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The
Fugitive Atheist Act
July 16, 2002
By arendt
"No person held to service or labor in one
state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall
in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged
from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim
of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
- U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2 (the
basis for the Fugitive Slave Law)
Fast forward to tomorrow: a bill submitted to Congress by
the Sons of the Biblical Confederacy, a.k.a. the Grand Hypocrisy
Party:
Whereas, our first Big Lie, that the founders
of the U.S. (agnostics almost to a man) thought of America
as a "Christian nation", has been repeated often enough to
brainwash the church-going fundamentalist masses; and, whereas,
our second Big Lie, recently expounded by Tom Delay, that
"separation of church and state is a myth", is currently being
parroted by a supine media and rammed through packed courts
with well-funded test cases (we especially enjoyed the specious
and distracting economic apologetics of the Supreme Court's
5-4 School Voucher decision); therefore, it is now time to
declare that theocracy shall know no restraints in our benighted
country.
Hence, we promulgate the Fugitive Atheist Act:
"No atheist or non-Christian residing in
the U.S., relying upon the guarantees of the First Amendment,
shall be discharged from funding the ancillary operations
of Christian sectarian religions, but shall be forced to tolerate
these 'takings' of organized religions upon the public purse
and to submit to sectarian dogma delivered under the pain
of denial of public service. This act validates, as the basis
for these takings, the unfounded and anti-historical claim
of 'religious intent' of the Founders of this country put
forward by self-interested religious sects, who covet the
American government's property as much as Henry VIII coveted
the Catholic Church's property when he he set up the state
religion of Anglicanism."
By this act, we openly declare war on separation
of church and state and on public literacy - two of the bulwarks
of American democracy. It is our intention to create religious
schools like the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas where children
will be taught a cartoon-like version of Christianity and
distrust and hatred of anyone not equally fundamentalist.
By this act, we equate secular or a-religious
activity with atheism, just as John Ashcroft has already equated
criticism with treason. We also declare all non- Christians,
be they Buddhist, Hindus, or Moslems, to be second-class citizens.
We re-affirm our designation of gypsies, homosexuals, and
feminists as vermin.
By this act we create a specially-privileged
class of corporations, known as Christian churches, which
are given tax exemptions while still being allowed to engage
in partisan political activities, such as the recently reported
event of a teacher taking a class on a field trip to picket
abortion clinics.
By the deliberately vague phrase "ancillary operations",
we invite religious leaders to press for further handouts
from the government and further intrusions of religious dogma
into the government, such as "faith-based health services".
However this act, shall in no way be interpreted
as applying against those anti- environmental groups which
have invented the concept of "takings" to prevent the necessary
protection of endangered commonly-held environments.
It would be a refreshing bit of honesty if the Republican
counter-revolutionaries would introduce the above mock legislation.
At least then their agenda would be clear, without the endless
obfuscation of their anti-democratic intentions. But, the
Republican Party is the most prominent American example of
Scott Peck's "People of the Lie" since the slave-owners, who
were also masters of denial, self-justification, and intricate
dissembling. Witness the quote at the beginning of this article,
which the historian James M. McPherson calls "the typical
oblique language of the Constitution on slavery". Or recall
that the epithet "wage slave" was used by slave-owners against
Free State working men long before Karl Marx had written Das
Kapital.
Today's Republicans have set themselves a much harder task
than the slave-owners. The word "god" does not appear in the
U.S. Constitution. And the word religion only exists in the
First Amendment prohibiting the establishment of any.
On the other hand, slavery was "obliquely" written into the
Constitution. Slaves had been held for the entire existence
of the U.S. prior to the Civil War. So, slave-owners had law
and precedent on their side. Their mistake was the arrogance
with which they enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. They rubbed
the faces of the Free States in their powerlessness to prevent
their own residents from being kidnapped by, as McPherson
puts it, by "professional slave catchers (who) did not always
take pains to make sure that they had captured the right man".
The result was Abolitionism and war.
To accomplish their task, today's Republicans have propaganda
tools unavailable to the Confederate fire-eaters. They have
raised to the level of an art form the use of religious venues
to convey hard-right political messages without loosing their
tax exemption.
They have bought and paid for the mainstream media, which
daily insults our intelligence with its partisan refusal to
pursue criminal wrongdoings by Republicans at all levels of
government, while blaming Bill Clinton for every problem since
tooth decay. They have funded a veritable menagerie of right-wing
think tanks that churn out the party line on matters great
and small. By laundering and repeating the rantings of marginal
fundamentalist and neo-Nazi cranks, they have steadily dripped
the poisonous lie of "a Christian nation" into the public
discourse.
