The Summum of All Fears
Washington Dispatch: Can a fringe religious sect that believes in mummifying pets and their owners force a landmark Supreme Court decision on free speech?
November 13, 2008
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Reverend Fred Phelps, the infamous head of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, runs a website called www.godhatesfags.com and wants to erect a monument in Casper, Wyoming's Historical Monument Plaza depicting Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998. The caption would read, "Matthew Shepard entered Hell October 12, 1998, in defiance of God's warning 'thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.'"
The city of Casper has declined to host Phelps' monument. But whether the city can keep it out hinges on how the US Supreme Court decides a major free speech case involving a fringe religious sect that specializes in mummification of its adherents and, occasionally, their pets. If the court comes to the rescue of the religious group, whose cause civil libertarians would normally support, cities and towns across the country might have no choice but to showcase all manner of bizarre or hateful monuments, like the one proposed by Phelps.
On Wednesday, the court heard oral arguments in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, a case that is essentially forcing the justices to decide which is worse: letting the likes of Phelps fill public plazas with a parade of horrors, or allowing governments like Pleasant Grove to discriminate against religious minorities when it comes to adorning public space. The case got its start in Utah, a perennial hotbed of church/state separation litigation, and centers on a Ten Commandments monument in Pleasant Grove's Pioneer Park. The monument is one of many erected around the country by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in the 1960s and '70s with backing from Cecile B. DeMille, who was promoting his Charlton Heston movie. The monuments have generated a host of litigation in the past few years, and at least one previous Supreme Court decision.
Summum is a small religious sect founded in 1975 by the late Summum Bonum Amon Ra (who also went by Corky). The group operates out of a pyramid in Salt Lake City and is most famous for carrying on the Egyptian tradition of mummification, a practice that is also the sect's primary source of income. Over the past 15 years, the group has become a thorn in the side of Mormon Utah towns that have public displays of the Ten Commandments. Summum first sued several towns to have the monuments removed in the mid-1990s. When those efforts failed, the group sought to erect monuments of its own, displaying its "Seven Aphorisms." Summum believe that God gave Moses the Aphorisms before he handed down the Ten Commandments, but that Moses destroyed the original tablets because the people weren't ready for the received wisdom. The Aphorisms, in the shortened version, are "Psychokinesis, Correspondence, Vibration, Opposition, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender."
As you might expect, the Utah towns, including Pleasant Grove, all said no to the Aphorism monuments. In response, Summum sued them for violating the Establishment Clause, the constitutional wall between church and state that bars the government from favoring one religion over another. These would normally be slam-dunk cases because the towns so clearly discriminated against the sect. (In Pleasant Grove's case, the town elders made up new rules for monuments after Summum's request that conveniently excluded the Aphorisms.) This being Utah, where other nontraditional religious theories are mainstream, the case is anything but simple.
In 1973, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Utah, ruled in Anderson v. Salt Lake City that the Ten Commandments aren't a religious symbol at all but are principally secular in nature, so governments can display them at will without any fear of violating the Establishment Clause. The case was one of the first to challenge a religious display and has remained the law of the Land of Zion ever since, even though the Supreme Court has found otherwise since then. That's why Summum's original attempts to eradicate these monuments initially failed.
This points to a blatant, if not acceptance then at least, tolerance of some kind by many heterosexuals. Perhaps this is because they themselves cannot quite comprehend why people are gay?
Why is it that churches feel that they deserve or have the right to public space? If that's the case, then anyone should be able to post anything anywhere about whatever they want.
I'm disgusted about the concept of the Mathew Shepard statue. Obviously this ignorant, bigoted, bible-thumper of a Jesus-Chrispie Fred Phelps needs to be pistol whipped and tied to a fence so he can somehow glean some intelligent insight.
On the flipside of this arguement, I don't think the Summum's should be allowed to post their monument either. Let's think of WHY they feel the need to do so. Basically, they don't think the 10 commandments are good enough for them, they have to have this special 7 Aphorisms which they feel trumps the 10 commandments. Either way, they're doing it out of discriminatory motivation. It's like a petulant child going, "he has a lolly, mum!! Why can't I have one??"
