OK, technically, the Religious Right doesn't hate everybody. They actually like people who are just like themselves. Too much deviation, however, can rapidly move you from the “like” to the “hate” category. Indeed, a persistent problem in Christendom is the vast array of sectarian differences that have led to the ever-increasing number of sects and denominations that constitute American Christianity today.

Anyone reading this book from the “Religious Right” universe would also beg to differ with my conclusion. They might even state the platitude, “We hate the sin, but not the sinner.” People sometimes write to me or come up to me after a speech and politely inform me, “I am praying for you.” I actually don't question the integrity of all such comments, but certainly it is hard to be convinced of the sincerity of those beliefs as articulated by most such commenters.

In the pages that follow I take a look at the varieties of people the Religious Right doesn't care for. These include: Wiccans, Muslims, women, atheists, members of the LGBTQ community, and dying people.

 

MINORITY RELIGIOUS GROUPS

All non-Christians, and of course all humanists and atheists, are persona non grata in heaven, according to a very widely held rightwing belief. But there may be a special place in “the other place” for those who characterize themselves as pagans or Wiccans. I've represented their interests since 1985 and on July 4, 2007, was asked to speak at a rally for Pagan Rights in Washington, DC.

Here is some of what I said:

I was recently surfing the Internet to look at some of the latest information on pagan websites, and I noticed that some of those pages discuss the various unpleasant things people say about you because they do not understand you or disagree with what you believe in. So I feel like I'm in good company because I think some of the same people are writing to me. I recently got this note: “Barry Lynn is a disgusting punk. I almost puked every time I saw him. I no longer see him because I got rid of cable.” Well, one less viewer for the Fox News Channel.

I must confess that I didn't know much about modern paganism or Wicca until one afternoon in September of l985. I was about to leave my office at the American Civil Liberties Union, on the way to my dentist for completion of a root canal, when I got a call from a staff member of one of the best religious liberties advocates in the Senate at the time. She said, “I just wanted to tell you that Senator Jesse Helms just put some language in the bill to fund the Internal Revenue Service that the tax agency will be prohibited from granting or maintaining a tax exemption for any group ‘which has as its primary purpose the promotion of witchcraft.’” She went on to say that “witchcraft” was defined as the “purported use of power derived from evil spirits, sorcery, or supernatural powers with malicious intent.” Her question: should my boss have objected to that? Politely, I answered, “Yes! Of course!”

I had one more thing to do as I delayed my dental appointment: call the news wire services and tell them about this, and how I as a civil libertarian was outraged by any government effort to give more or less favorable tax treatment to any group based on the nature of its religious beliefs. That night Hurricane Gloria struck Washington. (I know you had nothing to do with it: I've been told about the rule of three.) Roads were flooded and I didn't get into work until about one o'clock the next day. When I arrived I had over fifty of those pink “While You Were Out” message slips from all over the country from people whose names were totally unfamiliar to me. As I called them back, I found they were all wiccans or pagans or neo-Pagans who had seen that comment of mine in the morning paper and they were all (a) unhappy with what Senator Helms had done and (b) eager to do something about it. Over the course of the next six weeks (and in this pre-email era) thousands of pagans got organized, wrote letters to Congress, appeared on television shows, and, if you will, corrected the record: “witches” do not cast evil spells, or routinely wear pointed black hats (unless it was fashionably appropriate), or even worship Satan. They did talk about all the damage this amendment would cause if it resulted in tax liabilities for places of worship and celebration and for sacred sites and lands.

Well, when the House of Representatives own tax committee took up the issue, its members had been sufficiently well informed that they literally laughed the Helms amendment out of the bill—all this just one day prior to Halloween. (Goddesses, too, may work in mysterious ways!) What a terrific organizing effort, too, to educate people about and to protect the constitutional right to worship. And, of course, we didn't need to set up a federal commission to determine which spirits were “evil” and which were “good.”

I am a big music fan. Every once in a while I hear a song that just blows me away. I felt that way the first time I heard the late singer-songwriter Steve Goodman perform his great train song “City of New Orleans.” I had the same reaction to a song with which many of you are probably familiar: Dar Williams's “The Christians and the Pagans,” about a family reconciliation over a Christmas/Solstice dinner. The last verse goes: “So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table/ Finding faith and common good the best that they were able/ Lighting trees in darkness/ Learning new ways from the old and/ making sense of history and drawing worth out of the cold.”1

To make sense out of the religious history of America we need to understand the basic impulse behind the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom. It was the widespread (but not universally held) belief of the Founders that keeping a decent distance between the institutions of government and those of religion would ultimately help each one. Has it worked? Well, I can't think of any better model on the planet. The United States has close to two thousand different identifiable religions and twenty million nonbelievers, freethinkers, and humanists. We have lived, worked, played, and studied side by side to make the rich mosaic that is the American experience. No sugarcoating, though, is permissible. We also rioted in the l870s over which version of the Christian Bible should be read in Philadelphia schools; we forced the children of Jehovah's Witnesses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in West Virginia schools, even though for them this was an act of idolatry; we destroyed mosques and killed innocent Muslims and Sikhs in the pursuit of unfocused retribution after the 9/11 attacks; we failed to stand against anti-Semitism in our own immigration policies during Hitler's sweep through Europe. But, in the main, we have worked to make real the promise of George Washington when he wrote that in America we would give “to bigotry no sanction.”

Many of you find, however, that it is still common to have to fight for your dignity and liberty. That is frequently the case for new religions, or in your case, old religions with dramatic growth spurts. To go back to Dar Williams's song, though, from the cold chill of persecution there is still worth to be drawn. We saw the tremendous organizing efforts derived from the Helms amendment that are bearing even more fruit now than twenty years ago. There are other examples of gaining awareness when you see the abuse of power in the actions and comments of those in power.

Near the end of 2003, the then-head of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives Jim Towey was asked if “pagan faith-based groups” should be given consideration as recipients of federal funding. He gave this nasty response: “I haven't run into a pagan faith-based group yet, much less a pagan group that cares for the poor…. Helping the poor is tough work and only those with loving hearts seem drawn to it.”2 Apparently, Mr. Towey was still suffering from “childhood post-traumatic Hansel and Gretel syndrome.” Many of you let him know directly, and through a well-done article in the Washington Post,³ that you possess the same heart he claims. Pagan Pride groups alone have contributed seventy-four thousand pounds of food and $51,000 in donations to homeless shelters recently. Chicago pagans fund a battered women's shelter and Massachusetts pagans give thousands to help children with AIDS. Unlike the nearly exclusively Christian recipients of these government funds, most pagans actually appear quite properly skeptical of the entanglement of government and religion in the President's plan. I suspect that if you got any funds you would not use them to promote your faith (or criticize that of others) and you wouldn't be making hiring decisions or decisions about who to help based on some religious litmus test. Sadly, that is the practice of some of the actual recipients, as many people learned after the Towey incident.

A bedrock principle of religious freedom is that freedom is achieved only if it is achieved for all. Too frequently, though, politicians and even judges simply insist on setting one standard for the religions they understand or believe in and a lower one for ones they find “troubling.”

Why is it that witch Cynthia Simpson (whom Americans United helped represent) was told by a federal appeals court that the Chesterfield County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors could bar her from getting into a rotation of clergy to open their meetings with an invocation. The court said it was just a matter of choice by the Board, a matter of discretion not to be overruled by the judicial branch. Upon what basis, though, was that “choice” made. We can't know the soul of others with precision, but we can listen to the words of some of those board members. One said to call Wicca a religion was “a mockery. It is not any religion I would subscribe to.” A second said, “I hope she's a good witch like Glenda.”4 These are what we might call clues to the source of Ms. Simpson's rejection: they add up to ugly prejudice that has no place in America.

Or consider another judge, Marion Indiana family law judge Cole Bradford. He granted a pagan couple a divorce decree in 2004, but then added a provision a year later that stated that the couple's nine-year-old son could not be exposed to any “nonmainstream religions.” The good news is that an appeals court has now thrown out that condition as an unconstitutional impediment to the right of parents to decide the religious upbringing of their children. But I remember how upset this boy's father, Thomas Jones, sounded when I interviewed him on my radio show and he told me how painful it was for him to engage in Yule or Ostara rituals downstairs in his house while his son was relegated by court order to spend that celebratory time alone upstairs in his bedroom. What could conceivably have motivated that judge to create such obvious additional pain for this family? These judicial decisions, though, I hope have made more pagans interested in the need to ensure that judges understand the importance of a respect for the Constitution and the First Amendment rights of all by giving careful scrutiny to those appointed to our courts. Groups like Americans United monitor federal judges and alert our allies about ones for whom the First Amendment is treated as a first draft of little consequence.

Even on this day that many of us remember those who serve the nation in many capacities, including the military, we are sadly reminded that some of those who send our sons and daughters to war do not respect the faith that was carried into battle. Remember when former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr said that Fort Hood, Texas should not even be accommodating the desire of Wiccans to meet together on base for discussion and worship. In his buffoonish stereotyping, Barr asked, “What's next? Will armored divisions be forced to travel with sacrificial animals for Satanic rituals?” At that time, George W. Bush said he agreed with Barr's concern. One wonders if some of that hostility is still behind the Veterans Administration's continued refusal to provide a pentacle symbol on headstones in veterans’ cemeteries for those Wiccans who have died in service to their country. You'll hear more of this from Roberta Stewart about her struggle to have the spiritual symbol of meaning to her and her husband placed on a memorial plaque after his death in Afghanistan.

We learn even from the bad experiences in life; from the challenges to individual rights and freedoms we encounter. What is critical is that all of us understand that the same Constitution was designed to protect us all. If the day ever comes that paganism and Wicca are officially treated as second-class faiths, their believers and practitioners second-class citizens, real religious liberty will have died in the United States. Together, I know that we can prevent the sun from rising on such a day in America.

The story of Roberta Stewart mentioned in that July 4th speech was about to become an Americans United lawsuit. Here is how I characterized the conflict between the United States government and Ms. Stewart and other widows from the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and our multiple engagements in the Middle East:

WICCANS AND THE VA: THE CASE FOR DECENCY AND COMMON SENSE5

Some things should be easy. Some injustices ought to be resolved under notions of common sense and basic decency.

That is the case with a request from Roberta Stewart of Fernley, Nevada. Roberta's husband, Sgt. Patrick Stewart, was killed in action when his helicopter was shot down on September 25, 2005, over Afghanistan. Sgt. Stewart had served with the military in a variety of capacities for sixteen years. He had returned to the Middle East in 2005 after serving earlier in Operation Desert Storm, and he was a decorated soldier.

His widow, following his wishes, wanted to put a symbol of his religion on a military memorial plaque in Nevada that commemorates local veterans. She was told that it was not presently an option.

At this point, some readers might be thinking that the powers and bureaucrats that be were just deciding not to raise any religious issues on these markers. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for such decisions, however, crossed that river a long time ago. Thirty-eight icons and symbols have been approved by the VA for use on government-provided headstones, markers, and plaques. If you are a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a follower of Eckankar, there is a symbol for you. Indeed, if you are a secular humanist or an atheist, there is a symbol for you, too.

Sgt. Stewart, however, was a Wiccan, who, along with his wife Roberta, followed a nature-centered spirituality, and the VA has not approved any symbol for that belief system.

It is not as though the VA hasn't had time to think about this. Indeed, there have been Wiccan applications pending for recognizing the pentacle, an interlaced five-pointed star inside a circle, since 1997.

New symbols for six other groups, including Sikhs, Soka Gakkai, and Izumo Taishakyo Mission of Hawaii, were added, but the Wiccan applications lay dormant—so dormant that the VA didn't turn them down, it just ignored them.

Enter Roberta Stewart. Her situation came to a head when she was told that she could only have a plaque for her husband at the Nevada military memorial without a pentacle. She refused, and there is currently only a blank spot on the Wall of Heroes where Patrick's plaque should be.

I met Roberta on Independence Day at a religious rights rally near the VA headquarters and the White House. A crowd of pagans, Wiccans, and those of other faith perspectives had gathered to hear speakers discuss the need for the “free exercise of religion” to include all religions and those who choose no belief in spirituality.

