For crying out loud JD, we went over this when the story first broke. Your cite claims that: “When a state university requires students to immerse themselves in the study of a particular religion, it can expect trouble”. But (surprise,surprise) they provide absolutely no evidence to back up this statement. Public universities have a right (and a responsibility) to establish their own curriculums. Many of them require readings from the Bible or other Christian texts. I know for a fact that honors students at the University of Kentucky are required to spend months reading the Bible, as well as Saint Augustine and others. Your post is a perfect example of the mindset for the religious right. One set of standards for Christians, a completely different one for everybody else.
Did you really believe that just because this particular case happens to be a couple years old, those of us who take an intelligent approach to the issue would have forgotten the basic facts? If so, you’re in for disappointment.
JD:The point is, everyone has there panties in a bunch because they don’t want anything “Christian” federally or publically funded.
We don’t want anything religious federally or publicly funded, because it’s unconstitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that restricts government expenditure in general only to things that everybody supports. Government support of religion, however, is specifically forbidden.
*Don’t worry, before long, the ACLU will make sure Christianity is illegal. *
An ignorant and malicious lie, which as a committed ACLU member I resent very deeply. You should be ashamed of yourself. Civil liberties are for everybody, and that means that we defend religious freedom for Christians as well as for everybody else. We just don’t let Christians (or anybody else) use the government to impose their religious practices on others.
Can anyone give me a cite for what the ACLU did when some students of the University of North Carolina were required to read part of the Koran?
How is having to read a book about the Qur’an a civil-liberties issue? The university was not requiring students to practice Islam or espouse Muslim beliefs; it was just requiring them to find out something about it because Islam was very central to important contemporary events. Similarly, courses on religion in schools and colleges all over the country require students to read the Bible and books about the Bible, and the ACLU doesn’t object to that either.
*There was an incident where a fifth grade teacher, Kenneth Roberts, of Berkley Gardens Elementary School in Denver, Colorado, was sued by his principal, Kathleen Madigan, the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League, because he kept a Bible at his desk for his own personal reading during tests. *
Urban legend. There isn’t even a public elementary school in Denver called “Berkley Gardens”, for heavens’ sake! Honestly, do you Christian-extremist types just believe anything you’re told as long as it makes the ACLU look bad?
As for ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, it will no doubt startle you to learn that his activism stemmed from his church work: ‘Baldwin reflected in his later years that, “social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.”’ Just because he was a left-wing radical doesn’t mean he wasn’t sincere about protecting freedom of religion for everybody. (By the way, he abandoned Communism in 1939 and in fact “revised the ACLU charter in order to prevent anyone affiliated with a totalitarian organization from joining the board and in particular, to rid the Board of a Communist party member”.)
As for union dues paid to the ACLU, I agree that Mr. Poisel should have a say in where the charitable part of his dues go, but your beef here is with the union, not with the ACLU.
I wonder if the ACLU would fight for me if I decided to make a religious statement by wearing my Bible on a necklace?
Sure, if you asked them to support your lawsuit and they felt it was an important case. You will notice that Keweenau provided a cite to an ACLU case where they supported the right of a Christian student group to distribute religious literature in school:
I apologize if this deluge of genuine factual information about the ACLU, as opposed to what is apparently your usual mental diet of Internet spam and hate-filled partisan mythology, is making you feel a little woozy. But I promise that once you get used to honest information, you’ll come to enjoy it.
Hi, Jersey! You make some excellent points, and I’m not minded to challenge most of them – some I do agree with. But there is one that, in the interests of accuracy, I ought to – not refute, but correct. You may still have a problem with what was done, but at least you’ll be objecting based on the facts:
I looked into this one quite thoroughly – it’s a freedom-of-religion question, no doubt, and I live only 40 miles from the school in question.
It’s been the policy for several years of UNC-Chapel Hill, the flagship school of our state university system and a place with very high academic standards, to require incoming freshmen, over the summer before they start their first year at college, to read a book that gives background on a contemporary hot-button issue, as a part of expanding their horizons beyond what they may have gotten in high school. One year, with an issue about what the Sons of Confederate Veterans stood for a major local news item, they assigned a book on the lingering impact of the Confederacy on Southern attitudes.
