Tag Archives: equal protection

Christian Nationalism Versus The Constitution

Yesterday, I spoke at a gathering in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, sponsored by multiple civic organizations convened by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Other speakers addressed the growing threat of this unAmerican movement and the multiple ways it is not Christian. I addressed the threat it poses to America’s constitution. My remarks are below.

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I’ve been asked to discuss the multiple ways in which Christian Nationalism is inconsistent with America’s founding documents—especially the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. It’s always a good idea to define our terms, so let me begin by listing the basic premises of Christian Nationalism—a political movement that my friends in the Christian clergy assure me is anything but authentically Christian.

Christian Nationalists begin with the ahistorical insistence that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and that one must be a Christian (or– let’s be honest here—a White Christian) in order to be a “true American.” Christian Nationalists reject Church-State separation and believe that civil government should impose their version of “Christian” behavior on all American citizens. That would entail—at a minimum—banning abortion, rejecting same-sex marriage (and for that matter, criminalizing homosexuality), and reinstating patriarchy.

Virtually every tenet of Christian Nationalism is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. I won’t spend time today explaining how the movement distorts and mischaracterizes either Christianity or the actual history of this country. What I will do is “compare and contrast” some of the foundational provisions of America’s constituent documents—and especially the Bill of Rights— documents that reflect what I call “The American Idea”–with the absolutely contrary premises of Christian Nationalism.

What do I mean when I talk about the “American Idea”? What is that Idea, and what were its political and philosophical roots? Where did our Constitutional system come from, and how did it differ from prior beliefs about the nature of government power and authority? Answering those questions does require a visit to the history of America.

A while back, while I was doing research for one of my books, I came across an illuminating explanation of the stark differences between the original settlers who came to this country—those the scholar called the “Planting Fathers”—and the men who would draft our legal system—the men we call the Founding Fathers. As he pointed out, the Puritans and Pilgrims who first came to America had defined liberty—including religious liberty– as “freedom to do the right thing”—freedom to worship and obey the right God in the true church, and to use the power of government to ensure that their neighbors did too. But the Founders who crafted our constitution some 150 years later were products of the intervening Enlightenment and they had accepted its dramatically different definition of liberty.

Enlightenment philosophers defined liberty as personal autonomy—an individual’s right to make his or her own moral and political decisions, free of government coercion. In the Enlightenment’s libertarian construction, liberty meant freedom to “do your own thing,” subject to two very important caveats: you could do your own thing so long as you did not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as you recognized the equal right of others to do their “own thing.”  The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are firmly grounded in that Enlightenment understanding of the nature of liberty.

It’s also important to understand that, as a result, America’s constitutional system is largely based on a concept we call “negative liberty.” The Founders believed that our individual rights don’t come from some gracious grants from government; rather, those rights are “natural,” meaning that we are entitled to certain basic rights simply by virtue of being human (thus the term “human rights”), and that a legitimate government is obliged to respect and protect those natural rights.  If you think about it, the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government—“the state”—is forbidden to do. For example, the state cannot prescribe our religious or political beliefs, it cannot search us without probable cause, it cannot censor our expression—and it is forbidden from doing such things even when popular majorities might favor such actions. That concept of a limited and constrained government is absolutely antithetical to Christian Nationalism, which seeks to use the power of the state to compel behaviors consistent with their version of Christianity.

Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, is among the many scholars who have described why that Christian Nationalist approach is inconsistent with the American system, writing that –and I quote–“A worldview that claims God as a political partisan and dehumanizes one’s political opponents as evil is fundamentally antidemocratic, and a mind-set that believes that our nation was divinely ordained to be a promised land for Christians of European descent is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and equality of all.”

The Founders’ view of freedom of religion is incorporated in the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty through the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses – clauses that, operating together, require the separation of Church and State.