When I talked with Roberta, it was clear that this was a matter of justice for her husband and for other Wiccan military personnel past and future. It is reported that Wicca is one of the fastest-growing religions in the United States, so this is neither a small nor theoretical problem.

Roberta and the senior minister of her church, Circle Sanctuary, the Rev. Selena Fox, came to my house that afternoon. We met the following day in the AU office to discuss their imminent meetings with congressional staff and with the undersecretary for memorial affairs at the VA.

From the VA, they heard again that their requests were not being “turned down,” but that this time the agency was concerned that the current regulations may have been improperly adopted in 2005. The VA is looking into that. The VA apparently looks into everything for a very long time these days. On the other hand, the veterans they serve reported for duty immediately.

After several more weeks of inertia, Ms. Stewart and the Rev. Fox decided to have AU represent them in the pursuit of their goal of fair and equal treatment. We will work with Congress; we will work with VA regulators and officials; we will appeal within the VA; we will file a lawsuit if necessary.

But why should it come to this? Even most of the Religious Right is on board (or at least silent with no opposition). No one is claiming, as Senator Helms had, that Wiccans are in league with Satan. No one is arguing that Wiccans want special treatment. No one is running for reelection on a “No Pentacle” platform.

Why should Roberta Stewart pass the anniversary of her husband's death with an empty space on a wall in Nevada?

I was asked to return to the 2008 Pagan Rights rally—that year, right across from the White House—to report on the success of our legal effort on behalf of the so-called “Wiccan widows.”

Last year I chronicled some of the legal problems of Wiccans and pagans over the past twenty-five years since I first worked with some of you to preserve your organizations’ tax-exempt status after Senator Jesse Helms nearly had it revoked for all “practitioners of witchcraft,” something he had learned about while watching a special on television. This was sad proof of just how dangerous television can really be. But at least there may be a silver lining about television these days; more people at Halloween will now dress up like Paris Hilton and Ann Coulter if they really want to scare people and fewer will paint their face green and wear a pointed black hat. This year the Rally has moved closer to the heart of the beast and at the same time we have in large part resolved the principal legal question that was the subject of so much of last year's rally: achieving a legal victory against this Administration's virulent refusal to grant Wiccan veterans the pentacle as an emblem of honor. We who believe in religious freedom for all may be on a roll.

The President [Bush] and his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, have started up something called “The First Freedom Project” to highlight all the great work they are doing to protect religious freedom in America. (I have the list here somewhere.) To suggest that this administration supports real religious liberty is like calling the Guantanamo prison “a gated timeshare community in the Northern Caribbean.” This is the administration that fought against the grant of the pentacle as an emblem of honor. This was the administration that we found in our work on behalf of Roberta Stewart and many others was blocking the pentacle because it remembered that back when George W. Bush was governor of Texas (we refer to that period as the “good old days”) he did not want pagans to even meet for worship at the Fort Hood army base because he didn't think “witchcraft was a real religion.”

Why this hostility to what you do and how you worship on the part of the President and his top people? What causes it? Could it be the undue influence of repetitive readings of Hansel and Gretel at Barbara Bush's knee? Possibly. In the l950s there was a widely syndicated newspaper comic strip one December that featured Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer battling to save Christmas from the grasp of an evil witch who had planned to suck up all the toys from Santa's workshop with a vacuum cleaner. Maybe that image has not been deleted from the President's memory. But I'm not buying that because he seems to delete so many other things from his same memory: ranging from the message in that daily intelligence briefing he got in August 2001 about a group called al-Qaeda and its interest in using airliners to attack America on to the fact that he placed his hand on his Bible to take the oath of office twice and swore to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and not shred it article by article and amendment by amendment. Did he read any of the coverage about the Pentacle Quest and the men and women who sacrificed their lives for this country? The answer is almost certainly no. I'm not trying to be insulting. He has said he doesn't read the newspapers, and in his most recent interview on the subject he said he still didn't read them but his aides will bring them in and if he sees an interesting headline he'll “look” at it—not read, “look.”

I love working with you: I have been fortunate enough to work on some important issues in my life so far. But there was something about the Pentacle Quest that was different. Something about the potency of the spiritual commitment behind it on the part of the folks we represented.

When we announced the settlement in April, Roberta Stewart and Selena Fox joined me and the legal staff at Americans United (the legal staff who did all the heavy lifting from our end) at a news conference at the National Press Club. We went back to my office so that we could tape my own syndicated radio show for later in the day and so that Roberta and Selena could do other media appearances. And as Selena was about to go on the air with National Public Radio, one of the lawyers brought her a copy of the official Veterans’ Administration regulation form that had, one day earlier, depicted thirty-eight emblems of honor; it had been changed that morning to include the 39th. Selena Fox is rarely speechless, but as she looked at the symbol at first she said nothing and then I would swear that a light came out of her body. It was the closest thing this Christian has ever seen to something we call “transfiguration.” That's what a combination of joy and justice will do to you!

But we need to get the VA to understand that the pentacle is not the only emblem of interest to this diverse community you all represent. There are probably more kinds of pagans and Wiccans than there are kinds of Baptists; it's just that you are probably nicer to each other than some of those Baptists are to each other. Those other groups amongst you deserve their emblems too. And when we look at folks on active duty today, the growing diversity of service membership deserves a recognition that spiritual assistance cannot be granted solely to members of the groups with the largest number of adherents at the moment. Pagan chaplaincy programs for those far from home and in harm's way need to be established now.

See, the essence of America is that we have no second-class citizens, we have no second-class soldiers, and we have no second-class religions. A battle for the rights of one group is ultimately a struggle for all groups in this county. In a nutshell, until pagans are treated no differently than Presbyterians or Pentecostals, none of us should count ourselves as free.

The basic privileges that Wiccans are continually refused—like being able to express their faith even at a final resting place—illustrates one of the greatest problems I fight every day: inconsistency. In a country in which the rule of law guarantees that everybody is entitled to equal treatment, religious differences are still enough to bend the rules. But, then again, being different has warranted poor treatment since the country's inception. Just ask the Catholics and Jews of yesteryear. History reminds us that questioning an individual's religion (or, if one were to look at Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., even that of a company) is sacrilege until it comes to the nonbelievers and nontraditional faiths. The face of the unknown might change—what was once a Quaker is now a Wiccan—but at least the Religious Right is consistent in its despicable treatment of those who are different.

But this ire is not reserved just for Wiccans—but other religious minorities as well.

Islam has been a particular target of hostility, of course, since 9/11.

Sadly, there were two kinds of responses that showed a few Americans at their worst. First, there have been acts of cruelty and violence directed against religious minorities. The Ohio mosque in which the parents of an Americans United staff member worship had its stained glass windows demolished by rock-throwers. In Arizona, a Sikh was shot to death outside his gas station in an incident law enforcement officials attributed solely to the killer's ignorant belief that the owner was a Muslim, and his morally reprehensible collateral view that such identification marked him as a target of vengeance. In a third incident, an Arab-American Christian was assaulted.

The other sad note was the instantly well-known and deeply disturbing dialogue between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Before Falwell was even introduced on that broadcast, Robertson noted that the Supreme Court's doctrine on separation of church and state—in his words—“has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye and said we're going to legislate you out of the schools…. We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. And then we say, ‘Why does this happen?’”6 Only later on the broadcast did Falwell make his grotesque remarks about how civil rights groups, feminists, gay people, and pagans have so enraged God that God has “lifted the curtain” of protection and allowed the terrorists to—in his words—“give us probably what we deserve.”

In all the years I've spent following these men's careers and debating them in the media, I have heard many strange things from them but never such a set of abominable political or theological statements. Not since segregationist preachers in the 1950's used the words of Genesis that “God separated the light from the darkness” to justify Jim Crow laws has the true meaning of the Gospel been so defaced.

There are a few curious footnotes to this story. First, even before the Falwell-Robertson exchange, the very first telephone call for me at the office the day after the attack was a woman who claimed I was personally responsible for the acts of terrorism because, she said, since I do not want to allow praise to God every moment of the day God has turned on the nation. I have heard variants on this for many years; the assertion that prayer should be allowed in school at all times so that teachers or students can lead prayers whenever they feel like it. What I didn't anticipate were the number of writers and callers who said to me, “Jerry Falwell should never have backed down.” Falwell had made some vague statements about how he wished he had not named specific groups in his causation explanation. This fallout just indicates that not only can leaders of these Religious Right groups be extremists, the local folks they have unleashed can be even worse. Here is some of what happened around the country after the 9/11 attacks:

We have seen a great upsurge in what sociologists call “civil religion” and judges often refer to as “ceremonial deism,” that uneasy merger of religious imagery and patriotic fervor.7 Much of this, like the President's declaration of his third national day of prayer since his inauguration are beyond the scope of judicial review, but sometimes they do offend by their exclusionary nature. Thomas Jefferson refused to declare any national days of prayer or fasting even during the darkest days of his Presidency. I got an email from a woman who works at the Department of Housing and Urban Development after she got a letter from Secretary Mel Martinez offering employees prayer sessions and extra leave for “healing through prayer.” She did not object to the thoughtfulness of his acts, just the thoughtlessness of not recognizing that some did not turn to religion at all in times of crisis. She wrote, “We all need to heal, to regain strength, and to come together with others in community, even those of us who do not pray and do not believe in anything to pray to. There was no recognition of our needs—there never is.” It's a good thing that President Bush invited Jews, Muslims, and even a Hindu to the White House, but why in over eight weeks has he not been able to make a single reference to the millions of decent Americans who deal with calamity in ways that do not involve religion? It's not so hard.

Even more direct violations of the Constitution have already occurred. Some schools have been turning to mandatory assemblies in which outside ministers or the principal lead children in prayer in direct violation of Supreme Court rulings. After one such event in a Texas middle school the governor announced he would run for reelection on a platform of returning government promoted prayer to schools. Some of these practices have now stopped as more sober members of the community realized that the First Amendment was not suspended on 9/11, and that this was not the time to make any young person feel like a second-class citizen in his or her own school. Such recognition has not always come. You may have seen the reports of a controversy in Northern California at an elementary school that had posted a “God Bless America” banner on the marquee over the school's front door. One mother kept her child out of class because she was uncomfortable with the school's embrace of a religious concept that her daughter was not taught at home. Perhaps some of you find that trivial. However, as the incident escalated and the principal released the name of the objecting parent to the media, the mother became fearful for her daughter's physical safety if she returned to school. She has not returned. For me, the bottom line is that no American should have to fear their nextdoor neighbor more than they fear Osama bin Laden. Somehow, that community must work this out.

Misunderstanding has already turned to vindictiveness in other places. In Ringgold, Georgia, a newly erected city council display includes a framed Ten Commandments, a framed Lord's Prayer, and an empty picture frame. The last, according to sponsor Bill McMillon is “for those who believe in nothing.” Ho. Ho. Ho. When the Associated Press asked if this imagery wouldn't offend non-Christians, particularly Muslims, he answered that “We don't have any of them around here.” Well, with that kind of a welcome mat out, don't expect the next town doctor, or teacher, or firefighter to be a Muslim.

The Ringgold story has the seeds of a happy ending, however.8 Last June, Americans United and the Georgia affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union sued to have the display removed. One of our plaintiffs chose to remain anonymous, fearful of his safety. The other plaintiff was a very vocal longtime resident, Thomas J. Odom.

Odom, a Vietnam veteran, had to look at the display every time he attended his Rotary Club meeting with other local businesspeople at city hall. His view, he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press, “goes back to when I became an officer in the Army. I swore allegiance to defend the Constitution.” Our local counsel for Odom, Georgia K. Lord, explained that her client felt the need to fight for our constitutional rights when his local officials decided to promote one religious tradition over others.

In mid-August, the city council hastily called an “emergency” meeting to discuss the trio of plaques. Shortly thereafter, the display was quietly removed. Council members and other city officials, who were proud and boastful when the religious display went up, were suddenly shy. In fact, they refused to discuss the decision to remove the plaques.

We can safely assume that the lawsuit was the prime mover here. That's why I noted earlier that the Ringgold case contains the “seeds” of the best outcome. Vital and effective as lawsuits are, they don't always change the hearts or minds of the losing side.

After over a decade of remembrances of 9/11, American Muslims still face heightened scrutiny in some quarters.

