Republican Governor Pat McCrory did the right thing -- and in so doing showed the way for conservative Christian Republicans in the age of marriage equality.
McCrory not only vetoed a North Carolina bill that would allow some government officials to opt out of same-sex marriage duties based on "sincerely held religious" objections, but in so doing he also said the right thing. North Carolina Public Radio reported:
In his veto message, McCrory told lawmakers that his "sincerely held" religious belief is that a marriage is an union between a man and a woman.
"However, we are a nation and a state of laws," McCrory wrote. "Whether it is the president, governor, mayor, a law enforcement officer, or magistrate, no public official who voluntarily swears to support and defend the constitution and to discharge all duties of their office should be exempt from upholding that oath."
In the early seventies I made a visit to church members. I was with Dr. Bill Hendrix, one of the most distinguished theologians in the Southern Baptist Convention at that time. Hendrix was held in high academic esteem by his colleges. We were visiting a member who was putting together a book attacking evolution by his research on the Paluxy River at Glen Rose, Texas. After a brief visit, Hendrix told me the man lacked the educational credentials for such claims he was making.
Religious exemptions to various laws and regulations have been much in the news in recent years, particularly in relation to the advance of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. But the history of religious exemptions does not belong just to the culture warriors of the contemporary Christian Right.
As a society we have long wrestled with religious objections to a wide range of public interests, from African American civil rights, to mandatory vaccinations, and even public schooling. These issues are significant, nearly always controversial in some sense, and getting them right is not easy.
Indeed, figuring out whether and how to accommodate religious exemptions is one of the necessary skill sets in our religiously plural society.
On February 26, 2012, (when I first published this post), the heated GOP presidential primaries were getting hotter as the Christian Right sought to find someone who could take the GOP presidential nomination away from Mitt Romney. Santorum made a good run at it, and came in second, but Santorum being Santorum had more than a few problems. -- FC
It is amazing what a difference a few weeks can make. When I published an essay comparing speeches about separation of church and state by John F. Kennedy, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, I had no idea that Santorum would become such a serious contender for the GOP nomination for president, nor did I think that his views on separation would become a central issue, let alone that he would usher in this new era of American politics by declaring on national television that he found JFK's views on separation to be vomitorious.
"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute," he told George Stephanopolous on ABC's This Week. "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country... to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up."
Now that Rick Santorum has announced that he is running for president, again, it is worth reminding ourselves that he is a coarsely obvious religious bigot. I published this post when he was running in 2012. To my knowledge, he never retracted or apologized for his prior statements. -- FC
Rick Santorum has sought to project a sunnily suburban, regular guy appeal as he vies for the GOP presidential nomination. But whenever I have seen him during the campaign, there seems to be a seething and loathing just beneath the surface that he has to struggle to keep from leaking out.
But back in 2008, while a senior fellow of the neoconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, we got a glimpse of what it is that is so churning under his public face. In a speech, he quietly explained to students at Ave Maria University, in Naples, Florida that Satan, the "Father of Lies", is destroying America. Part of Satan's effort, according to Santorum, has been to so transform the mainline Protestant churches in America -- that they are no longer even Christian.
Now that Bishop Robert Finn has finally resigned his leadership of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri -- here are some final thoughts on this child abuse debacle.
The Betsy DeVos-led American Federation for Children (AFC) and its core funders have spent more than fifteen million dollars in Pennsylvania over the last five years. The majority of the funding was in support of a Democratic state senator, Anthony H. Williams, who is a candidate in the Democratic mayoral primary for mayor of Philadelphia to be held on Tuesday, May 19. While banking on Williams, AFC has quietly filed and begun to fund a new Pennsylvania political action committee (PAC) in preparation for their ongoing onslaught in the state. Initial funding for the PAC has come directly from the DeVos family, the national leaders behind school privatization as well as major funders of the GOP and Religious Right causes. Thus far the only recipient is Williams.
