  Meeting
Report
April 27, 2003
Full Transcript of Edd Doerr's Speech:
"Will Church-State Separation Survive the Reign of George The Second?"
Will church-state separation survive the reign of George
the Second? No one can predict, but before getting into the subject, it
might be good to review just how we got church-state separation, which
most authorities agree is the most significant and most important
contribution that our country has made to civilization.
In every part of the world without exception throughout
history, religion and government have been closely linked. Sometimes they
could not be viewed as distinct at all, as in fundamentalist Muslim
countries. Our story should begin in the early 17th century when English
dissenters moved to Holland to better exercise their religious freedom. As
they had a great deal of difficulty with the Dutch language, as many of us
would, they returned to England and decided to resettle in British North
America. We call them the Pilgrims. Interestingly, their church is now a
Unitarian church of a more or less Humanist bent. Their ideological
cousins, the Puritans, settled around Boston for similar reasons around
1630. It has been said that they loved religious freedom so much that they
wanted to keep it all for themselves. Thus we had the expulsion of Anne
Hutchinson and her children from the colony in 1638 and the execution of
Mary Dyer and several male Quakers on Boston Common in 1660 for the crime
of simply being Quakers.
As time went on, the British North American colonies
developed a certain degree of religious pluralism, mainly Anglican from
Maryland on south, and Congregationalist or Puritan in the New England
colonies, except for Rhode Island, where Roger Williams came up with the
idea of preserving religious liberty through separating religion and
government. In between we found Catholics, German Lutherans, French
Huguenot, Sephardic Jews, and others. Not much happened until 1775 when
people now called Americans began a several-year struggle for independence
from Great Britain. During that struggle the religious differences of
people led, in Virginia, to the decade-long effort by Jefferson and
Madison to implant the idea of religious liberty and church-state
separation in Virginia law. They succeeded in 1786, and the remainder of
the new states eventually followed their example.
The very next year, the Constitutional Convention was held
in Philadelphia and we adopted one of the first charters of government in
the world. It gave to government no authority whatever to meddle with
religion, the only mention of it being in Article VI, where religious
tests for public office and mandatory oaths of office were prohibited.
Jefferson, then ambassador to France, wrote to his buddy
Madison and commented that the Convention had done a fine job except that
it had not put in a Bill of Rights. Madison and other politicians found
that promising to add a Bill of Rights was the only way to get the
Constitution ratified. In 1789 the first Congress adopted the Bill of
Rights — that is, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. The First
Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In
1802, in response to complaints from Baptists in Connecticut, Jefferson
wrote that he "viewed with sovereign reverence that act of the whole
American people … that erected a wall of separation between church and
state." That is how the phrase came into common use in our country and
eventually spread to other advanced countries.
Unfortunately the states did not do a terribly good job of
applying the principles of the Bill of Rights and so, after the Civil War,
a farsighted Congress led by Representative Bingham of Ohio and Senator
Howard of Michigan introduced the Fourteenth Amendment. This was intended,
by its authors and the Congress that approved it, to make the Bill of
Rights applicable to state and local government. Unfortunately, in the
1870s, the Supreme Court ruled in some Louisiana cases that the Fourteenth
Amendment really did not mean much at all. It was not until 50 years
later, in the 1920s, that a new Supreme Court began applying bits and
pieces of the Bill of Rights to state and local government through the
"due process" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
That is the end of the history lesson. There will not be a
quiz.
For the last 200 years, most American politicians and
religious leaders and thinkers have agreed with the position taken by
Jefferson. Unfortunately however, today we are seeing a split in the
Supreme Court over the "separationist" or Jeffersonian/Madisonian point of
view and the "accommodationist" point of view originally promoted by
Patrick Henry of Virginia, who, fortunately, lost the argument to
Jefferson and Madison.
Beginning in the 1940s the Supreme Court began applying
the separation principle in major rulings on religious liberty, which we
need not bother to list here. But, beginning in the late 1970s, we began
to see a certain erosion of the separation principle. The addition to the
Supreme Court of justices like Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, augmented on
and off by Kennedy and O’Connor, began to move the Court away from
Jeffersonian separation. The great danger today is that George the Second
will succeed in stacking the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts
with accommodationists who could well destroy church-state separation
entirely.
Let us look at the major problem areas.
