Jesus Camp: one sentence review

This is child abuse.

Read more!

Today's text

Source: Saint Gasoline

In my view, the only culture war that really matters was won during the Enlightenment, when we realised that we didn't need a theory of God to be ethical or to explain the Universe. Today's reactionary culture-warriors are fighting a rearguard action in a battle that was lost long ago.

Read more!

The Myth of church-state separation in Australia

National Day of Secularism
May the 26th

“The Myth of church-state separation.” Google that phrase, and you invariably come up with historical revisionist articles claiming that America’s Founding Fathers were strict Biblical literalists who intended the US to be a Christian Nation ™. That’s because, however devoutly the American Christian Taliban wish it to be otherwise, the First Amendment has repeatedly been interpreted to have established a “wall of separation” between church and state. Probably the most significant legal ruling to be based on such an interpretation was Kitzmiller v. Dover.

In Australia, many of us take it for granted that a similar wall of separation exists in our democracy. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t.

In a 2005 issue of Australian Humanist, Max Wallace points out that there are only two places in the Australian Constitution in which religion is mentioned—in the Preamble and in section 116:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

As Wallace’s article demonstrates, High Court judges and constitutional law experts alike have been unanimous in insisting that a notion of church-state separation cannot be inferred from the wording of section 116, much less from anywhere else in the Constitution. This interpretation was crucial in the 1981 Defence of Government Schools case, in which the Federal Government’s funding of church schools was challenged.

Justice Sir Ninian Stephen said s.116:

... cannot readily be viewed as a repository of some broad statement of principle concerning the separation of church and state, from which may be distilled the detailed consequences of such separation.

That is pretty unequivocal. The day after the case, none of the newspapers reporting the case published what the judges had said. Also, in many histories of Australia, these words, and the subject of church and state, do not appear. Textbooks on politics in Australia do not discuss it. We have an Australian Republican Movement that is arguing for a republic with no mention of church and state on their website. This is despite the fact that separation of church and state is the foundation stone of two of the leading republics in the world: the American and the French.

It is, in other words, the elephant in the room of Australian democracy. It places us, Wallace suggests,

somewhere between democracy and theocracy. I suggest that is an unacceptable state of affairs for a modern liberal democracy. We can hardly criticise regimes that refuse the distinction when we have not formalised it ourselves.

Indeed. On this National Day of Secularism, it is truly sobering to consider that the separation of church and state in Australia is even more tenuous than it is in the maniacally-religious US. You can just imagine what might transpire if the Religious Right (whether it’s the Opus Dei Liberals or the Pentecostal megachurch Liberals leading the parade) ever attains the same level of influence here that it has attained over there.

Other resources on this topic:
"Separation of church and state?" (Michael Hogan, University of Sydney)
"Church and state in Australia" (also by Max Wallace)
"Church and state" (Anglican bishop Tom Frame, who has also written a book on the subject)

UPDATE: May 26th also marks the tenth annual National Sorry Day, and it has been remiss of us not to have mentioned it earlier.

So the Australian Prayer Network just happened to select this date for their National Day of Thanksgiving? How interesting. I wonder who they think the members of the Stolen Generations should be thanking. See Simmo's post. Read more!

Blog Against Theocracy: National Day of Secularism May 26th

The National Day of Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and in an election year you just know the pious frauds on both sides of politics (but let's face it, mainly the Right) will be screaming more loudly than ever about religion, values (which, as we all know, only the religious possess) and the "spiritual emptiness" that is the hallmark of a secular democracy (apparently).

Well, as Bruce has declared, enough's enough.

Bye-bye, ta-ta, theocrats take your disingenuous political stunt with you. You
haven’t fooled me or anyone else with a functioning brain.

That's right, fundies--the evil secularist babykilling hordes are fighting back. Let May 26th henceforth be known as The National Day of Secularism!

National Day of Secularism
May 26th

This is a tagging meme, so I'll let Bruce tell you the rest:

How the “meme” works
This “meme” works in two steps; first the “Tagging stage” and then the “Blog against theocracy stage”.