Post 9/11, of course, the Religious Right (and a few nontheists to boot) also found Islam to be a horrifying example of religion-gone-amok. All religions are entitled to First Amendment protection; that includes Islam. But for some, that truth is hard to swallow. As the Muslim community grows apace in the United States, Muslim Americans are seeking to build houses of worship in their neighborhoods. They are not always welcomed.

In 2010, plans to build a Muslim community center on land near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City raised the ire of conservative pundits. This construction was repeatedly referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque”—but it was neither at Ground Zero nor was it a mosque. Now, Muslims had every right to build on that land. I appeared on outlets like Fox News to explain exactly why: It's a religious liberty matter. There's no legal reason to prevent them from building a community center simply because of its relative proximity to the site of great tragedy. But the Religious Right accused them of attempting to recruit terrorists—a grave allegation they could never substantiate. After severe public backlash, the plans were scrapped. (Admittedly, this may also have been a result of a lack of funding, however.)

Muslims in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, encountered similar problems while trying to build a worship space for their own growing community. Although country commissioners approved the building, infuriated residents filed suit after suit to stop its construction. They argued that the mosque would be used to implement sharia law, and, incredibly, that Islam wasn't even a religion. Someone even set the construction site on fire. But that didn't deter Murfreesboro's Muslims, and in 2012 they finally opened their new building. Of course, they shouldn't have had to deal with that legal battle at all—a battle in which Tennessee's lieutenant governor took the position that Islam is not a “real” religion.

The Constitution is very clear that all religions have the right to worship freely, and that includes the construction of worship spaces. But opponents of Islam frequently try to use zoning laws to discriminate against members of the faith.

In Kennesaw, Georgia, city council members approved a zoning permit for a church, but rejected one for a mosque. The argument: Muslims wanted to build the mosque in a local storefront, which violated zoning laws. But that's exactly where a local Pentecostal congregation had sought to build a church in July 2014, and the city council rushed to grant them an exemption. Protests may have influenced the decision, too. Local residents vociferously opposed the mosque, relying on the same tired arguments we've heard before about our Muslim neighbors. The storefront space would be used for terrorist purposes. Sharia law would come to Georgia, and thus end democratic rule.

But we can't base legal decisions on our fears. Kennesaw Muslims have indicated through their attorney that they may sue the city; they'll probably win if they do. It's high time people accepted that Muslims have the right to build mosques, and that the law that permits them to do so is the same law that protects their own rights, too.

In 2000, Congress passed the “Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act” (RLUIPA), to require that the federal government actually provide a “compelling interest” to avoid accommodating religious claims regarding zoning or the conditions of imprisonment.

Some secularists opposed this as granting yet another “special privilege” to theists. Although there is a compelling case for this position, there is also a way in which a parallel “privilege” was expanded to sincere nontheists by court action. Under the Military Selective Service Act, only religiously motivated “conscientious objectors” could be awarded that status. In 1970, however, an atheist named Elliot A. Welsh II successfully argued to the Supreme Court that his “opposition to war in any form” was based on secular principles that in his mind “were at the level of traditional religious doctrine.”9 Ironically, a Roman Catholic claimant failed when he suggested that his opposition to the Vietnam War was based on his conclusion that it was “unjust.” The Court rejected this effort to expand opposition to all wars to selective opposition to some wars, even though that is a generally recognized position of the Catholic Church and other religious bodies. Couldn't this be viewed as a “special privilege” for members of “historic peace churches” like the Amish, Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren.

I do find it disturbing, however, when “liberals” accede too quickly to exemptions they know or believe are unique to American Muslims. Americans United was virtually the only group that opposed the actions of several high schools in California that gave as a homework assignment the memorization of the prayers of the Quran. Imagine the outcry if any school insisted that all students memorize the Lord's Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm and then claimed that it was purely for “cultural” and not “religious” purposes.

Similarly, Americans United strongly opposed the reconstruction of bathrooms at the University of Michigan at Dearborn to accommodate foot washing by Muslim students, something, it turned out, that had not even been requested by any student followers of Islam. Permanent alternations of architecture at a state-run facility seemed much more of an accommodation that the Constitution requires.

 

ATHEISTS

Recent polls suggest that far more parents are supportive of their children marrying a person who is of a different race than are happy about a child being joined in matrimony with an “atheist.” Similarly, poll takers find little support for politicians who openly declare they are nonbelievers in divinity. This may be why so few candidates ever suggest they are atheists. For many years the only atheist in Congress—or at least the only openly avowed atheist—was California Representative Fortney “Pete” Stark.

I was approached in early 2014 by David Silverman and Amanda Knief of American Atheists about doing a plenary address at their convention scheduled for Easter weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. They even made it clear that the presentation would be scheduled for Saturday so I could go to church on Sunday.

I agreed; the speech printed below was well received. I did fail to get to church the next day, though, as I had to fly home for someone's seventieth birthday party.

Thanks for inviting me here. I am unique at this gathering. It is not because I am wearing a suit: This is an obviously fashion conscious crowd. It is not because I am a theist, because you know there are “hidden theists” among you, all trying to figure out what the secret “atheist agenda for America” is, since similar people spent years trying to locate the secret “gay agenda” at national conferences. (They found the answer: We want to be viewed as first-class citizens.) No, I am unique in my possession of this: this stuffed monkey in a devil costume, a representation of the two things Christian fundamentalists fear the most: “Satan” and “evolution.”

In the course of the next twenty-five minutes, I will offer a few bits of unrequested advice about how to grow the atheist movement, this a tactic used so that you like me more. For example: Ask Darren Aronofsky to make more Bible-themed epics like Noah—a film in which giant things that look like Transformers toys made out of clay help Noah nail the Ark together. I'd suggest you work on a movie where these same “giants in the earth” extract Jonah from the gullet of a big fish, and a second where these creatures seek unsuccessfully to help Mary and Joseph locate an open inn in Bethlehem.

Reporters have been calling me this past week—“what are you going to say?” I will not be discussing the existence of the divine nor pondering such questions as whether there is purpose to the universe or why something exists rather than nothing. Exciting and important as these matters are, the resolution of them might take us another two millennia. I am here to urge us to deal with something all believers in secular government—theists and atheists—need to work on right now: saving the heart and “soul” (metaphorically speaking, of course) of the First Amendment: The demand that government be rigorously neutral on matters of religion; that it not pick winners and losers among religions or between religious belief and nonbelief; that it not expand one cent of tax funds in support of any religious institution's doctrine or dogma, ministry or mission. What could be simpler than that?

Sadly, it isn't. So today in 2014 we can be just as sure as we are that we don't know where Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is that we do know there are powerful, well-connected politico-religious forces trying to upend the very idea of the separation of church and state and the freedom to believe, doubt, or detest according to your own beliefs. The “religious freedom” promoted by Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Religious Right of Ken Ham and Tony Perkins is a fraud and a scam; it is antithetical to true freedom of conscience and belief.

See, far from an assault on religion generally or Christianity specifically, we have a dizzying level of spiritual supply in America—two thousand different faiths and twenty-five million freethinkers, atheists, humanists who make up this American intellectual landscape. Christian majorities have nothing serious to worry about: It is only you and members of minority religious groups that find your liberties in jeopardy. I said that to a Congressional committee not long ago, headed by Arizona Republican congressman Trent Franks. It really didn't go over too well with him because he had begun the hearing asserting that “religious freedom” was in serious jeopardy and reminding the rather large audience that the nation was founded on that principle, harkening back to the fact that Christopher Columbus himself was exercising his “religious freedom” when he “set sail from Spain to find the new world.” I actually recall that he was looking for India at the time—but I have come to expect nothing short of breathtaking confusion from Mr. Franks.

Right now in 2014 America, we face problems from two directions. Are there any physicists here? That figures. Be gentle with me here because I'm going to use an analogy from physics that may not be completely scientifically accurate. I'm going to call one front the danger from momentum and the other a danger from inertia, as in the “object at rest tends to stay at rest” variety.

Momentum to destroy the wall of separation comes via the continued presence of a powerful political force we call (when we are being polite) the “Religious Right,” which constitutes about 20 percent of the American electorate. This is a movement of theocrats, seeking to write public policy along their own narrow sectarian lines. I have a book on my desk called Politics According to the Bible, which in its 619 pages gives a purported answer to every conceivable political issue. It doesn't just tell you that US policy should prohibit abortion and disallow same-sex marriage, but drills down to explain what the Bible, properly understood, tells us should be the next fighter aircraft to be purchased by the Air Force (the F-22 Raptor, in case you are taking notes). Did you all forget Romans 13:4?

Many of the people who think this way are also yammering about an alleged loss of “religious liberty.” To make this case, they need to dramatically alter the meaning of those two words. Confucius once remarked (allegedly) that “when words lose their meaning the universe crumbles.” If true, this ceiling is at risk right now.

In an egregious example of altering the meaning of “religious liberty,” they believe that even for-profit corporations, whose bosses oppose contraception, can refuse to cover it in their employees’ health insurance plans because of the corporation's “religious liberty.” This was the topic of a Supreme Court argument I listened to about ten days ago at the US Supreme Court.

The far right says corporations have free speech rights identified in the recent Citizens United case, so they must have religious liberty rights too, a kind of “corporate conscience.” One of the companies making this claim is the national arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby; another is a Mennonite-owned furniture company called Conestoga Wood. Whatever you think of Citizens United, speaking is a major thing corporations do—it is called advertising and it is why they spend 1.5 million dollars to have Danica Patrick in a bikini for a Super Bowl ad. Corporations engaging in “religion” are harder to find. If I ever see a make-it-yourself garden gnome next to me in a pew at church or open up a wooden cabinet and have it ask me to join in a chorus of “Nearer My God To Thee,” maybe I'll consider that companies have legally cognizable religious freedom claims. Until then, this is just a way to claim that the religious convictions of the head of the company control the moral decision-making of the dozens or thousands of women who work for these firms.

When you consider the ramifications of this thinking, it is staggering. Just in the healthcare world alone, if a Catholic employer says no coverage of birth control, surely a Scientologist business owner can refuse coverage for psychiatry and the Jehovah's Witness employer can reject surgical coverage because so much surgery ends up requiring whole blood products, use of which is forbidden in their faith. But these medical corollaries are just the tip of the iceberg. Once you jump over this cliff of business “religion rights,” there is no easy way to turn back.

For example, I was on the Laura Ingraham radio show a month ago to discuss a lawsuit in Colorado. Two men went to a bake shop to order a cake. Somehow it arose that the two men were themselves the happy couple and that the cake was to be used as a post-wedding celebration. This was not strictly speaking a “wedding cake,” because Colorado may have pot now, but it doesn't have marriage equality. The couple was getting married in Massachusetts and then some days later returning for a party in Colorado. The owner of the bakery refused to take the order for his cake masterpiece—and actually the name of his company is “Masterpiece Bakery.” Owner Jack Phillips said he couldn't make this cake because of his Christian religious objections to same-sex weddings. This guy is a real piece of work. The Colorado ACLU represented the couple and in the course of seeking evidence found that Mr. Phillips has a wide range of curious beliefs. He will not bake Halloween cakes; he did once agree, however, to making a cake for a “wedding” of two dogs, but claimed that if he had baked the gay couple's post-wedding cake would be like baking a “pedophile cake” (whatever that is). A lower-level Colorado court has just ruled that when you are in the business of serving the public, you have to serve everyone. The judge rejected the idea that Mr. Phillips's cakes are “expressive behavior” protected under the free speech clause. There is a kind of surface appeal to this argument for civil libertarians, but the service offered is making a cake based on the wish of your customer not the creative spirit within you the proprietor. The court even noted that the bakery had the right to put into its ads or on its walls that it didn't approve of marriage equality. Nevertheless it had to serve all the people who wanted the publicly available service. Just last week the Supreme Court rejected an appeal in a New Mexico case involving a similar refusal to photograph a same-gender commitment ceremony. But someday a case like these will get to that august body.