Ridiculous.
I informed(?) him that he had been played the fool by the mormon, catholic and rushdoony religions. His response was a resounding "huh?".
He was clueless when I questioned who would be next to have their rights and civil liberties stripped away by the "church". He thought I was being absurd. Perhaps he should read this article.
If religions want to push their agenda upon the public they need to pay TAXES and accept the consequences of the law like all other Americans.
Now I think I'll hit Phelp's website and see what I can stir up there.
So I'm in favor of banning all permanent religious expression from public spaces. Temporary holiday exhibits are fine, just not permanent monuments. Because if we're going to go by what the majority believes then there's still space to put some pretty hateful stuff out there.
Apparently these OVER THE TOP wackjobs believe that God hates the entire world! except of course the faithful/mindless at Westboro.
And they will expend hundreds of thousands of rhetorical words to tell you so.
I couldn't find how to post on their blog, but their god hates me too so that's no surprise.
If someone knows how to get on their blog, let me know. I'd like to post a nice first amendment boot to their collective hater asses. Thanks
Solution: a new holiday.
Anyone who wishes to build any sort of monument on public property shold be free to do so. Once a year, in August, comes Dynamite Day. (Why August? There's no August holiday; a big hole in the calendar that needs filling.) On Dynamite Day, anyone who feels strongly enough can legally dynamite one, and only one, monument that offends them enough to want to blow it up. If its builders want to put up a new one the very next day, let them. If it's offensive enough, it will only last 364 days.
Disclaimer: I am not a lobbyist for DuPont, Olin, Dynamit Nobel, nor any other dynamite manufacturer.
Go Summum, stick it in their craws!
Even if someone wanted to argue that right wing religious had a right to *express* their opinions about homosexuality, there's still a difference between "saying something" and turning it into a monument in *someone else's* local community (no less).
I don't see how they can win that one. I would think that a talented jurist without an ax to grind could direct these cases in socially desirable directions. Frankly, I think trying to scrub social spaces of non-offensive religious expression just shores up the power that Judeo-Christian traditions have in this country.
Let faiths and philosophies post their aphorisms. Go for it, people.
To say that a religious symbol (for example, the Ten Commandments, a seminal philosophical tenet of the Christian religion) is actually "principally secular in nature" is absurd on the face of it. That fiction needs a monument of its own dedicated to incredulity.
Having said that, it can't be practical that any ruling in favor of "if one monument to religious tenets is allowed, all such monuments must be allowed" could ever be anything but equally absurd. It would turn governmental grounds into what would essentially be cemetary-like expanses, appropriate to no one’s edification. Summum and Phelps would be just the tip of a juggernaught of an iceberg of competing religious assessments.
I am afraid that the only rational outcome would be a “return” to the separation of church and state. No monuments even hinting at establishing a one and true religious leaning ought to be on government (local, state or federal) property, supported by the taxes of a splendid range of true believers. All those belong on private property where regulation would be more difficult to proscribe. Religion would not be damaged in the slightest and the controversy would be concluded so we could move on to more critical elements of cultural/societal/legal distinctions and principles.
This one ought to be a slamdunk.
Just recently, a priest in South Carolina, told his congregation that those that voted for Obama could not and should not receive communion because he supported the woman's right to choice.
Religion is and always will be the root of most evil in this world. And until it is understood for the mythology and superstition its foundation stands on and is banished to the trash heap of human ignorance it belongs, it will always be a major part of the evil and bigotry in the world.
In 1635, Williams and his followers were expelled from Massachusetts. They fled south to what is today Rhode Island, where he founded the city of Providence. Williams, announced that all who chose to live there would enjoy full religious and political freedom. Williams' proclamation proved the sincerity of his beliefs, as he soon had to suffer many religious views he personally found distasteful. For example, Williams detested Quakers and often blasted them in his writings. Yet in Rhode Island, Quakers worshiped unmolested, at least during the years of Williams' oversight.
