The Progressive vs School Vouchers

Matthew Rothschild, editor for the past 19 years of The Progressive (founded over a century ago by Wisconsin Senator Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette), is turning over the editorship of the magazine to current political editor Ruth Conniff. In making the announcement in the September issue, Rothschild has this to say about Conniff ---

"In the past few months, she's been pouring herself into a crucial project she designed to defend our public schools. She has brought together some of the leading researchers who are fighting against the vultures who would voucherize, privatize, and destroy public education."

The Progressive is published in Madison, Wisconsin, where the first school voucher plan was started a generation ago by Republican politicians who thumbed their noses at the state constitution and denied the state's  voters the opportunity to vote on the matter. Wisconsin is the state in which Gov  Scott Walker and the Republican dominated legislature have been working overtime to wreck the state's public schools and crush their teachers.

It would be great if other other magazines -- liberal, progressve, moderate, even conservative -- would follow suit.

Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty (arlinc.or g)

Davies' Prescience

A. Powell Davies (1902-1957) served as minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington until his untimely death. In that prestigious pulpit he became one of the most well known liberal, progressive voices in the country on a host of issues. His sermons were regularly reported in the press and his packed services attracted even members of the Supreme Court and Congress.

Near the end (p 231) of his splendid biography, A. Powell Davies and His Times (Skinner House Books, 1990), author George Marshall wrote this paragraph: "The issues of church and state in the postwar world were fought on three fronts: the requests for public funds for parochial or religious education, government recognition of the Vatican, and the question of applying Catholic medical ethics to public policy and administration." How prescient! Let's look at these three areas of concern.

1. The campaigns for diverting public funds to church-run schools got well under way in the 1960s, with 27 state referenda on the matter from coast to coast between 1966 and 2012, numerous court cases, school voucher or tax-credit neo-voucher measures passing only in states where voters were denied the opportunity to say yea or nay (Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, etc), and opinion polls (such as the Gallup/PDK poll reported in August 2013) showing overwhelming public opposition to match the results of the referenda.

2. Ronald Reagan and Congress finally in 1984 granted diplomatic recognition to the Vatican (Holy See), making just one church the beneficiary of such US government recognition. Since Davies' time the Holy See has become the only religious Permanent Observer at the UN, a position it has consistently used to block or impede international action on women's rights and overpopulation, with painfully obvious impact on the resource depletion and climate change problems.

3. Since the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling the drive to apply the Catholic hierarchy's (note that I use the word "hierarchy" rather than Catholic people's) medieval medical ethics to public policy and administration, a  matter that cannot have escaped anyone's attention. (For a devastating in-depth critique of the Vatican's take on medical-sexual-women's ethics see German Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann's book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church [Doubleday, 1990]. See also Catholics for Choice's journal Conscience [2013, No.2.].)

So, well over a half century ago this far-sighted minister-lecturer -writer put his finger on three of the most important controversies facing us in America today.

Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty (arlinc.org)

Religious privileging in Maryland laws

By Mathew Goldstein

Laws that accommodate religious beliefs are sometimes appropriate, and even necessary, to respect individual religious liberty.  Laws should make a reasonable effort to accommodate religious beliefs, even when the religious beliefs are themselves foolish and deserving of disrespect (as is often the case).  Legal accommodation of some peoples' religious beliefs becomes unreasonable religious privileging when it is not protecting free exercise or when it infringes upon other peoples' freedom, civic equality, health, or safety.  Maryland law, like most other state law, includes some religious privileging.  Following are some examples, this is not a comprehensive summary of all such laws in this state.

There are a number of provisions in Maryland that accommodate faith healing.  Faith healing is a good example of a foolish religious belief that arguably negatively impacts primarily the religious believer and thus is at least partially protected as a religious liberty.  But Maryland law sometimes goes further and grants parents the ability to deny prudent medical care for their children. 

Most notable in this category is a religious exemption from a law that requires pregnant women to be tested for syphilis when they first become pregnant and again during the final trimester.  About 50 percent of pregnant women with untreated early syphilis end up with a baby who's infected. That's compared to 1 to 2 percent of women who get treated (thanks to atheist and materialist medicine that some people mistakenly characterize as exhibiting a methodological naturalism bias). They may lose the baby in miscarriage, stillbirth, or soon after birth, or the baby may be born with severe neurological problems. Syphilis also increases the risk of preterm birth and intrauterine growth restriction. This religious exemption from syphilis testing of pregnant women in Maryland is unconscionable and should be eliminated.  Other examples of questionable religious privileging in Maryland law that undermines the welfare of innocent children are exemptions from hearing, eyesight, and lead poisoning screening and from vaccinations.

