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No Tax Money for GA Public School Bible Classes

No Tax Money for GA Public School Bible Classes

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The Georgia State Senate has passed two pieces of legislation that pose a serious threat to the separation of church and state.

One would create state-funded Bible classes in Georgia public schools.
The second would allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed by county governments.

Both bills are on Governor Sonny Perdue’s desk, and he is contemplating whether to sign them.

Take action now and demand that Governor Perdue defend the Constitution and Georgia’s citizens from these attacks on the separation of church and state.

If these were really christians, they would want to post something that better represented Jesus’ teaching. The focus on the ten commandments is symptomatic of their seeming inability to understand love, forgiveness and grace. Neither do they take into account hundreds of years of Jewish and Christian scholarship and debate on issues of interpretation, translation, or socio-historical context. Their “take” on christianity is a perversion of their own religion. Their absolutist views of human beings show little evidence of any of the spiritual virtues. Think I’m overstating? Try Googling “Christian Reconstruction” or “theonomy” – they want a theocracy here, complete with the total control of women, even stoning!

From the Forerunner – I’m not linking to this site – Google a phrase:

We are not looking for a “voice a the table” nor are we seeking “equal time” with the godless promoters of pornography, abortion, safe-sodomy subsidies, socialism, etc. We want them silenced and punished according to God’s Law-Word.

They use God as a tool. Jesus would think they were jerks. This is about votes! This is about scapegoating and turning us against one another so that we don’t notice that we’re all getting robbed. I mean literally robbed – of our traditions, our ideals, our treasury, our natural resources, our futures.

From Apologetics Index:

Epitomizing the Reconstructionist idea of Biblical ”warfare” is the centrality of capital punishment under Biblical Law. Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder. Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, ”sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, ”unchastity before marriage.”

I can’t believe this. Really. I’m shaking my head. So now they want to get ’em while they’re young – and use our own tax dollars to do it! Already they have uniforms. What next, a special salute?

The separation of church and state protects religious rights, the freedom of religious expression. There should be no state sponsorship of a specific religious tradition. Religious training of minors is the right and responsibility of families and their own religious tradition.

There is no proposal here to teach a wide range of religious texts or religious themes across the world’s traditions. The cuts to more fundamental educational areas serve only to highlight the political motivation of these bills.

Bible classes for minors are an unconstitutional use of funds. At the college level, courses related to religion, such as comparative religion and mythology, spiritual autobiography, Bible as literature, and the like are appropriate as elective courses at state universities. I have been trained in theology and ethics at a state university, and taken courses in religion at the undergraduate level at another. But courses and departments of religion have a different set of approaches than the ones we can expect to see from public school teachers. They started with home schooling, now this. Questions of belief will enter the classroom, and we will see a newly indocrinated “Christian Youth” if they get their way. Wake up, sheeple.

No – you can’t use our tax dollars to indoctrinate our children. No – you can’t fool us, we know what this is all about, and we’re not all as ignorant as you seem to think. Add these totalitarian “religious” power freaks to the neo-cons of empire and the puppets of corporate interests, and you see the unholy trinity that is killing this country and all it stands for! Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, take heed!

Stop the pseudo-religious right from pushing their dubious “theology” in our public schools and our public square.

Thanks only to 10 Senators

Thanks only to 10 Senators

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For the record – and I will remember this – these are the only Senators who stood up for my civil liberties by voting against the renewal of the USA Patriot Act.

I thank you:

  • Russ Feingold (D-WI)
  • Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
  • Robert Byrd (D-WV)
  • Tom Harkin (D-IA)
  • Ron Wyden (D-OR)
  • Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
  • Patty Murray (D-WA)
  • Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
  • Carl Levin (D-MI)
  • Jim Jeffords (I-VT)

Boo-hiss to all the Republicans, and:

