Tag Archives: religion

Religious Corporate Personhood

February 13, 2012 – 12:44 pm

Cable-news shows the last two weeks (especially on Fox) have been dominated by the Catholic bishops’ objection to including contraception in the minimum healthcare plan employers must provide under the Affordable Care Act, and the compromise the Obama administration offered.

In brief: Churches could already claim an exemption to the rule, so the issue centered on other church-run institutions like hospitals or universities. By making a Catholic institution provide contraception to its employees, despite the fact that Catholic doctrine objects to contraception, “the Obama administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty” — according to one version of the letter which the bishops had read in every Catholic church.

The administration compromised: Church-run institutions also would not have to offer contraception in their healthcare plans, but if they didn’t, the insurance companies providing the plans must offer individual employees a separate, no-fee, no-co-payment contraception policy. (This works financially, because contraception doesn’t cost the insurance company money, it saves money by preventing pregnancies. So the employer is not subsidizing contraception, even indirectly.) But the bishops announced that they would not be satisfied until contraception was withdrawn from the minimum healthcare plan for everyone.

Most of the problems with the bishops’ claims have been dealt with in detail elsewhere:

But one point is not getting nearly the attention it deserves: The bishops are not defending the religious liberty of individual Catholics (who remain free not to use contraceptives). They are claiming “religious liberty” as an institutional right of the Catholic Church.

It’s corporate personhood all over again.

The Founders must be spinning in their graves. The whole point of separating church from state is that we should not have to run our laws past a council of unelected bishops.

The United States has a long history of making room for individual conscience, most notably in allowing conscientious exemption to a military draft. But recognizing the institutional conscience of a church would be something new and strange.

In the American legal tradition, a church’s rights are derived from the right of its members to believe as they will, to worship as they will, and to freely assemble. Any “institutional right” that can’t be so derived is alien to us.

I found this spelled out quite clearly in the 1949 book Cornerstones of Religious Freedom in America by Joseph Blau (which also provided this week’s Sift quote):

Much as business corporations in the United States have battened on their fictitious legal status as corporate persons entitled to individual rights under the “due process” clause, churches — religious corporations — are able to grow overweening and oppressive if their claim to legal status as corporate persons under the First Amendment is granted. “Due process” for corporate persons has produced the legal anomaly of violation of the rights of the very individuals whom the due process clause was intended to protect. Religious freedom for religious corporations, if it is allowed, will end in the trampling of the religious freedom of the individual under the marching feet of a remorseless and self-aggrandizing hierarchy.

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Under-reported Stories of 2011

January 2, 2012 – 12:49 pm

You didn’t need some blogger to tell you that Charlie Sheen flipped out in 2011, or that Kim Kardashian got married and divorced. It was everywhere. You couldn’t miss it. But one valuable service that the blogosphere and the alternative press provide at the end of every year is to raise the question: What important stuff didn’t you hear about?

It’s got a few flaws, but my favorite such list for 2011 is AlterNet‘s. These stories weren’t censored, exactly, they just went by so fast that you had to really be paying attention to catch them.

  1. 2011’s carbon emission increase was the largest ever.
  2. 50,000 Iraq War refugees have been forced into prostitution in Jordan or Syria. (Thanks for liberating us, America.) [Caveat: The links AlterNet gives are horrifying, but I can’t find the 50K statistic in either of them. This study looks authoritative and says 5,000, which is bad enough. Maybe somebody at AlterNet typed too many zeroes.]
  3. More activity-duty troops are killing themselves than are dying in combat.
  4. Drone strikes kill innocent civilians.
  5. Record numbers of US kids face hunger and homelessness. The homeless total is higher than after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2006. The 2010 raw numbers for hunger were a record, but the percentages were about the same as 2009.
  6. Prison hunger strikes protest long-term solitary confinement. If you aren’t crazy when you start your ten-year time-out, you will be when you finish.
  7. 5,000 kids are native-born American citizens, but they’re in long-term foster care because we deported their parents.
  8. The FBI is training its agents to suspect all Muslims. The religious bigotry here is bad enough by itself, but it also promotes the very terrorism the FBI is supposed to fight: “depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict.”