One of the most serious issues before us today is the
question of tax support, extracted from all citizens, for the support of
faith-based schools and charities. I do not wish to knock private schools
generally, or religious charities generally, as they have made important
contributions, but there is something seriously objectionable about making
citizens pay involuntarily for private religious institutions, not of
their own choosing, that would be allowed to discriminate in hiring and to
proselytize. This is really evident in private schools, most of which are
pervasively sectarian and many of which, particularly so-called Christian
day schools, promote bigotry against anyone who is not a fundamentalist or
evangelical. Californians have had the good sense in the last ten years to
twice reject school voucher plans by a better than 2 to 1 margin. That
opposition to vouchers comes from Republicans and Democrats, rich and
poor, whites and blacks and browns. Similar referendum defeats for school
vouchers or their analogs have been registered over the past 35 years in
Massachusetts (twice), New York, Maryland (twice), the District of
Columbia, Michigan (three times), Missouri, Colorado (twice), Oregon
(twice), Washington State, and Alaska. The Colorado legislature’s approval
of a new voucher plan this year is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at
both the voters of the state and the clear provisions of the state
constitution. It is to be hoped that the state courts will put this ugly
genie back in its bottle.
Any voucher or similar plan would have the effect of
fragmenting our school population along religious, ethnic, class,
linguistic, academic ability level, and other lines. Vouchers or their
analogs would rob our already needy public schools of support and increase
the costs of education considerably. Teachers would be reduced to the
level of sectarian indoctrinators.
The big problem with tax support of faith-based charities
is that such support would result in an incredible proliferation of
unaccountable operations of uncertain efficacy, but George the Second and
his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, referred to recently by historian
Arthur Schlesinger as a "religious nut," are intent on pushing this mess
in the courts. Worse, by using executive orders, they have ignored
Congress.
Moving on, we see a set of problems with religion in
public schools. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court held, both wisely and
properly, that public schools must be religiously neutral. All attempts to
amend the Constitution to move schools away from that neutrality have been
defeated in Congress. But the Religious Right keeps on trying, most
recently in 1998, when the Istook Amendment was smashed. But Istook is
back again.
We are still having to deal with the efforts by
fundamentalists to either dilute the teaching of evolution in science
classes or to get "equal time" for fundamentalist creationism. The Supreme
Court ruled our way, 7 to 2, in 1987 in a Louisiana case. I am happy to
say that I was instrumental in getting before the Court an amicus curiae
brief, signed by 72 Nobel laureates in science, in support of evolution.
Another rather more vague problem arises with the
possibility of teaching about religion in public schools. I believe this
is now required in California, though I do not know how properly it is
being done. My friend Jack Masson, in San Mateo, led to the development of
a coalition involving the American Humanist Association, the Council on
Secular Humanism, and others to promote balance and neutrality. There is
no real demand in the country for teaching about religion; there are no
state certification procedures for teachers; there are no teachers trained
to do the job; and I have yet to see an adequate textbook. If religion
cannot be taught about objectively, neutrally, and in a balanced way,
including our end of the spectrum, it should not be done at all. As a
former history teacher I know that religion must be dealt with, but it has
to be done very carefully. And if you’re going to talk about the bright
side of religion, you are obligated to talk about the dark side as well.
For every Martin Luther King, there were many hundreds, if not thousands,
of preachers who defended segregation. Enough said.
Now let us come to an issue that I am sure you want me to
talk about, the Newdow case, in which the Ninth Circuit has twice ruled
that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance may not be imposed
on children in public schools. Technically, Newdow is correct and,
technically, the Ninth Circuit is correct. However, on the basis of
everything I have learned in Washington over 40 years, if the Supreme
Court does not find a weasely way to overturn the Ninth Circuit ruling,
then we can be as certain as that the sun comes up in the East, that an
effort will be made in Congress to amend the Constitution to reinsert the
phrase and there is no way possible that such an amendment could be
stopped either in Congress or in the state legislatures that would ratify
it. Moreover, such an amendment would likely be ornamented with school
vouchers, tax aid for faith-based charities, school prayer, creationism,
and anti-abortion provisions.
The lesson in all this is that it is not enough to be
right. You have to be smart and you have to think strategically. If, in
World War II, as the Russians demanded, the United States and Great
Britain had attempted to invade Europe in 1943, we would have been
clobbered. Eisenhower was right: You have to think strategically and pick
your fights when you know you can win them. Anything else is suicidal.