Now, as fundamentalists like to point out, the actual phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the text of the First Amendment. What they prefer to ignore is that that the phrase refers to the way the First Amendment’s two religion clauses operate. However, the concept of church-state separation had long preceded its incorporation into the First Amendment. The first documented use of the actual phrase was by Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, well before the Revolutionary War. The most famous use, of course, was that of Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson was President, a group of Danbury Baptists wrote to him asking for an official interpretation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Jefferson’s response was that the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause were intended to “erect a wall of separation” between government and religion. What is less often noted is that since Jefferson’s response was official, it was duly confirmed by the then serving U.S. Attorney General before it was transmitted to the Danbury Baptists.

Historians tell us that the Establishment Clause went through more than 20 drafts, with the Founders rejecting formulations like “there shall be no National Church” as inadequate to their intent. The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” The courts have uniformly held that this language not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion or state Church but also prohibits government actions that endorse or sponsor religion, favor one religion over another, or that prefer religion to non-religion, or for that matter, non-religion over religion.

Meanwhile, the Free Exercise Clause prohibits government from interfering with the “free exercise” of religion. It protects the right of Americans to choose our own beliefs, and to express those beliefs without fear of state disapproval. Read together, the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause require government neutrality in matters of religion. The Religion Clauses prohibit Government from either benefiting or burdening religious belief.

One way to think about the operation of the religion clauses is that the Establishment Clause forbids the public sector (that is, government) from either favoring or disfavoring religion, and the Free Exercise Clause forbids government from interfering with the expression of religious beliefs in the public square (that is, the myriad non-governmental venues where citizens exchange ideas and opinions.)

When states misuse their authority and play favorites, when they privilege some religious beliefs over others, people who do not share those privileged beliefs are relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Separation of church and state prevents adherents of majority religions from using government to force their beliefs or practices on others, and it keeps agencies of government from interfering with the internal operations of churches, synagogues and mosques.

As to that original purpose of neutrality, I’ve come across few explanations better than the one offered by John Leland. Leland, who lived from 1754 to1851, was an evangelical Baptist preacher who had strong views on the individual’s relationship to God, the inviolability of the individual conscience, and the limited nature of human knowledge. He wrote, “religion is a matter between God and individuals; religious opinions of men not being the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control…Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics.”

(Leland could hardly have envisioned our current government’s belief that it does have the right to interfere with the principles of mathematics and statistics…But that’s a scary subject for another day…)

The bottom line is that we Americans live in a diverse society, where different religions hold dramatically different beliefs about the matters Christian Nationalists want government to dictate.  For example, in several traditions, including my own, abortion is permissible. Nevertheless, here in Indiana, where our legislators routinely ignore the official neutrality required by the First Amendment, lawmakers have passed a law that imposes a belief held by some Christian denominations on members of denominations and faith traditions who do not share those religious beliefs.

It would be a serious mistake to think that Christian Nationalism is only inconsistent with the First Amendment. The racism and misogyny that is built into it also run afoul of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection guarantees. The constitutional requirement of equal protection is intended to prevent majorities (or in this case, activist minorities) from using government to disadvantage individuals and minorities of whom they disapprove

Essentially, the Equal Protection Clause requires government to treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a group. In the United States, our laws are supposed to be based upon a person’s civic behavior, not on gender, race or other markers of identity. So long as we citizens obey the laws, pay our taxes, and generally conduct ourselves in a way that does not endanger or disadvantage others, we are entitled to full equality with other citizens.  That guarantee of equal civic rights is one of the aspects of American life that has been most admired around the globe; it has unleashed the productivity of previously marginalized groups and contributed significantly to American prosperity. Christian Nationalism strikes at the very heart of that commitment to civic equality—it would privilege certain citizens over others based solely on their skin color and religious identity. It’s hard to think of anything more anti-American.

The conflict of Christian Nationalism with the Constitution and Bill of Rights isn’t limited to the First and Fourteenth Amendments. There is another incredibly important principle embedded in the Bill of Rights that we are already in danger of losing to the sustained assault of these pseudo-religious fanatics: the doctrine of substantive due process, often called the right to privacy or the right to personal autonomy.

