Category: Church-State Update

A call for concern on climate change and a look at the November election results.

Overpopulation was the cause of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, which the world has largely overlooked.

Outrage over Hobby Lobby—and a priest turns (sort of?) secular humanist.

Daring Pope Francis to reconcile his church to today’s world; New Orleans loses its last public schools.

“Perhaps you didn’t know that [Carl] Sagan was also an important champion of abortion rights.”

The data actually undermine claims that private, especially religious, schools deliver better education.

On December 3, 2013, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers reported on two interesting lawsuits.

Make no mistake: America’s public schools, an indispensable component of our religiously neutral (that is, secular) democracy, are under serious siege.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in attacks on public schools, which serve about 90 percent of K–12 students in the United States.

Australia and the United States have much in common. Both are English-speaking, continent-wide former British colonies. Both pretty much displaced their indigenous populations. Both are reasonably prosperous today. America’s founders, with fresh or not-so-fresh memories of Europe’s centuries of religious conflict, had the wisdom and foresight to put the concept of separation of church and …

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the American national government’s founders, following the lead of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in Virginia, incorporated these words into the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In 1802 Jefferson explained that these words built …

On December 18, 2012, PBS broadcast a ninety-minute documentary titled First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty. An excellent introduction to the subject, it traced the evolution of religious freedom in the United States from early colonial times to shortly after 1800, coming down nicely on the side of church-state separation and using a great …

November 6 was a good day for President Barack Obama. The Democrats increased their majority in the Senate and gained a few seats in the House. The popular vote for the House favored the Democrats, but the Republicans retained control thanks to gerrymandering in “red” states after the 2010 election. The percentage of women in …

Thanks to the Brothers Grimm, we are all familiar with the tale of Hansel and Gretel, the young brother and sister who were abandoned by their father and stepmother in the woods of medieval Germany. While the tale is fiction, it is actually a metaphor for a practice that was rather common during long stretches …

In the early 1950s, I was a guest on a Sunday evening talk-show in Indianapolis discussing the overpopulation problem. World population then was less than a third of today’s seven-billion-and-counting. The following morning’s newspaper headlined a hysterical rant about the audacity of discussing something so controversial in anything above a whisper. The talk-show host was …

“Vagina. The passage leading from the uterus to the vulva.” So says the 1998 Webster’s American Family Dictionary, a “family” reference work “to record the standard vocabulary of American English in a way that reflects the common ethical, moral, religious, social, and civic values of mainstream Americans.” This 1,124-page volume is so prissy that it …

On January 20, 2012, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (a Catholic) issued regulations, effective next year, that would require church-related institutions such as hospitals, universities, and social service agencies to provide coverage for birth control in their employee health-insurance plans and without a co-payment. The new HHS regulations were recommended by the …

On November 8, 2011, Mississippians voted 58 percent to 42 percent to reject a proposed state constitutional amendment intended to establish legal “personhood” at the moment of fertilization or implantation. The amendment, supported by leaders of both political parties in this most religious of all states, was aimed at outlawing all abortions and several types …

“The Threats to a Crucial Canopy: Deaths of Forests May Weaken Controls on Heat-Trapping Gas” was the headline of a two-page report by Justin Gillis in the New York Times on October 1, 2011. Color maps accompanying the comprehensive article made dramatically clear that our planet’s forest cover—a primary reservoir for long-term sequestration of carbon—is …

Operating largely below the public’s—and the media’s—radar is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an ultraconservative policy shop founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority). Its mission is to influence state legislatures, far too many of whose members are only too happy to accept “expert” advice. ALEC …

On May 11, Education Week published this letter of mine: The four states discussed in the article “GOP Lawmakers Press Voucher Expansion in States” (April 27, 2011) are among the 39 states whose constitutions prohibit tax aid to religious institutions, but, tellingly, are not among the 14 states (including the District of Columbia) where voters …

April Fools’ Day arrived three days late this year. The victims of the prank were the American people and the United States Constitution. The perpetrators were the five Supreme Court justices appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Here’s what happened. On April 4, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 to reverse a decision …

It has been nearly a decade since fanatics hijacked planes and crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. As this is being written, multiple political tsunamis guided by other fanatics are engulfing the U.S. Capitol and many state capitols. This column has space for dealing with only two of them: those aimed at forcing …

November’s election results do not bode well for church-state separation and democratic, humanist values. Although “social issues” did not dominate the news coverage throughout 2010, the election outcomes seriously enhanced the political strength of the religious Right. We will see new pushes in Congress and state legislatures for a range of schemes to divert public …