So, here we have cases about cakes and contraception that could still eventually lead to what I consider a bizarre outcome: religious claims trump any and all laws some corporate owner doesn't agree with. Why not just let companies refuse to go along with civil rights laws based on religious objections. Some of us heard preachers in the early sixties actually argue that the words in book of Genesis, “God separated the light from the darkness,” should be interpreted to reject school integration. And how about the Equal Pay Act? Why pay those women as much as men, because the “man is head of the house just as Christ is head of the Church,” thus hubby has more responsibility on his shoulders. Legislation allowing this kind of trumping the civil law with religious claims—allowing denial of services to non-Christians or LGBT travelers nearly was enacted in Arizona (Gov. Brewer there perhaps both read the Constitution and some columns suggesting that the NFL would be moving the Super Bowl out of Phoenix next year in deciding that she'd veto the bill. OK, she was probably more concerned with football than the First Amendment). [There will be more discussion of this kind of legislative battle in the next chapter.]

Also, we have now begun a wide range of case involvement at religiously connected hospitals and universities that are already exempt from having to cover contraception, in my view a completely unnecessary accommodation this administration doled up to such entities. All a place like Notre Dame needs to do is sign a statement refusing to cover contraception and the government will then get a third party to cover it for free. We represent the only actual women involved in any of these cases, and Notre Dame has told them that the university refuses to sign a refusal letter because even that would “trigger” a response that would lead to the sinful birth control option. So refusing to say you won't do something is the moral equivalent of doing it. Maybe in one of Michio Kaku's alternate multiverses, but that is from a legal viewpoint what is technically referred to in the Latin as de minimis” and, in the equally technical language of common sense, as “batshit crazy.”

But there are a few things happening that give me solace about the Religious Right's future—or perhaps its lack of one. First, sometimes when it comes up with bizarre ideas, like a North Carolina proposal a year ago to allow each county to “align” itself with a particular religion (and we all know that there would be so many atheist and Scientology counties), a few comedic comments by Jon Stewart or Rachel Maddow are often enough to laugh it off the legislative landscape. Second, its own primary polling organization, the Barna Group, finds that it is losing its grip on its own children. A growing percentage of fundamentalist children now accept the evidence for evolution, and the percentage of young evangelicals supporting marriage equality is now 64 percent. Those are not exactly pro-growth trajectories for extremism.

Remember the flap in 2012 when Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said he wasn't worried about cuts to higher education loans because when you send your kid to college she becomes an atheist.¹⁰ I remember ridiculing that on the Ed Show a couple times, but it turns out that there is a kernel of truth in what he said. Many young people who go to religious private high schools or to one of the one-third of public schools that don't teach evolution, then hear about it in college and start to accept the evidence for it, rejecting at least the Bible literalism that requires belief in a six-thousand-year-old universe. Similarly, if they have been told growing up about the “Gay Agenda,” which includes a virtual kidnapping of straight people into the so-called “homosexual lifestyle,” they find halfway through the semester that one of the people on their dorm floor is “gay” and never once has tried to seduce him in the shower. See, reality-based experience and education can go a long way to terminating utter nonsense. But we aren't out of the cold, dark woods yet.

A more insidious threat comes from what writer Michael Lewis might call “moral inertia,” that “so long as it serves the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became….”11 Let me just give you a few examples from Washington.

Let's start with money for religious groups. George W. Bush began a program referred to as the Faith-Based Initiative, an effort to get more grants and contracts to religious providers of secular services, from mentoring to feeding the hungry, based on the largely mythological claim—akin to the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq—that there was widespread discrimination in giving government funds to religious groups. At the time, Catholic Charities alone appeared to be getting over five hundred million dollars in aid and the Salvation Army, literally a Christian denomination with strong homophobic tendencies, was getting eighty-nine million dollars for work in New York alone. He did recognize that you couldn't force people to participate in religious services to get help (although plenty of groups still try), but he did allow groups to get subsidies even where they refused to hire persons in those subsidized programs who had different religious beliefs. You could literally hang up a sign in a Baptist homeless shelter seeking staff: “No Jews or Atheists Need Apply,” as if humanists tucked in bedsheets differently than did those Baptists. This reversed executive orders from the Truman administration barring such religious discrimination in hiring with taxpayer dollars.

And then what about tax laws? Churches and other charities are given a 501(c)(3) exemption (and churches just that status automatically without having to file any documents) and can engage in absolutely no endorsement or opposition to any candidate for public office. So over the past few years we have reported about thirty really egregious cases of pulpit politicking for or against candidates—not allowing people to get on the church bus to the polling place unless you agreed to vote Republican, telling people that voting for Barack Obama was like voting for both Hitler and Stalin at the same time. But those complaints have now languished for years. Why? A judge in 2010 ruled that the IRS needed to rewrite a simple regulation to have a slightly more senior official sign off on investigations of this kind of activity. This administration has been sitting on such a change for four and a half years. Two monkeys in a locked room with a typewriter would have typed the right fix through random key pecking in about a month, but this administration has been unable to publish a rewrite in close to four and a half years.

President Barack Obama needs to fix these things. And if he did what was right, the public would support him. In the most recent polls, close to two-thirds of us do not believe that churches should be able to endorse candidates, and nearly as many believe that if a religious group receives federal funds it should not be able to discriminate in its hiring with that money. So, we have already prevailed in the world of public opinion: To do what the public agrees is correct policy is hardly something even a marginally progressive President should be worried about doing.

There is a final policy the administration has pursued that always comes up during Q and A, which we aren't having today, so I'll go out on a limb here pretending to be a psychic and say I'll bet you are shocked if you know this and will be shocked if you don't. Americans United represents two women in Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester, who are trying to stop the almost exclusively Christian prayers given by a town-council-selected minister before their monthly meetings. Our clients felt uncomfortable about this practice because the few people who show up at these meetings usually want to ask the council for something: A change in cable TV access policy, a business special exemption, a new stoplight, assistance for a handicapped child, or the dozens of other things that come up in relatively small cities. Since our clients did not want to participate in Christian prayers, they felt (we thought quite reasonably) that an outlier—someone who doesn't bow her head or stand or recite words when asked by the minister—would be noticed and might find her requests rejected. The council of course said, “We would never do that.”

The Obama administration said, “We side with the town council.” Why if this kind of prayer practice is illegal, maybe the prayers of the chaplains in the House and Senate would also be illegal. For a range of strategic reasons, we so narrowly crafted the relief we wanted in this case that such a result wouldn't have been possible—at least because of this case. But so what if it did? Legislative prayers are a terrible idea and unnecessary as a part of the business of any government. Like with Noah, here is another piece of gratuitous advice directed to all nontheists in particular in this room—if you wanted to make the case that prayer doesn't work, all you have to look at is how much “good stuff” gets done in Congress after it prays every day it is in session.

I am convinced that with vigilance we will prevail in these battles. I don't mean that all those cable TV preachers will start sending money to us, but I mean that governments will not make religion a test of patriotism nor will it pick up the financial pieces the faithful are unwilling to donate themselves to the collection plate. We are winning the hearts and minds of the people on the issues I've mentioned. Six months ago we saw the first-ever public opinion poll where a majority of Americans oppose school vouchers.

There are plenty of judges hanging around who are on the wrong side of these issues and will be there for the next decade or so. There may be some bad Supreme Court decisions that will need to be reversed. There are entrenched legislators who fear any change in their antiquated viewpoints. However, there are new generations abornin’ and they don't think much of the hate gospel, the big government/big church coalition, “religious rights” for furniture companies, and other lousy ideas that makes a mockery of individual freedom. They are the people upon whom we should focus a lot of attention. They are the future and they appear to be “getting the message” of separation a far sight easier than many of us older folks did.

Here's my final thought—a final bit of advice to my nontheistic brothers and sisters. You have come a long way from the days when an atheist book would not be printed by most private publishers and mailing atheist pamphlets was a federal crime. You have come a long way since atheists like Herb Silverman had to sue just to run for an office in a state that barred nonbelievers from holding public office. You have come a long way from the days when Phil Donahue was pilloried for having Madelyn Murray O'Hare on his syndicated show (she was his most frequent guest) to now when David Silverman regularly eviscerates Bill O'Reilly on his own program.

Sometimes I hear critics say “well what good did atheists ever do for anybody.” Well, you were leaders in many cities in the struggle to end segregation, but that was an era when a Baptist preacher would seek a rabbi or a priest to join him on a civil rights march but wouldn't even consider linking up with a known atheist. You were not to blame for that. You were some of the earliest advocates for the availability of contraceptives to give men and women the ability to take medical, moral, and economic control of their lives. You are today asking some of the most challenging questions of the “faithful” and being self-critical about the stain of sexism and racism in when it arises in the culture. It is a pleasure to work with you and your sister organizations on the preservation of the very principles that will allow all of us to act and be seen as first-class citizens in all places in every part of this country—no matter what we think this weekend does or doesn't mean.

 

WOMEN

Women may hold up 51 percent of the sky, but the Religious Right and the Catholic hierarchy barely see them as co-equals to men. Even the leadership of the fundamentalist Concerned Women for America has primarily been male. The Roman Catholic Church does not ordain women, does not allow women to vote on local ecclesiastical matters, and does not take much interest in women once they stop being fetuses. I am frequently asked to address the religious roots of these conclusions and regularly do so at reproductive justice events, including this “opening statement” in a debate I had with Christian apologist John Rankin at the University of Richmond in March of 2009:

One of the reasons I like having these debates with John is because they don't come with presuppositions. They are open ended; they stake out the differences we have clearly because they let both of us answer a fundamental question. Tonight's is basic: “Women, Choice, and Abortion: What Are the Issues?” To me, there are indeed three big issues.

First is the relevance of the Constitution to the resolution of the reproductive choice debate. Second, of what relevance is Holy Scripture (including the Christian Bible) in the debate? Third, what would the ramifications be if we created a legal regimen that protected fetal life like the lives of everyone in this audience?

I realize that, statistically speaking, if this were a random group of citizens, at least a third of you believe that every abortion is a murder of a human being and that the Holocaust of Hitler's Germany pales in comparison to the number of deaths of fetuses through abortion. For those of you with different views, though, it is incredibly important that you not cede any ethical high ground to “anti-choice” advocates, no matter what rhetoric they use. Indeed, as I said to the million people on the Mall at the March for Women's Lives in 2004, it is the pro-choice movement that is on the sacred space, a place where every child is a wanted child. Every woman facing a moral decision about her reproductive choice must be guaranteed the right to make a choice without fear that it will be trumped by what her husband thinks, her boyfriend thinks, the Virginia legislature thinks, or the Congress of the United States thinks. Indeed, there are those who believe that abortion should be a crime even in the case of rape—and that the rapist effectively should have a vote in the matter.

Let's look at issue number one. The Supreme Court really only started thinking about the scope of individual rights in the l930s; it wasn't until 1965 that it actually ruled on the merits about whether married couples could use contraceptives in the state of Connecticut. Seven justices said that the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment in fact was designed to take an expansive view of “liberty”: it guaranteed “a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints.” In plain terms, the Court said “let's apply some commonsense here; where would a state think it had acquired the right to tell a married couple they couldn't use a condom to limit the size of their family.” Six years later, the Court said there really isn't any difference between married and unmarried couples when it comes to what it called “the right…to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusions into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or begat a child.” I'm curious about whether John agrees with that reasoning; many anti-choice advocates do not and indeed there is now a renewed national movement to prevent access to contraceptives. Many erroneously claim that most methods of birth control are really “abortifacients,” that is that they induce abortion by preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs in the uterine wall. Others, like R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues against what he calls the “contraceptive mentality,” which he calls “an insidious attack upon God's glory in creation, and the Creator's gift of procreation to the married couple.”12

On the other hand, some folks actually agree with the court about contraceptives—but see something radically different when it comes to abortion, the subject of the decision in Roe v. Wade, because of the claim that there is then more than one “person” involved. Roe, of course, eliminated laws against abortion that existed in about thirty states. The Court used the completely legitimate argument that in intimate personal matters, privacy prevailed over the majority wishes of legislators, at least up to the point of “viability” (assessed by the court at that time to be not earlier than twenty-four to twenty-eight weeks of gestation.) We'll get back to that “two persons” argument in a few minutes.

Although Roe was correctly decided, I wish the Court had also used another basis for invalidating antiabortion law, enshrining the right of women to make moral choices on issues of reproductive choice on the basis of the separation of church and state.

