnic) minorities. Obviously, fighting a case all the way to the SC (the
only level at which a decision will be permanently binding) is an
expensive and lengthy proposition. While some can afford the necessary
legal representation, most can't. A few examples:
1. Most US prisons will allow clergy ONLY if they are Christian or
Jewish. Some extend that to Muslims. This clearly discriminates against
those of non-Judeo-Christian origins. Legal actions by convicts in two
States to grant the same rights to Wiccan clergy (and in three States to
grant them to Church of Satan Priests) were rejected by the lower courts
who supported the claims of the Corrections departments involved that it
would pose a security risk to the prisons.
2. In a very large number of public schools in the US, wearing clothing
or jewelry which promotes or symbolizes Satanic or Wiccan religions is
grounds for suspension. In NONE of those schools is the wearing of a
Christian crucifix or a Jewish Star of David treated in that manner.
Again, legal action has resulted in decisions in favor of the
schools--using the argument that such symbols would increase the risk of
"another Columbine massacre."
3. When students attempted to form a gay student's organization at
Jackson High School recently (the arguments are still going on), they were
prevented from doing so by the administrators who stated that it would not
be in keeping with the values of the school. Yet the ONLY value the
spokesperson could cite was that "homosexuality is a sin and shouldn't be
glorified in our schools."
4. In many States, blue laws exist which prohibit conducting business on
Sunday's. These laws, which provide unfair restraint of trade for Orthodox
Jews who may not, by religious requirement, work on Saturday OR, by legal
requirement, on Sunday and thus cannot compete with Christians who CAN
work one of those days. State officials have often identified those laws
as existing to protect the "sacredness of the Lord's day." Yet, overall,
the courts have rejected any challenges to them.
5. In several States, membership in a "radical" (Tr: Non-Judeo-Christian)
religion can be--and often is--grounds for loss of one's children. Ranging
from earlier cases in which Mormons lost custody of their children for
teaching them that polygamy was NOT evil or wrong to very modern cases
where Wiccans have had their children taken away to "protect them from
ritual sacrifice or perversion," the State has effectively used the threat
of losing custody of one's children as an effective tool of terror
supporting the supposedly non-existent State religion!
6. Despite being registered as a church in all fifty States, in several
States (NV, MT, UT, etc.) a marriage performed by a Wiccan Priest or
Priestess is NOT legally valid, while one performed by a Baptist minister
is. THAT is clear religious discrimination, yet the courts in those States
have supported the State's position.
7. By passage of DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act--signed into law by
Bill Clinton), the US Government usurped the rights of religions to define
marriage according to their own moral teachings (not all religions oppose
either homosexuality OR polygamy) and insisted on the right to define it
by the more narrow standards set by the Christian religion instead. This
bill has a direct impact on the rights and freedoms of all glbt people in
the US.
Do I believe we are "perfect?" Far from it.
I've been a rights activist since the late 1950s, and in the last 40+
years, I've seen the country become MORE, not less, repressive of rights.
Today kids in schools can be expelled for expressing thoughts and ideas
that go against the mainstream--particularly those dealing with sex, drugs
, or religion. More, not less, discrimination is occurring, and more hate
crimes are happening (and I'm NOT excluding the violence against the civil
rights workers in the South in the 1960s from the comparison). If you were
to plot the pattern of increases in these losses of rights and increases
in discrimination (particularly the increases in hate grimes against glbt
people since the early 1970s) against a plot of the increases in the
involvement of religious special interest groups (the "Moral Majority,"
the "Christian Coalition," etc.) and PACs in the US you would rather
rapidly see a very clear correlation (which, as an historian, I'm sure
you've already noted).
Laws may exist to protect people from religious intolerance or
persecution, but the existence of laws is meaningless without their
enforcement. As a perfect example, read the Constitution of the former
USSR. Even a non-legal scholar will instantly recognize the document to
offer the most enlightened and freedom oriented set of laws of any modern
nation. Yet despite that Constitution, the USSR rapidly (under Stalin)
became one of the most repressed nations on Earth.
In order to protect our rights, we have to be very vocal about defending
them--and one of the most important rights we have is freedom of religion.
By prohibiting religion any role in our government, or in our public
schools, including the role of deciding what is "moral" and therefore
"acceptable" behavior, we protect that right for both the religious and
the non-religious. Theology, dogma, and the teaching of religious morality
belong in the church and the home--they do NOT belong in a public
institution. Many Christians in the US argue that "God MUST be permitted
into the schools, because He is absent in so many children's homes." That
isn't freedom of religion, it's the imposition of it, a very different
matter altogether.
> There was silence. He called me and told me that (1) he had
> polled the teachers in the school and discovered that only one
> child had ever refused to accept a bible; (2) that no one saw
> any harm in the practice; (3) the school system attorney did
> indeed tell them that it was unconstitutional. The practice
> was stopped.
You had better luck than many.
They hand out those New Testaments at the campuses where I teach as well.
On one occasion I complained to the administration that there are clear
posts on campus that NO form of solicitation or other distribution of
material was permitted (student organizations are exempted, of course) and
that, therefore, the distribution of the bibles was a violation of the
rules in addition to being a clear issue of church/State separation. I was
told that bibles are NOT the same thing as other distributed matter (if
the local Women's shelter is not permitted to hand out material on
battering I fail to see how a copy of the NT is acceptable material, but .
. .) and that the distribution would continue.
In one of the history classes on our campus, the Adjunct teaching the
course has selected a text which addresses American history from "A
Christian Perspective." Despite the fact that this book demonstrates CLEAR
bias against non-Christian groups (Native Americans are viewed as heathens
to be brought to know "God," etc.) and offers an inferior presentation of
historical data (in particular, many important legal decisions are
addressed from a Christian, not an historical, perspective), no attempt
has been made by the school to prohibit the use of this text. It should be
noted, btw, that this is a public, not a private, institution, and that
students are not informed prior to the start of the term that they will
have to purchase and read a book with a strong fundamentalist religious
orientation--or even that other sections of the course do NOT use the same
text!
> My son, Michael, now in high school,volunteered that single
> student was him. He was the only Jewish kid in the fifth
> grade and he refused to take the bible because he was Jewish.
> The person handing out the bible tried to convince him to the
> correctness of the NT, and so did the teacher. Michael stood
> his ground. Michael hadn't told me because he knew I "would
> make a scene."
I applaud your son's commitment. What most people don't realize about the
involvement of religion in the schools is that students feel compelled by
peer pressure to participate in or acknowledge the validity of those
religions. I doubt _seriously_ that all the students who accepted NTs from
the Gideons wanted them--or that all of them were even Christians (are you
the only non-Christian family in the area?). In nearly all cases, the
students took the bibles because they would have "stood out" (as,
obviously, did your son) if they failed to do so. The same holds true of
prayer in the schools, etc.
Again, my fundamental concept is a simple one--freedom OF religion
demands freedom FROM religion. The US--or any nation--is free ONLY to the
extent that it separates any and all aspects of religion from government
policy. There is no more excuse for allowing religious leaders such as Pat
Robertson or Jerry Falwell to influence policy in this nation than there
would be to permit political leaders such as Bill Clinton to establish
moral standards for the churches. Keeping both entities separate insures
that both will maximize their usefulness and that the rights of the
citizens will be respected.
Rick
--
Rick Adams
Department of Social Sciences
Jackson Community College
Jackson, MI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"... and the only measure of your worth and your deeds will be the love
you leave behind when you're gone. --Fred Small, Everything Possible "