Tagging stage
If you are tagged by the meme, then it’s the same old format; mention this entry so
people can see the rules and then tag five other bloggers (preferably Australian given the nature of the NDoT.) You can link back to these rules and display the above (rather modest) banner by inserting this code at the end of your entry

(Check Bruce's post for the code--Blogger won't let me post it here)

Feel free to copy the PNG file to your own host and alter the code accordingly, and remember when entering the code to enter it into the “code” window of your blog editor (blogger and wordpress users, I know there is a tab for this above your editing window)!

This meme does however have somewhat of a difference; an additional stage…

Blog against theocracy stage
If you have been tagged (heck, even if you haven’t, it doesn’t bother me) then in addition to tagging others, it is also hoped that you will write a blog entry about the separation of Church and State in Australia. It could be a critique of Pell’s “normative democracy”, the historic anti-democracy sermonizing of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, inevitable discrimination by the funding of (approved) chaplains in public schools, the state backed imposition of bans on forbidden women’s dress or whatever Church-State issue you find important.

Preferably, such a blog entry would be published on the 26th, but I’ve been lazy in getting around to this and I’ve left people little time so there is no deadline as such.
Just a couple of caveats; 1) the church-state anti-theocracy blog entry should mention the phrase “National Day of Thanksgiving”, possibly mentioning that the entry is a response to the NDoT, and 2) feel free to add the (again admittedly modest) banner.

I, in turn, tag the following: A Churchless Faith, BeepBeepIt'sMe, Smogblot, Super Simmo and The Dog's Bollocks.

UPDATE: We haven't spoken too soon, evidently. John Howard courted uber-fundies Catch the Fire in January; now Kevin Rudd's at it. Now let me get this straight. They umm and aahh and fiddle with their diaries when it comes to meeting the Dalai Lama, but they're falling over themselves to court an organisation whose leader claims to have personally met Jesus "face to face on 21st July 1997 at 3.40am (He spoke to me for 2 hrs. 20 minutes.);" who in the run-up to the 2004 election called on his followers to pull down "Satan's strongholds," including brothels, gambling places, mosques and temples; and who in 2005 addressed a meeting of the Australian League of Rights.

What's going on here? First the Exclusive Brethren, and now Catch the Fire? Has the batshit insane fundie vote really become that significant?

Read more!

Another wonderful week of Howard sookery

The Howard Government is dominated by:

(a) Sooks
(b) Control freaks
(c) Theocrats
(d) All of the above

The correct answer, of course, is (d), judging by the Government's reaction to negative portrayals of its industrial relations policies on television this week, and by the news that its "citizenship test" will require aspiring citizens to affirm the notion that Australian values are based on the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As I noted briefly in an earlier post, the conservative side of politics has been screaming hysterically about "bias" at the ABC all week, in response to the station's screening of Bastard Boys, a dramatisation of the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute. Later, Howard chimed in, pronouncing the miniseries "One of the most lopsided pieces of political propaganda I've seen on the national broadcaster in years." What he wouldn't have seen coming was the scene in this week's episode of McLeod's Daughters, in which a character is fired and then immediately offered reinstatement on a workplace agreement with lower pay. This prompted several government ministers to condemn the show, claiming that the scenario would be illegal under the Industrial-Relations-Legislation-Formerly-Known-As-Workchoices laws, although the scene is apparently based on an actual event involving an employee at a BP service station in Adelaide. In any case, the Government is evidently coming to the realisation that Howard's battlers just aren't embracing the thought of signing away their hard-earned rights and entitlements in the workplace with the enthusiasm one might normally expect. (I know, we're all scratching our heads on that one, Johnny.)

But it is the knee-jerk nature of the Government's response to both programmes that is disturbing, and fits a pattern of control-freakery that has been a hallmark of Howard's tenure from its beginning, as books like the excellent Silencing Dissent clearly demonstrate.

