Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (10 page)

So, where are the self-proclaimed “right-to-life” groups when it comes to Amiyah White dying alone in that van? Life is sacred, they say. Where were they for fifteen-year-old Jessica Crank?

More importantly, where were we? Why aren’t all of us who care about basic human rights organizing and calling Congress right now? Federal law should have one standard for protecting children from abuse and neglect—not one standard that applies to most of us but that allows a chosen few to intentionally ignore the desperate medical needs of their children, all in the name of religion.

It is not enough to simply eliminate the various exemptions at both the federal and state level. Federal and state statutes should impose civil liabilities on “faith-healing” treatment providers. In addition, federal dollars for state child-abuse programs must be made contingent on a uniform child-medical-neglect standard.

Politicians sometimes justify these horrific legal exemptions as a religious constitutional right. This is a lie. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 in
Prince v. Massachusetts
that the religious have no constitutional right “to make martyrs of their children.” Medical science and compassion must be the decisive factors in children’s health.

Today, the exemptions in federal and state law are the result of lobbying that places religious special rights above basic ethics, a basic sense of humanity, and basic science. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National District Attorney’s Association all oppose religious exemptions for so-called faith healing. Doing away with the torture of children is a moral imperative.

As with the exemptions given to religious child-care centers, legislatures across the United States that exempt “faith healing” from child-abuse and child-neglect laws made a moral choice. Or was it an immoral choice?

Sexual Abuse

Religious exemptions in child care, and religious child-sacrifice exemptions,
are less notorious than a third form of child abuse: pedophilia. Sexual abuse certainly isn’t a problem unique to priests. I knew excellent priests at the University of Notre Dame, during my studies in Ireland, and when I served with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in a Yupik town in Alaska. So I don’t paint all priests with one brush, and it’s a sad reality that pedophilia extends well beyond the walls of the Catholic Church. But how has the Church handled charges of abuse? It is the institutional decisions that are most reprehensible and utterly immoral.

The reason? Let me explain by example.

Bishop Thomas Daily knew—knew!—from more than one report that a priest in his jurisdiction had made more than one positive statement about man-boy sex. Indeed, Bishop Daily had reason to believe that the priest had attended Man-Boy Love Association meetings.

Forget priests. What should and would any sensible and moral employer do under such circumstances? Well, as someone who started a children’s museum back in Maine, let me suggest two obvious reactions: first, remove the suspect from any position that involves access to minors until an investigation is conducted, and second, request an investigation by proper law enforcement authorities. What did Bishop Daily do in response? Isolate the priest? Report the matter to the police? No. He gave the priest a promotion. I repeat. He gave the priest a promotion and transferred him from one parish to the next, thus endangering even more children.

It gets worse. In a 1993 piece written for the
Boston Globe
, Father Andrew Greeley calculated that there were 100,000 victims of pedophile priests in the United States. This estimate comes from a respected priest—before the worst of the charges about pedophile priests surfaced. Whatever the actual number, let’s focus on two things: (1) the systemic pervasiveness of the problem and (2) the legal defense that the Church has asserted. Church lawyers argued that internal administrative documents and decisions (like moving suspected pedophiles from parish to parish) was, get this, religious free expression. Walk through this looking glass again: Church lawyers argue that covering up employment policies regarding pedophiles is a form of religious free expression. Church leadership successfully delayed cases with this argument.

Physical Abuse

The specifically religious justifications for legal exemptions that put children at greater physical risk are not isolated but part of a pattern. Consider this interesting quote: “Pain is a marvelous purifier.” These are not the words of an avowed masochist, or a sadist. These are the words of
James Dobson, easily one of the most powerful religious leaders in America today, author of books such as
Dare to Discipline
. Dobson’s organization, Focus on the Family, has an annual budget of over $100 million.

Let’s be clear: when James Dobson says “pain is a marvelous purifier,” he means pain for children. Dobson asserts, “spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” Dobson advocates spanking children as young as eighteen months.

Dobson states that if children cry for more than five minutes, “the child is merely complaining” and “I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” As a former assistant attorney general who handled numerous child-protection cases, I assure you that such a practice could easily result in tragedy. Given the sway of Mr. Dobson, I fear for the children who attend one of the religious schools that has the “privilege” of using corporal punishment (not to mention the many children in homes under the influence of Dobson’s “moral” pronouncements). Unfortunately Dobson’s disturbing attitude is not an isolated one.

Michael Pearl—another prominent fundamentalist and author whose books have sold over 1.8 million copies—influences parents and teachers in fundamentalist schools nationwide. Regarding child discipline, Pearl states, “A length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line is a real attention-getter.” It certainly got some attention when a seven-year-old girl died after an apparent repeated beating—with a “quarter-inch plumbing supply line.” A parent had listened carefully to Mr. Pearl’s detailed suggestion.

The Bible does contain several passages that specifically recommend inflicting pain on children as a method of discipline. (For that matter, the Bible contains statements condoning things like stonings and slavery.) Of course, most Christians don’t support corporal punishment. Yet Mr. Dobson and Mr. Pearl remain prominent leaders in a widespread movement and, according to at least one study, 66 percent of fundamentalist Protestants believe corporal punishment should be allowed in public schools.

