Moral Compass

Does this look familiar to you?

The Establishment Clause part of the First Amendment might as well have been written in Serbo-Croatian, where North Carolina legislators are concerned. The highest law of the land is an apparent mystery to them. They’re equally non-plussed, I have to assume, by the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

So here’s what a group of neener-neener Christianist Representatives introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly on Monday. (I know Monday was Aprils Fool’s day, but if this was some kind of prank, no one told the local media, who are reporting on the measure more than a day later as if it’s real — and from what I can tell, it is.* See here, and here, and here.)

We’re talking about House Joint Resolution 494, otherwise known as the Rowan County Defense of Religion Act of 2013. The bill was filed by Representatives Carl Ford and Harry Warren. In total, eleven House Republicans signed on to sponsor the resolution.

The crux of it (read the whole one-page document here):

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

So what that does is to allow the state of North Carolina to declare an official religion. Oooooh, I wonder which one they’ll pick!

To put the judicially somewhat baffling move in perspective, the bill is the direct result of a federal lawsuit filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In that suit, the ACLU alleges that the board has illegally opened 97% of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

House Joint Resolution 494, then, is meant to give a big fat North Carolina middle finger to the ACLU and its commie Godless pansies who want to stick their city-slicking noses into the good old boys’ business.

Of course, 494 won’t go anywhere. The whole thing is patently, hilariously unconstitutional, and if the Assembly members live anywhere near the realm that I call reality, they know this. In effect, the bill is just a bit of absurdist political theater, performed by a faction of fundies who don’t mind beclowning themselves in an effort to win praise and re-election from their evangelical base.

Still, you have to wonder if these lawmakers would be so brazen as to declare their intent to break any other federal law on the books. Me, I look forward to future legislation in which they allow themselves to take bribes, rob banks, evade taxes, and beat up homos. Check back soon.

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* To make sure I wasn’t being punk’d, I called the newsroom of the Raleigh-based News & Observer, one of the two leading newspapers in North Carolina, and spoke to a reporter at the political desk. He confirmed that H.J.R. 494 is real — not an April Fool’s joke. I asked if the bill, which the Assembly referred to the Rules and Calendar Committee yesterday, would actually be scheduled for a floor vote at some point. His response: “I would be surprised, but then, I’ve been surprised by the Assembly many times.”

Anyone can check the current status of the bill here.

Walter Olson’s guest post, below, hit a nerve with me — I guess because the sad trend he writes about casts my two adopted daughters, and my family, as both less whole and less wholesome than “regular” (biological) families.

Evidently, the National Organization for Marriage wants it that way. Although my own marriage (straight and strong, 18 years and counting) presumably passes muster with NOM, I don’t plan to sidle up to the organization anytime soon. I’ve written in favor of marriage equality many times, which presumably puts me on NOM’s shit list (and, not to be too holy about it, it is on my shit list too). That’s all fine.

But here’s my problem (and Walter’s): Big chunks of the religious right have gone from supporting adoption to using it as a opportunistic weapon against gay marriage. And that hurts families with adopted kids — whether the parents are gay or straight. That’s not fine. This one, for me, hits closer to home than ever.

So here’s what I’ve decided: If people honestly decide to argue that my family somehow falls short in moral standing, or lacks legitimacy in any way, I’d like to invite them to emerge from their digital lair and engage me and my wife and kids face to face.

Please understand that this is not a mere gauntlet slap, but an effort to exchange ideas and perhaps spread some clarity. How about it, NOM?

That’s a photo of my girls (and that’s me on the left). Look at their faces and then, any of you, please come to our home and explain to us why we are not a real family, and why my marriage isn’t as genuine as yours. Or we can do this by Skype, if you’d prefer.

Seriously, consider this a social offer. Come visit if you can. I’ll cook. We’ll talk. I will try to meet any of your objections with logic and reason; and when our brains begin to throb and our throats get sore, we’ll switch track, and the four members of my family, me included, will simply be living proof of our familial love. Observe us for a few hours. We won’t mind.

I hope you will then report back to your base what you found.

Open invitation. Anytime, anyplace.

(This is a guest post by Cato Institute senior fellow and Overlawyered blogger Walter Olson. Olson, who is an adoptive parent, and who helped bring about Maryland’s pro-gay-marriage election result in November, wrote this piece for IGF Culturewatch. It is re-published on Moral Compass with his permission. The original article is here. — T.F.)

You may have noticed — I certainly have — that for the past year or two, the National Organization for Marriage/Witherspoon Institute/Princeton crowd’s campaign against gay marriage has been steadily reorganizing itself as a campaign against gay parenthood.

Increasingly, as a powerful Esquire piece by Tom Junod argues, that campaign is resulting in the belittlement of non-biologically-based family forms — and among the targets to suffer collateral damage are adoptive families whether straight or gay.

The Florida professor who offended millions by allegedly making students “stomp” on a piece of paper with the word Jesus on it has broken his silence.

No doubt he’s got plenty of time for interviews now that, after a deluge of death threats, his university has decided to place him on leave.

The mid-March kerfuffle at Florida Atlantic University happened when the instructor, Dr. Deandre Poole, who taught an intercultural communications class, asked his students to write the word Jesus on a sheet of paper and then step on it. One Mormon student refused and was suspended by the university. Soon, outside protests came pouring in, including a scathing letter from Florida’s Republican governor Rick Scott. The school then apologized for both the disciplinary action and the professor’s exercise.

So far, we’ve had little but the student’s version of events to go on, but now Poole (photo) has told his side of the story to Inside Higher Ed.

And what do we learn?

• Far from being a Jesus-mocking heathen, Poole is a lifelong church-going Christian and former Sunday-school teacher who describes himself as “very religious.”

• The student exercise, Poole says, involved stepping (not “stomping,” as Fox News and others alleged) on the sheet of paper.

• The exercise was meant to demonstrate that some students would feel inhibited about stepping on something that 15 seconds earlier had been a random, insignificant piece of paper. This would give everyone an opening to discuss symbols and their meaning.

• Poole says it made no difference to him whether the students stepped on the paper or not. Most didn’t, and that was fine, he explains, as their discomfort was intended precisely to jumpstart the discussion.

• The suspension of the angry student was the result of the student’s aggressive behavior after class, claims Poole. The young man allegedly slammed his fist into his palm and told the instructor he wanted to hit him (although the student’s attorney denies this ever happened). Alarmed, Poole notified campus security and filed a report on the student.

In revisiting this Christian tempest in a teapot, we can see that at the very least, things are a little less clear-cut than the Christian-right outrage machine made them seem.

Now let’s look at what America’s very own Taliban had to say when they contacted Poole.

He said he has received hate mail and death threats, some of them coming in forms particularly hurtful to an African American. “One of the threats said that I might find myself hanging from a tree,” he said. [H]e has had some days that he did not feel safe at his home and so stayed elsewhere.

On Friday, Florida Atlantic University announced that the threats against the professor had become so numerous that

Poole has been placed on paid leave because his safety could not be assured on campus.

Yet again, the love of Jesus’ followers shines through bright and clear.

[photo via Inside Higher Ed]