It was Williams who coined the phrase that may have been the grandfather to Thomas Jefferson's famous "wall of separation" between church and state metaphor. In his 1644 treatise, "The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, for cause of Conscience," Williams warned against opening "a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." A decent distance between church and state, he maintained, would keep the purity of the church intact and safe from the corrupting influence of government."
Similarly, Pastor John Leland was dismayed to see dissenting preachers in jail for their religious views. Leland's writings echo some of the comments made by Jefferson. Leland, defending freedom of conscience, wrote, "Government should protect every man in thinking, and speaking freely, and that one does not abuse another...all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, pagans and Christians." On another occasion, Leland wrote in opposition to the idea that holders of public office should have to believe certain things about religion before they could even run. Such "religious tests" were common in many colonies. Wrote Leland, "If a man merits the confidence of his neighbors...let him worship one God, twenty gods, or no god--be he Jew, Turk, Pagan, or Infidel, he is eligible to any office in the state."
Unlike Jefferson, who was a rationalist and something of a religious skeptic, Leland's support for church-state separation was anchored in his theological views. In 1790 he wrote, "The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever...If all the souls in a government were saints of God, should they be formed into a society by law, that society could not be a Gospel Church, but a creature of the state."
Clergy in other states also played a pivotal role in the struggle to establish the separation of church and state in America. In Massachusetts, Pastor Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister, went so far as to refuse to pay a church tax and was arrested. In 1774 he wrote a document blasting the tax, which asserted in part, "Religion is a concern between God and the soul with which no human authority can intermeddle."
In 1787 when the framers excluded all mention of God from the Constitution, they were widely denounced as immoral and the document was denounced as godless, which is precisely what it is. Opponents of the Constitution challenged ratifying conventions in nearly every state, calling attention to Article VI, Section 3: "No religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
An anti-federalist in North Carolina wrote: "The exclusion of religious tests is by many thought dangerous and impolitic. Pagans, Deists and Mohammedans might obtain office among us." Amos Singletary of Massachussetts, one of the most outspoken critics of the Constitution, said that he "hoped to see Christians (in power), yet by the Constitution, a papist or an infidel was as eligible as they."
Luther Martin, a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 wrote that "there were some members so unfashionable as to think that a belief in the existence of a Deity, and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers, and that in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism." Martin's report shows that a "Christian nation" faction had its say during the convention, and that its views were consciously rejected.
The United States Constitution is a completely secular political document. It begins "We the people," and contains no mention of "God," "Jesus," or "Christianity." Its only references to religion are exclusionary, such as the "no religious test" clause (Article VI), and "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." (First Amendment)
The presidential oath of office, the only oath detailed in the Constitution, does not contain the phrase "so help me God" or any requirement to swear on a Bible (Article II, Section 1). The words "under God" did not appear in the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, when Congress, under McCarthyism, inserted them. Similarly, "In God we Trust" was absent from paper currency before 1956, though it did appear on some coins since 1864. The original U.S. motto, written by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, is "E Pluribus Unum" (Of Many, One) celebrating plurality and diversity.
In 1797, America made a treaty with Tripoli, declaring that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This reassurance to Islam was written under Washington's presidency and approved by the Senate under John Adams.
We are not governed by the Declaration of Independence. Its purpose was to "dissolve the political bonds," not to set up a religious nation. Its authority was based upon the idea that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," which is contrary to the biblical concept of rule by divine authority. The Declaration deals with laws, taxation, representation, war, immigration, etc., and doesn't discuss religion at all. The references to "Nature's God," "Creator," and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration do not endorse Christianity. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, was a Deist, opposed to Christianity and the supernatural.
"Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus," wrote Thomas Jefferson. However, Jefferson admitted, "In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man and that other parts are the fabric of very inferior minds..." It was Thomas Jefferson who established the separation of church and state. Jefferson was deeply suspicious of religion and of clergy wielding political power.