The reason we are here tonight—and the reason that the average year brings over fifty new state laws restricting reproductive choice—is because powerful religious groups want to claim divine truth for their anti-choice position. If you go to women's clinics that provide abortions you will very frequently find picketers; they are waving Bibles—not the constitutions of their states and not medical journals. This is a battle over theology, bringing me to issue two: the value of Scripture in resolving issues of legal rights. In my view, it is without relevance.

Indeed, anti-choice forces have built an entire movement based on an issue that is not even mentioned in the very book, the sacred text from which they claim to draw their moral teachings. There is no reference to abortion in the Bible: none. The closest we get is a description, found in the book of Exodus, of the penalties in early Jewish law for killing a woman and for causing a woman to have a miscarriage. It was greater for the former. What is important is that this demonstrates that abortion was not viewed as the same as murder because, if it had been, the penalties would have been identical. The topic is also not addressed in the Christian New Testament.

In the absence of any concrete references, advocates turn to obscure poetic references like one in Jeremiah where God reportedly notes, “Before I formed you in the belly, I knew you.” Clearly, this passage is merely a reflection of the belief that God is the creative force in all the universe. Taken literally, of course, it suggests that God had knowledge you were coming even before you had been conceived, before the merger of sperm and egg. That then sounds like an argument for immediate intercourse than a proscription of abortion.

Religious antiabortion advocates are on a form of interpretational quicksand to which even the earliest Fathers of the Church, the progenitors of Catholicism today, did not subscribe. Many of the early Christian leaders, for example, did not even believe the termination of pregnancy posed any moral question until the point of ensoulment, generally traced to thirty days after conception for a male and sixty days after conception for a female. The difference at the time was clearly linked to sexist views of male superiority: “my soul is older and wiser than yours.”

Any of you absolutely have the right to believe that “life begins at conception” or “life starts at ensoulment,” and to make all your personal decisions based on such beliefs. However, such views should not have any legal significance at all because this nation is regulated by the commonly shared values articulated in the Constitution, not the spiritual allegations of any religious body.

As I said, I wish the Supreme Court itself had been forthright about this. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a concurring opinion in a 1989 case that spelled this out very well. The state of Missouri had passed restrictions on public employees performing abortions and had written into the statute's preamble that the reason for such a prohibition was that “the life of each human being begins at conception.”13 Stevens noted that such a definition was “an unequivocal endorsement of a religious tenet by some but by no means all Christian faiths” and thus “serves no identifiable secular purpose.” He continued that the legislature “may not inject its endorsement of a particular tradition into this debate.”¹⁴ Admittedly, Justice Stevens's view was a minority one that day, but one case's dissent can easily become another day's enlightened majority decision.

As promised, I want to turn to what difference it makes that there is a “second entity” involved when a fertilized egg becomes part of the debate. Here is where John and others sometimes claim that there really is a “nonreligious” basis for the anti-choice vision. Fertilized eggs (zygotes) and fetuses are (with rare exceptions generally not yet tested in courts) not currently considered to have legal rights aside from the mother's interest. Just knowing what to call these “entities” is difficult. Some of the people on my side of the debate refer to them as “potential life”—but that is wrong because they are clearly “living,” they are not minerals or plastics. But similarly, when people on both sides of the debate refer to them as “unborn babies,” they are wrong also. Babies are “persons” given legal status generally by the very act of birth.

Most of the arguments for treating them identically to persons are pure sophistry, reflecting a disdain for science and evidence. At its rawest, people argue that the appearance of fetuses on sonograms proves they are people. Even Christopher Hitchens, one of the very rare nonreligious opponents of abortion makes this loopy claim. If it looks like a person it is a person, though, is not far removed from one early theological claim that because of the shape of sperm (which of course wasn't even known at the time), sperm contained a “homunculus”—a little human that gradually developed in the womb. Left alone, this would generate a male child; if injured, it would become a female child—another resounding affirmation of the negative view of women at the time.

And, of course, the argument gets corrupted even further. Fetuses feel pain, claim anti-choice advocates, because you can see, on a sonogram, fetuses moving away from needles. A great deal of medical research has been done on this issue, nearly uniformly warning that this conclusion is inaccurate. In perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of medical literature, published in a 2005 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the authors conclude that any fetal awareness of “pain” requires a conscious awareness of the noxious stimulus and that this rests on certain structural connections in the brain that do not exist until twenty-eight to thirty weeks.

Now, recall that at this point, Roe actually permits states to severely restrict abortions, and many do. However, this is not the same thing as passing bans on so-called “partial birth abortions,” all of which have been ruled unconstitutional because they would all have the effect of restricting reproductive rights long before that fetus is in the birth canal.

My third “issue” is what would happen if John and his friends achieved their goal of limiting or eliminating abortions—if compulsory pregnancy became the rule of the day. Very bad things would happen.

Women would go to jail for murder. I have heard people claim that only doctors would go to prison, because women would be seen as “victims” of those physicians. Once again, this is a demeaning view of women based on the assumption that they couldn't possibly be making a genuine ethical choice. In fact, pre-Roe literature is replete with stories of how physicians were literally being pleaded with by women to do that which the law generally did not allow: terminate a pregnancy that the woman had decided was wrong for her at that time for reasons related to health, economics, or family dysfunction.

Medical research would be impeded, as it was for the past eight years, by prohibitions on such techniques as embryonic stem cell research. The reason then-president George W. Bush said that new lines of cells could not be created from existing frozen embryos (regardless of the wishes of the donors) was that this would lead to the destruction of persons. It is bizarre to me that any rational person could argue that these embryos, which will never be implanted anywhere and will eventually be destroyed as medical waste, should not be utilized for research on the crippling and fatal diseases of those whose “personhood” is not in doubt at all.

In addition, the economic status of women, which has gradually been creeping toward, although nowhere near, parity with males would be severely stifled. Forced pregnancy will make dire economic times worse not only because of the cost of raising more children, but because of lost opportunities for good jobs at good wages. The availability of abortions has allowed many young women to continue their educations in universities and graduate schools, something barred by early pregnancy. This is not to be trivialized as an example of selfishness over the needs of others. Indeed, it is women who have historically been the caregivers, the nurturers, the peacemakers—that's why their ethical compass must be the guide to their own life decisions.

And, yes, of course in a world where abortion was criminalized, women would once again die. Politicians love to say they want to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” but the truth is that it is unlikely to ever be rare. Indeed, in a world where information is restricted and contraception availability limited, there will be more persons seeking abortions or trying to do them themselves. Even today, the ignorance spread by the anti-choice movement is responsible for many unwanted pregnancies and later-term abortions. (We can talk about that later, too, if you want.) I wonder how many people saw the film Revolutionary Road and didn't realize that the book upon which it was based was written pre-Roe (by twelve years) and that the homemade abortion effort that kills the wife in the book was a commonplace occurrence with a sadly commonplace conclusion. That is not a world to which I want my children and grandchildren subjected.

There might have been some lightheartedness during the debate in May of 2009, but there was nothing funny about what happened a month later.

THE ASSASSINATION OF DR. TILLER: DO RELIGIOUS RIGHT EXTREMISTS SHARE SOME OF THE BLAME?15

Americans United's field director, Beth Corbin, called me on my cell phone minutes after the news was reported that Dr. George Tiller had been assassinated while serving as an usher at Reformation Lutheran Church, the church in Wichita that he attended most Sundays.

I pulled the car over, and we talked about the terrible tragedy this represented for his family, his friends, and his patients. I had met Dr. Tiller just once, but he seemed to be unstintingly dedicated to both his patients’ choices and the preservation of the constitutional basis for guaranteeing that those intimate moral choices could be made by individuals, not by legislatures and sectarian lobbying groups.

I returned home and scoured the internet for information. I was struck by how many accounts referred to the murder of an “abortion doctor.” It would have been more accurate to call Tiller a “doctor who performs abortions,” a nod to the idea that he was a physician who met specific needs that his patients had.

Within hours, Scott Roeder was arrested for the crime. Although some at the church had seen him around the area previously, Roeder was not a “leader” of any “right-to-life” group locally or nationally. He did only occasional postings on right-wing websites.

I was curious about the response of the anti-choice movement. Most groups issued denials of any connection to Roeder and wailed about how a “pro-life” movement could never take a life, even the life of the provider of abortions. Frankly, I thought those denials and denunciations rang a little hollow, because the rhetoric used by most of those groups is so demonizing to pro-choice advocates and is filled with statements that refer to abortion as morally indistinguishable from murder.

Over the next few days, some of the most visible anti-choice activists stopped even the semblance of distancing themselves from the crime. Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, held a press event in Washington within twenty-four hours of the killing, during which he insisted that he would never stop using language that he felt was accurate.

“George Tiller was a mass murderer,” Terry said. “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”¹⁶ That was clearly the only reason for his “grief.” Not to be outdone, Pastor Wiley Drake (the same clergyman who has been praying “imprecatory prayers” for my demise for over a decade) asserted directly on his daily radio show, “I am glad George Tiller is dead,” referring to Tiller as a “brutal, murdering monster” who was “far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler.”17

When talk show host Alan Colmes asked Drake a few days later whether he prayed for Tiller's murder, Drake “clarified” that he prayed that God get rid of him in some way. (Incredibly, Drake then announced that he was also praying daily for the death of President Barack Obama.¹⁸)

Those of us who support the First Amendment vigorously, including the provision of freedom of speech, do so because we understand that words do matter, do have meaning and power and influence. This is all the more reason to choose our words carefully.

I made this point to the annual convention of the American Humanist Association in June, when I was honored to receive its Religious Liberty Award. I noted Drake's claim that prayer had done in Dr. Tiller, remarking, “No, Pastor Drake, it was not prayers that killed him; it was a man who listened to the rantings of people like you who provided him with the amoral framework to justify his actions.”¹⁹

Many Religious Right groups had been highly offended several months back when the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo suggesting that law enforcement agencies needed to be concerned about domestic, as well as foreign, “terrorism” and specifically noted that persons allied with the anti-choice and anti-immigrant movements could be in that category.

About a week after Tiller's shooting, Roeder called the Associated Press from his jail cell and told them there was a “plan” to have other people do what he did. If there is a plan or, given the possible lack of veracity with which Roeder speaks, even might be a plan, this seems like a pretty concrete thing to investigate in the “anti-choice” world.

This doesn't mean that every leader of an anti-abortion group should be hauled into the nearest FBI office for interrogation. It doesn't mean that government infiltrators have to head to every rally against reproductive freedom. It just means that prudent investigative steps need to be taken.

Just one day after I expressed sentiments like these on my Beliefnet.com blog, an eighty-eight-year-old man long associated with anti-Semitic hate groups walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington firing a weapon, killing a security guard before being shot himself by other security personnel. He had told people that he blamed the Jews for electing Obama, also claiming that Jews were not “God's Chosen.” Presumably, he thought he was a person in that elite category.

Those of us who support church-state separation, diversity, and reproductive freedom have many opponents. I support their right to speak out against our views. But violence is never acceptable. Anyone who engages in it must expect to face the full force of the law.

Not satisfied with lowering women to second-class “person bearer” status, the Religious Right decided to go further. Enter the mindset of “your employer gets to decide about your birth control.” Here is what I said at a 2013 session at the annual conference of the Feminist Majority Foundation, held in Washington, DC. [You can find more about the Hobby Lobby case in the next chapter.]

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church today has no moral authority whatsoever to speak on the rights of women or the nature of human sexuality. Its authority has been abdicated on pillars of bad constitutional interpretation, junk science, and a framework of patriarchy right out of the twelfth century. In other words, if I may borrow a word I just learned last week from Rick Santorum in his response to a New York Times reporter—this is “bullshit.”

The battle being waged against coverage of contraception in healthcare plans is not about “religious liberty.” That claim is fraudulent. Contrary to a Baptist “moral theologian” at one Congressional hearing—having a fundamentalist university simply inform women employees or students about how to obtain no co-pay birth control is not “a rape of the soul.”²⁰ Contrary to the Catholic Bishop's top lobbying official, Bishop William Lori, it is also not comparable to forcing an Orthodox Jew to eat pork.²¹ Have these men no decency and no moral perspective? The central message of the Christian Church is about the significance of Jesus as Christ; it is not and never has been about IUDs, or Norplant, or frankly even about abortion.

