Category: freedom from religion

FFRF rebukes NYC mayor Mamdani for mixing city business with Islam

March 18, 2026 • 10:15 am

Since I was in an upsetting kerfuffle with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF, and I call the squabble “The KerFFRFle”), over which I resigned from its Honorary Board along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, I haven’t paid much attention to the organization. I do get their alerts, for they’re still doing good work in upholding the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, reinforcing the wall between church and state. Their condemnations, like the one I highlight here, don’t usually accomplish much, but their lawsuits or amicus briefs have been effective, and the FFRF does raise awareness about Constitutional violations.  Yes, they are overly woke, which is why I resigned (see the first link), but that doesn’t mean that their overall effect is bad. It isn’t!

I noticed the other day that they’ve gone after New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who I see as both an antisemite and an Islamist. And by “Islamist” I mean a Muslim who is active in trying to make countries adopt Islam as part of their system of governance.  In this case, Mamdani is mixing Islamic religious celebrations with city business: a violation of the First Amendment. I have little doubt that he would like the U.S. to become the Islamic Republic of America.

Click the screenshot below to read:

An excerpt:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is again warning New York City’s mayor that the Constitution prohibits government officials from using the machinery of public office.

FFRF has sent its second letter in a couple of months to Mayor Zohran Mamdani after receiving a complaint from a New York City employee regarding a recent religious event organized through official city channels. The national state/church watchdog previously contacted Mamdani in February after he posted on the official New York City Mayor’s X account about participating in a suhoor meal and praying with Department of Sanitation workers during Ramadan. [JAC: he appears to have deleted the tweet, and if that’s the FFRF’s doing, good for them],

Despite that warning, FFRF has now learned that the mayor’s office held a “City Workers Iftar” on March 12 to “celebrate workers who keep New York City running while fasting.” The event notice was emailed to city employees by Interim Commissioner Melissa Hester and it noted that the event included a call to prayer.

A city employee who contacted FFRF observed that it is “completely inappropriate for a government agency to have a religious celebration.” The employee expressed concern that events like this may create the perception that the mayor’s office favors one religion and that employees attending city-sponsored events may be expected to participate in religious activities.

“While you are entitled to observe your faith in your personal capacity, the Constitution prohibits government officials from organizing, promoting or participating in religious exercises in their official roles,” FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line writes to Mamdani. “Hosting a religious observance for city employees of one religion and facilitating a call to prayer through official government communications and personnel crosses the line between private religious expression and government-sponsored religious worship.”

FFRF emphasizes that city employees work under the authority of elected leadership, creating a dynamic where even “voluntary” religious events can carry implicit pressure. “Public employees should not be placed in a position where they may feel compelled to attend a religious event or appear supportive of a particular faith tradition to maintain favor with their employer,” the letter states.

I oppose Mamdani not only because of his Islamism and apparent antisemitism, but because he’s a faux Democrat, promising much but likely to deliver little. (See his latest gaffe on St. Patrick’s day!) And I worry that because the Democrats are so befuddled and besotted by “oppressor/victim” ideology (Mamdani, being a Muslim, is seen as “oppressed”), he will have a future in politics beyond being mayor. He could become a Congressman, though fortunately not President, as he wasn’t born in the U.S.

Anyway, be aware of what’s going on in NYC, and kudos to the FFRF.

The difference between scholarship and political activism

March 7, 2025 • 11:20 am

You wouldn’t think that this difference would need to be discussed once again, but yes it does, because distinguishing between the two is one of the missions of new University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, founded with a $100 million (!) gift of an anonymous donor.  This forum hit the ground running, with a number of special events and discussions on free expression, usually related to how it works and should work on college campuses. Its first director, Tom Ginsburg, who teaches International Law and Political Science here, has buttressed his mission by publishing several articles in the most widely-read forum for higher academia, The Chronicle of Higher Education.  

Ginsburg’s piece below, which you can access by clicking on the link, explains why scholarship and not political advocacy is what we want in University classrooms. Moreover, departments and units of the University should not be engaged in making “official” political pronouncements that chill speech (that is a violation of our Kalven Report, now endorsed by 30 universities besides ours.