I agree with the numerous constitutional scholars who argue that, although the right to personal autonomy or self-government is not explicitly mentioned, the principle is inherent in the Bill of Rights. That’s because it is impossible to give content to the rights that are specifically enumerated unless we recognize the doctrine of substantive due process –and that impossibility was explicitly recognized by the Supreme Court in 1965, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The legislation prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and prohibited pharmacists from filling any such prescriptions. The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives simply wasn’t any of the government’s business; it was not a decision that government was entitled to make

The Court recognized that an individual right to personal autonomy—a right to self-government—is essential to the enforcement of the other provisions of the Bill of Rights.  Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the terminology “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or in the Ninth or 14th Amendment—the Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.

The doctrine of Substantive Due Process draws a line between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide. What books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are far outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate: the issue is who gets to make that decision—the individual or the government. Allowing any unit of government to decide such matters violates the most fundamental premise of the Bill of Rights and the philosophy that underlies our constitutional system. Yet that is precisely what Christian Nationalists want.

Let me be clear: Government has the right–indeed, the obligation–to intervene when a person’s behaviors are harming people who haven’t consented to that harm. (Mask mandates to protect public health, or requirements that students be vaccinated before entering a public school classroom are examples.) Otherwise, in the constitutional system devised by the Founders, government must leave us alone.

For a long time, secular and religiously tolerant Americans dismissed warnings about the growing fundamentalist assaults on that principle, confident that their right to self-determination was secure.  The conservative Christian reasoning in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, justified an invasion of that personal liberty, and it was shocking. For the first time in American history, a Supreme Court had withdrawn a constitutional right that had been considered settled for over fifty years.

As polarizing as that decision was, there is still very little understanding of its scope, and the fact that it threatens far more than the health, well-being and self-determination of American women.

In this country, different religions—and different denominations within those religions– have very different beliefs about the status of women and about procreation. What amounts to the Supreme Court’s elevation of a particular version of Christianity has understandably engendered an enormous and negative reaction–a majority of Americans, including a majority of religiously-affiliated Americans, disagree with the Court’s decision, and are even more opposed to emerging efforts to make access to contraception difficult or impossible. What is still not fully appreciated, however, is the fact that Dobbs was more than just an effort to force women to give birth—it was a devastating assault on the American definition of individual liberty, a definition which draws a line between legitimate and impermissible government actions.

If there is no right to privacy—no substantive due process guarantee–if government can force women to give birth, government can move to make interracial or same-sex marriages illegal. It can outlaw birth control. It can forbid divorce. In short, it can decide those “intimate matters” that the Founders and former Supreme Court decisions protected against government over-reach.

So far, my discussion of these issues has been necessarily abstract—a discussion of principles. Let me just conclude by reminding you of the challenge we are facing right here in Indiana, where we have statewide officials who are self-identified Christian Nationalists and who demonstrate daily that they neither understand nor respect the Constitution.

The most obvious example is our Lieutenant Governor, Micah Beckwith, who has  pushed the racist White Replacement Theory, compared vaccination policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews, advocated that brown people crossing the border be shot, and accused the Indy Star, members of the left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers of wanting to cut off the private parts of children. When he served briefly on a library board, he tried to censor and remove books of which he disapproved, and he constantly engages in ugly diatribes against gay citizens. Most recently, he claimed that undocumented immigrants aren’t entitled to due process.

Todd Rokita, Indiana’s embarrassing Attorney General, has hounded and harassed a doctor who legally aborted a ten-year-old rape victim, and is engaged in a wide-ranging vendetta to root out efforts to foster racial and religious inclusion. I won’t go through Jim Banks’ numerous assaults on the American Idea, since as Fort Wayne residents you are undoubtedly already familiar with them. These men are so busy pursing a Christian Nationalist culture war, they don’t have much time to attend to the duties of their offices. They provide an excellent example of what government would be like in a country run by Christian Nationalists—aka, the Christian Taliban.