Jefferson helped create the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, incurring the wrath of Christians by his fervent defense of toleration of atheists: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only injurious to others. But it does no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Jefferson advocated a "wall of separation" between church and state not to protect the church from government intrusion, but to preserve the freedom of the people:
"I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest morality that has ever been taught;" he observed, "but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invested by priestcraft and established by kingcraft, constituting a conspiracy of church and state against the civil and religious liberties of mankind."
Jefferson and the founding fathers were products of the Age of Enlightenment. Their world view was based upon Deism, secularism, and rationalism. "The priests of the different religious sects dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight," wrote Jefferson. "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter...we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this..."
As late as 1820, Jefferson was convinced everyone in the United States would die a Unitarian. Jefferson, Madison and Paine's writings indicate that America was never intended to be a Christian theocracy. "I have sworn upon the altar of God," wrote Jefferson, "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
The jerk trying to install that horrid monument is not an aberration: he's the logical conclusion of religious belief.
Some people say they know God exists because they feel him in their hearts. Again that is just childhood conditioning.
Others are fond of saying that there had to be someone, or something to act as a First Cause, but even a child can see through that argument.
If you tell a child "God made the world" he will usually ask "Then who made God?" If we reply, as the catechism states, "No one made God, He always was," then why couldn't we just say that about the world in the first place?
Those of you here that still believe in Jesus are enablers of the wackos and give them credibility.
Check it out, there is no more evidence (archeological or anthropological) for the existence of your miracle producing Jesus than there is for Zeus. And until the stories of Jesus are placed in the proper category of mythology and/or superstition, the world (and especially this country) will continue on its ignorant, dysfunctional, irrational, bigoted path.
Almost everything is driven by language and culture. A misinterpretation of words in the Bible can cause and has caused a lot of problems. If you take religion out of the mix humans would still find something to disagree over. Basically it comes down to certain people wanting to attain power so that their ideology can be the ultimate truth when really there is no such thing.
Physicist can't "prove" gravity yet you blieve in that. You merely see it's effect. I would think the argument for God is the same.
The issue of whether religious expression should occur in public space is a completely separate argument. I think that a jurist can easily argue that since religious expression is often intrinsically sectarian, promoting division and potential violence.
Evidently the desert-wandering focus groups weren't on board with that mushy new-age stuff, and demanded some old-age prohibitions about Golden Calves instead. What happened to Gawd's omniscience? How come He didn't see that one coming?
And how poetic, too -- that the LDS should be the ones complaining about such historical/doctrinal revisionism. After all, it was Joseph Smith "himself" (there's a deal of controversy over the very existence of a real Joseph Smith) who supposedly dug up some gold tablets hidden for him by the "Angel Moroni," that supposedly added to and addended all of the previous scriptures, by "revealing" a deeper book and plan for the (newly) "Chosen" people (the Mormons, of course).
That the tablets in question were again permanently "lost" is only par for the course, in revelation circles. Revelation and faith actually suffer, for having the "proof" at hand, because concrete evidence not only risks being concretely disproven, but also ossifies the revelationist instinct; which is to keep on revealing "new" truths as they are revealed to the elect by Gawd (read: made up for ideological convenience).
Personally, as one who would drive hundreds of miles out of my way, to avoid going through "Zion" (I have Mormon relatives, so I know how crazy they are), they can put up monuments to all the gods and angels they want. They can put them up in the middle of the highway, for all I care. It just makes them look like the kooks they are. Let's have monuments to Moroni, Kabuki, Stanislavski, and Fahuti, for all the great things they supposedly did in the great by-and-by. And let's have the personal testimonials of all these ridiculous "deities" engraved on new golden tablets, and used to pave the roads of Zion.
I've no problem with this, so long as they stay in Utah. But if they try to bring that nonsense to Alaska with them (and they're trying), they should expect to run into some, let's say, Second Amendment obstacles.