The book they picked for the Class of 2006 to read in the summer of 2002 before entering school was a book that examined the Middle Eastern culture and Islamic values from the perspective of the earliest parts of the Koran. There were excerpts from the Koran included, of course, as background to what the authors were talking about.
Recognizing that there was indeed a freedom-of-religion issue involved, UNC gave the option to students who felt that reading this book would be contrary to their beliefs, to instead write an essay justifying why they held that view.
The intent was never to promote Islam, but to give some breadth of college-level knowledge on the subject to students who are presumably going to be taking university-level courses during a period when issues relating to our dealings with the Islamic world are a major national bone of contention. The option to write the essay kept the students who took it from getting that background, of course, but was necessary to protect their right not to read something that they had scruples about, and instead substituted the requirement to make a clear argument as to why their beliefs called for refusing to read it – a test, if you will, of their ability to write a compelling argument.
I do not object to anybody arguing clearly for their Christian beliefs – I do it quite a lot myself, as you may have noticed! – but I do object to anyone knowingly lying for the purpose of promoting a quasi-Christian stance – and I have nothing but pity for the folks who swallow whole such lies, as His4Ever (whom I count a friend, by the way) seems to have done, since they’re put forth by “good Christian men.” I’m rather confident that you and Joe Cool are edified by some Christian broadcasts, and find others to be truly distasteful, and too full of hate and vitriol to be anything deserving the name Christian. It’s these latter folk and their spiritual brothers that I’m speaking of.
I’m not looking to set up a “Christians are evil” thread here – you know better! – just hoping to “combat a little ignorance” by getting the facts marshalled.
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
I’ve just searched for “Trial and Error”, by Geo Grant, at both amazon and Google. amazon gave me no hits. Google gave me exactly one hit, namely back to that webpage that you linked to. Hmmmmmm.
Let’s focus on that web page for a little bit, why don’t we. It’s a personal blog by the notorious anti-choice activist Diane Dew. Now I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no everything that appears on the net is automatically true. Dew claims that the quote above and many others come from the “policy papers” of the ACLU, but gives us no clue as to how we might go about verifying such a claim. She gives us a link to the ACLU’s front page, tellings us that we can find the proof of all her statements for ourselves. I searched the site for “policy papers”, I got many links. None of the first twenty or so that I followed contained anything similar to what Dew had said would be found in the “policy papers”. Hmmmmm.
Hey Poly.
I am glad you cleared that up for me! Thank you.
I think it is fine for a university to give the students the option to read or not to read a religious book.
I thought they were required to with no other options. I have NO problem with the way it was handled.
I tried to do a more in depth search on the topic, but I was unsuccessful.
Do you have any links to this? For some reason my googling abilities are off.
Yep, George was an Episcopalian, and served on the Vestry (=official board) of the parish church he attended for many years. He was a bit of a freethinker, drawn towards Deism, and there will be folks who will quote some of his private correspondence to show that “he wasn’t a Christian” – apparently meaning that he didn’t subscribe to every bit of orthodox doctrine.
I’ll try to chase down the cites for what I said and post 'em here; they’re pretty well buried in old threads by now, but it was a really hot issue both locally – the paper even devoted half its Sunday opinion section to it one week – and over on the Pizza Parlor. So I really got an earful about it!
Not quite. Of course, we all hear stories of the brave Pilgrims who sailed across the sea in search of a new land to create that “Beacon on a Hill”,–and in the process brutually slaughtered thousand of Native Americans because they were the Devil’s minions-- but they weren’t the first group over. Remember a little settlement known as Jamestown? If anything, you can claim the country was founded by people who wanted freedom to make lots of money and exploit the land.
For the first one, scroll down and you will see the quote, and for the second link, Click on the top of the page (freebooks), and it will take you there.
Sorry
JD: *I tried to do a more in depth search on the topic, but I was unsuccessful. Do you have any links to this? *
Here is the page from the UNC-Chapel Hill orientation program on their 2002 topic, Approaching the Qur’an. Glad you are interested in finding out more, and sorry I snapped at you.