A country in the thrall of a Christian Nationalist worldview would look nothing like the America that most of us love and want to protect. We live in a dangerous time, but we cannot give in to fear and reaction, and we absolutely cannot allow Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and other assorted bigots to jettison the legal system that has fostered American progress and been a beacon to oppressed people around the world.

Throughout our history, America has had to reckon with significant numbers of people who never accepted the premises of the system devised by the Founders. There have always been Puritans who–like the Planting Fathers–believed that they should be able to use government to control the lives and behaviors of everyone else. Throughout our history, we have always had to deal with America’s “original sin” of racism. We’ve had dark times. It wasn’t just the Civil War—I’m only one of the many old folks in this room who have lived through the Civil Rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the gay rights movement. American liberty has always been a work in progress—and has always been frantically resisted by those who have felt threatened and disoriented by social change. That said, the country has moved—granted, in fits and starts—toward realizing the ideals of liberty and civic equality set out in our constituent documents.

Because I am old, I often think of a folk song that was popular during the great upheavals of the 60’s. It was sung by Peter, Paul and Mary, and the chorus was “don’t let the light go out.” That should be our motto as we face this latest eruption of deeply unAmerican challenges from people who are threatened by diversity and dead-set against equality and inclusion.

Don’t let the light go out.

Thank you.

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The Fourteenth Amendment

Here is the talk I will be delivering to the Danville Unitarians this morning. It’s longer than my usual posts, so–unless you feel the urge to visit or revisit the 14th Amendment– feel free to skip it!

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Thanks to our current political environment—and especially to an argument that Section 3 of that Amendment requires barring Donald Trump from the ballot—we’ve seen an explosion in references to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the 14th Amendment has been incredibly important for a long time, for reasons having nothing to do with Section 3. Together with the 13th and 15th Amendments, the 14th is credited with strengthening and “reframing” the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Together, they are frequently referred to as our Second Founding.

It’s presumably due to that current interest that I was asked to talk about the 14th Amendment today, so you will get the equivalent of my class lecture on the subject. I apologize in advance…

The 13th Amendment, as you undoubtedly know, outlawed slavery, and the 15th forbid abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Together with the 14th, they are the Reconstruction Amendments.

Of the three, the 14th Amendment is the lengthiest and most ambitious. Thanks mainly to the Equal Protection clause, it is now considered to be a part of the Bill of Rights.

The first Section is the one with which most of us are familiar; It reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Congressman who drafted the 14th Amendment, John Bingham, was very clear that his intention was to make the Bill of Rights binding on the states. Most Americans don’t realize that, prior to passage of the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government. Bingham insisted that his language—“privileges and immunities” encompassed the entire Bill of Rights, and made them binding upon the states, and the contemporaneous arguments for and against passage tended to focus on that stated outcome.

Nevertheless, after the 14th Amendment was passed, it took the Supreme Court a number of years and a collection of discrete cases to apply most of the constraints of the Bill of Rights against state and local government actors, a process called (for some reason) incorporation.

Prior to passage of the 14th Amendment, state and local officials could “establish” religions, prevent you from exercising your right to speak freely, engage in blatantly discriminatory behaviors and other activities that violated the first 8 Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

An important clause in Section One established birthright citizenship—which has recently become something of a flashpoint for the considerable number of racists and self-defined “patriots” who want to close America’s borders and prevent the children of immigrants from becoming American citizens. Since most, if not all of the people arguing against birthright citizenship are not descended from Native Americans, the hypocrisy is rather noticeable.

The Second Section of the Amendment is historically interesting, but generally obsolete—it forbids denying the right to vote to any “of the male inhabitants” of a state who have reached the age of 21 and are citizens. Since passage of that language, we’ve extended the vote to women and lowered the voting age to 18.