[Photograph: Anthony H. Williams (left), Jeb Bush, and Kevin Chavous attend AFC's First Annual New York Gala on October 30, 2014.]
Back in the 1990s when I was regularly covering the antics of TV preacher Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, one part of the job was particularly distasteful: listening to speeches by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
Lapin headed a synagogue in Washington state and ran a small right-wing group called Toward Tradition, but he was best known for being the Religious Right's token Jewish supporter. Unlike "Messianic Jews" who are really just converts to evangelical Christianity who rip off Jewish rituals, Lapin, a South African expatriate, is actually Jewish. He was a regular speaker at the Christian Coalition's "Road to Victory" conferences, where his job was to convince attendees that real Jews love them some Religious Right.
As marriage equality has advanced around the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the issue in June, threatening language is escalating on the Christian Right. If these culture warriors actually follow through with their threats, the story of our time may turn on terms like civil disobedience, martyrdom and even civil war. The operative word here is, "if."
In recent years, we have repeatedly heard threats of civil disobedience from Christian Right Leaders - everyone from the signers of the historic, 2009 Manhattan Declaration (which included top Roman Catholic prelates and evangelical and organized Christian right leaders), to Rick Warren.
We have heard predictions of civil war, revolution, and martyrdom from the likes of Catholic thinker John McCloskey, theocratic evangelical intellectual Peter Leithart, and even Christian Right electoral activist David Lane.
We have also heard calls for political assassinations and secessionist civil war from White Southern Christian Nationalists, Michael Hill, David Whitney, and Michael Peroutka.
Most recently, some 200 Christian Right figures signed a renewed pledge of resistance to the anticipated Supreme Court decision favoring marriage equality.
At a press conference, they called this "A Bonhoeffer Moment in America." The reference is to the famous Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazi regime and was hanged for his role in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
Bonhoeffer is increasingly invoked by Christian Right leaders as they compare the situation in the United States to Nazi Germany and cast him -- as they choose to define him -- as a role model for Christian Right resistance.
The new manifesto says that extending marriage to same-sex couples violates their religious freedom, and that they want to "respectfully warn the Supreme Court" that they would adhere to "higher law." Their language was (relatively) soft, but clear: "Make no mistake about our resolve," they concluded, " ...this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross."
Some might say that the relationship between the conservative US Jewish community and Evangelicals is inviolable, with support for Israel being the cement that forever binds the two. However, a number of controversial social issues could threaten to alter a relationship that has historically been replete with awkward, and not so secret Christian objectives.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow in Obergefell v. Hodges, the marriage equality case.
In preparation for this, a sad collection of Religious Right leaders trooped to the microphone at the National Press Club on Friday to denounce marriage equality - again.
You don't have to be a Hillary hater (and I'm not) to recognize that Clinton and other Democratic Party leaders have had long and -- sometimes disturbing -- relationships with elements of the Christian Right.
From the origins of Charitable Choice and its offspring, the Faith Based Initiative, the diversion of federal dollars into creating an infrastructure for service delivery by conservative Christian groups is a long term, bipartisan (arguably transpartisan) project. Bogus gestures such as the effort to find common ground on abortion and claims of neutrality on abortion in public policy that marked the early years of the Obama administration diverted attention from the administration's secretive efforts to inexplicably direct federal funds, particularly in foreign aid, to religious groups that were hostile to the administration's stated agenda.
Rosenberg's essay recounts the origins of some of the conservative Christian exceptions to federal laws and policies, how they have evolved, and the role Clinton has played in this. She is certainly not the only one, but she is the one who happens to be running for president.
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While banking on Williams, AFC has quietly filed and begun to fund a new Pennsylvania political action committee (PAC) in preparation for their ongoing onslaught in the state. Initial funding for the PAC has come directly from the DeVos family, the national leaders behind school privatization as well as major funders of the GOP and Religious Right causes. Thus far the only recipient is Williams.
