Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (8 page)

Jefferson and Madison strictly and vehemently opposed religious discrimination in government-funded entities. To be consistent with our Founders and our Constitution, the U.S. government must overturn all faith-based-initiative executive orders and end preferences for religious organizations. These are the values of our nation’s Founders. They must be our values as well. President Obama gave his word in 2008 that he
would end proselytizing and discrimination in so-called faith-based initiatives. He has yet to keep his own pledge.

Taxpayer-Funded Religious Propaganda

Voucher programs force every U.S. taxpayer to subsidize private religious schools. These schools discriminate on the basis of religion and proselytize to students who have no choice but to be subjected to propaganda when they should be getting an education. That is an unethical use of your tax money.

In the federally funded Washington, DC, voucher program, more than 80 percent of participating students attend private religious schools. In 2009 in Arizona, more than 50 percent of taxpayer funds donated by the state under a scholarship program went to students who attended religious schools. Our laws protect students in public schools from many forms of discrimination, including religious discrimination. Compare that to the mission statements of these two private schools in Washington, DC, that receive federally funded vouchers:

Anacostia Christian Bible School (grades K–6)
: “Our purpose is to turn an audience into an army by reconciling them to God by making warriors for Christ and to each other through worship, prayer, preaching, fellowship, and teaching.”

Cornerstone Schools of Washington, DC (grades K–6)
: “God’s truth is infused throughout the curriculum and is reinforced in chapel each week.”

Not only may private religious schools have a religious curriculum, but they may also discriminate against teachers based on religion, ignoring their professional qualifications. Giving tax money to religious institutions without holding them to nondiscrimination law violates our Constitution’s central principles.

Since 1967, voters in over twenty states have rejected voucher proposals and other tax-assistance programs for religious schools. American public schools should unify our country’s entire range of diverse communities. Vouchers for religious schools undermine this vital unifying function by surrendering the long-standing principle of equal treatment regardless of religion. Your tax money should not fund programs that harm the fundamental civil rights of students, teachers, and other employees.

Boy Scouts of America

Neil Polzin joined the Boy Scouts at age nine. At eighteen Neil earned his Eagle Scout badge. For nine years, Neil worked for the Boy Scouts of America organization as an aquatics director. “Scouts made me who I am,” says Neil. “At 14, I became a life guard and began training other life guards—that’s how I met my fiancée. . . . The rescue skills that Scouts taught me enabled me to save lives; on a hiking trip I came across a stranded hiker and my Scouts survival skills allowed me to climb down a ravine and perform first-aid for seven hours until the hiker could be rescued by an emergency helicopter.”

Yet, after almost two decades and top commendations, Neil was ordered to “sever any ties” with the Boy Scouts of America in June 2009. The Boy Scouts “did not feel he was a capable role model for children.” Why? Because he doesn’t have a belief in god. Not only did the Boy Scouts fire Neil, the organization also told him to never again contact anyone from his troop.

Neil’s story is no isolated incident. Many American families are hurt by the Boy Scouts’ discriminatory practices that bar both children and adults without a “god belief” from participation. This discrimination continues with your tax dollars.

In 2005 Congress passed a resolution encouraging the Department of Defense to support Boy Scout activities through the use of military personnel, federal land, and other assistance for its massive jamborees. The 2005 jamboree alone cost taxpayers approximately $8 million. Then, in 2006, Congress included the Support Our Scouts Act in its defense authorization bill. This law requires the Department of Defense to provide at least the same level of support for the Boy Scout’s national and world jamborees as in past years. This law also requires any state or local government entity that receives Community Development Block Grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to allow the Boy Scouts to have meetings in its facilities or on its property. This requirement overrides local antidiscrimination laws forbidding access to a discriminatory group.

In 2008 Congress directed the U.S. Mint to produce commemorative Boy Scouts coins as a $3.5 million fundraiser for the Boy Scouts of America. Federal funding of the Boy Scouts allows the organization to continue discriminating against those without a belief in god and to teach young boys that only believers in god can be “good citizens.” Many boys with a naturalistic worldview violate their own consciences to remain scouts.

The “Declaration of Religious Principle” found in the Boy Scout’s bylaws must be affirmed by every participant, volunteer, and employee. This declaration states that “no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God. . . . The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship and are wholesome precepts in the education of the growing members.” Apparently the Boy Scouts believe that many Girl Scouts are not “the best kind of citizen” since the Girl Scouts, unlike the Boy Scouts, do not discriminate based on sexual orientation nor on the basis of religion.

To the Boy Scouts of America, Warren Buffett is a deficient citizen. Using tax dollars to impose religious bias on others is immoral and unconstitutional. The Boy Scouts of America also continues its taxpayer-funded tradition of discrimination against gay people. This tiresome hostility to gay people is an absolute passion in some religious circles. If you want to discriminate against gay people in your church or in your services, that’s up to you. Mean as it is, you have a constitutional right to enshrine prejudice in your church and structure marriages—within your church—as you see fit. However, religious prejudice should not be imposed on civil law.

Civil Marriage

More than fifty-five years after they fell in love, eighty-four-year-old Phyllis Lyon and eighty-seven-year-old Del Martin became the first same-sex couple to legally exchange marriage vows in California on June 16, 2008. But the U.S. government’s Defense of Marriage Act prohibited recognition of their marriage by any other states or by the federal government. They can’t get any of the more than 1,100 federal protections and responsibilities—including social security and immigration benefits—that apply to married couples.