Clergy are partially exempted from reporting child abuse revelations to law enforcement and judicial authorities.  Maryland law also has a second provision that broadly exempts clergy from testifying as a witness in judicial hearings "... on any matter in relation to any confession or communication made to him in confidence by a person seeking his spiritual advice or consolation."  Parents should think twice before passing their children over to religious institutions in Maryland.

Article 37 of the Declaration of Rights in Maryland's constitution  permits "... a declaration of belief in the existence of God" mandate "... as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State".  The U.S. Supreme Court declared this provision of Maryland law to be a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments in 1961, however this law has still not been amended to comply with the federal constitution.  Oaths of office for the National Guard and the Maryland Defense Force include a "So help me God" appeal.  Article 10 of the Rules of Interpretation contradicts these oaths while still incorporating an appeal to a god as follows:

The form of judicial and all other oaths to be taken or administered in this State, and not prescribed by the Constitution, shall be as follows: “In the presence of Almighty God I do solemnly promise or declare”, etc. And it shall not be lawful to add to any oath the words “So help me God”, or any imprecatory words whatever.

Article 36 of the Declaration of Rights permits anyone who does not believe "... in the existence of God, and that under His dispensation such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefor either in this world or in the world to come" to be involuntarily disqualified from serving as a juror or witness.  This Article was amended in 1970 but the amendment did nothing to eliminate this religious privileging.  Instead, the amendment endorsed government establishment of theism by adding this sentence:  "Nothing shall prohibit or require the making reference to belief in, reliance upon, or invoking the aid of God or a Supreme Being in any governmental or public document, proceeding, activity, ceremony, school, institution, or place."

The theistic Pledge of Allegiance must be recited in public schools.  There is an opt out provision for both students and teachers.  Laws like this make it difficult for people to keep their personal beliefs private.  And children in particular shouldn't be instructed by the state that theism is the more patriotic belief.

There are exemptions from sales and property taxes for religious organizations, including a parsonage exemption from property tax.  Another provision gives localities the option of refunding part or all of the property tax that religious organizations would otherwise be required to pay.  There are also regulation exemptions for religious organizations regarding cemeteries, obtaining a trader's license, and erecting advertisement signs.

Alabama, Oh My!

by Edd Doerr

Roy Moore, the  Alabama supreme court chief justice who was removed from that bench for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building a decade ago but who was returned to that office by the voters in 2012, is up to his old tricks. In a WFSA TV interview on August 21 Moore said that putting up the monument was "the right thing to do." He added that "the Constitution ... and the First Amendment [state] basically we must acknowledge God to have a moral basis for our society and to retain [our] freedom of conscience." Moore  evidently has not read the Constitution or the First Amendment.

Dean Young, one of nine candidates running in the September Republican primary to fill a vacant House seat, is pushing his rivals to sign a pledge that they will oppose same-sex marriage and that they belong to a church whose "tenants" [sic] oppose same-sex marriage. Moore is evidently not familiar with Article VI of the US Constitution and Article I,  Section 3 of the Alabama constitution, both of which prohibit religious tests for public office.

Is there something strange in the water in Alabama?

Visit the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum

Gary Berg-Cross

Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll, the great, progressive orator of the late 19^th century,  was born August 11, 1833 at 61 Main Street in  Dresden, New York. . That’s 180 years ago this month.  By chance I happened to be in the Dresden area on that August 11th weekend.  Thanks to a timely tip from the Ingersoll Oratory Contest held in June, I knew of the  Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden and stopped by to perused the collection of Ingersoll memorabilia and literature.

It gave some time to reflect on the life of this great human being who had so much to say on politics, the arts, science, and the intrusions of religion into these and other aspects of American life.  I was familiar with many of Bob's writings, but less so on the details of his life in the Midwest, his wife and family and some famous people touched by Ingersoll's oratory - Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison and  Mark Twain. On Ingersoll death of heart failure in July of 1899 at the age of 65 Mark Twain wrote the following to Ingersoll’s niece:

“Except for my daughter’s, I have not grieved for any death as I have grieved for his.”

If you are ever in the Finger Lakes area of NY, I recommend a stop by for a chance to walk with an exceptional mind. There is also a video to see and it is also online.