None of this "Into the valley of death rode the 600; ours is not to
question why; ours is but to do or die."
Another extremely important area of battle concerns
reproductive rights. While the Supreme Court held in 1973 that a woman has
a constitutionally protected right to decide for herself whether or not to
become a mother, that right has been slowly eroded by federal and state
legislation, by assorted court rulings, by violence and threats of
violence from anti-choice fanatics, and by the failure of Americans
generally to defend the rights of women adequately. No anti-choice
constitutional amendment is likely to be passed, but the anti-choicers
have other methods. Waiting periods, parental notifications, and mandatory
provision of medical misinformation are but some of the ways. There is
Congress’s effort to ban so-called "partial-birth abortions" — not a
medical but a propaganda term, and an effort to throw a monkey wrench into
reproductive health care. The Supreme Court will, one hopes, deal with the
legislation currently going through Congress the way it did two or three
years ago in the case of
Stenberg v. Carhart.
Then you have the actions by Reagan,
Bush the First, and Bush the Second to impose a gag rule on all overseas
institutions providing family planning assistance, who might so much as
mention abortion as an option. Just in the last year, the Administration
of George the Second blocked provision of $34 million appropriated by
Congress for the UN Population Fund. And, just last December, the Bush
Administration made this country look extremely foolish at the UN
population conference in Bangkok. The U.S. stood alone in advocating the
fundamentalist position. It is interesting that one of the U.S. delegates
to this conference, John Klink, was a Vatican delegate to the 1994 UN
Population Conference in Cairo.1
It is clear that George the Second is playing to his
Religious Right fundamentalist base and to the wishes of the Vatican and
the Catholic bishops, who, it should be emphasized, in no way begin to
adequately represent the Catholic people, who tend to be liberal and were
the people who elected Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
Where do we go from here? First of all, we have to
recognize that Humanists, Unitarian Universalists, and people of similar
bent cannot fight this battle alone. It can only be fought successfully if
we ally with moderate to liberal people and leaders in the Catholic,
Protestant, and Jewish communities. The AHA has been working with these
other groups for a great many years. The AHA has been a member of the
Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice since it was founded in 1973,
in part through the efforts of the then AHA/AEU/UUA lobbyist in
Washington, Bob Jones. We have worked with a vast array of religious,
educational, civil liberties, civil rights, labor and other groups to
oppose school vouchers and Bush’s charitable choice initiatives. This kind
of cooperation is essential if church-state separation is to win and must
be done on the national, state, and local level. An excellent example of
local cooperation is the Texas
Freedom Network.
Internationally the AHA has joined with
Catholics for a Free
Choice in Operation See Change, a multinational, multi-organizational
effort to get the Holy See (the Vatican) out of its unique and specially
privileged position in the UN General Assembly, where it works incessantly
against women’s and reproductive rights. We may never win, but we have to
fight the good fight.
At this point I should mention that in the last two years
the AHA has adopted, as an affiliate, Americans for Religious Liberty, an
organization founded in 1982 by Sherwin Wine of the Society for Humanistic
Judaism and Ed Ericson of the American Ethical Union. Americans for
Religious Liberty is based in the AHA Washington office and this makes the
AHA the only Humanist organization to have its own church-state separation
operation. ARL is governed by a seven-person board, including the
treasurer of the AHA. I have been the executive director and then
president of ARL since its foundation. I believe that, available at the
meeting today, are copies of ARL materials which I hope you will take with
you. One way to promote church-state separation is to provide support for
Americans for Religious Liberty.
I am currently drafting a plan that AHA chapters may wish
to use to deal with church-state issues on the local level.
It is regrettable that I cannot be here in person to field
questions for the next hour, but you can always contact me by email, snail
mail, fax or phone at the addresses on the materials available at this
meeting.
Thanks for coming today, thanks for listening, and the
best of luck in your endeavors.
Edd Doerr
____________________
1 Delegates from Asia and the Pacific had gathered to prepare for a
United Nations population conference in December. The U.S. sent a newly
appointed, inexperienced but confidently fanatic spokesperson, together
with John Klink, a hardliner who formerly represented the Vatican, to
threaten the rest of the world. The U.S., they told the stunned delegates,
is all set to withdraw its support from an historic 1994 agreement on
reproductive health. Source: Michelle Landsberg, Toronto Star.
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