Several other most-under-reported lists were less interesting (New Republic‘s, for example). But BlackAmericaWeb.com has a suggestion that could be on the list every year: any missing black woman. Derrica Wilson of the Black and Missing Foundation says, “It just seems like our lives are less valued.”

A couple of stories suggested by Current TV’s Josh Sternberg are worth a look:

Every year has dogs that didn’t bark — important things that should have happened, but didn’t. Usually those non-events pass without notice, so hats off to the NYT for highlighting this one: After investigating the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster, Congress should have closed the loopholes that let Massey Energy risk its employees’ lives until 29 of them died. But it didn’t.

Religion never gets covered properly in the corporate media. When the media pays attention at all, it’s usually for some stupid reason like the trumped-up War on Christmas, or to cover some tiny sect of weirdos like the Westboro Baptists. But religion is pretty important in America and important developments must happen there from time to time. So who covers that stuff?

Check out Religion Dispatches. In particular, look at their Top 2011 Religion Stories That Weren’t: the Vatican’s clout in historically Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland is shrinking; a pioneering gay-friendly church is losing its identity now that mainstream denominations are open to gays; fewer Americans believe the US plays a special role in God’s plan; plus several other developments you won’t see on CNN.

But I especially want to call your attention to this neglected religion story: “Upside-Down Ideas About Religious Liberty” (which Kevin Drum also noticed).

In the past, the social service arms of religious bodies understood that if they wanted public money they would need to honor public law regarding the disposition of the money: i.e., provide the full range of mandated services on a universal basis. We used to say to objectors, “If you don’t like the mandate, don’t take the money.”

Apparently such a commonsensical response is now insufficiently deferential to religion. More and more people seem willing to say that if a Catholic health care provider doesn’t “believe” in providing reproductive health care to women, that private belief can trump public law.

A lot of attention has come to this issue lately because Catholic Charities is pulling out of Illinois rather than help gay couples adopt children. The bishops are getting away with painting this as a religious liberty issue when it really is nothing of the kind.

The principle here is pretty simple: If you take public money, you have to serve the public — the whole public, not just the portion of the public you happen to like. Nobody in Illinois state government is stopping Catholic Charities from arranging adoptions. They can even keep discriminating against gay couples, as long as they raise their own money. The only change is that Illinois tax dollars will no longer support a bigoted program. That’s right and just, and infringes no one’s religious liberty.

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Christopher Hitchens and the Politics of Atheism

December 19, 2011 – 1:12 pm

I could write a long article about the strange way we mythologize the recently dead (especially if they die mid-career), and how particularly inappropriate it is to treat Christopher Hitchens that way, given how much of his writing was devoted to breaking down mythology. But since Glenn Greenwald already wrote that article, I’ll just take those ideas as a place to start.

Hitchens himself was never one to make a socially-required saccharine comment if it got in the way of driving his point home. Interviewed after the death of Jerry Falwell, he lamented that “there isn’t a hell for him to go to.” And his farewell to Jesse Helms article includes the phrase “senile racist buffoon”.

So, in honor of the spirit he didn’t believe in, I’m here to bury Christopher Hitchens, not to praise him.

The New Atheists. I have never been a fan of Hitchens or any of other New Atheists. (My review of two new-atheist classics preceded Hitchens’ God is Not Great, which I would have included.) By treating all religion as either full-throated fundamentalism or watered-down fundamentalism, they overlook the most interesting contemporary religious thinking and also misrepresent a lot of the history of ideas.

Plus, something about Islam makes them crazy. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris found torture in the context of the War on Terror to be “not only permissible, but necessary”. (It’s hard to imagine a position more out-of-step with the tradition of the Humanist Manifestos.) And Hitchens was one of the most outrageous apologists for any abuses the Bush administration could come up with, as long as they were targeted at Muslims.

But at the same time, I get where the New Atheists are coming from, and I think they’re a necessary phase in the development of a more reasonable humanism. To put it bluntly: You are not really equal until you are allowed to as a big a jackass as anybody else.