Now, religious liberty does means something very important in America. It means that government cannot tell churches what to believe; it means that we try to accommodate religious observance that doesn't significantly affect the rights of others; it does mean government can't play favorites among religions or even between theists and atheists; it means that persons of faith can proselytize, evangelize, even condemn those who don't believe so long as they do it on their own dime. But now the definition is being twisted and we are told to believe that it means, “We in the institutional church have the right to get as much money from the government as our well-heeled lobbyists can squeeze out of it and we as a corporate entity demand that we be allowed to ignore any and all rules, regulations, or civil rights laws that we don't like.” Well, this construction cannot be allowed to stand. With this interpretation, the church ends up setting the rules: Anything that violates some claimed tenet of some faith, no matter how trivial it may be, becomes a justification for exemption from laws that apply to the rest of us; any adverse effect this has on anybody else is just a cost of doing the church's business.

I'm not going to explain all the convoluted changes these insurance regulations have gone through because I think it is morally wrong to put people into a coma before lunch. The bottom line is this: The Obama administration initially wanted big religiously affiliated hospitals and universities (not the church on the corner) to cover birth control for their students and employees who chose to use it. And why not? First, these corporations employ hundreds or even thousands of people who have no connection to the religious orientation of their employer. Second, these corporations get hundreds of millions of tax dollars through state and federal programs. Third, these corporations hold themselves out as performing a public function in their community. No Catholic hospital advertises, “Come to St. Joseph's and learn about Jesus”; they promote that they are going to treat and try to cure your cancer. This is the trifecta of reasons that they should not be allowed to ignore the rules that apply to everybody else. Then the administration started to try to be conciliatory and, if final regulations ever actually come out—and if the world doesn't end on December 21 at the end of the Mayan calendar—I predict this is what they will say: Big religious institutions just have to give employees a piece of paper that tells them how to get birth control coverage from some insurance company outside the institution.

And you know what? The Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council will again scream from the rooftops, “This is an impingement on freedom.” Even a simple administrative act like handing out a form will be treated as complicity in a sin comparable to murder, theft, or adultery. And we know already something else they will say, because they are saying it already: “We demand that every single Catholic or fundamentalist business owner has a right to overrule the conscience of his employees.”

Anthony Picarello, general counsel of the Conference of Catholic Bishops told USA Today that, as a good Catholic, if he quit his current job and decided to open a Taco Bell—not too likely, I suspect—he would want the right to deny women employees insurance coverage for birth control, sterilization, and anything else he found immoral.22 Of course, we all know that women who garner the munificent wages of the fast food industry will have plenty of disposable income for paying for their own family planning. And under this standard, would an employer who is a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses be able to refuse coverage for surgeries under the theory that many require blood transfusions, which the church opposes? You can't run a comprehensive healthcare system in America—a compelling governmental interest—if every employer can opt out of providing other people coverage they desperately want whenever a single tenet of the faith is impinged upon in some tangential way.

I testified in November at a Judiciary Committee hearing alongside the aforementioned Bishop William Lori. He was all upset that a grant to the Catholic Conference to stop sex trafficking had not been renewed, and he suggested anti-Catholic bias as the reason. I suggested it was something else—the church's unwillingness to provide comprehensive services to the girls and young women being sold. I've spoken to some of the brave people who sometimes literally drag women from the very brothels in which they have just been forced to provide sex. Neither the church nor any of its one hundred subgrantees would provide Plan B contraceptives,²³ wouldn't even admit there is an option for abortion, and won't tell these abuse survivors where they can go for a full range of information—all because these steps would again violate the “conscience” of the Roman Catholic Church.

Well, they went to court and, a few days ago, they lost. You don't get grants and contracts when you can't or won't do the work required. The judge in the case ruled that it would violate the principle of separation of church and state if a religious organization could “impose religiously based restrictions on the expenditure of taxpayer funds”; that this would “implicitly endorse the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church.”²⁴

We are hoping that soon courts will start to undermine the premise of the George W. Bush/Barack Obama “faith-based initiative,” which still allows funds to go to bigoted religious groups that refuse to hire people outside of their own faith for the very programs funded by federal taxpayers. We are, of course, happy that no court has accepted the preposterous claim in some clergy sex abuse of children cases that the church should be allowed to use canon law—principles of church doctrine—in civil or criminal cases involving priest who abuse children. But the church keeps trying, doesn't it?

The day before the Darrell Issa hearing, I thought that I would be testifying along with Sandra Fluke: The two of us obviously more than capable of debunking all of the then-sixteen witnesses on the other side. When, at four in the afternoon, I was told that Issa had not considered Sandra “qualified” to speak, I was immediately faxed my invitation to appear, which I promptly tore up. The next day, Issa explained how although he never agreed with me I was “well respected” and that maybe I would actually show up in spite of me not responding to his letter calling me as a witness. Of course he wanted me there because he wanted to try to embarrass the Democrats who objected to the gender bias of the other witnesses. Issa declared, “I note that Barry Lynn is not a female.”25 That's true, but Barry Lynn is a feminist. We feminists stick together. We feminists do not play games with women's health; we feminists do not let the patriarchal rulers of religious mega-corporations tell us or our partners or our daughters what choices to make on the most intimate moral decisions of our lives. And, as I think the nation has been learning again over the past four weeks, we do not go quietly into the night. We organize, we petition, we growl, and we go on to win. [More about the Darrell Issa hearing in chapter 8.]

 

LGBTQ COMMUNITY

Honestly, the Religious Right is so upset by the LGBTQ community and its regular legislative and judicial successes that it can barely contain itself. Former dean of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University's law school Mat Staver recently said that marriage equality “is something that I believe is the beginning of the end of Western civilization.”²⁶ And Mr. Staver and his colleagues have been unhappy for a long time.

Here is an after-dinner speech I gave in 2007 to Michigan's highly respected Triangle Foundation—supporters of LGBTQ rights.

Thanks for that kind introduction. Yes, both a minister and a lawyer: a man who can forgive you one day and go on to sue you the next day. Look, I don't have too much time tonight, so I will have to eliminate any further attempts at humor. I'm really glad to be here and I'm only able to be here because it is still September. Starting October 1, I will be spending the next eighty-six days in a relentless “war against Christmas”—kicking over Nativity scenes, telling big box retail stores to insist their employees shout “Happy Holidays” to shoppers instead of “Merry Christmas,” and of course looking for elves to run over on my way to work. You'll be able to see reports that discuss all this on Bill O'Reilly's show on the Fox News Channel. Maybe Bill will even have me back on again—and he can again tell me in one sentence both how I am one of his favorite guests and later refer to me as a “paranoid crazy.” I'd like to thank the Triangle Foundation for mentioning his characterization of me in the press release for this event.

Actually, I'm glad to be here for another reason. I'm under a curse. That's right. Last month, Americans United filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service against the pastor of the Buena Park Baptist Church out in California, a man with a name some would consider more appropriate for the Cartoon Network than real life, Wiley Drake. We said he violated the tax exempt status of his church by endorsing the Presidential candidacy of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee both on his official church stationery and on his daily radio show run out of his church basement. He was upset. So he asked all his supporters to pray “imprecatory prayers” against the two gentlemen from my communications department listed on our press release on the matter and yours truly. “Imprecatory prayers” are basically requests for God to do unpleasant things to people. In case his folks didn't know what to say, he had a few suggestions, including “may his wife be a widow and his children fatherless. Let his children be continually vagabonds upon the earth, let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.” Apparently, the pastor didn't realize my son is employed at Google and my daughter is at the University of Virginia Law School. I'm hoping they take me with them to the desolate corners of the fancy French restaurants they will be scouring for baguettes!

I love my kids; I hope I taught them a few things along the road. Parenting is pretty great. Americans United's legislative director and his partner just adopted their second child last month—men can do that in the District of Columbia. I hope I'm still around to see the day when gender becomes irrelevant in adoptions throughout America. I'll tell you one of the best ways to determine if a parent is a good one, and it has nothing to do with gender: good parents give their kids gifts like this cuddly SpongeBob SquarePants—bad parents give their children this hard plastic Ann Coulter talking action figure.

Ann is a trip isn't she. She's not really fond of the LGBTQ community. Actually, there are a lot of groups and people she doesn't care for. She wrote an obituary following Jerry Falwell's death last April in which she said she agreed with everything the man ever said except…Quoting Ms. Coulter: “actually there is one small item I think Falwell got wrong regarding his statement after 9/11 that ‘the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians…. I point my finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’ I disagreed with that statement because Falwell neglected to specifically include Teddy Kennedy and ‘the Reverend’ Barry Lynn.”27 I'm proud to be in the company of every one of the groups she and the late Dr. Falwell included in that outrageous remark. And I'm proud to be aligned with Senator Edward Kennedy, who was the lead sponsor of the hate crimes bill passed three days ago helping protect those against whom violence is directed because of race or gender or gender identity or sexual orientation. It's about time. The Senator said, “At a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that lead to violence here at home.”²⁸

This legislation is an important step; it does not trample on the right of any American to speak, even using hateful rhetoric, but it makes it clear that some acts of hate have a goal far more pernicious than the random act of violence—these are the acts that are designed to serve as a warning for an entire community that all of its members have been targeted for the worst kind of vengeance simply because they exist.

Here's one problem: Hate crimes legislation only gets us so far. It doesn't have the capacity to stop hate itself. That is the far greater task. I don't really mind the stuff the Religious Right says about me: After all, it provides fodder for after-dinner speeches. But when it comes to their attacks on whole groups of folks, there is something much worse going on. There really is a whole “anti-GLBT hate industry” in this country. It is a campaign of marginalization; it is a campaign of fear-mongering; it is a campaign to make you invisible. This movement wants to say, as President Ahmadinejad did at Columbia University, there are no gay people in my country. In the United States this effort is primarily generated by the Religious Right, but it is enabled by the deafening silence of too many in the religious center, and even the “religious left.”

I understand that Frank Kameny is an advisory board member of the Triangle Foundation. I've known Frank a long time, and I had a chance to interview him on my radio show a few days before he was honored by the Smithsonian with a display of his papers and his memorabilia about the beginnings of the gay rights movement. Frank, along with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, were demanding equality at a time when same-gender relationships were often referred to as “the love that dare not speak its name.” You speak it now. But on the other side is a “hate that cannot stop speaking, indeed screaming, its vitriol.”

This hate machine operates on many levels, and the operators are a mix of bigots and blowhards and beguilers. The groups and individuals in this movement often operate in all three dimensions, in large measure depending on their primary audience at the moment. One outlier, of course, is Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. He and most of his family are the creators of the “God Hates America.com” and “God Hates Fags.com” websites. They scream their homophobic denunciations at funerals of persons who have died of AIDS. Lately they have gone to many funerals of gay and straight GI s killed in Iraq, shouting from the sidewalk, “Thank God for Improvised Explosive Devices,” to try to make their “point” that a nation that tolerates homosexuality in any way deserves destruction. When Dr. Jerry Falwell died, Fred Phelps put up a video in which he assured viewers that “Falwell split Hell wide open the instant he died” because he was a “fag enabler”: that means he occasionally talked with members of the gay and lesbian community. One of the many sad things about Phelps is that he usually makes people with equally bigoted views sound more reasonable as they condemn his tactics but never truly challenge his assumptions. In fact, they thrive on the same assumptions that members of the GLBT community are and should forever be second-class citizens in their own country.

The bigotry, though, sometimes takes an oratorical backseat when the blowhards of the hate industry appear, for example, on talk shows on cable television. But they are so self-righteous as they pontificate. Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says things like it is “foolishly naïve to think that ‘liberated’ homosexuals will settle down into faithful, monogamous, childrearing relationships.” Bob Knight, long associated with Concerned Women for America (don't go there) is always seeking connections between “leftist” groups. He once famously asserted, “If you look at the footage from Operation Rescue, um, vigils outside abortion clinics, you will see that the anti-Operation Rescue demonstrators invariably have a pink triangle on and they are usually pretty big heavyset women who look like they've been over working October Fest for the last six years.”29 Last weekend, Bob was down in Florida at this big gay-bashing conference and claimed that gay journalists were frauds who ought to sell their material to the Weekly World News, joking that they might have some “gay alien” stories.³⁰ And then there is Peter Lababara, who runs this new outfit called Americans for Truth about Homosexuality. His website has a list of issues along the left side including the provocative “Public Sex in Your Neighborhood?” For your protection, I clicked on it, then clicked on Michigan, and found that nothing is happening in your entire state. I have known these guys for decades. What motivates a person to spend his entire career trying to stop the wheels of justice and human understanding?