I’ll give a few quotes below, which echo in more eloquent language positions I’ve held and advanced on this website. I’ve put the quotes under my own bold headings, but words from Ginsburg’s essay are indented:

Why you can’t just teach anything in the classroom (i.e., no complete “free speech” in class):

Academic freedom is centrally dependent on claims of professional expertise. Within a field, academics have freedom of teaching and research. (In the United States, at least, academics are also allowed broad extramural speech.) But academics can be punished for failure to observe disciplinary standards.\

In my own case, I cannot go into my constitutional-law course and instead teach the laws of physics or advertise the latest brand of detergent; the reason this is true is that no legal academic would in good faith recognize those speech acts as within the domain of constitutional law. While I cannot be fired for the way I teach constitutional law, I can be punished for failing to do the job for which I was hired.

This is why you can’t teach creationism (judged by the courts as “not science”) in a science class, even of the Discovery Institute would have it otherwise.  The line between teaching and advocacy, however, can be thin—especially so when you’re teaching politics. It’s all too easy when teaching about the history of the Middle East, for example, to distort what happened to favor the message you want to impart (and of course history has divergent interpretations).

Why “studies’ courses are particularly susceptible to advocacy. (Ginsburg largely exempts black studies, which seems to have reached academic maturity). Not many science courses in college include ideological advocacy; this is found more often in secondary schools.

American society, however, began to doubt such claims of neutrality with the crisis of the 1960s. Many of the academic disciplines created in that period were born under a political star and rejected claims of technocratic neutrality in favor of promoting perspectives that had theretofore been excluded. It is hardly surprising they saw their mission as integrating scholarship with a particular set of definitions of social change.

Unfortunately, these fields also became active agents of social construction and political mobilization, sometimes on an ethnic basis. Scholarly associations of these new interdisciplinary fields do not hide these goals. The Chicana- and Chicano-studies association begins its mission statement by saying it will “advance the interest and needs of the Chicana and Chicano community.” The Association for Asian American Studies mission statement includes as an objective “advocating and representing the interests and welfare of Asian American studies and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

Presumably scholars in these fields are evaluated not only by their scholarship but by their advocacy of particular interest groups. We can understand why histories of exclusion encouraged scholars to blur the lines between scholarship and advocacy, but doing so draws on the social capital of the scholarly enterprise for unabashedly political purposes. (Interestingly, Black studies may have done a better job of transforming into a stable scholarly interdiscipline.)

Among older disciplines, anthropology has led the way in insisting that cultural advocacy must be at the heart of scholarship. In a 1999 statement on human rights, the American Anthropological Association pronounced that it had “an ethical duty to protest” when any culture or society denies the right of people and peoples to the “full realization of their humanity.” But in 2020, it refined this commitment to include a cultural relativism, stating that “no one jurisdiction ought to impose its own interpretation of how to recognize and protect these rights on any other jurisdiction.” Reflecting on its own tainted history, the AAA leadership went on to demand “forms of research and engagement that contribute to decolonization and help redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”

When one’s scholarship is designed to include advocacy — what Tarunabh Khaitan has called “scholactivism” — risks are obvious. Advocates may reject or downplay inconvenient results, distorting academic debates. More deeply, they violate the “role morality” — the notion that some roles entail specific ethical commitments — of scholarship, which is the very basis for the social tolerance of academic freedom in the first place. While of course there is always a deep politics of scholarship, for example in the selection of topics for inquiry or methods for approaching them, these biases ought to be examined and minimized in genuine inquiry, not celebrated. This requires a humility about the limits of one’s own perspective.