Education “reform,” whatever that might mean, is on the front burner. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) plan has led to a frenzy of testing that has narrowed and weakened curric ula, led to an epidemic of “teaching to the test,” and stimulated the proliferation of charter schools, which have on balance done …

Q: What do these countries have in common: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States? A: All have been in the news this year regarding the ongoing clerical sexual-abuse scandals roiling the Catholic Church. Even the briefest summary of the …

Like the Terminator, they keep coming back, and they’re hard to stop. Like Dracula, they want our blood—er, taxes. “They” are the folks who have been campaigning for more than forty years to have all of us pay for faith-based private schools with our federal and/or state taxes through the mechanisms of tax-funded school vouchers …

Sainthood for Pius 12? (Gasp!) Tone-deaf, arrogant, Orwellian, Kafkaesque—the Holy See (the Vatican) is hell-bent on conferring sainthood on World War II-era Pope Pius 12 (née Eugenio Pacelli), known for his timidity regarding the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other “Untermenschen.” Pius’s canonization, though an internal church matter, would be a grave …

Faith-Based Programs George W. Bush’s signature faith-based initiative providing public funds to religious and community organizations remains popular, according to a report released November 16 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Based on polls by Princeton Survey Research Associates, the report (available online) is complicated but does admit to some generalizations. Sixty-nine …

Swedes R Us—NOT Sectarian and secular special interests promoting school-voucher plans (tax aid for faith-based and other private schools in the United States) are a long way from giving up their crusade despite overwhelming popular opposition in more than twenty-five statewide referenda; from liberal Massachusetts and California to conservative Utah; clear constitutional bans in three-fourths …

‘Family’ Values It’s a rather ordinary row house at 133 C Street SE—a short walk from the nation’s Capitol—but it has attracted attention of late because of its connection to Senator John Ensign (R–Nev.), Governor Mark Sanford (R–S.C.), and former Representative Chip Pickering (R–Miss.), whose well-publicized extramarital affairs piqued media interest. The C Street house …

‘Pro-life’ Terror Assassination The terrorist assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, on May 31 was not just a tragedy for the courageous physician who was one of the very few who provided rarely needed reproductive health-care procedures for many women. It was also a vicious attack on the rights of women to appropriate …

Voucher Plan Dies On March 10, the U.S. Senate defeated a Republican effort to continue the District of Columbia’s controversial school voucher plan. This is a victory for church-state separation, religious liberty, and public education. In taking this action, the Democratic-controlled Congress was very much in line with the twenty-five statewide referenda from coast to …

  From Hither . . . The school voucher movement may well be collapsing. Century Foundation official Greg Anrig, writing in the January 27 Christian Century, observed that: The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio, voucher programs have shown no advance over local public schools. The idea that the existence of voucher schools would lead to …

Elections Reflections November 4, 2008, was a pretty good day for church-state separation. It marked the end of the eight-year reign of error of the incompetent, secretive, corrupt, faith-based Bush-Cheney administration. But it may not tally the end of agnostic (sic!) Karl Rove’s signal achievement, harnessing the power of the Religious Right, the “theocons,” to …

Quelle Horreur! Que passé en la terre de laïcité? On a visit to France in September, Pope Benedict XVI called on the country to relax its rather strict separation of church and state—laïcité, or secularism—which other countries in western Europe increasingly try to emulate. The “pontiff” seems to be playing the same card as U.S. …

Of Apes and Embryos United States. Colorado voters this November will vote on a proposed amendment to the state constitution, the “Human Life Amendment.” If approved, it will define human personhood as beginning at “the moment of fertilization.” In other words, all fertilized human ova would be persons, presumably with the full panoply of human …

  Sanctified Genocide? In 2006, California politicians voted to place a statue of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. As each state is allowed only two statues, it was decided to remove the statue of Thomas Starr King (1824–1864) to make room. King, a heroic San Francisco Unitarian minister/orator, led the struggle …

Center for Inquiry Hits Textbook Errors A high-school government textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies, Tenth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), has been criticized in a twenty-five -page report issued by the Center for Inquiry/Transnational (CFI) on March 28. The textbook was written by two conservative authors—James Q. Wilson and former Bush administration Faith-Based Initiatives and …

A U.S. district judge upheld a Texas moment-of-silence law, even though it had been amended to call specifically for “prayer.” The U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case regarding a neon-lighted Bible display outside a Texas courthouse. A lower court decision that the Bible display must go stands. —TF Global Warming, Population, Clericalism …