So we have chatted about the overt bigots and the blustery bloviators, who are the beguilers in this industry of hate? The most important ones are those who claim either scientific or religious scholarship to prove that the GLBT community is sick and/or going to hell. They lure people in the middle into thinking that there is only one set of facts on these matters. Their so-called “scientific” tests are always coming up with some new alleged proof that homosexuality can be reversed through some kind of “reparative therapy.” Writers like Wayne Besen have looked into this phony and expensive cottage industry and found it filled with loopy science. But, you know anything labeled “scientific” can fool some of the people. I can't stand here and say that no one has temporarily, or even permanently, changed the locus of their sexual interest, but I can tell you this much: if there were conventions for “ex-straights” organizations, they would be a lot bigger than any “ex-gay” convention.

And, of course, they have the Bible scholars (who always assert that you don't need the Bible to reach the conclusion that hate crimes bills or equal-employment measures are bad, but of course really don't mean that because they always fall back on allegedly Christian views). One of my favorites is Professor Robert Gagnon at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is so anti-gay that he has written, and I quote, “…faithful polyamorous arrangements—whether a traditional polygamous bond or non-traditional ‘threesomes’…are not as severe a violation of God's sexual norms as are homosexual unions.”31 What seminary class did I miss where Jesus took that view? I recently asked Gagnon whether if the threesome had two men in it, would it be still be considered better than a loving gay union of two men? I don't think he understood the question.

Almost all of these folks have a legislative agenda. It is a very dangerous one. At the top of the list is still the proposed amendment to the United States Constitution often referred to as the Federal Marriage Amendment. It would define marriage in all states as the relationship between one man and one woman. It would be the first time that we constitutionalized bigotry. It would also violate the principle of the separation of church and state. During the unsuccessful effort to pass this in the last Congress, we knew that it was all about religion from the very rhetoric its supporters used. President Bush called it necessary to preserve a “sacred” institution; then-majority-leader (and long-distance psychic diagnostician of Mrs. Terri Schiavo) Dr. Bill Frist insisted that the Senate's failure to pass this meant the “sacrament” of marriage was jeopardized, another religious referent. I am proud of the fact that the denomination in which I was ordained, the United Church of Christ, allows its ministers to perform same-sex marriages, and I'm glad that Unitarian ministers and Reform rabbis can do the same. Unfortunately, with an amended Constitution, the very relationships we do sanctify with our rituals are considered meaningless in the eyes of the state. But opposite-gender rituals performed by other faiths pass muster. That is not equal protection of the law. That is religious preferentialism. That the Constitution today forbids. And if state and federal courts were populated with people of wisdom and courage not one of the state anti-same-sex marriage amendments would stand up to the federal Constitutional mandate.

If federal courts respected fundamental values as much as they respect federalism when it serves their purpose, the idiotically named Defense of Marriage Act would have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Right is so concerned that someday this will happen that they have even argued that federal courts should not be permitted to hear cases challenging anti-gay restrictions like the Defense of Marriage Act and actually got a majority of the House of Representatives back in 2004 to pass what is called a “court stripping bill” on the subject, denying federal courts the right to hear any cases on this topic.

The Right is still arguing with a straight face that if gay people get married, it will hurt the 50 percent of straight marriages that manage to hang together. I have been married for thirty-seven years, as it happens, to the same woman. If the two gay men up the street are allowed to be married in the state of Maryland, does James Dobson actually believe that I will be catapulted into paroxysm of newfound lust, terminating my longstanding relationship. That might not even happen if Nicole Kidman moved into my neighborhood. (Sorry, that was a joke, and I said there would be no more funny stuff.)

Although it appears from the current level of publicity that the next Presidential election is occurring next week, it is actually over thirteen months away. The Right is still hoping, indeed there is an imprecatory prayer circle praying, that one of the remaining liberal members of the Court be forced to step down—or simply die. They don't just want Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito to push the narrow, crabbed anti-vision of the Constitution to which the Right subscribes; they want another guaranteed vote on the Court. Should anyone else leave the Court, the majority in the Senate should not hold hearings, should not dance around the nominees qualifications; they should just say, “This President does not deserve one more lifetime appointment to the Court.” No more rhetoric about “rolling the dice” in the hopes of a fair nominee; this isn't a monopoly game, this is the future of the rights of the people at stake.

And then there is the President's much-discussed “faith-based initiative”: a way, as it turns out, to funnel a modest amount of money to churches that might learn to be friendlier to Republicans if they got a few grants. One of the many constitutional problems with this program is that it allows the recipients of the funds to discriminate in hiring people to fill the slots paid for by all of us, the taxpayers. In a case Americans United is doing with the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project of the ACLU, a woman who worked as a counselor at the taxpayer-subsidized Kentucky Baptist Home for Children was fired after the following events occurred: A photographer took a picture of our client and her partner at an AIDS march. A year later, the picture was exhibited at a county fair. The woman's supervisor saw the picture and recognized our client. The next morning, the supervisor confronted her: “Are you a lesbian?” “Yes.” “You are fired!” Ironically, the courts have ruled that she has no cause of action for the firing, but we are now investigating whether such a pervasively religious organization should have gotten tax monies in the first place.

The people with this machinery and this agenda are dangerous people in whatever guise they appear. Adding to the problem is just how well-heeled they are. The group called the Traditional Values Coalition, which labeled this week's anti-hate-crimes bill “The She-Male Enabling Pro-Homosexual Drag Queen” bill, raked in about 6.5 million dollars last year;32 the Family Research Council made 10.8 million.³³ James Dobson's Focus on the Family groups hauled in a whopping 157 million dollars.³⁴

For years, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition had an annual convention in Washington with a “bookstore” that sold a book written by George Grant called Legislating Immorality. It called for the execution of all gay people but was discrete enough to qualify in a footnote that in our judicial system we would have to give them a trial first. As we know because of Matthew Shepherd and Brandon Teena and countless others whose names we don't know, some people in America do not read the footnotes. See, you can't peddle hate literature out of the back of your bookstore and then take no moral responsibility for the actions of others who act on those prejudices. Last year, Dr. James Dobson and his supporters had a Values Voters Conference in DC. They were excited when prominent African American pastor Wellington Boone said, “Blacks who are oppressed had not broken any laws of nature or of nature's God…. Sodomites are people who willfully break the laws of God and the laws of the land…. You tell me a gay has a right to get on some of [those civil rights]? Get out of here!…Back in the days when I was a kid, we see guys that don't stand strong on principle, we call them ‘faggots.’”³⁵ I presume Pastor Boone now knows exactly what that word originally mean—a bundle of sticks, specially used in the thirteenth century to burn, while still alive, heretics and sexual minorities. Just sheer naked bigotry from a man whose forbearers themselves had to fight the lynchings that had come to replace the killing fires. Words have power; the First Amendment gives people the right to use them—it gives us the power to condemn them and expect that others will challenge them as well. For Christians there to allow this insulting speech to go unchallenged was a disgrace; an example of the immorality of silence.

Now, I've referred to this group I've been discussing as a “hate industry.” You know, though, that this is a good old capitalist country. It means industries have to compete to stay alive. There is a “respect industry” out there too. It is selling its ideas every time an elected official stands up for GLBT concerns; every time a local pastor denounces an attack on a gay man and also denounces the immoral thinking that allowed the attacker to justify his crime; every time a family is open and affirming about their gay son or lesbian daughter and is proud to discuss his or her work; every time a union passes a resolution in support of passage of legislation to end job discrimination; every time somebody writes a letter to the editor acknowledging that something they have learned by finding out a friend or colleague is gay has changed their outlook on the necessity for equal rights under the law; every time a parent says to his son who has just called another kid at school a “fag” that that expression is intolerable and then explains why.

See, I remain an optimist about the long haul. I share the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's frequent observation that “the arc of change is long, but it tends toward justice.” We have all come a long way in the last half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first is only moving in one direction. Unless we leave the field, unless we stop the struggle, we are going to prevail.

Two days of rallies outside the Supreme Court were held as the justices were discussing the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Human Rights Campaign asked me to do a short speech on the steps of the Supreme Court in March of 2013:

I am a minister in the United Church of Christ and a member of the Supreme Court bar. Long ago, I gave up thinking I had the gift of prophecy generally, and I've also given up trying to predict specifically what the justices behind us will do.

Two groups of Americans have been gathering here for the past two days. I know quite a few people in both camps. Those who are anti-marriage-equality are not all haters and bigots. But—they are all wrong. Their time is past and they know it; polls demonstrate that they cannot even convince their own children they are right. Their ethical analyses and their purportedly moral viewpoints will soon be relegated to the dustbin of human history.

I oppose the agenda of the Religious Right every day at Americans United for Separation of Church and State because I know that America is not a theocracy; it is not a place where the law reflects some powerful group's narrow and crabbed view of what any holy scripture allegedly says. It is why we have fought for a separation of church and state—and why we need to get that correct each day. We would not have DOMA or Proposition 8 if it were not for the powerful, wealthy sectarian forces that stand behind the rubric of marriage inequality and who treat some to a second-class citizenship our Constitution abhors.

American history is an interesting thing. Taking the long view, it is crafted by ordinary people like us more than by presidents or senators or Supreme Court justices. And sometimes sooner, sometimes later, we the people tend to get it right. And we—the second camp—are getting it right today: We are standing up for something so fundamental, so real, so remarkably simple that these marble steps cry that we haven't seen it sooner.

I have been married to my spouse, Joanne, for forty-two years; we have two great children, one girl, one boy; we are just what one anti-equality speaker on the radio yesterday said was the dream American family. I know how good that feels. Yesterday, I was in tears listening to the dreams of other families, dreams that cannot yet be fulfilled for them because of the very law being debated today inside that building. You shouldn't need a theological or a legal degree to recognize one simple equation. All people who are willing to accept the rights and responsibilities of a long-term commitment deserve equal treatment under our Constitution no matter what job they do, no matter in what state they live, no matter who they love. A simple equation of simple justice!

As I said, I don't know what this Supreme Court will do in June. I don't know whether our side will win or lose or get a mixed message or perhaps get no definitive answers at all. This I do know: If decisions don't go our way, we will find every other venue in which to make our arguments, and we will return to this court one day. Even if we prevail on the arguments of the past two days, our job will not be over. Decisions of this court are not self-executing. We will need to be vigilant that every family is accorded whatever rights this Court grants them. Just like Brown v. Board of Education, we will need to be sure that every state, every community puts the principle into practice, so that no one is left behind.

And we will do that because we have always done that. We do not stop litigating, we do not stop marching, we do not stop debating, we do not stop organizing until we win equal rights for every family, everywhere, forever.

DOMA was declared unconstitutional on June 26, 2013. It has been cited as a cornerstone for rejected state laws and initiatives that sought to define marriage solely as a relationship between one man and one woman. As of this writing, four of the thirteen circuit courts have had an opportunity to examine these laws and have found them to be unconstitutional violations of the principle of equal protection under the law. As of this writing, the Supreme Court has been asked to consider the Sixth Circuit's outlier decision upholding a narrow definition of marriage. There is a widespread belief on all sides of this debate that on or about June 30, 2015 “marriage equality” will be the law everywhere in America.

 

DEATH AND DYING

The Religious Right doesn't always wait to bother people once they're buried six feet under. (See the last section on the Wiccans’ difficulty with the Department of Veteran Affairs.) Recently, the Religious Right has decided that it can also impress its perception of the world onto people who are lying on their deathbeds. As you are about to read below, in a speech that I gave at the 2009 Compassion and Choices Conference in Washington, DC, the Religious Right is also ready to tell you how to end your life (that is, let “nature's God” take its course).