When neo-Nazis invented "holocaust denial", the Jewish community
understood what was at stake. They raised the alarm and pursued
the deniers with publicity, and, when their denials impuned
genuine historians, with lawsuits.
Surprisingly, no similarly clear and motivated defenders
of the genuine definition of religious freedom by our Founding
Fathers have made a similar impact. Perhaps it is because
no one is still alive to testify in the first person about
the Founders' intentions. Or, perhaps it is because it is
easier to get away with saying some thought that didn't happen
(Christian nation) did happen than that some fact that did
happen (holocaust) didn't. In the first case, all you have
to do is concoct phony evidence; in the second case, you have
to destroy real evidence. Or, perhaps its because "theocratic
subversion" isn't a catchy-enough phrase for our sound-bite
happy media. Whatever the reason, the alarm has not been clearly
sounded; and the barbarians are inside the gates, courtesy
of the self-avowed aristo-phile and Opus Dei member Antonin
Scalia.
The assault on public education is a core tactic of these
theocrats. Democracy is impossible without a genuine free
press and a citizenry educated enough to supply the context
to judge the news that press reports. The Republicans have
already hijacked the press, and they have been out to hijack
the educational system for quite a while.
Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed the propaganda
campaigns for creationism, creation science, home schooling,
charter schools, school vouchers, moments of silence, use
of public school buildings after hours for religious clubs,
displays of the ten commandments, to name the most prominent.
Some have succeeded, and some have failed. But the movement
has never faltered. It has delivered a relentless, distracting,
expensive, and chilling assault on the ability of the public
schools to carry out their function. The contortions and missteps
caused by responding to this assault are then cited as further
reasons to defund the schools.
That we are well on the road to the evisceration of education
about true and vitally important American history can be made
clear by asking a random American adult to explain the Fugitive
Slave Law and its role in the genesis of the Civil War. You
might as well ask him to derive Einstein's theory. (You needn't
bother to ask about Darwin's theory. That has already been
"disappeared".)
When history is gone, we will be in the land of George Santayana,
doomed to repeat the worst brutalities of the twentieth century
and the worst inequities of the Robber Baron Era while fighting
over the same worthless "my god is bigger than your god" turf
as the sixteenth century wars of religion and the eleventh
century crusades in the Holy Land.
Before they are burned, here are some historical reflections
by just two of the countless authors who witnessed and fought
the moral and social carnage of World War II. As you read
them, recall the fire brigade in Fahrenheit 451, but give
them the moral values of the Saudi Arabian religious police
who locked girls in a burning school to "save their virtue":
"Every time a church tried to act through
the propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and
authenticity of Christianity were debased...In such moments
(when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be
an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes
institutionalized in all its expressions and compromised in
all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the
greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax...Thus reduced to
nothing more than an ideology, Christianity will be treated
as such by the propagandist...this ideology will no longer
be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine."
- Jacques Ellul "Propaganda"
Or, to put it more colloquially, Frank Zappa was right when
he said that organized religion is nothing but a real estate
scam - declare yourself a religion and get tax-free property.
Also germane is the sentiment that a cult is just a religion
that has yet to acquire pollitical power.
"Equality of condition...is not sufficient
for totalitarian rule because it leaves more or less intact
certain nonpolitical communal bonds between the subjects,
such as family ties and common cultural interests. If totalitarianism
takes its own claim seriously, it must come to the point where
it has 'to finish once and for all with the neutrality of
chess', that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity
whatsoever... From the point of view of totalitarian rulers,
a society devoted to chess for the sake of chess is only in
degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers
for for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined the
SS member as a new type of man who under no circumstances
would ever do 'a thing for its own sake'."
- Hannah Arrendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
So, just as in the Dark Ages (when Catholic peasants were
taught to see every element of their miserable lives as merely
a prefigurement or a symbol of their heavenly life to come
and were told that this world was merely a test for the next)
get ready for the theocrats to reduce our society to third-world
sweatshop levels of poverty, all the while proclaiming a great
religious crusade against moral evil. (Oh, my mistake, Bush
the Younger already announced the crusade last September.)
Expect executions of evil-doers instead of football in your
stadiums. (You can bet Mr. Ashcroft is studying this Taliban
innovation.) If you want a prefigurement of this world to
come, you can go work for Wal-Mart and attend a Christian
Identity church.
Or, you can get as tired of the in-your-face arrogance of
these fundamentalist mandates as the Free State Abolitionists
got with the slave-catchers and the Southern-dominated Federal
courts that supported them. You can go out and do something
about the unconstitutional insertion of fundamentalist Christian
dogma into the government of our modern and decidely diverse/secular
society.
Never forget that the Abolitionists were deeply religious
and, at first, a villified minority.
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