  • Obama (D-IL)
  • Clinton (D-NY)
  • Kerry (D-MA)
  • Kennedy (D-MA)
  • Biden (D-DE)
  • Boxer (D-CA)
  • Feinstein (D-CA)
  • Schumer (D-NY)
  • Durbin (D-IL)
  • Landrieu (D-LA)
  • Lieberman (D-CT)
  • Baucus (D-MT)
  • Bayh (D-IN)
  • Cantwell (D-WA)
  • Carper (D-DE)
  • Conrad (D-ND)
  • Dayton (D-MN)
  • Dodd (D-CT)
  • Dorgan (D-ND)
  • Inouye (D-HI) (no vote)
  • Johnson (D-SD)
  • Kohl (D-WI)
  • Lautenberg (D-NJ)
  • Lincoln (D-AR)
  • Menendez (D-NJ)
  • Mikulski (D-MD)
  • Nelson (D-FL)
  • Nelson (D-NE)
  • Pryor (D-AR)
  • Reed (D-RI)
  • Reid (D-NV)
  • Rockefeller (D-WV)
  • Salazar (D-CO)
  • Sarbanes (D-MD)
  • Stabenow (D-MI)
A view on NSA Spying

A view on NSA Spying

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The New York Review of Books: ON NSA SPYING: A LETTER TO CONGRESS

Vol 52, no 2, Feb. 9 2006

A collection of constitutional law scholars and former government officials published this letter to Congress in the New York Review of Books. I would love to post the whole thing, but I don’t want to run afoul of their permissions rules.

The administration’s argument that the 2001 AUMF authorization of the use of force somehow grants permission for the NSA spying program fails for many reasons.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has admitted that the administration didn’t even seek to amend FISA because it was advised Congress would reject such amendment. How can he argue that Congress authorized it already when they were clearly conscious that Congress would say no if they asked? (Isn’t that called premeditation?)

The clear and specific view of Congress in the language of FISA isn’t trumped by an implicit or unstated one. Domestic surveillance during wartime has been specifically addressed under FISA as the exclusive means under which it may not be a criminal act. The power to do what has been done under the NSA Program has been explicitly withheld. Congress has already spoken, and used their power to regulate the exclusive means by which domestic surveillance can be conducted. Absent any evidence that Congress intended to repeal those provisions, they take precedence.

It makes criminal any electronic surveillance not authorized by statute, id. § 1809; and it expressly establishes FISA and specified provisions of the federal criminal code (which govern wiretaps for criminal investigation) as the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance…may be conducted," 18 U.S.C. § 2511.

The FISA statue specifically allows for wartime domestic electronic surveillance – but only for the first 15 days of a war. (Again, where is the declaration of war?) They further maintain that the President (even in his role as Commander in Chief) can only act against FISA where his authority is exclusive (not subject to the check of statutory regulation). This is not the case for domestic spying. In addition, both the constitutional protections of probable cause and judicial order and/or oversight have been ignored by this program.

The letter goes on to discuss all of this in some detail. I missed it when it first came out, so here’s a deep bow to TJJA (as always) for alerting me.

2 Groups to Sue on Eavesdropping

2 Groups to Sue on Eavesdropping

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Two Groups Planning to Sue Over Federal Eavesdropping – New York Times

The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

…

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960’s and 70’s?

…

The lawsuits over the eavesdropping program come as several defense lawyers in terrorism cases have begun challenges, arguing that the government may have improperly hidden the use of the surveillance program from the courts in investigating terrorism leads.

By their words

By their words

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“Not that I have anything against lawyers. Looking around the room, I’d guess that a year ago, about half of you were down in Florida.”
Dick Cheney, Nov 2001, to The Federalist Society

“You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
George W. Bush, speech at a Washington dinner, 3/2001

“I am the federal government. I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government employee. I am the Constitution.”
Tom DeLay responding to a government employee who tried to prevent him from smoking on government property, 1995

“I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
George W. Bush

“Given the outcome of our work in Florida and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country.”
Martin L. Fagan, ChoicePoint Vice-President, speaking of expunging voters from the rolls

“God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”
George W. Bush, to former Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, 6/2003

Unable to Mourn, Unable to Care

Unable to Mourn, Unable to Care

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Now that more than two thousand of our side, and who knows, really, how many thousands of the other side (the ones who start counting seem to end up dead fairly often), it’s a good time to review a basic lack in the President, who was put into office through the judicial activism he claims to deplore. This President, simply, doesn’t care.

Bush stole the 2004 election – E L Doctorow’s statement

Ringing even more truthfully today than it did then, these words from the political novelist’s statement pinpoint the character of this President. As he enjoys his record-breaking vacation, avoiding all funerals and other such unpleasantries, it is clear that the families of the fallen will get no comfort from him. Of the ones not counted – the ones who died on the way to a hospital elsewhere, or who died after their return, or who had psychological breakdowns – there is still not a word. You have to die in Iraq to be counted.

“He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life…. they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

…
How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.”