Barry W. Lynn Quotes
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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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Liberty does not mean being given state sanction to force your own ideas—religious or otherwise—on other people. It does not mean being given a free pass from laws you don't like.
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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 real enemy of the Christian Right is not Americans United or the ACLU; it is themselves.
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From cradle to grave, the Religious Right is concerned about every choice you make.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Governments and their official representatives will be strictly neutral on matters of religion: not hostile, not promotional, simply neutral.
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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 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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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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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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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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That is from a legal viewpoint what is technically referred to in the Latin as de minimis” and, in the equally technical language of common sense, as “batshit crazy."
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I think it is going to be very difficult for any church that still calls itself a church, never to try and convince someone that their religion is the best one.
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Prohibiting use of state tax dollars “directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.
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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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Indeed, some legislators happily admitted they wouldn't promote Islamic, Wiccan, or Buddhist plates. The argument seems to be: no Muslim plates because we don't want to look like we are supporting that faith, but a Christian plate is great—although in court we'll say that isn't a sign of support. When you combine hypocrisy with bad constitutional law, little wonder you buy yourself a lawsuit!