Civil marriage involves a state license. The state conveys no religious blessing with this license. Some people have a religious ceremony, but the ceremony has no legal standing. The civil marriage contract should not require adherence to any specific religious doctrine.

Civil-marriage law was historically used to legally encode segregation. Blacks and whites couldn’t marry each other in some states until the Supreme Court overturned “miscegenation” laws in 1967. There were biblical justifications for this form of marriage discrimination as well.

Theological definitions for civil contracts must be opposed and the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act must be supported. Constitutional amendments seeking to define marriage as “one man, one woman” must also be opposed.

Religious bias is the primary justification for injustice against gay citizens. This bias is repugnant in law.

Religious Bias Harms Our Communities

The County of Boulder in Colorado has employed careful land-use planning designed to balance the needs of its citizens and the need to preserve open space. Its land-use law passed in a local democratic process. Everyone must obey the law—except a megachurch that sought a sixth expansion of its facility and successfully challenged the law in court.

Why was this megachurch successful in its suit? The federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) privileges religion by providing a broad exemption to the enforcement of any land-use regulations when, and only when, such regulations are challenged by a religious organization. RLUIPA is labeled as protecting religious freedom, but its title is misleading. The free expression clause of the First Amendment continues to protect religious freedom as always. Congressional action to “restore” a freedom, such as the ability to ignore laws others must obey, is nothing more than special rights dressed up pretty.

The rest of us can’t ignore zoning laws with an artificially created loophole. For those who believe in local control, consider that local elected representatives in Boulder County made a decision meant to benefit the community as a whole. Yet, because of a top-down federal mandate, religions are exempted from local law. These top-down federal mandates riddle our legal code with exemptions for specific religious sects, leaving other religious groups and the nonreligious in a state of second-class citizenship.

A nonprofit that serves the poor must obey the law. Why then should a megachurch that focuses on preaching against gay people be exempt from zoning law? A for-profit software company must obey zoning laws. Why then should a megachurch that preaches that women should be subservient be able to expand its buildings willy-nilly ignoring local law? Who does more for society? The software developer? Or the megachurch? The nonprofit that helps poor people? Or the megachurch?

These laws also impose federal authority on purely local issues. Talk about top-down. The federal government comes in and picks who must
(or need not) obey local laws. Our abiding American value, equal treatment under the law, calls out for repeal of this unjust special right in law.

Religious Bias Degrades Our Schools

Hundreds of thousands of public school children are misled by taxpayer-funded religious propaganda in multiple ways. In 2009, the Texas Board of Education voted to present “all sides” when studying evolution and misleadingly required consideration of “gaps” in the fossil record. Stated former Texas Board of Education member Don McLeroy, “Evolution is hooey.” That year it also voted to remove from curriculum standards reference to the strong scientific consensus that the universe began more than 13 billion years ago.

In March 2010 the Texas Board of Education voted to remove Thomas Jefferson’s name from a list of leaders who have inspired changes in governments worldwide. Why? It might have something to do with the fact that President Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, also penned the phrase “separation of church and state.”

Although this reference to Jefferson was later reinstated, students taking government classes in Texas get told that America’s founding was informed by the Judeo-Christian legal tradition and “especially Biblical law” and that the legal principles of “Moses . . . informed the American founding documents.” In fact, as Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University, states, the Founders “did not draw on Mosaic law.” Indeed, the Enlightenment developed in opposition to reliance on biblical law, and our nation’s founders were strong proponents of the Enlightenment. Green’s research of late-1700s American court cases that referenced Mosaic law yielded almost nothing: “The record is basically bereft.”

Texas’s influence reaches well beyond the state line. Because other big states (e.g., California and New York) don’t impose statewide standards in the same way, Texas remains one of the largest statewide textbook markets. The Texas government buys or distributes a staggering 48 million textbooks annually, which strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor products to fit Texas standards. Even if this problem were limited only to Texas, we wouldn’t be content to leave approximately 4.8 million Texas public school children behind. It’s unacceptable for any child to be subjected to religious propaganda in a taxpayer-funded school.

The Obama administration has embraced common core educational standards developed by the National Governors Association. Although the administration offers financial incentives for states to adopt similar standards,
these standards apply only to math and language arts. George Will, the conservative columnist, views science and history as “neglected” in national standards. If there are to be national standards at all, government must give to science and history the same weight it gives to language arts and math, with no pandering to religious bias.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower strongly supported federal efforts to improve science education. Their positions were uncontroversial at the time. President Kennedy said, “Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man’s place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man’s own nature.” But the
New York Times
noted in March 2010 that some basic, factual subjects, such as evolution, may be deemed “controversial” in the twenty-first-century educational environment. Whether we will teach our students the truth about science and history has now become a point of political contention, as religious bias competes with reality.

A few theocratic Texans shouldn’t get to determine the educational standards for America’s schools. We must therefore press for educational standards equity as essential for America’s future. Just as national standards for math and language arts have been developed and embraced by the Obama administration, the National Governors Association, and many members of Congress, so should common core standards for science and history be given equal weight. Textbooks and teachers must present accurate information on evolution, the age of the universe, America’s secular founding, and laws affecting church-state separation.