Tag Archives: Church-State

“One State Under God”

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Texas is considering tossing the Constitution of the United States of America under the bus by issuing license plates depicting three crosses on a hill and reading “One State Under God”

The plan is, it will make some money, so it doesn’t really matter that the Constitution of the United States of America will be trampled on. “Think about this: It is a revenue stream that’s a discretionary purpose, how do you argue with it?” said Kim Drummond, spokeswoman for the company that would make the plates.

Well, I guess it’s OK then.

Details here.

Should the National Cathedral get Government Funding?

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When the news first broke that the National Cathedral in Washington DC was damaged by the famous earthquake that hit the region last summer, I had two thoughts: 1) They are probably including on the list of needed repairs things that were already extant before the quake and 2) They are probably going to ask for government money to fix this.

But then I looked into the current news reports and found out that the National Cathedral has always been privately funded. I did not accept that as, shall we say, gospel, but I stopped worried about it, and then went on with other things.

But then I ran into this:
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Groups Drop Lawsuit After Shelter Agrees to Change Operations and D.C. Government Abandons Plan to Pay Shelter Public Funds

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A religiously based homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., will no longer require the homeless to attend religious services as a condition of getting food and shelter, and the D.C. government no longer plans to pay tax dollars to the shelter, as a result of a lawsuit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital.

Because of these changes to the terms of the deal, the groups today dismissed the lawsuit, which had challenged the District’s planned support of the shelter.

Said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, “Organizations that want to promote religion should rely on private donations, not taxpayer support. I’m glad that taxpayer dollars will no longer be handed to a religious rescue mission.”

Read the rest here.

Separation of Church and State is Not Separation of Churches and State

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Where I grew up election were held in firehouses and public schools. I seem to remember the same being the case in Boston. But here in the Midwest, you go to a church to vote, and that is very annoying.

Equally annoying is a public school having its graduation in a church:
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Alabama “Church or Jail” plan awaits AG’s opinion

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Remember the question of mixing church ad state in Old Dixie? It apears that the City Council of Bay Minette, where people who committed low level offenses were to be given the option of messing with the law or having the whole thing just “go away” if they went to church for a year, are slowing down their rush into the abyss. They have asked the Alabama attorney general’s opinion first.

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

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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.

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Church-State Separation Case Impending

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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.

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