I learned a bit of the history and effort to save this house as a museum and the story is told in the museum this way:

The house has been restored on three occasions. It was first restored in 1921 by a blue-ribbon committee whose members included Thomas Edison and Edgar Lee Masters. It operated as a community center until the Great Depression. It was restored in 1954 by atheist activist Joseph Lewis, and operated as a museum until the mid-1960s. It was near collapse when it was purchased in 1986 by the Council for Secular Humanism. After raising and spending more than $250,000, the Council rehabilitated the birthplace and in 1993, opened it as a museum. It is open weekends each summer and fall. 

Thank you. Council for Secular Humanism and director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum Tom Flynn. Tom, BTW, will the speaker at the WASH MDC chapter meeting Dec. 14^th which will be held at the Rockville library (2-4).

While you are in the area you might organize some of your tine along the Freethought Trail of update NY to peruse as you travel.  This is a collection of locations in West-Central New York such as the Elmira home of Mark Twain,  important to the history of freethought. 

The Freethought Trail website is a project of the Council for Secular Humanism, a nonprofit educational organization based in Amherst, New York and we have (again)  the Council’s Tom Flynn , along with Sally Roesch Wagner of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation to thank for it.

Image Credits

From the museum site and

Photo by Gary Berg-Cross

Energy and the Evolution of Culture Life: Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

On Saturday Oct. 12, 2013 from 2-3  Nancie L. Gonzalez will present a talk on the topic of Energy and the Evolution of Culture Life:  Nancie a Ph.D. anthropologist (Univ. of Michigan) is  Professor Emeritus from the  Univ. of Maryland, College Park. She has conducted ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on marriage and family patterns in a number of societies, including the American Southwest, the Caribbean, Central America, China, and the West Bank and has published widely since the 1960s.  She lives in Richmond, Virginia. Below is a small abstract of the talk.

We start by defining culture broadly as that body of acts, objects, ideas and sentiments that depend upon symbols and abstract thought for their existence.  This view also asserts that culture distinguishes humans from all other life forms, and that the symboling ability developed after certain brain mutations occurred in ancestral primates. Articulate speech was one of those that proved successful in developing and passing on to new generations ways to improve the quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Some other animals can learn cultural symbols, but they are not known to invent them.

            Using data from archaeological sites and ethnography in societies ranging from preliterate foragers to modern, industrial, urban civilizations, this talk argues that the key to cultural evolution has been the kind and amount of energy humans have harnessed and controlled at different points over the past 200,000 years.  Non-cultural animals, including early hominids, had only the energy of their bodies at their disposal, and had to depend upon their biological makeup for food, defense, and the acquisition of mates for reproduction and care of the young.  Beginning with the domestication of plants and animals, and ending with the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic energy, it is suggested that the globalized society we now know has perhaps sowed seeds of its own destruction and may not continue to persist as we know it until and unless new forms of energy are discovered and harnessed.

70% Opppose Vouchers: Gallup/PDK

by Edd Doerr

The Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll released today (Aug 21) shows that 70% of Americans polled oppose school vouchers and tax-credit "neo-vouchers". This closely matches the 2 to 1 opposition registered in 27 statewide referendum elections from coast to coast, from Alaska to Florida and from Massachusetts to California and states in between.

The question used: "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" This very neutral wording made no mention of the sectarian religious nature of the vast majority of private schools, of their selectivity, or of the fact that tax support of private schools would fragment the school population along creedal, ethnic, class and other lines.

Over the years the primary political thrust for vouchers and similar schemes has come from the Republican Party in Congress and state legislatures and from the Religious Right and the Catholic bishops.

More details on the Gallup/PDK poll will appear in the next issue of Americans for Religious Liberty's journal Voice of Reason, deu off the press in two weeks.

For more details on the state referenda and vouchers in general, see my monograph "The Great School Voucher Fraud" at arlinc.org.

" A Principled matter for Virginia"

(posted by Edd Doerr)

This letter was published in the Washington Post on 8/16/13 ---

Virginia gubernatorial aspirant Ken Cuccinelli II ["Cuccinelli's K-12 plan would let parents take over failing school," Metro, Aug.  14] wants to amend the state constitution to remove language prohibiting the diversion of public funds to religious institutions,  i.e., sectarian private schools. That language was the foundation of the US Constitution's First Amendment and should remain in Virginia law. Similar provisions in the majority of state constitutions, based on the Jefferson/Madison principle of church-state separation, guarantee the religious freedoms of all Americans.

Ken Sandin, Rockville, MD

The writer is a member of the board of directors of Americans for Religious Liberty.