Academic boycotts. The American Association of University Professors recently removed its opposition to boycotts, clearly so that scholars could boycott Israel. That was a cowardly and heinous move, which impedes academic freedom. Ginsburg says this:

The horrors of the Gaza war have provided a litmus test for whether disciplines are committed to genuine inquiry or instead to “scholactivism.” Several associations have debated or passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire. With the tacit support of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), several scholarly associations have signed on to a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These include the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

While the promoters of the boycott emphasize that it is not to be directed at individual scholars, it has in fact led to hundreds if not thousands of individual-level cancellations of scholarly engagements and collaborations. Such a collective boycott arguably undermines the academic freedom of scholars at both targeted and targeting institutions, who should be free to collaborate with whom they choose. Advocates of academic freedom should oppose this kind of boycott vigorously.

Institutional neutrality. The last part of the essay promotes the kind of institutional neutrality first adopted by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report in 1967, and now held by about 30 schools. It is an essential part of Chicago’s promotion of free speech, because if a department or center

. . .We should, for example, call into question the general practice of scholarly associations making pronouncements by majority rule. The internal progress of science depends on tolerating dissidents and does not proceed by majority rule. Why should things be different when the discipline is speaking as a whole? A small step of self-correction would be to use collective statements only in extreme circumstances, perhaps only with super-majoritarian rather than majoritarian mechanisms.

. . . . In a prescient observation in 2001, Clark Kerr noted that there was a conflict between the traditional view of the university that flowed from the enlightenment, embodied in a vision of seeking truth and objectivity, and a postmodern vision in which all discourse is political, with university resources to be deployed in ways that were liberatory and not repressive. He thought the conflict might further deepen, and noted that “any further politicization of the university will, of course, alienate much of the public at large.”

As we stand at a moment of deep alienation, stepping back from the further politicization of scholarship is an existential step.

This essay originally appeared in Inquisitive.

The postmodern view is wrong, and it’s clearly opposed by Ginsburg. The Chicago Forum is clearly defending the Chicago Principles of Free Speech, but is also a forum for discussing and tweaking those principles. When, for example, do demonstrations on campus abrogate freedom of speech? When does teaching lapse into advocacy? We have continuing discussions about issues like this, and the Forum is also supports a unit on freedom of expression given to first-year students before they start classes.  Actually, our faculty need it as much as do the students!

Four Israeli geneticists unwisely urge universities to issue official condemnations of terrorism and antisemitism

November 16, 2023 • 10:46 am

Readers must know by now that while I’m sympathetic to Israel in the current conflict, I wouldn’t let those sympathies weaken my hard-line support for freedom of speech. So when universities rushed to condemn Hamas in official statements, I didn’t really approve. Universities shouldn’t be in the business of making official statements about politics, ideology, or morality (something embodied in the University of Chicago’s Kalven report), no matter what the issues are, for official statements chill the speech of those who disagree. Still, only two schools in America that I know of—ours and UNC Chapel Hill—have official positions of institutional neutrality. (Ours has a few exceptions when the statements involve issues directly affecting the mission of the university: teaching, research, and learning.)

However, if Universities issue ideological statements habitually, and have made statements about George Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse, Breonna Taylor, and the like, then of course they should have condemned what Hamas did on October 7.  It just wouldn’t do, after a history of emitting political statements, for a university to suddenly become institutionally neutral when called upon to defend Jews.  That has, as they say, “bad optics.” But then they need to reassess their overall principles. And they should adopt Kalven. I think that this will happen more often after the war, even if  it happens for the bad reason that universities can barely bring themselves to criticize antisemitism.

Unfortunately, several universities, notably Harvard and Penn, didn’t condemn Hamas strongly enough for many people, and they had to go through several iterations of the condemnations.  Harvard went through three, as President Claudine Gay, who signed an official condemnation with other administrators, then had to issue two subsequent clarifications.  Despite that, both Penn and Harvard lost big-time Jewish donors appalled by what seemed to them reluctance to condemn outright evil behavior.

And that pretzel-twisting by universities is the very reason they should adopt institutional neutrality. It simply avoids the impossible requirement to strike the right tone in a political statement, one that doesn’t offend a lot of students, faculty, and especially donors. The University of Chicago, whose anodyne statement about the war is here, hasn’t lost any donors because we took no official position.

