Barry W. Lynn Quotes
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Let's keep this simple: We separate religion and government in this country. That means the state has no business setting aside special days for prayer or other religious observances. Thomas Jefferson knew that. He refused to issue prayer proclamations during his presidency. James Madison issued a few under pressure from Congress but later in his life wrote an essay saying he wished he hadn't. Andrew Jackson followed Jefferson's lead and refused to issue such proclamations entirely.
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Ohio's students deserve a first-class education appropriate for the 21st century, not Sunday School lessons masquerading as science.
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So refusing to say you won't do something is the moral equivalent of doing.
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So, here we have cases about cakes and contraception that could still eventually lead to what I consider a bizarre outcome: religious claims trump any and all laws some corporate owner doesn't agree with. Why not just let companies refuse to go along with civil rights laws based on religious objections. Some of us heard preachers in the early sixties actually argue that the words in book of Genesis, “God separated the light from the darkness,” should be interpreted to reject school integration.
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Because none of the wording is included in the artistic rendering. Moses is depicted cradling two tablets on a frieze that also includes historical lawgivers like Hammurabi, Solomon, Confucius, Muhammad, Napoleon, and the Roman emperor Augustus. The display represents the evolution of the law over the centuries. It's not intended to promote religion.
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Lawmakers reacted to the report by cutting off the funds to continue the testing of students so nobody would know if there was any improvement. This even turns free marketism on its head: Create an expensive government program with taxpayer money, and when the data suggests the program isn't working, hide the data and make sure consumers.
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I was interested in the question of the power of religious organizations to effect public policy in a negative way. When I was in college, and I found out at that time the Catholic Church was in such control of everything in communities, including in progressive places like New York - that a roommate of mine was not able to obtain an abortion with his girlfriend, even in places like New York. What I learned at that moment was the extraordinary clout that religious organizations can have to impose their theological views on others. And I found it exasperating and dangerous.
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We have now begun a wide range of case involvement at religiously connected hospitals and universities that are already exempt from having to cover contraception, in my view a completely unnecessary accommodation this administration doled up to such entities.
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Thurmond Rule,” a largely fictional claim that in presidential-election years the party whose President is in office is supposed to sit on its hands and await the outcome in November. This is named for Senator Strom Thurmond, arch-segregationist to the end; Strom Thurmond, who never saw a wasteful weapons system he didn't want to fund; Strom Thurmond, who attempted to get John Lennon deported; Senator Strom Thurmond, who has no moral standing to be invoked for one blessed thing. If we truly believe that this is a real emergency because these vacancies are denying the opportunity for Americans to be heard when their fundamental rights and liberties are in jeopardy, then we should insist that the Senate not allow the Thurmond rule to be the last word.
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Clarence Thomas, a man of no known intellect, did NOT have to be on the Court; spineless senators put him there.
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For decades I've been told by my adversaries in the Religious Right that they only seek a “place at the table” for their Christian worldview—well, their version of Christianity, that is. But evidence has mounted recently that what they really want is something else entirely: to own the table, determine what goes on it, and force-feed everyone the same gruel they consume.
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One of my press comments may have been literally true: “This may be the biggest collection of theocrats in one.
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I'm very worried about the future of separation of church and state: will it survive in a meaningful way? I'll tell you, there are a very large number of people throughout this country whose values, statements, and conduct appear to place them in some alternate universe governed by some constitution they apparently found while cleaning out their sock drawer. It is not the American “living” Constitution that reflects, increasingly, the search for individual freedom and justice: in other words, what the Constitution's purpose is.
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George W. Bush began a program referred to as the Faith-Based Initiative, an effort to get more grants and contracts to religious providers of secular services, from mentoring to feeding the hungry, based on the largely mythological claim—akin to the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq—that there was widespread discrimination in giving government funds to religious groups. At the time, Catholic Charities alone appeared to be getting over five hundred million dollars in aid and the Salvation Army, literally a Christian denomination with strong homophobic tendencies, was getting eighty-nine million dollars for work in New York alone.
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hHave used it in a highly offensive way and drenched it in fallacious, right-wing “Christian nation” pseudohistory. Worse, they've sponsored “Christians only” prayer events that exclude millions of Americans. And by “Christians” they mean fundamentalists. Progressive Christians like me got nowhere near the microphone.
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To me the separation of church and state is a thread that ought to run through public policy so that we can always recognize that we make laws in this country, based not on theology of any particular group, but on the basis of a commonly shared values of the Constitution itself.
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Work by George Grant called Legislating Immorality, which called for the execution of all gay people, but was kind enough to qualify it in a footnote by saying that in our judicial system we would have to give them a trial first.
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The real enemy of the Christian Right is not Americans United or the ACLU; it is themselves.
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Air Force officials appear to be more concerned with appeasing the powerful Religious Right lobbyists who have argued against any guidelines that seek to respect and protect the rights of all cadets -- not just those adhering to majority religious beliefs.
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I have a basic rule of thumb that about 2 percent of any large group will believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous it seems to the rest of us.
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Religion and the wars against other faiths it engenders should teach us all that we have a pretty good thing going here. In fact, the separation of church and state is probably the single best idea that our two-hundred-year experiment in democracy has engendered.
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AU investigated the Religious Right's most common examples of the “war on Christmas.” Guess what? They're bogus! Two schools accused of banning red and green did no such thing. Another school was accused of rewriting “Silent Night.” In reality, it was putting on an eighteen-year-old play that changes the words of familiar Christmas carols to fit the play's secular theme of homelessness.
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What “value” is taught when school administrators thumb their noses at the highest court in the land and continue illegal practices?
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Those five members of the Supreme Court found a nonsensical distinction; that doesn't mean that Florida state legislators or state supreme court judges are required to play the semantic games that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia did to reach the result they desired.