Jersey–given the cites above in which they defend Christians against infringements on their religious freedoms, are you willing to concede that the ACLU is not the anti-Christian boogeyman you’ve been led to believe it is?
Right. I believe several of the states surrounding Massachusetts were founded by people who had been run out of the Massachusetts Bay colony for religious reasons.
Regarding the purported Madigan vs Roberts lawsuit:
Actually, it is not an urban legend, but an actual case from Colorado (although I do not know the school).
However, the presentation found in the literature of the Religious Right does serious violence to the facts (of course).
Roberts did have a Bible from which he read silently during the period he had set aside for his students to read silently. However, he also maintained the Bible prominently on his desk and kept two other religious texts in his “classroom library.”
At the complaint of a parent, the principal ordered him to remove the texts from sight. He (not she) sued on the grounds of religious freedom. When it got to Federal court, it appears that the court ruled against him, while supporting the idea of including any of the specific works in the school library, (which had been a key point of his argument). The court ruled that the library was a general collection of books that included a range of possible titles, while he was maintaining only a limited number of religious works and that, as the authority figure in the room, he had the ability to produce undue influence on the students.
I am not sure that I entirely agree with the ruling, although I have not found the original with all the particulars, so I am reserving judgement.
However, it remains that the case as presented by the Religious Right is a lie: the ACLU did not “sue him” simply because he was reading silently from a book he kept inside his desk drawer. He sued for the right to keep that Bible plus two other books before his students, despite the protest of one or more parents of the children he was affecting.
Roberts v. Madigan, 702 F. Supp. 1505 (D. Colo. 1989)
Roberts v. MADIGAN, 921 F. 2d 1047 (10th Cir. 1990)
As presented, here, this is actually a bit of that notorious “revisionism”–in this case, it reflect an ignorance by the people “correcting” the history books.
The Pilgrims (who were never called Pilgrims until a couple of hundred years after the Plymouth landing) were Separatists who were not Puritans, and Governor Bradford spent the majority of his long life keeping them free of the entanglements of the later Puritans (who founded the Bay Colony to the North and who did spend a lot of time in warfare against the native inhabitants). Until eventually overwhelmed by the Puritan majority, the Plymouth Colony always maintained good relations with the people who had saved the first settlement in 1621.
Actually, the New Testament endorses slavery, so freedom and equality are out the window as Christian values. The sanctity of human life is a universal value not a Christian one, per se, and the founding fathers drew nothing whatever from Christianity in drafting the constitution. It was based on Greek and Roman democratic models more than anything else, and was always intended to be secular. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name two, were not Christians. Jefferson even compiled his own gospel in which he removed all miraculous or supernatural references from the canonical gospels.
I would also remind you that the Msrs. Jefferson, et al did not set out to create an egalitarian society. Democracy was only for white, male landowners
And even absent the NT and OT endorsements of slavery there is a definite lack of freedom and equality in many Christian denominations. Just think of the role of women in conservative denominations, the things they aren’t allowed to do. You are also required to believe various things in order to be a member of that church, in addition to your obligations of tithing and attendance (these vary depending on denomination/diocese/church etc., of course).
I mean, Hell, if you’re going to make the argument that Freedom, equality and sanctity of human life are Christian principles, how many other religions put those forth as principles? Using your argument, Soup, each of those religions, per your premise, given that it existed at the appropriate time, served as a guideline for the foundation of America.
Now, I’m neither a Jewish nor an Islamic scholar, but IIRC those values you mentioned as being Christian also belong to those two religions. Do we now make the argument that this country was founded on Islamic values, and as such is an Islamic state?
– but I do object to anyone knowingly lying for the purpose of promoting a quasi-Christian stance – and I have nothing but pity for the folks who swallow whole such lies, as His4Ever (whom I count a friend, by the way) seems to have done, since they’re put forth by “good Christian men.” I’m rather confident that you and Joe Cool are edified by some Christian broadcasts, and find others to be truly distasteful, and too full of hate and vitriol to be anything deserving the name Christian. It’s these latter folk and their spiritual brothers that I’m speaking of.