Sadly, there will always be those who don’t recognize the utility of becoming institutionally neutral, and the reason why such policies exist.  “Why?,” they demand, “can’t you simply condemn something so palpably evil as the butchery of Hamas on October 7?”  To them it seems like you are timorous or even afraid to condemn Hamas. Not so: our university leaves it up to us to make unofficial personal statements about anything. It’s called freedom of speech, and we don’t have to worry about bucking what’s seen as “official policy”.

Sadly, four Israeli geneticists published a letter in Nature (below) which I’ve embedded, demanding the denunciation not just of terrorism, but of antisemitism, as well as calling for the release of kidnapped Israelis. Of course I agree with their views, but where I disagree is in their call that universities should issue official condemnations.

Below is the letter, which you can also read here:

 

Now of course universities should protect their members from “antisemitic actions” if those actions are repeated harassment of individuals, threats, or physical violence. That is illegal behavior. And they shouldn’t give academic credit to students who participate in pro-Palestinian rallies, unless there’s some reason to give academic credit to students who participate in any rally. (I can’t think of any.)

But beyond that, I reject all the other demands of the writers.  Yes, there are people who think Hamas is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and their moral compasses are all twisted, but they have a right to express their views without fear of university retribution.

And the sentence “academic institutions should not condone distortion of facts in responses to the Hamas-Israeli conflict” leads inevitably to the view that “academic institutions should not condone distortion of facts” period, and that rabbit hole has no bottom.

Déjà Vu: S.F. State University investigates professor for showing Muhammad picture in class

April 7, 2023 • 12:30 pm

Both FIRE and The Chronicle of Higher Education report that, mirabile dictu, yet another professor is in trouble for showing a picture of Muhammad—this time at San Francisco State University (SFSU).  He hasn’t been fired, but he’s under investigation.  FIRE is of course campaigning to nip this in the bud, and so they have both a blog post about it as well as a four-page letter they sebnt to SFSU letting them know that they’re violating the professor’s academic freedom and that even investigating him is chilling speech and violates the First Amendment (SFSU is a public school).

Here’s the backstory from the Chronicle (the “Muhammadgate” incident is at the very end, part of a longer article about academic freedom).

Maziar Behrooz, an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, does not yet know what a teaching decision he made might cost him.

In the fall of 2022, Behrooz was teaching the history of the Islamic world between 500 and 1700 and showed a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad. He’s taught the course, and the image, for years. One student, a devout Muslim, strongly objected, outside of class. His main point, Behrooz told The Chronicle, was that it’s not permissible for an image of the Prophet Muhammad to be shown in any shape or form.

“This is the first time that this has happened,” Behrooz said. “I was not prepared for somebody to be offended, in a secular university, talking about history rather than religion.”

Behrooz said he told the student that, as the professor, he is the one who decides what’s shown in class. The student then complained to Behrooz’s department chair, who broached the issue with the professor, according to Behrooz. He said he explained to his chair that the student’s view is not uniform among all Muslims. The type of drawing he shows in class can be bought at markets in Tehran near holy shrines. Many Shiite Muslims have such drawings on walls in their homes, said Behrooz, who was born in Tehran and has written books on Iran’s political history.

The student also apparently complained to “authorities higher up” at the university, according to Behrooz. The professor said the institution’s office of Equity Programs & Compliance informed him in March that it would investigate the incident and asked him to attend a Zoom meeting.

A staff member in the vice president’s office at San Francisco State told The Chronicle in an email that she could not comment on specific reports or investigations. She instead described the process for assessing reports of potential misconduct. An investigator meets with the complainant to gather information and discuss options, she said. If it’s decided the conduct could violate the California State University nondiscrimination policy, an investigation begins, and both parties are notified.

The Zoom meeting is slated for early April. Behrooz said he’s not overly worried, though he thinks an investigation by this office — which fields reports of harassment and discrimination — is unnecessary. He’s not sure what the inquiry portends. “How it goes from here is anybody’s guess,” he said.