Put that idea in racial terms: As long as they had to be Booker T. Washington or Martin Luther King to get respect, black Americans were nowhere near equality. Real equality would mean that blacks can be just as obnoxious as whites and get away with it — and nearly half a century after Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, we’re still not all the way there.

Christopher Hitchens was an atheist Muhammad Ali. He didn’t just politely ask to be included, like Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis; he loudly pointed out that he was better than you. If he was an obnoxious jerk at times, well, that in itself was a step towards equality. During Hitchens’ career, how many high-profile Christians got away with being loud obnoxious jerks? Lots.

Anti-atheist discrimination in politics. Many American atheists are (like Hitchens) economically and educationally above average. But politically they’re still an oppressed class, ranking well behind blacks and even gays. (Let’s not even talk about the Christians who fantasize that they are oppressed because they losing their right to oppress others or to use public resources to promote their faith.)

Last time I checked, there was exactly one admitted atheist in Congress. The constitutions of several states either explicitly ban atheists from holding public office (Tennessee, Article IX), or exclude atheists from the protection of a no-religious-test-for-office clause (Maryland Declaration of Rights, Article 37).

(I haven’t verified the exact number of states that have such clauses. Some articles claim eight, but a few of their links point to obsolete constitutions.)

Bans on atheist office-holders are unenforceable because of the federal constitution, as North Carolinians found out in 2009 when they tried to keep Cecil Bothwell from taking his seat on the Asheville city council by quoting Article VI, section 8 of their constitution. But keeping them on the books is like leaving up the “whites only” signs.

And what exactly is the point of printing “in God we trust” on the money or saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Is any public good achieved other than to remind atheists that they aren’t really Americans?

Stereotypes of atheists. In addition to discriminatory laws, personal prejudice against atheists is still socially acceptable. In polls taken over the last 30 years, the number of people who admit they would refuse to vote for an atheist candidate has stayed stuck at around 50%. (A 2007 poll by Newsweek got a 62% refusal.) Compare that to the 17% who said in 1999 that they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon or the 38% who wouldn’t vote for a Muslim.

In that same Newsweek poll, 26% thought it was not possible for an atheist to be moral. And this opinion is based on what, exactly? Have atheist leaders been raping children, like Catholic priests have? Have well known atheists been caught doing crystal meth with gay prostitutes, like a certain high-profile televangelist? Have they assassinated doctors in the name of their beliefs? Crashed airplanes into skyscrapers? What?

Mostly, American atheists have just been doing their jobs and raising their families. According to research by the evangelical Barnes Group, 21% of atheists have been divorced, compared to 24% of Mormons and 29% of Baptists. Funny how you never hear about the Baptist threat to American family values.

The immoral atheist is like the shiftless Negro or the greedy Jew — a stereotype. But it’s a stereotype you can still voice in respectable company.

The Overton window. Whether you loved Christopher Hitchens, hated him, or found him embarrassing, you’ve got give him this: He stretched the Overton Window. In the same way that the crazy ravings of Glenn Beck and virulent nastiness of Rush Limbaugh have made previously beyond-the-pale conservatives look like statesmen, Hitchens’ in-your-face style has created some space in the mainstream for softer-spoken atheists and agnostics.

Anybody whose beliefs are more complicated that just “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” owes a little bit to Hitchens. As long as he was the guy sitting furtherest out on the limb, you didn’t have to be.

So I guess, in my own grudging way, I’ve gotten around to praising him after all.

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The Dog Whistle Defined

July 25, 2011 – 11:02 am

I’ve been ignoring Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy because the voters are. But this campaign video is worth watching purely for educational purposes. If you’ve ever wondered what the term dog whistle means, this is it:

According to Wikipedia, a dog whistle is “coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.”

