Monthly Archives: April 2015

RFRA Madness

Posted by on 2015-04-12 No comments

More than 20 states have introduced prohibitions against “foreign” (code for “Muslim”) religious laws which would not only ban Islamic “shariah law” but Jewish halacha and (surely unintended) Catholic Canon law as well: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

But when it comes to promoting Christian shariah, many of these same states are anything but shy.

Indiana’s recent passage of the so-called RFRA (“Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) was the predictable result of two jaw-dropping Supreme Court rulings. The “Hobby Lobby” ruling added religious personhood to the corporate personhood that “Citizens United” conjured up. In so doing, we now live in an alternate reality in which real religious discrimination is enshrined in law and other types of bigotry are legally sanctioned for largely Christian “religious corporations” like Hobby Lobby, owned by billionaire David Green.

Besides Indiana, Arkansas has also passed RFRA legislation. In Georgia and North Carolina similar legislation is pending. According to the New York Times, a dozen other states have some form of laws which give Christians a free pass to act in very un-Jesus-like ways.

This is nuts. We need to go back and read the U.S. Constitution again. We already have religious freedoms here. Who would claim that Christians are still fearfully huddling in catacombs? People can do whatever they want in their churches and homes. And they do – thanks to our Bill of Rights, which is perfectly adequate. If we desperately need to protect any vital, lost liberty, I suggest we restore the Fourth Amendment. That’s one that’s truly under attack.

It is the state, not a religious institution, which has an obligation to protect new families created by marriage and any children that issue from them. States need to firmly reclaim marriage as a purely civil act with legal consequences, like registering your dog or your boat. The rest is purely ceremonial. And states need to take on all forms of corporate bigotry using all means at their disposal.

So here’s what I suggest for both marriage licenses and documents of incorporation.

Go ahead and get married with a preacher who hates gays if you are so inclined. Call it a sacrament. Call it anything you want. But your marriage will simply be a private matter as far as the state is concerned. You can have a minister, a priest, a rabbi, a philosopher, your therapist, or a trapeze artist conduct your chosen rites. The state, on the other hand, requires your marriage be registered in city hall. That’s it. You’re instantly married. No one other than a state or municipal clerk will have any standing to register the marriage. Ministers lose quasi-legal marrying privileges, although they obviously continue to officiate at congregant’s weddings.

If you have a company that (like convicts and philandering politicians) has suddenly found religion, remember: your corporation exists thanks to documents of incorporation and permits issued by the state. Your company, whose ostensible purpose is to serve the public, operates at the pleasure of the state. If you and your company discriminate against even one person in the state, your corporate license should be immediately revoked. You don’t want to serve cake to gays? Fine. Make cake for your church and stop calling yourself a baker. Don’t want to sell condoms in your drug store? Fine. Choose another profession more suited to your rigid beliefs. No one is stopping you from selling to the public except yourself.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 7, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150407/opinion/150409566

Freedom is Personal – Passover 2015

Posted by on 2015-04-04 No comments

B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et-atzmo, k’ilu hu yatzav mimitzrayim.

In every generation, everyone is obligated to see themselves as though they personally left Egypt.

The beauty of Passover is that we consciously place ourselves in the shoes of people struggling to be free. We remember a story that happened long ago and far away. But our real job is to remember – personally – the slave’s struggles – any slave – and to identify personally with the underdog, the little guy, the bigot’s victim, the person whose destiny is not in his own hands. For most of us, Passover will always be a warm ritual of Jewish history, one in which we enjoy the company of family and friends – and all those cups of wine. For others it mirrors very real struggles that continue even today.

I read a wonderful article by Michael Twitty, a chef, and an Afro-American Jew. He was writing about what went into his seder plate. Exactly 150 years ago, one of his ancestors, Elijah Mitchell, was released from slavery, virtually at the moment the Civil War ended. At Passover Twitty serves a bitter herb – collard greens – on his seder plate. Instead of a shank bone there is a chicken leg – of the sort his family took with them when they began their way North during the Great Migration. For Twitty freedom is personal. The Civil Rights movement brought freedom another step closer for Afro-Americans. But who would say the struggle is over? For Blacks, like Jews, there have been numerous flights to freedom, each time discovering there is always some new way to strip them of rights and dignity. But the value of remembering history, the value of Passover, is that it illuminates the present.

Passover is a call to action. It is a constant struggle to be free. It always has been, and this is still the case today. We are at a point in our history where our democratic freedoms are threatened by any number of things. Our American ideals, and our Jewish ideals, have gone wildly off the rails, both here and in Israel.

If we really value freedom, we cannot deny it to others. A nation built on inequality and injustice, xenophobia, militarism, surveillance, paranoia, bigotry, and privilege for a small group of people is not free. Those of us who feel free, like German Jews before 1935, are at least partially deluding ourselves. The strongest person or group in a twisted society can become the most vulnerable – in the blink of an eye, in the signing of a piece of legislation, or in the interests of national security.

Unless we are the ones shaping our own government – and not Big Money or their friends in a growing police state – we can never be free. And until everyone is free, even the most vulnerable, none of us truly will be. You will not be free.