FIRE’s letter is very good, with all the legal citations and bells and whistles, implying that the investigation should end tout suite and requesting that SFSU should respond by April 13.  I sense a lawsuit in the offing, and if SFSU doesn’t stop this investigation, they’ll be in a Hamline-University-like situation where they’ll get negative national publicity and a fat lawsuit filed against them by Dr. Behrooz.  Remember, even an investigation for charges that don’t carry weight, as these don’t, serves to chill speech and is a form of punishment.

It looks like Behrooz is going to at least accede to giving trigger warnings, but he doesn’t seem sufficiently angry! From the Chronicle:

In the meantime, Behrooz is thinking through what, if anything, he should change about his teaching. As a principle, he said he doesn’t think religious groups, or students, should decide how an instructor teaches a course at a secular institution. “But one has to also take into consideration, I think, the sensitivities of some religious people, be it Muslim or otherwise.”

Should he talk about the drawing without showing it? Should he still show it, as he’s done for years? Or, should he offer a compromise — warn students that the image is offensive to some and perhaps allow them to leave the class and come back?

He hasn’t decided, but he’s considering the compromise.

Finally, if you want to send either a boilerplate message to SFSU objecting to this stuff, or confect your own letter (I did the latter), just go to this site (bottom of page) and fill in the form. I wrote my own short letter, which follows. Feel free to appropriate from it if you wish.

Subject: End Investigation into History Professor ImmediatelyDear President Lynn Mahoney (show details) 

I understand that your university is investigating Professor Maziar Behrooz for showing a picture of Muhammad in a class about Muslim history. One student objected because some sects of Muslims consider this forbidden, and now SF State is investigating Behrooz.

I taught on the faculty of the University of Chicago for 36 years, and, unlike you, this university understands the meaning of the First Amendment and of academic freedom. Even investigating this didactic and proper use of the picture is itself a violation of the First Amendment, for it acts to chill speech.
I urge you to not go the way of Hamline University and try to punish this professor, for you will end up like they did: a national laughingstock and an academic embarrassment. Please stop this baseless investigation now.
sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Big new British monument to answered prayers

September 13, 2020 • 8:45 am

As Britain races towards secularism faster than the U.S., the faithful are making their last stands. One such stand is this Mobius strip of a memorial slated to be started next spring in Coleshill, near Birmingham. As this article in The Times explains, it’s to be called “The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer”, and it’s huge. (Of course, an Eternal Wall of Unanswered Prayer would be much, much larger!)

Click to read; it may be paywalled, but judicious inquiry will yield you the document:

Here’s how big it is:

At 169ft tall, the monument will be just a few inches shorter than Nelson’s Column in London but almost three times the height of the Angel of the North, Anthony Gormley’s 66ft-high steel structure in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.

 

It’s a big ‘un!  It was envisioned by Richard Gamble, former chaplain of the Leicester City football club, who had a revelation to build it.  He began a crowdfunding campaign had an international competition to design it, and then crowdfunded the construction. It’ll contain a gazillion answered prayers (actually, about a million).

Each brick in the wall will be associated with a Christian prayer and feature a unique code that can be read with a smartphone app. Visitors can use their phones to learn about the prayers individuals feel were answered, as well as the personal stories behind them. For bricks out of reach, the app can zoom in on a map of the monument.

Gamble, 51, and a team of volunteers have been collecting people’s testimonies online since 2018, noticing a surge in messages during the pandemic.

“Until this year it had been a small trickle,” he said. “But then it started accelerating. During lockdown it went mad.”

They need £9.35 million to finish it off, but, you know, God will provide; all you have to do is pray. So far God has prompted the faithful to ante up nearly £6 million. And you can submit answered prayers here.

It’s curious that God decided to answer more prayers during the lockdown (were more people were praying?), but the one prayer he didn’t answer was “God, please make this pandemic disappear.” But of course He works in mysterious ways, and one of those ways is killing off lots of innocent people.

The article gives examples of some of the prayers that will appear on the bricks:

The apparent miracles people have shared range from the dramatic to the mundane.