The Third Section of the 14th Amendment is the one that has recently become relevant to the current election cycle. It reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The Supreme Court of the State of Colorado concluded that the language of Section 3 precludes Donald Trump from appearing on Colorado’s ballot. That decision is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will now have to decide to affirm or reject Colorado’s analysis–whether Section 3 bars Donald Trump from appearing on all the nation’s presidential ballots. It certainly seems straightforward; in order to evade the clear language of Section 3, the Court would have to find that the President wasn’t an “officer” of the United States, or that the provision isn’t what lawyers call “self-executing”—that is, that it requires Congress to pass a bill to make it operative. Neither argument passes the smell test. The Court could also find that Trump didn’t engage in insurrection, a finding which would be equally unpersuasive. Given the Justices’ performances at the oral argument on this case, I think we can safely assume that they will find a way to duck the clear implications of the Constitutional language.

Finally, Sections 4 and 5 confirm the validity of the national debt and authorize Congress to enforce the provisions of the 14th Amendment by “appropriate legislation.”

The most important operation of the 14th Amendment—at least in my opinion—is that it constitutionalized the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality. Scholars refer to the Reconstruction Amendments as America’s “Second Founding,” because passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments transformed the nation’s charter from what was really an aggressively pro-slavery document into one that prohibited chattel slavery; it changed it from a document that was silent on the Declaration’s call for equality to one that granted equal citizenship to everyone born on American soil; and it changed the Constitution from a charter that stood aside while state governments abused individual rights to one that protected these rights against state government abuses.

A constitutional insistence on “equal protection of the law” effected a fundamental change in American politics and society. As historian Eric Foner has explained, no state gave Black people full legal equality before the Reconstruction era and the 14th amendment. Supreme Court decisions over the last century – outlawing racial segregation, decreeing “one person, one vote”, and many others – have rested on the 14th amendment. Foner and many other historians think the 14th Amendment should be seen as a form of “regime change” — an attempt to change the United States from a pro-slavery regime, which is what we had before the Civil War, to one based on equality, regardless of race. That’s a pretty fundamental change. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has written that the 14th Amendment established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation.

The Fourteenth Amendment prevents government from denying citizens the “equal protection of the laws.” What constitutes “Equal Protection” can be complicated, because governments need to classify citizens for all kinds of perfectly acceptable reasons. For example, the law draws distinctions between children and adults, between motorists and pedestrians, and between smokers and non-smokers, and those classifications don’t run afoul of the 14th Amendment.

The Equal Protection doctrine is intended to prevent government from imposing inappropriate classifications; those based on criteria that are irrelevant to the subject of the law, or that unfairly burden a particular group.  The general rule is that a government classification must be rationally related to a legitimate government interest. A requirement that motorists observe a speed limit is clearly a classification related to government’s legitimate interest in public safety. A law that imposed different speed limits on African-American and Caucasian drivers just as clearly would be illegitimate.

Complicating it further, although laws can be discriminatory on their face (for example, a law saying only white males can vote); these days, laws meant to discriminate are usually crafted to achieve that result by design. That is, they are drawn to look impartial on their face, but to have a discriminatory effect. A rule that all firefighters must weigh over 180 pounds would prevent many more women from being firefighters than men, despite the fact that weight is not an indicator of the ability to handle a fire hose or climb a ladder.

There are also situations in which genuinely neutral laws are applied in a discriminatory fashion. The phrase “Driving While Black” grew out of statistics showing that some police officers were disproportionately stopping black motorists for speeding.

The courts will look more closely at classifications that burden constitutional rights, or disadvantage members of groups that have historically been subject to discrimination. Lawyers call that process of taking a closer look “heightened” or “strict” scrutiny.

The Equal Protection doctrine is intended to prevent government from disadvantaging individuals and minorities of whom majorities may disapprove. Equal Protection guarantees—like all the other provisions in the Bill of Rights—  apply only to government actions. Civil Rights statutes address private-sector discrimination. Here in Indiana, for example, our civil rights statutes don’t forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, so unless you live in a city or town with a civil rights ordinance, private companies in your town can fire people for being gay, and restaurants can refuse to sell pizza to someone perceived to be gay.

