Barry W. Lynn Quotes
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When asked by the New York Times why she altered her position, she quoted the great economist John Maynard Keynes: “when the facts change, I change my mind.
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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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The Constitution—the Bill of Rights in particular—was filled with “majestic generalities” precisely so that federal courts could breathe life into them as the reality of America changed.
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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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And some materials also claim that condoms are ineffective because students who can't “exercise self-control to remain abstinent” are not likely to “exercise self-control” and use a condom. That's like saying we shouldn't teach our kids safe drinking techniques because those who choose to drink underage can't control themselves anyway—so we should just let them binge drink without any guidance at all.
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From cradle to grave, the Religious Right is concerned about every choice you make.
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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.
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The Supreme Court got it right in a 1973 case, PEARL v. Nyquist, when it said bluntly: “If the State may not erect buildings in which religious activities are to take place, it may not maintain such buildings or renovate them when they fall into disrepair.
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Some of those who crafted the Constitution had serious doubts about tax-supported clergy. James Madison, for example, wrote that such employment was a “palpable violation of equal rights as well as Constitutional principles” and a “national establishment” of religion.10 He suggested that if Congress wanted chaplains to discharge religious duties, members should pay for them from their own pockets. “How just would it be in its principle!” he proclaimed.
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Chaplains are here to serve the needs of servicemembers who ask for assistance—persons struggling with personal, professional, or philosophical problems they want addressed from a religious viewpoint. They are not hired to be roving missionaries to all persons with whom they come in contact.
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Calling the Guantanamo prison “a gated timeshare community in the Northern Caribbean.
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I think one of the great strengths of Americans United is that it has such diversity. That it has not only people who have no religious belief, but lots of people who do and who take that belief very seriously. And I think that provides us with a great opportunity to talk about the separation of church and state. There are plenty of other groups, and some of them are quite good at what they do, but they also have an agenda of non-theism, but we don't have, you might say, a theology. We just have a commitment to the Constitution.
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Even a first-year law student knows that you can't curtail the right of one person to speak because other people get disorderly.
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The promise of anyone seeking to be on the federal bench, the Supreme Court in particular, must again be—not to serve as Chief Justice Roberts's “referee” but to do what is necessary to serve that one great overarching value of American democracy: to serve as a constraint on the otherwise overarching tyranny of the majority (and their political allies) for us and future generations.
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A bedrock principle of religious freedom is that freedom is achieved only if it is achieved for all.
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Governments and their official representatives will be strictly neutral on matters of religion: not hostile, not promotional, simply neutral.
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I think fundamentally, the real power behind the anti-choice movement in regard to abortion and the opposition to the rights of LGBT Americans is fundamentally religious. I know that there are people who are secularists who have problems with the rights of gay people and problems with reproductive choice, but frankly those people are few in number.
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Furthermore, the National Day of Prayer has always been soaked in the kind of offensive “God and country” rhetoric that many of us find nauseating.
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It was an effort to include intelligent design and treat it as science, disparaging evolution along the way. That will not stand.
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The “religious freedom” promoted by Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Religious Right of Ken Ham and Tony Perkins is a fraud and a scam; it is antithetical to true freedom of conscience and belief.
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The government is, in fact, urging you to pray. That's simply not government's job.
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I am much more troubled by the claims we get in our office about what can only be described as a “Christian nationalism,” an effort by some in military circles to denigrate the service of those who are not Christian, or who are not even religious. There is a real difference in my view between God and country—Christianity has not cornered the market on faith. When we lapse into a sense that what we do is a holy enterprise and that our military policy represents God's will as well as that of the Pentagon.
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Under the claim of “religious freedom”—the cover for a gigantic new fictional creature called “corporate conscience”—the rights of workers could be given short shrift once again.
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On December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III, appointed by President George W. Bush, with the strong endorsement of Pennsylvania's staunch conservative senator Rick Santorum, ruled for our plaintiffs in a superbly written 139-page opinion that shocked many observers.