One person wrote about how their baby daughter had been rushed to hospital with a brain haemorrhage but survived and is now a healthy five-year-old. A doctor told a story about how, after 20 minutes kneeling in prayer, he and his team were sent a delivery of personal protective equipment that had been cancelled. Others also talked about mending difficult relationships and overcoming serious illnesses.

At the other end of the spectrum, one person explained how they had managed to have an “impossible meeting” with a dentist while suffering a swollen gum during lockdown.

“God is sooooooooooo good! He listens to our hearts’ cry,” they wrote.

But God is also sooooooo bad! He’s killed a million people in this pandemic, and he could have stopped it. At any rate, there’s been some discussion about “inclusivity”—not racial inclusivity but religious inclusivity. Not all religions are Christian, so they’ll be an exhibit inside about how adherents to other faiths pray.

I still think the humanists should build an Eternal Wall of Unanswered Prayers nearby, but to make its point it would have to be larger than this one, and that would cost too much.

h/t: Dom, Jez

 

Ohio passes ambiguous “Student Religious Liberties Act”

June 19, 2020 • 12:45 pm

Last November, when I was on a ship off Antarctica, I posted about a bill in the Ohio Legislature, now called the “Student Religious Liberties Act,” that, critics fear, would expand the role of religion in the public schools. At that time the bill had passed the Ohio House over the objections of Democrats.  Now, according to the news site Cleveland.com, the bill has passed the Ohio Senate unanimously, by a vote of 32-0, and is on the way to the governor for his signature.

 

While my earlier post singled out four areas of concern, the one that most disturbed me was this one, which appears to have been adopted without any changes:


You don’t have to parse this closely to see the ambiguity. You are not to be penalized or rewarded by engaging in religious expression on assignments, but yet you’re supposed to be graded using “ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance.” How is that going to work.

The proponents of the bill, below, say that nothing will change, with one person using as an example that if someone draws a picture of Jesus in an art class, “They are not to be penalized on the religious content but on their skill as a painter.” The problem is, of course, that not all classes are art classes! (See below.)

The newspaper article at the top notes that ten other states have adopted similar legislation, and it’s worrisome that religious organizations were the ones lobbying for the bill.

My concerns remain the same as they were seven months ago, and so I’ll just repeat what I said then. My words are indented, and quotes are further indented:

The fourth bit—the subject of this post and the Ohio bill—is especially worrisome, because it allows students to give wrong answers if those wrong answers comport with their faith. That, too, is inimical to the public welfare, and to the duty of public education, in the service of religion. While the bill is said to be more “nuanced” than that, I don’t know how, and even the bill’s supporters aren’t sure.

Here’s what that bit says in the bill:

Sec. 3320.03. No school district board of education, governing authority of a community school established under Chapter 3314. of the Revised Code, governing body of a STEM school established under Chapter 3326. of the Revised Code, or board of trustees of a college-preparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.

You can see the ambiguity here. On the one hand the code permits students to use religious expression to do homework or answer test questions, and to do so without penalty (or reward); on the other hand it says that assignments will be graded “using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance.” That gives no guidelines about what to do when a student says that the Bible says that the Earth is 10,000 years old, or that all animals and plants were created within a day or two because that’s what Genesis says. This is a bill that’s simply begging for a lawsuit.

. . .Well, there’s plenty of chance for religious self-expression after school or in church. And there’s no excuse for impeding students’ education by giving them credit for religious answers that are wrong—or failing to tell them that they’re wrong, even if you don’t penalize them. If you want religious answers to be acceptable, have your kids home-schooled—or send them to religious schools.

But would the bill allow students to get credit for wrong answers that buttress their faith? It’s not clear, for that might depend on the results of later First-Amendment lawsuits. The Cleveland.com website says this:

ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] of Ohio Chief Lobbyist Gary Daniels called HB 164 a mixed bag. On the one hand it removes some restrictions on students’ religious rights.

