[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Chipping Away at the Wall

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Chipping Away at the Wall

August 22, 2004
 By DAHLIA LITHWICK 



 

Nearly 80 years ago in Dayton, Tenn., an epic trial pitted
the literal truth of the Bible against modern science. And
when the Scopes monkey trial concluded, the presiding judge
closed the proceedings as he'd opened them each day - with
a prayer. 

In his wonderful book, "Summer for the Gods," Edward J.
Larson paints a picture of America in the mid-1920's that's
oddly familiar: torn between modernism and religious
fundamentalism, Americans felt an old-time burning need for
a burning bush. Horrified by the moral and cultural
declines of the Jazz Age, they turned away from
internationalism and intellectualism. 

Welcome to 2004 and "Summer for the Gods Part 2: Revenge of
the Public Officials." In a new wave of religious fervor,
we resent that secular courts have chased God out of the
public square. Again we want public institutions to carry
water for our churches. And again, public officials happily
flout the law to advance personal religious agendas.
Consider: 

In Horry County, N.C., last week, local officials opened
their council meeting with a prayer to Jesus, despite the
fact that the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit had ruled the practice unconstitutional. "This is a
nation that gives us great freedoms: freedom of religion,
not freedom from religion," said the council chairwoman. 

A Republican congressman called for a civil rights
investigation last week, after the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill declined to recognize a Christian
fraternity for refusing to accept non-Christian members.
Every other student group on campus is held to the
university's nondiscrimination policy. The basis of the
complaint: Such policies discriminate against Christians'
right to religious freedom and association. 

During the recent confirmation hearing of a federal judge,
J. Leon Holmes, several senators - concerned by his
religious writings - questioned whether his extreme views
would prevent him from applying existing civil rights and
abortion law. Holmes's supporters countered that the Senate
is anti-Christian, that federal judges cannot
constitutionally be subject to "litmus tests." 

The Defense Department confirmed last week that a senior
military intelligence official violated internal rules by
giving speeches, mostly at Baptist or Pentecostal churches,
in which he said that America is a "Christian nation,"
depicted President Bush as having been anointed by God, and
described the war on terror as a battle against "Satan." 

Add these incidents to the national furor over the
amputation of "God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, and the
president's decision to hobble stem cell research for
religious reasons, and it's clear there is a growing wave
of public officials convinced that their own, personal
religious freedom renders the notion of a wall between
church and state personally offensive and legally
irrelevant. 

The twin religious protections enshrined in the First
Amendment - that one can freely exercise one's religion,
and that the government cannot establish a state religion -
are forced onto a collision course when public officials
insist their personal religious freedom allows them to
promote sectarian views in office. Yet with ever-increasing
shrillness, we hear from elected or appointed officials
that it's religious persecution to ask them to suspend
sectarian prayer or practices on the bench, in the
legislature or at the schoolhouse gate. 

To be sure, the courts have made a hash of the First
Amendment religion jurisprudence. A crèche on government
property is constitutional so long as the manger includes a
Malibu Barbie; and state aid to religious schools is
constitutional if it's triangulated through the alchemy of
parental choice. But the courts have not backed down from
the principle that imposing sectarian religion in the
public square violates the Constitution. Religious
Americans have every right to insist they shouldn't have to
be religious in the closet. But that doesn't give public
officials some free-floating constitutional right to
exercise their religion at the expense of everyone they
ostensibly serve. 

At the end of the monkey trial, H. L. Mencken wrote that
Tennessee had seen "its courts converted into camp meetings
and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers
of the law." We are there again. Maybe the judge and the
jury were right to convict Mr. Scopes for teaching
something so absurd as Darwinism. We haven't evolved one
bit. 

Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate, is a guest
columnist during August. Thomas L. Friedman is on leave
until October, writing a book. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22lithwick.html?ex=1094199682&ei=1&en=e1819f35de33a862


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