What is even more disturbing is the new "citizenship test" and its flagrant flouting of the principle of the separation of church and state (very much an Aussie tradition, arguably) in the following question:

15. Australia's values are based on the ...

a. Teachings of the Koran

b. The Judaeo-Christian tradition

c. Catholicism

d. Secularism

As EvilWombatQueen points out in her fisking of the citizenship test, there is a disconnect between this question and the previous one asking examinees to identify Australian values:

Now, remember that the previous question actually stated the main Australian values. Remember them boys and girls? Men and women are equal. 'A fair go'. Mateship. Now, which option listed above can genuinely say it believes all of those things? If you said d, Secularism, you are right! However, sadly, you are also wrong. According to the government the answer is b, the Judeo-Christian tradition.

She's right: according to Kevin Andrews, immigrants must acknowledge that Australia's values--which include the equality of the sexes, fairness and mateship--are based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Well let's explore this notion by looking at the track record of the Judeo-Christian tradition regarding just one of these values--that men and women are equal.

• In the Old Testament, women's inferiority to men is axiomatic, and manifests itself in a variety of ways: Eve's submission to Adam, the polygamy of David and Solomon (among many others), the original "handmaid's tale" (Abraham, Sarah and Hagar), Lot's offering of his daughters to the crowd besieging his house in Sodom, concubinage, the treatment of women as property in the Ten Commandments, mandatory pre-marital virginity for women (on pain of death by stoning), the requirement of women rape victims to marry their rapists, etc.
• Jesus' attitude to women was very different, of course. But his views didn't seem to have caught on. (Perhaps Nietzsche was right: "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.") By the time we get to Paul, women are again being told to submit to their husbands and their inferiority to men is reaffirmed.
• The church fathers were unanimous in their disparagement of women. Augustine remarked, "I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children." Martin Luther suggested, "Let them die in childbirth, that's why they are there."
• Another great moment in the history of Christianity's treatment of women was the lynching of Hypatia in 415 CE. She was guilty of the terrible sin of being a pagan and a woman teacher of mathematics and philosophy. The good Christians of Alexandria dragged her into the church, tore her flesh from her bones with oyster shells, and burned her. This episode was but a precursor to the long and grand Judeo-Christian tradition of witch-burning.

Yes, yes, I know. It's not like that anymore--Bill Heffernan's "barren" comments aside . That's not the point. If equality between the sexes is indeed an Australian value, it is not a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition--it is a significant departure from it. Every advance women have made towards being treated as equals has been resisted by defenders of the Judeo-Christian tradition--the same kind of people who today resist moves to grant gays and lesbians equality with heterosexuals under the law. It is logically contradictory, therefore, to hold that sexual equality is an Australian value and at the same time hold that Australian values are based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Any citizenship test which requires aspiring citizens to believe these two impossible things before breakfast is not only privileging one religious tradition unconstitutionally: it is also perpetuating unreason.

UPDATE: See Ninglun and Legal Eagle for more commentary on the citizenship test. Read more!

Sammy Jankis fisks Muehlenberg on Jerry Falwell

Falwell: a born again Christian and a failure as a human being

Sammy Jankis, who has one of the best excuses for not posting more regularly--he's out seeing the world, brilliantly fisks Bill Muehlenberg's drooling obit to the televangelist who put the "nut" in "wingnut," Jerry Falwell. Muehlenberg whines that Falwell was "simply someone trying to stand up for biblical values in an increasingly hostile culture," and that he's being unfairly caricatured as a "thundering theocrat" by TEH SECULAR LEFT; Sammy is able to deftly juxtapose these complaints with multiple instances of a Fundy Saying The Darndest Things. And Sammy has barely scratched the surface, as The Republic of T's post on Falwell demonstrates.

(Muehlenberg wrote the piece after being interviewed about Falwell on "a secular radio station." They have secular radio stations in Australia? OH NOES!!!!!)

UPDATE: Do yourself a favour and watch Christopher Hitchens' Falwell eulogy at Pharyngula. Read more!

A question for Julie Bishop and Kevin Donnelly

I just marked one of my students down for using the word "Abo" in a class debate on the films Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australian Rules. Does that make me a Maoist, anti-American, left-wing, Trojan Horse brainwashing thug?

Me

My student

P.S. My justification for penalising the student was that the use of such a pejorative term was inappropriate in the context of a formal debate, and that it might distract or alienate the audience--something that public speakers (and debate participants in particular) should generally try to avoid. Read more!