Church State Separation | Greg Laden's Blog

The CSM reports:

The Ten Commandments — How the Ten Commandments came to be.

The US Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a case examining whether an Ohio judge violated the separation of church and state when he displayed a poster in his courtroom that contrasted The Ten Commandments with humanist precepts.

By declining the case, the court let stand rulings that found that the judge had indeed violated the church-state principle.

This follows from the case of Judge DeWeese, who made numerous claims about how judicial law and churchy law are the same thing, and how the founding fathers would want it this way, and so on and so forth. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio saw it differently, filed suit, and won.

Continue reading It is still not OK to display the ten commandments in a court room →

Mark your calendars. October 5th is the scheduled oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States for Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

The long and the short of it: The EEOC has rules about hiring and firing designed to avoid discrimination. Churches claim that they need to be able to discriminate (or at least not be held accountable for discrimination) because it is their religious thang to hire and fire who they want because they are churches. More specifically, from one perspective, pastors and such are “called” not really hired, and from another perspective (leading to the same outcome) church communities, they say, need to be able to chose their own religions.

Like if they wanted to fire Jesus, back in the old days, the Roman version of the EEOC would have no case if it claimed that the church was being, say, antisemitic.

There is a law that has been on the books for decades that seems to provide this exception for churches, but that is being challenged.

Continue reading Church-State Separation Case Impending →