A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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Legislative Prayer

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(Via Indiana Law Blog) The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the case of Hinrichs v. Bosma (in his official capacity as Speaker of the House of Representatives) on Thursday, September 7 at 10:30 a.m. in Chicago. The appellate materials are available here, including briefs from the parties and amici briefs from the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, Advance America, the Indiana Family Institute, and the “Liberty” Counsel. The issue, as readers might recall, is whether the Speaker of the House of Representatives can exercise his authority over access to the Speaker’s podium during session to allow sectarian prayer, such as a revival-style singing and clapping rendition of “Just a little walk with Jesus”  as official business of the Indiana House of Representatives. The District Court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled that the government’s ability to engage in such public speech was limited and that the Constitution’s limitation on the government prohibited this activity. Speaker Bosma has appealed the decision.

According to a story in the Indianapolis Star by Mary Beth Schneider, the appeal is currently being paid for by taxpayers, but Speaker Bosma is appealing to “the public” to defray expenses in excess of $67,000 paid to a Washington, D.C. law firm. Taking Down Words suggests that this issue will play into the GOP “WedgeWhack” strategy wherein Republican strategists seek to distract voters from bread-and-butter issues with emotionally charged wedge issues.

Political Quote

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A fine political quote. I think I’d vote for this guy over Katherine Harris (though obviously I’d prefer something in the middle):

I would have your wife right in front of you. I would smoke the last of your glaucoma medication. Then I will surely drink your liquor cabinet dry. However, know this my friend. I will never break an oath to uphold the public trust. My affidavit will be signed in my own blood. A Pirates crimson mark, with real binding effects into my after life.

Katherine Harris: Non-Christians will legislate sin

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Katherine Harris, a Florida member of the House of Representatives and former Republican Secretary of State for Florida who was instrumental in securing the State of Florida for George Bush’s 2000 election effort is the Republican nominee to represent Florida in the U.S. Senate.

In the course of her Senate campaign, she has released a few statements that are pure, unadulterated wingnuttery:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris (news, bio, voting record) told a religious journal that separation of church and state is “a lie” and God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.” The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will “legislate sin,” including abortion and gay marriage.

. . .

Separation of church and state is “a lie we have been told,” Harris said in the interview, published Thursday, saying separating religion and politics is “wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”

“If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” Harris said.

Thankfully, some of her fellow Republicans are trying to distance themselves from this kind of position. However, Harris is not some fringe member of the party. She was front and center in the effort to give Florida’s electoral votes to George Bush in 2000. She is a member of Congress. And she’s the party’s nominee in Florida’s Senate race. I’d be a lot more comfortable with the Republican Party if this kind of Dominionist nonsense was anathema to mainstream candidates.

Disturbing

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This image is more than a little disturbing (h/t  Torpor Indy):

The New York Times has the story about the statue which was erected at a megachurch in Memphis.

The real Statue of Liberty’s more formal name is Liberty Enlightening the World. Her powers of enlightenment are gone with the new statue, her torch having been replaced with a cross, and the tablet she held bearing the inscription “July IV MDCCLXXVI” now holds a tablet with the 10 commandments; pretty lousy trades in my opinion.

Virginity or Death

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My wife was kind enough to call my attention to a 2005 column in the Nation by Katha Pollit entitled “Virginity or Death.” She makes a compelling argument that what many conservative Christians are interested in is, not so much preventing abortion, but in keeping sex tied to reproduction and disease to make women afraid of sex.

A primary exhibit in this argument is the baffling opposition to the HPV vaccine. Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have developed vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus, generally recognized as a sexually transmitted disease resulting in genital warts. However, its more serious consequences is as a leading cause of cervical cancer which is diagnosed in 10,000 women per year and kills 4,000.

So, vaccinate girls and get rid of cervical cancer. A no brainer, right? Well, not according to the Family Research Council:

“Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

While HPV might not be a reason that girls are avoiding sex, it provides a pretext for the New Puritans to oppose condom education in schools since HPV is not preventable by condoms. “Why bother, you could just get HPV anyway.”

Ms. Pollit puts it this way:

Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It’s Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally–why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow.

Ms. Pollit goes on to argue that this mentality goes along with the right wing opposition to reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available; they want to make it less available and to make abstinence the only viable option for avoiding pregnancy or disease.

While I’m sure actual reasons vary for the various stances of politically active New Puritans on restricting availability of birth control and medicines to prevent STDs, as a whole the stances seem to make the most sense if one views sex as evil and views disease and pregnancy as God’s punishment for promiscuity.

Ostentatious prayer

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Advance Indiana continues its skewering of Eric Miller’s Advance America. Seriously, with respect to this legislative issue, somebody’s gonna have to address the admonition against ostentatious prayer in the Gospel according to Matthew before I’m seriously going to believe that Christians absolutely have to pray in the name of Jesus from the Speaker’s podium.