The targeted subgroup here are evangelical Christians. The general public will find the intro (where Pawlenty and his wife testify to their faith) dull but unobjectionable. The Pawlenties believe in something; good for them. Most will get bored and stop watching. But this lengthy testimony tells Evangelicals to get out their codebooks to decrypt phrases that will follow, like:

  • people of faith. If you’re a Muslim, Jew, liberal Christian, or even a Catholic, you may think you’re a person of faith. You aren’t. Evangelicals do not use people of faith in this ecumenical way. To them, the phrase is a synonym for evangelical Christian.
  • God. Similarly, you may think that the Pawlenties are talking about your God. They aren’t. If you worship somebody other than the Lord Jesus Christ (as He is envisioned by conservative Protestants), you don’t believe in God.
  • nation under God. Not the ecumenical meaning (that America is united under a larger truth rather than divided among warring sects). Instead, this means that only a government dominated by right-wing Christians is legitimate.
  • the Founders. Not the historical politicians who wrote the Constitution. The Founders are latter-day prophets who were inspired by God to create a Christian nation. They wielded a divine authority similar to Moses or St. Paul.
  • faith in the public square. Rather than every American’s right to profess his or her beliefs in public, this phrase refers to the special right of Christians to commandeer public resources to promote their religion.

So later, when Pawlenty says:

The separation of church and state was intended to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith. … I think the Founders of this country made it very clear: We were founded as a nation under God. … So it’s very clear what roadmap they put out for us as it relates to faith in the public square.

codebook-holders hear him agreeing that Evangelicals have inherited the prophetic authority of the Founders. America is their country, the power and resources of the government are theirs to use, and the rest of us should be grateful for their tolerance, such as it is.

Evangelicals want to hear that message from a candidate, but Pawlenty knows he’ll offend the general public if he says it in so many words. Hence the dog whistle: They hear it; you don’t.

Another dog-whistle to the Religious Right is Rick Perry’s 1-minute invitation to “The Response“, a “call to prayer for a nation in crisis”.

This event will sail under most voters’ radar, because it sounds just like the prayer breakfasts and days-of-prayer that politicians are always associating themselves with.

But true believers will hear something different. Perry has modeled the Response after what “God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel”. If you haven’t read Joel lately, you probably don’t realize how apocalyptic it is. Invoking Joel implies not just that America is having hard times, but that God is smiting us for our sin.

Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Given that the Response is hosted by the American Family Association, we can guess what that sin is: tolerance of homosexuality.

A little of that apocalyptic flavor comes through in the official Response promo video, which most voters won’t bother to watch.

And then there’s the Response’s page of “endorsers”. (The Endorser link from the home page was dropped after it started getting attention, and then the page disappeared altogether.) Chances are you’ve never heard of them, but they include some of the most dangerous religious nuts in the country.

Here Mike Bickle, for example, warns his flock about “the Harlot Babylon movement”, which is “preparing the nations to receive the Antichrist”.

I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement — it’s not the Harlot movement yet — is Oprah.

Oprah is the forerunner to the forerunner to the Antichrist. Who knew?

Another official Response-endorser, C. Peter Wagner, believes that the Japanese Emperor has had sex with a Sun Goddess/Demon, and that this event had real consequences for the Japanese economy.

Since the night that the present emperor slept with the Sun Goddess, the stock market in Japan has gone down. It’s never come up since.

And of course there’s John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain had to renounce in 2008 because of Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry. His picture was also up there on the Endorsers’ page.

Rachel Maddow collects more of this kind of insanity from Perry’s endorsers/allies.

It’s not clear yet how many of these people will appear on stage with Perry at the Response. But their followers know that Perry’s event is their event. You should know it too.

The Response-hosting AFA is not just ideologically conservative, it is partisan for Perry. Tuesday, the AFA’s Bryan Fischer wrote that Michele Bachmann’s migraines “make a Rick Perry candidacy both inevitable and necessary.”

Liberals, interestingly enough, are not the ones piling on this issue. “I thought Hell would freeze over before I defended Michele Bachmann,” Dana Goldstein writes.

The Texas Observer describes Perry’s connections with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement founded by the same C. Peter Wagner. The movement’s leaders talk about “infiltrating” government because “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”

Contrast Pawlenty’s and Perry’s dog whistles with Herman Cain, who just lays it out there for everyone to see, as during this interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to [can] ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

And draws this response from Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison:

It’s reprehensible that [Cain] just will not relent with this bigotry and that he actually thinks it’s going to enhance his chances to get the Republican nomination. If I were a Republican, I would be outraged.

But by talking in code, Pawlenty and Perry make no headlines and leave their opponents nothing to quote.

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