I think Daniels is a bit off the mark here. Those “restrictions on students’ religious rights” are already prohibited by the First Amendment (first and third points above). So what’s new?

Here’s the ambiguous bit:

On the other hand, Daniels said that if a student submitted biology homework saying the earth is 10,000 years old, as some creationists believe, the teacher cannot dock points.

“Under HB 164, the answer is ‘no,’ as this legislation clearly states the instructor ‘shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work,” he said.

Well, that’s confusing! If you can neither penalize nor reward students for arguing that, for example, the Earth is 10,000 years old, what can you do? If you give them credit, you’re rewarding them. If you give them no credit, you’re penalizing them.

Amber Epling, a spokeswoman for Ohio House Democrats, said that in an analysis of the bill by the legislature’s nonpartisan staff, “they cannot be rewarded or penalized for the religious content in their assignments.”

She believes the bill could result in teachers accepting assignments that fly in the face of science.

But I think it’s more likely that teachers would avoid this whole issue by not asking questions that could lead to religiously-inspired answers. But that means no evolutionary biology at all, and not many biology teachers want to avoid teaching evolution, even in the American South. To deprive students of this wondrous (and true!) theory by catering to students’ faiths would be to do them a profound disservice. After all, is religion so different from other unsubstantiated faiths like Holocaust denialism? Does Scientology and its crazy claims about Xenu and thetans get “respected” too? That way lies madness.

And here’s some more madness. Sponsor Gintis says that the bill’s “nuances” prohibit students from getting credit for wrong but religiously-inspired answers, but then undermines what he said by asserting that Moses was a historical figure and you could get credit for writing about Moses as if he existed.

But Ginter, the bill’s sponsor, said that the student would get a lesser grade in a biology class for an evolution assignment. Even if the student doesn’t believe in evolutionary theory, the student must turn in work that accurately reflects what is taught.

“It will be graded using ordinary academic standards of using substance and relevance,” he said.

However, if students were assigned a report based on historic figures, they could turn in a paper on a historical figure, such as Moses or Mohammed, Ginter said.

What, exactly, is the extra-Biblical evidence for the historical existence of Moses? It’s exactly as thin as extra-Biblical evidence for the historical evidence for a Jesus figure—i.e., NO evidence.

h/t: Tom

Supreme court set to further erode the First-Amendment wall between church and state

January 31, 2020 • 10:45 am

In the past few years, federal courts have continued a slow erosion of the church-state wall specified by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, often ruling that religious symbols or monuments can remain on public land, or be flaunted by government agencies, because they’re not really religious but simply part of our “tradition.” Now the Supreme Court is set to speed up that erosion, and I suspect that, given the preponderance of conservative Justices, they will decide to allow more of the religious camel into America’s secular tent.

On January 22, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a “landmark” case—that is, it could be a landmark case if the Court decides to further bash the First-Amendment wall between church and state. This is the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, whose arguments can be seen on the Supreme Court’s blog below (click on screenshot), and are summarized in the New York Times article below that.

This is a complicated case, with the details and issues not at all clear from newspaper reporting (even the NYT), so I had to call the Freedom from Religion Foundation to get clarification (h/t to Attorney Patrick Elliott).

What’s at stake here is whether the government is obliged to fund religious schools, something that’s previously been off limits in most but not all states. This case represents an appeal following a case in Montana, where the state’s supreme court ruled against a scheme that allowed such funding. At the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s website, constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel summarizes the case so I don’t have to:

The case involves a neo-voucher scheme adopted by the Montana legislature. Taxpayers owe taxes to Montana. They are relieved of that obligation [JAC: not completely relieved; they get a tax break] if they divert the payment to a scholarship organization that funds private education. It’s a dollar-for-dollar match. One dollar to a scholarship fund is one dollar off your taxes, and 94 percent of these scholarships fund private religious education. Montana appropriated $3 million to cover the anticipated shortfall from forgiving those obligations. The Montana Supreme Court struck down this neo-voucher program because the Montana Constitution says that the state “shall not make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies, or any grant of lands or other property for any sectarian purpose or [school].” The court ended the entire neo-voucher scheme, for all private education, religious and nonreligious.