Essentially, the Equal Protection Clause requires government to treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a group. American laws are supposed to be based upon a person’s civic behavior, not her gender, race or other identity. So long as we obey the laws, pay our taxes, and generally conduct ourselves in a way that doesn’t endanger or disadvantage others, we are entitled to full civic equality.  That guarantee of equal civic rights has unleashed the productivity of previously marginalized groups and contributed significantly to American prosperity. As we are seeing, it has also motivated a considerable backlash from people who see equality for “those people” as an attack on their “rightful” social privilege.

Critics of Equal Protection often argue that equality and liberty are at odds: that an individual’s liberty includes the right to dislike or disapprove of others and that true liberty would include the right to act on those negative opinions. What the 14th Amendment says, in essence, is: fine. Dislike Black people, or Jews or Gays. Don’t invite them to dinner. Tell your daughter not to date them. But you may not ask government to pass rules that discriminate against them or that prevent them from  participating as equals in the political system or civil society.

With that, I will conclude this admittedly very superficial description of the 14th Amendment. I’m happy to answer questions!

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I Don’t Think That Word Means What You Think It Means….

I wonder what theocrats think the word “liberty” means?

I guess we’re going to find out. According to Vox and a number of other media outlets,

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a “Religious Liberty Task Force” that will enforce a 2017 DOJ memo ordering federal agencies to take the broadest possible interpretation of “religious liberty” when enforcing federal laws. That memo, for example, prohibits the IRS from threatening the tax-exempt status of any religious organization that actively lobbied on behalf of a political candidate, which is not allowed under the Johnson Amendment.

In a bold speech delivered at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit, Sessions characterized the task force as a necessary step in facing down the prevailing forces of secularism. “A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom,” he said, which “must be confronted and defeated.”

I don’t think I’d call the speech “bold.” “Ignorant” might be a more appropriate adjective.

Secularism, properly understood, is simply the absence of religion–an absence which evidently constitutes an existential threat to the worldview of people like Sessions. And liberty, at least as defined by those who drafted the U.S. Constitution, definitely does not mean the privileging of Christianity and its adherents over all other belief systems, religious or secular, which is quite clearly what Sessions intends.

While the task force will only enforce the guidelines listed by the religious liberty memo, the language in Sessions’s speech was as significant as the creation of the task force itself. Using striking rhetoric and the incendiary narrative of culture wars, Sessions characterized America as an implicitly Christian nation under attack from secularists. In so doing, he is continuing a wider pattern of the Trump administration: treating the federal government as a necessary participant in the longevity of Christian America.

He’s advocating for the kind of Christian nationalism — blending patriotism and evangelical Christianity — that the administration has consistently used to legitimize its aims and shore up its evangelical base.

As the Vox article noted, over the past few years Sessions’ version of “liberty” has gained considerable legal ground–from the Hobby Lobby decision, allowing closely-held corporations with religious shareholders to deny contraception coverage to its employees, to the case of Trinity Church, in which the Court held that a Lutheran church could use taxpayer funds to build a playground on its property. The confirmation of Kavanaugh would likely carve another hole in the wall of church-state separation.

It is obvious that this task force and various other efforts to take America back for (their version of) Jesus have been prompted by fury over civil rights for LGBTQ folks–especially recognition of same-sex marriage–and hysteria over the growing recognition that White Christian cultural domination of America is on the way out.

I’m not going to waste pixels on the fundamentalists who use religion as a justification for their bigotry and who experience any loss of privilege as discrimination. But I am going to protest the misuse of language.

In America, the word “liberty” means “personal autonomy”–an individual’s right to self-government. Liberty means we each have the right to “do our own thing” so long as we do not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as we are willing to accord an equal right to others. It most definitely does not mean (as the theocrats would have it) an obligation to do the “right thing” as that “right thing” is defined by the theology of the majority and enforced by government.

The First Amendment protects the integrity of the individual conscience against government overreach, and together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, it prohibits government from favoring some religious beliefs over others, or from favoring religion over non-religion. (Or vice versa, for that matter.)

The fact that we have an administration filled with people who reject that understanding of liberty—who are dismissive of the most basic premises of America’s history, philosophy and law–is more than unfortunate. It’s scandalous.

