Religious
What does “religious freedom” mean to you?
Philips mentioned “The Liberty Counsel” on the air today so I looked them up…http://www.lc.org/…then I clicked on “About Us”…
Starts out OK: “Liberty Counsel is a nonprofit litigation, education and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom…”
even this seems alright: “, the sanctity of human life”
then it raises a big red flag: “and the traditional family.”
So I started digging around and from what I can tell the are really only interested in christian religious freedom.
Let’s take a look at a case from right here in FL…
In January of 2001 Hillsborough County School Board did a decent thing and gives all students a day off on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Of course anybody with a brain could have expected that this might open the door for other religious groups to ask to get holidays added to the calendar, and it did. In December of 2004 some Muslims ask for them to add Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. So they say “oh shit we will have to get back to you on that” or something like that. So in January the new calender comes out…hmmm…Yom Kippur, Good Friday and the Monday after Easter. The Board tells the folks that came up with the calendar to take a look at religious holidays for other faiths.
(OK, so in my mind…if your organization was truly about religious freedom then you would have started raising some shit at this point…right?)
So in June the calendar folks come back with no religious holidays other than Christmas. Christmas happens to fall during the “winter break” and really Christmas is so fucking secular anyway… The intersting thing here is that the only person on the calendar committee that didn’t vote in favour of the calender was the only Muslim member. In October the board approves the calender with no Good Friday, etc.
Now the shit hits the fan…In other words the religious right starts beating the drums. Right wing politicians get all puffed up and the county commission strong arms the school board into putting the “good” holidays back on the calender. So they put the calender on the agenda again and at the next meeting face off with the “good” people of the county. This is when our friends from Liberty Council decide to weigh in… http://www.lc.org/pressrelease/2005/nr110905.htm. In the end the school board gives in and restores the “good” holidays, and will continue to “look into” the issue.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me to add one more holiday to the calendar…but hey what do I know, I am not very good at hating people because of the color of their skin or who they get on their knees for…uhm…I mean…or pray to or something.
Maybe I just missed the footnote on the Constitution that excludes Muslims from the “religious freedom” thing…