The VA’s Religious Bias

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Ed Brayton has an interesting post up about the V.A.’s refusal to allow soldiers buried in military cemeteries to have Wiccan symbols on their headstone, despite the V.A.’s tendency toward religious inclusiveness — they allow headstones with religious symbols for atheists and obscure religions such as the United Moravian Church. But no Wiccans.

One prominent member of the religious right, Paul Weyrich encourages Christians to boycott the military until it refuses to allow Wiccans to serve their country.

Brayton: Religion & the Majoritarian Impulse

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Ed Brayton has a good blog post entitled “Religion and the Majoritarian Impulse” in which he discusses the case of Russell County High School in Kentucky. Apparently they had a tradition where the students elected a “graduation chaplain” who led a Christian prayer at the graduation ceremony. A Muslim student who was graduating filed suit to stop that tradition and a judge issued an injunction against it.

So instead, in the middle of the principal’s opening remarks, 200 students stood up, interrupted the proceedings, and recited the Lord’s prayer, prompting a standing ovation from most of those in attendance. That act received praise from the school principal and superintendant.

The Superintendent labeled the mass defiance an example of “critical thinking” that demonstrates an ability to make compelling decisions on one’s own.

The reaction didn’t stop there. The students booed the student who brought suit as he received his diploma and walked across the stage.

Mr. Brayton goes on:

Now, whether the judge’s ruling was correct or not is not the issue here; it’s a close call from a con law standpoint. But with all of the fervent cheering going on for these kids on the right side of the internet, I must dissent. I think what they did was act like a bully. On the religionlaw listserv, one enthusiastic supporter of action praised kids for celebrating “the spirit of liberty”. David Guinn of Baylor law school gave what seems to me to be the perfect response. He wrote:

First, the students (as approved by Prof. Duncan) are using prayer not as a religious devotion but as a political act — to express their disapproval of the one student and the “unelected judiciary” and as a weapon against others that don’t share in that faith. That strikes me as sacralege as well as a perversion.

Second, why is it necessary to make these prayers public in a public forum? This sounds a little too much like the hypocrites of Mt. 6:5 If it is a matter of needing community, why not a community made up of fellow believers rather than demanding the audience of those who might not believe (or believe as they do)?

While it may be “their” commencement, it is also the commencement of all of the other students and their families present. Should everyone be allowed to interrupt the service and impose their religious exhortation on everyone else?

Graduations frequently involve not just commencement, but a series of celebrations over the course of the weekend. Why not reserve religious celebrations for a separate ceremony shared among their community of faith? The only justification I can come up with is the belief that their faith is so weak that it must be endorsed by the school in the public ceremony.

I find the whole thing offensive and sad…..

I’ve probably quoted way too much, but the post is so dead on. I’m particularly struck by David Guinn’s statement that seems to capture so much of what is wrong with public proclamations of religious belief these days: The proclaimers are using prayer not as a religious devotion but as a political act and as a weapon against others that don’t share in that faith. It is sacrilege and perversion.

Government small enough to fit into your bedroom

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From the “government small enough to fit into your bedroom” department, we have the American Family Association of Indiana’s Micah Clark trying to breed hate against gays by trotting out the false assertion that homosexuality is somehow linked to child molestation. He provides no explanation for all of the molestations committed by heterosexuals. Advance Indiana takes him to task.

Could Steve Buyer facilitate nuclear war with Iran?

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O.k., I’ll grant you that the title of the post is inflammatory. But, for maybe the first time, I’m actually scared rather than extremely disgruntled. Sy Hersch has an article in the New Yorker reporting that a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran is being considered as a serious option. You might recall Hersch is the reporter who first unearthed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

This is the part that really made me nervous:

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

Reading the article called to mind Steve Buyer’s support for using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan.

Buyer said Thursday that it’s too risky to send large numbers of ground troops into mountain hideouts. Instead, small special operation forces could fight their way into caves and bunkers and plant timer-detonated tactical nuclear devices powerful enough to bring down entire mountains.

Add to those things the Bush administration’s recent drumbeat against Iran that has a striking resemblance to the drumbeat leading up to war with Iraq that for the first time makes me legitimately concerned that this lameduck President with minimal support at home, all of his policy initiatives in shambles, and a messianic notion that he is an instrument of the Almighty might actually drop a nuclear bomb in Iran and that he would have the support of members of Congress like Steve Buyer.

Tim F over at Balloon Juice has a good post on this subject. In particular, I agree with the sentiment reflected in the exchange between one of the commenters on that post and Tim F.:

I’m willing to entertain the notion that this is part of a grand bluff to Iran – look how nutty Bush is, he’ll do anything.

However such a plan would require a disipline and coordination that, given the observations of the last 5 1/2 years, does not exist in this administration.

However, if it isn’t an attempt to bluff, that leaves us with the only other explanation – the entire administration is batshit insane.

You can call that the Mel Gibson strategy, a la Lethal Weapon. Many of us figured that was what he was up to in Iraq, but – oops – it turned out that he was serious as a heart attack. Don’t make that bet unless you want to lose money.

You know, it’s a sign of the times where, in a bet between bluff and batshit insane, the smart money’s on batshit insane.