Thanks for inviting me here. I'm not sure how many of you even know who I am. I am one of those people better known by my enemies than by my friends. How do I know this? Last week, a group associated with the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University announced that they were soon issuing a group of trading cards—like baseball cards—of dangerous “liberals,” and simultaneously launching an “adopt-a-liberal” prayer campaign, trying to get them to become fundamentalist conservatives. They announced the first eleven names—Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and eight other government officials—and, then, me. I was honored. I did have to send out a brief press release of my own, though, because I wanted to make it clear that if anybody wanted to “adopt” me, they should know in advance (a kind of advance directive) that I don't rake leaves and I stay up really late.

I have some bad news for you. The so-called “Religious Right” is not in favor of “choices” (compassionate or otherwise) at the end of life. Here is the more comforting news: You are not alone. The Religious Right is not in favor of real choice about much of anything from the moment of conception until the moment of death, or pretty much at any moment in between. They have all the answers and, if you don't accept them voluntarily, they will be happy to try to enlist the power of government to force you to accept them.

I think that a lot of folks didn't even realize that the Religious Right saw end-of-life decisions as big moral/social policy matters to butt into—until, of course, the spring of 2005 when it launched one of the most reprehensible campaigns in its sordid history. Why mince words about it?

This movement turned a little known decades-long tragedy into its latest sideshow. I won't remind you of all the details, but I want to highlight a few of the facts of those days to show you what we are up against. Ms. Terri Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state for a decade. Her husband, Michael, was her legal guardian under Florida law and, after heroic efforts himself to find medical help, reluctantly concluded that withdrawal of life sustaining treatment was necessary. After years, Florida's highest court agreed—and that is when the Right stepped in, people who did not know him, had not known his wife, but only knew that Ms. Schiavo's parents did not approve of Michael's informed decision, and decided to launch a campaign to “save” her.

I never expected to get directly involved in this matter, but things don't always go as planned. In March of 2005, the then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay called his congressional colleagues back from vacation on a Sunday night to pass legislation to undo Florida's final legal pronouncement before Michael could actually have nutrition and hydration removed.

This bill was an attempt to start all the proceedings over again in federal court, a so-called de novo review of all the issues that had been reviewed endlessly for eight years by twenty state and federal judicial panels. The bill noted, additionally, that none of the earlier evidence regarding her medical condition, her own wishes on this matter, or the qualifications of her husband as guardian were to be considered.

A few hours after the lopsided vote (and a dishearteningly limited opposition to it by the bleary-eyed returnees), I was listening to a most extraordinary tape recording. It was of Tom DeLay, two days earlier, speaking to a lobbying outfit called the Family Research Council. Listen to why he was so eager to get into the Schiavo fray.

He bemoaned: “One thing that God has brought us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America. This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me, and against many others.”36 DeLay added that “the other side” was leading the attack with a goal “to defeat the conservative movement.”

Why was he comparing himself to Ms. Schiavo? As you probably recall, he was under fire for allegedly funneling illegal corporate contributions into Texas state government races, an offense for which he was indicted³⁷ (and then the conviction was overturned)—and still could be indicted for further misconduct even though he is now a dancer and not a congressman.³⁸

The New York Times was keenly interested in this matter—and in fact featured the tape on its front page for two days. Since I was credited with releasing the tape, the cable shows were eager to hear me. Although usually I lack reluctance to appear on these broadcasts—I didn't want to show up and do what every other guest seemed to be doing—I didn't want to appear to have miraculously earned a medical degree. It was bad enough that actual doctor-then-senator Bill Frist had developed the power of long-distance “diagnosis,” declaring that Ms. Schiavo's case was not hopeless, even though his examination was from six hundred miles away.

I did these shows because there were some other points to be made, points relevant to today and into the future.

First, the same “activists” who demanded that Ms. Schiavo be kept on artificial support forever were precisely the same cast of characters that are involved in every other control effort. They were the same people who screech outside of women's medical centers, the same people who we had battled legally in Alabama when a state judge (now former judge) put up a two-and-a-half ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the new courthouse and refused to take it down even after ordered to do so by several federal courts; they are the same people who turn their churches in election cycles into veritable campaign headquarters for their favorite rightwing candidates and then compare the IRS to Nazis when it warns them that such partisanship can cost them their tax exemption.

Second, these people are blatant hypocrites. In general they don't want federal courts to do much of anything. In the same session of Congress in which the Schiavo debacle occurred, they had tried to remove federal jurisdiction—including Supreme Court jurisdiction—on all kinds of issues: abortion rights, the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, some applications of the “equal protection” guarantee. Here, they demanded that the federal courts get involved in what is quintessentially a matter of state law: family law, including guardianship. They want certain results; they don't give a hoot about how they reach them.

For two weeks, courts had to review the constitutionality of the new legislation. There must be “finality”: you can't litigate forever. And eventually that is what happened. Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr. of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, “When the fervor of political passions moves the executive and legislative branches to act in a way inimical to basic constitutional principles, it is the duty of the judiciary to intervene…. [T]he [other] branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers’ blueprint for the governance of a free people—our Constitution.”39 When hours later, the Supreme Court rejected any need to hear an appeal, the nightmare was ended.

In the course of these weeks, Michael Schiavo allowed Terri's parents and a cast of rotating advisors and loudmouths to visit her hospital room every day, even though he had no legal responsibility to do so. He knew that they would leave, hold another press conference, and make the vilest comments about him again and again. I don't know if his tolerance of this routine is “saintly,” but it sure showed more class than I've seen from most of the Religious Right over the years.

The Religious Right lied during the event and after it. After an appearance on Nancy Grace, one of the “religious advisors” for Schiavo's parents came running up to me from another studio, yelling at me for defending Michael's position. The Rev. Patrick Mahoney said that Michael had ordered the hospital window shades closed so Terri would be trapped in darkness—while knowing full well that the shades were drawn because “his side” had hired photographers with telephoto lenses to try to get a shot of anything they could skew and claim showed how “alive” Ms. Schiavo was. In other words, they wanted more footage like the overused, underexplained old snippet, which they falsely claimed showed her “following” the motion of a balloon.

When this whole disgraceful episode was over, CBS news did a poll and found out that 80 percent of Americans thought the government should never have gotten involved in the Schiavo case.⁴⁰ Eighty percent is incredibly high; I don't think you could get 80 percent of us to answer “yes” to the question, “Does the Sun appear to rise in the East?”

The final reaction took a significant number of arrows out of the quiver for the Right, but, sadly, reinforced weapons have again arrived on the scene.

The “debate” (and I use that term advisedly) about healthcare now occurring here has been thoroughly corrupted by all manner of nonsense, but one highly damaging distraction has been false statements about end-of-life issues, tainted with the phrase “death panels.” Once again, the movement most responsible for all this turns out to be the Religious Right: its front persons not merely soon-to-be-bestselling author Sarah Palin but a popular Bush appointee as head of the faith-based initiative office, Jim Towey (now the president of a small college in Pennsylvania).

Frankly, if only Sarah Palin was involved, there would not have been such a fuss. She said on her Facebook page, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Downs Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity,’ whether they are worthy of healthcare. Such a system is downright evil.”41 And whatever alternative universe has a guy named Obama with such a system would be an evil place. That is, of course, not our universe.

But we have to remember that outlandish statements only die if they are not repeated. CNN, in its crawl across the bottom of the screen, had a one-sentence statement about Palin's belief in “death panels” for over twenty-four hours. You saw it far more frequently than the news story the network did about it, which gave little credence to the idea.

The Palin statement merely built on other claims that had been made by conservative news outlets virtually from the time that the president announced that he wanted healthcare reform to be a major legislative priority in his first year in office. The Washington Times had earlier invoked references to euthanasia programs in Nazi Germany.⁴² Commentators like Glenn Beck (who in most other cultures would be shouting his nuttiness to people in public parks) said the Obama plan was: “sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you've had a good life’—and so you have to go.”⁴³

On August 18, Jim Towey threw gasoline on this illusory fire with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “The Death Book for Veterans.” This was a screed against a book used by the Veterans Administration's National Center for Ethics in Health Care called Your Life, Your Choices, first published in 1997 and used until well-known ethical scholar George W. Bush decided it was not any good. Most of you know Towey's criticism: that it had scenarios designed, in his words, to “steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living.”⁴⁴ He claimed that raising issues like financial burdens and being in a wheelchair were a “push poll” for “predetermined conclusions.” Towey, of course, then noted that he had written a twelve-page document that was much better.

I have known Towey for thirty years. I first met him when he was a legislative assistant to Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield. Hatfield was a very progressive Republican I worked with on many issues, but we just had to disagree on abortion rights. Towey went on to be Mother Theresa's lawyer and then an assistant to Florida governor Jeb Bush. He ended up running the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives after its first director quit in disgust, telling Esquire magazine, “What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”45

By the time he got back to Washington, he was certainly a different fellow than when I first knew him. He turned the office into a massive partisan political machine.

The evidence for this political manipulation was all confirmed when Towey's second-in-command, David Kuo, wrote a book about the office. Kuo told of how Karl Rove became interested in the possible political impact of suggesting that pastors could get money, even though he knew most of them wouldn't get a dime. (Rove referred to the evangelicals who had to get invited to the White House for photo ops as “the nuts.”) Oh, and on Florida as one example of the partisan intent, Kuo wrote: “More than a dozen conferences with more than 20,000 faith and community leaders were held…in every significant battleground state, including one in Miami ten days before the 2004 election. The political power was incalculable.”⁴⁶

I give you this background because Towey's credibility should have been severely stained by his faith-based funding shenanigans. It wasn't tainted enough, because hundreds of other papers and blogs reprinted the audacious misstatements of the original Wall Street Journal piece.

As you know, this was all about the mere facts that Congress had included modest Medicare funding for voluntary “end-of-life consultations” with physicians and, separately, a council to help conduct research on comparative effectiveness of medical interventions, with a prohibition that any council recommendations cannot “be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage, or treatment.”⁴⁷

One might say, well, all the Right was doing was warning against the possibility that someone other than yourself would be making decisions about the end of your life. Perhaps these same people would take a more libertarian bent when it comes to making up your own mind on these matters. Perhaps they embrace many of the ideas that have long been of concern to members of this organization—durable powers of attorney for healthcare and “living wills”; perhaps even “physician assistance in dying.” No such luck. Listen to some of the rhetoric about “physician assisted suicide”; that would be—your dying. The most powerful Religious Right lobby now is something called the Family Research Council, an offshoot of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. In their most sophisticated arguments, they espouse the old tired arguments about not being able to draw any lines, that this is not a “private” decision at all, that this will lead depressed people to kill themselves and aren't we all depressed.

But the bigger issue is the one they talk about when they are talking to supporters: God decides when and how you die, not you. So you are not just having a debate with a local evangelical preacher when you are debating this issue in your communities—you are debating God. It is theologically clear to these folks that God decides that you get bone cancer, that you die in an airliner crash, that you are shot in a bar, but never would God decide that you leaving this planet surrounded by friends and caregivers after saying goodbye to those you love is the time or place to do it.

Luckily, in this country we do have a “separation of church and state.” It doesn't stop people like those in the FRC from making arguments about what the law should say on moral matters. It does, however, prohibit governments from passing laws that rely primarily on references to somebody's interpretation of some group's “holy scripture.”

A recent pew survey48 showed that two-thirds of Americans say there are at least some situations in which a patient should be allowed to die. At the same time, a growing share of Americans also believe individuals have a moral right to end their own lives. Meanwhile, the public remains closely divided on the issue of physician-assisted suicide: 47 percent approve and 49 percent disapprove of laws that would allow a physician to prescribe lethal doses of drugs that a terminally ill patient could use to terminate his life.

As of this writing, only Vermont, Oregon, and Washington have statutory protection for this right to choose. Montana's Supreme Court recognized this right in 2009 and New Mexico's courts seem to be moving in this direction. In 2012, a Massachusetts ballot initiative failed 51 to 49 percent, with 80 percent of the funds to defeat it emanating from the Catholic Church or wealthy individuals allied with the church. The California Senate has already passed an End of Life Option act, with a hearing scheduled in the appropriations committee. And New Jersey's Assembly passed The Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, which also has state Senate support.

Just as the Religious Right continues to survive, it seems that this issue is not going away soon. From cradle to grave, the Religious Right is concerned about every choice you make.