Plaintiff Espinoza brought suit against the state’s ban because she has daughters in a Christian school and want the state program to be maintained to allow them to stay there.

According to another NYT piece, 13 schools were served by these vouchers, 12 of which were religious—and all of the latter were Christian schools. Seidel continues:

Conservative Christian parents want the U.S. Supreme Court to save the program by declaring that they have a right to public funds for their private religious education. If the Supreme Court agrees, it will be overturning a crucial legal principle. Without that principle, states could compel all taxpayers to fund religious worship and religious education. So, yes, this case does threaten religious freedom. Because the right to be free from that compulsion is religious liberty. The right is possessed by every Montana citizen and taxpayer, not just a select segment of Christian parents. That is the right at issue before the Court today.

Well, the law as I read it doesn’t compel taxpayers to fund religious education; after all, you don’t have to contribute to the “neo-voucher” fund. Nor does the state government directly issue vouchers to give money to religious schools. But in effect, the Montana state government was subsidizing religious education, for tax monies that could go to secular schools were diverted, though the program, to private schools, and in Montana that means religious schools. That’s why the Montana courts completely dismantled that program: what was happening was an “indirect appropriation” used for religious purposes: a violation of the state constitution.  The issue might be clearer if the law said that if you gave money to a fund that supported churches, your state taxes would be reduced by that amount. Now that is clearly a violation of the First Amendment. Well, it’s no different with religious schools.

Now half of what the plaintiffs are arguing is that the Montana court decision violates the “equal protection” clause of the U. S. Constitution (which is why this is before the Supreme Court, which has no power to interpret a state constitution). But that argument is bogus because the program that funded both secular and religious schools was eliminated by the state. So the issue of protection has disappeared. If the Supreme Court had its wits about it, it would reject this contention. But many people think that conservatives on the court will accept any argument to further religion.

Besides constituting a government subsidy to religious schools at the expense of public ones, the prospective voucher system also weakened the public school system.

Apparently several other states have voucher programs that support religious schools, but some other states have forbidden them. In a ruling two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that eliminating such programs actually violated the First Amendment by barring religious schools from participating in programs along with other private schools. And the basis for that ruling is “religious freedom”: the second contention of Espinoza in the Supreme Court case. Apparently religious people think that the First Amendment entitles them to not only have religious schooling for their kids (a right they have already), but also should have government support for that schooling. That, too, seems to be a backwards interpretation of the First Amendment, which is supposed to prevent entanglement of the government with religion.

The religious plaintiffs and their defenders, which of course include the Trump administration as well as various conservative and religious groups, are arguing that freedom of religion demands subsidies to religious schools if there are subsidies for secular private schools, for otherwise, excluding them under a voucher system is discrimination against religion.  But, as New York Times court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote:

There is so much about this case that is simply backward. The administration argues in its brief that “the constitutional violation in this case is especially egregious because it involves the education of children.” But to the contrary, that’s exactly where the wall of separation has to be maintained with the greatest care. Religious education serves a purpose, inculcating religious values and preserving religious traditions. A parochial school is not just another neighborhood school down the block.

What is the FFRF and secularists worried about? Apparently that if the Supreme Court overturns the Montana decision, then all voucher programs must also include religious schools. As Greenhouse writes:

Certainly, parents are constitutionally entitled to choose a religious education for their children. And under a 2002 Supreme Court decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, states are free to offer parents the choice of using vouchers to help pay for religious education. That was a bitterly fought 5-to-4 decision. The administration now would go further: not only that a state may include religious schools in a voucher program, but that it must include them, if it wants to have a voucher program at all.

But it could be worse than that. It’s not beyond the Court’s purview to confect a ruling that requires all states to allow government funding of religious schools, though it’s not clear how that would work. In other words, they could not only reinstate Montana’s original voucher program, but make it mandatory for every state to have such a program. And that would represent the most serious erosion of the First Amendment.