Or to coin a phrase, deplorable.

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What Kind of Equality?

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion on equality. The panel was part of the 10th Annual O’Bannon Institute for Community Service, held at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington.

Our panel’s charge was very broad: we were supposed to discuss “equality” and consider America’s progress toward achieving it. In addition to me, the panel included a retired Pastor who heads the Bloomington Human Rights Commission, a social worker who founded and runs an organization called “Fair Talk” focused on equal rights for GLBT folks, and an 86-year old former football star who was the first African-American recruited by the NFL.

Beyond sharing stories from our different perspectives, we confronted a question: what do we mean by equality? No two people, after all, are equally smart, equally good-looking, equally talented or hardworking. What sorts of equality can we reasonably expect to achieve?

At the very least, we agreed that all Americans are entitled to equality before the law. Laws that disadvantage people based upon race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation—laws that treat people differently simply based upon their identity—cannot be justified. America’s greatest promise has been that our laws treat individuals as individuals, and not as members of a group. As a country, we are making progress toward that goal. The progress is halting, and the culture sometimes lags, but we’re getting there.

That’s the good news. The bad news, as the pastor reminded us, is that inequalities of wealth and power in this country are enormous and growing. The wealthiest Americans not only control a huge percentage of the country’s resources, their wealth also allows them to exercise disproportionate political power. America is in real danger of becoming a plutocracy.

I hasten to assure my readers that there weren’t any socialists on that panel; no one was advocating class warfare or massive redistribution of wealth. We all understand the benefits of market economies, and recognize that inequalities are inevitable in such systems. The problems arise when the inequities become too large, and when they are seen as the product of privilege and status rather than entrepreneurship and/or diligence. It is then that they breed social resentment and create political instability.

America is doing a reasonable job of leveling the legal playing field. But you can’t eat legal equality, you can’t pay the rent with it, and it won’t cure cancer.

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Sauce for the Goose

Yesterday’s post about the effort to expose the “reasoning” behind Senate Bill 371 got me thinking about equal treatment and its notable absence from other brilliant proposals currently wending their way through Indiana’s legislative process. (As you may recall, SB 371 “protects” women who want prescriptions for abortion pills, and the proposed amendment would similarly have “protected” men wanting pills for erectile dysfunction.)

For example, what would a more balanced approach mean for the bill requiring drug testing of welfare recipients?

So far, the arguments against that measure have been boring–the typical logical, evidence-based objections that routinely fail to persuade our lawmakers. The Indiana Coalition for Human Services, for example, has pointed out that Florida implemented such a program and found it to be ineffective and costly (only 2% tested positive). Others have noted that the available tests are not well-suited for a “pass/fail” situation. Legislative Services estimates the first-year cost to be 1.2 million, much more than is likely to be saved. Etcetera.

Wrong arguments! Logic has rarely prevailed at the Statehouse, and cost-effectiveness is not a concept embraced by our elected culture and class warriors.

So I say, pile on! Not only should TANF recipients be tested, so should all the other welfare moochers who are enriching themselves at taxpayers’ expense. Let’s start with corporate welfare, with the beneficiaries of crony capitalism–the coal-gasification boondoggle,the business enterprises that have persuaded lawmakers to grant them favorable tax treatment, the owners of sports teams we subsidize, and those like ACS that are making big bucks providing services like parking meters–taking a major chunk of the money that the city would otherwise have available for public purposes.

Perhaps we could require drug testing as a condition of getting an education voucher. And let’s not forget all the elected officials–10,400 of them, thanks to Indiana’s archaic township system–who are suckling at the public you-know-what. In fact, we should test everyone paid with tax dollars–teachers, police officers, firefighters, clerks in the City-County Building…Surely, those of us whose tax dollars pay their salaries are entitled to know whether our money is going to substance abusers.

Proponents of drug testing for welfare recipients justify that proposal by pointing to the expenditure of tax dollars. By that logic, we should test everyone we are supporting or enriching with public funds.

What’s sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander.

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