Most states prohibit corporal punishment in public schools. Less than five states prohibit corporal punishment in private schools. Well over a million children go to private fundamentalist schools, schools that are more likely to authorize corporal punishment today than other types of schools. A high percentage of Christian schools remain exempt from laws prohibiting corporal punishment while millions in tax dollars make their
way into their coffers. In this way the United States government authorizes the use of physical violence as a form of punishment for a specific set of children.

Children in religious schools are no less human—and no less deserving of safety from physical harm—than other children. Laws against corporal punishment in schools must apply equally to both public and private schools. In short, striking kids to enforce discipline should be prohibited in all public and private schools that receive federal dollars. American law must be consistent, especially when it involves our children and our tax money.

No ancient document should be called on to authorize harm to another human being, simply because it’s an ancient or an allegedly supernatural document. Why should religious bias justify placing children in distinct situations of danger?

* * * * *

In this chapter we have seen religious bias harm children, harm public health, harm our men and women in uniform, harm our seniors, harm our citizenry, and harm our schools—all at taxpayers expense. This is not the American way. America is still the greatest nation on earth because of its commitment to equal treatment under the law, its protection of minority rights, and its separation of church and state under the Constitution. The injustices described in this chapter corrode these most sacred American ideals. Deeply connected to this corrosive trend in American life is the pervasive and widespread desire among religious extremists to control the most intimate aspects of other people’s lives.

Marriage has historically never meant anything other than a man and a woman. It has never meant two men, two women, a man and his pet, or a man and a whole herd of pets
.

—Mike Huckabee

The big thing is to make this country . . . quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay
.

—Barry Goldwater

I quit watching broadcast TV shortly after
Seinfeld
closed up shop. The way I see it, most TV shows just aren’t that good, and, when TV is available, the strong temptation exists to watch stuff—just because stuff’s there.

Let’s pick an example:
Dynasty
was one of the top-rated shows of the 1980s. Watch it again and you find it’s kind of boring.
Dynasty
is more representative of TV in general than are the quality shows. Yet, those few nuggets do exist. Take, for example, the original
Star Trek
(yep, I’m a nerd), which captures Kennedy-era idealism well—that desire to boldly go where no man has gone before. Shakespeare it’s not, but
Star Trek
is iconic TV that resonates today. As another example, take
Twilight Zone
, which offers Kennedy-era morality plays—classic “what you can do for your country” ideals wearing the mask of sci-fi and hocus-pocus good fun.

Star Trek
and
Twilight Zone
were produced in the 1960s, but let’s consider (and I’m sneaking up on sex here) another show set in the 1960s, a show that raises the immortal question: what would Don Draper do? Well, he does a lot of alcohol—and cigarettes for that matter—and there was that episode with the stewardess.

The Don Draper character is expressly Republican and not someone whose values I personally admire overall. That said, he is a Republican of a libertarian (some would say libertine) bent. Republicans today say they’re
libertarians . . . all while they try to regulate your bedroom for Jesus. (I’ll beat up a bit on liberals later.)

As a lobbyist and advocate for secularism in the halls of Congress, I am familiar with the many religiously motivated policies that focus on sex. The previous chapter touched on three examples: (1) abstinence-only sex education, which often peddles biblical subservience to women and leads to higher rates of HIV and unplanned pregnancies; (2) laws that allow fundamentalist pharmacists to violate their professional responsibility and refuse to fill prescriptions; and (3) the “gag rule,” which prevents women around the world from receiving health-care services and accurate information they rightfully need and deserve. But the list of biblically justified sexual and sexist suppression goes on.

A fourth example: You may know about Title IX because of its relevance to equity in school sports for young women. However, a less well-known aspect of the law is the requirement that girls and young women be treated equitably not just in sports but in education overall. It’s less well known because, even in 1972, when the law was enacted, equity in academics was less controversial than equity in sports. However, a little-known provision in Title IX states that religious schools can treat males and females unequally—if it is a tenet of their religion. That’s right, if, and only if, sexism is a religious tenet, then the United States government is willing to permit it. Why should even one child be taught that women should be subservient? Children make no adult choice to attend a sexist school. It violates their human rights to impose such views on them.

A fifth example: Although the horrific term “female genital mutilation” calls to mind girls in Middle Eastern and North African lands, numerous American girls have been transported out of the United States to be subjected to this hideous procedure. Our laws and policies must do more to protect these vulnerable girls.

A sixth example: Fundamentalists notoriously call for separate and unequal treatment for gay people, particularly those straight-as-an-arrow male fundamentalist preacher types—like George Rekers, the guy who “treats” gay men to “cure” them of their gayness. Oh, wait. That’s right. My mistake. Rekers is the minister who was caught with his “rent boy” at the airport in Miami. To be fair, maybe he’s the rare exception—just look at that other theocratic preacher against gay sex, Ted Haggard. Oh, that’s right . . . well, never mind, you get the idea.Some of these fundamentalist ministers must only be homophobic, not brazen hypocrites, too.

Nosy-minded busybodies like Rekers and Haggard call to mind an old saying we have back in Maine. You may have heard it: mind your own
business! Whatever happened to this bit of reasonable common sense? Gossips and Peeping Toms, whether secular or religious, are some of the most disgusting slimeballs you can possibly meet, but gossipy sex lecturers are particularly noxious when they can poke around in other people’s sex lives with the imprimatur of law. Why? Three reasons.

First, someone is hurt. There is a real human victim—often women, sometimes sexual minorities—when religious sexual meddling imposes its mean-spirited will on American law.