The justice and only justice of removing "Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue" from the courthouse wall.

The words are from the Bible — Deuteronomy 16:20 — and they appear on a plaque under the name of the circuit attorney of St. Louis, Missouri. The demand to take down the plaque, on the theory that it violates the Establishment Clause, comes from The Freedom From Religion Foundation, Christian News reports.

“We write to request that this sign be removed, both because it represents a government endorsement of religion in violation of the First Amendment, and because it advocates a form of ‘justice’ that is incompatible with constitutional principles,” the letter, sent on Monday, reads.

How does that statement — "Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue"  — advocate a form of quote-unquote justice that's incompatible with constitutional principles? FFRF's idea seems to be that we can't judge the words out of context, and if we add the rest of Deuteronomy, we find a whole lot of "justice" that would be way out of line with the law to be applied in the courthouse. Would an ordinary observer load that meaning into the phrase? Well, the plaque does include the citation "Deut. 16:20." So we're told there is context, and you could check that out or draw up some general memories of what's in Deuteronomy, but I think an ordinary, reasonable observer would give a modern, general meaning to "justice." It's an abstract, noncontroversial value and not an endorsement of any particular religion or even the vaguest notion of God.

ADDED: I did a quick search for the worst idea of justice to be found in Deuteronomy. Maybe you can find something worse, but the one I came up with is Deuteronomy 23:1: "If a man's testicles are crushed or his penis is cut off, he may not be admitted to the assembly of the LORD." That's the New Living Translation. Here's the King James Bible: "He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD."

"The Seventh Circuit found an Indiana high school’s Christmas Spectacular concert constitutional after the school added Hanukkah and Kwanzaa songs and replaced its live nativity with mannequins."

"The parties put us in the uncomfortable role of Grinch, examining the details of an impressive high school production. But we accept this position, because we live in a society where all religions are welcome," wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood, reported in Courthouse News Service.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation and ACLU of Indiana sued the school in October 2015 over the event, claiming it “represents an endorsement of religion by the high school and the school corporation, has no secular purpose, and has the principal purpose and effect of advancing religion,” in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause....

“The religious nature of the nativity and the songs do not come off as endorsement in part because they make up only a fraction of the Spectacular, which as configured in 2015 is primarily a non‐religious seasonal celebration,” Wood said. “The Santas, jingle bells, and winter wonderlands of the first half all promote the secular aspects of the holiday season.... This would have been an easier case if the Christmas Spectacular had devoted a more proportionate amount of stage time to other holidays. But ultimately, we agree with the district court that in 2015 Concord sincerely and primarily aimed to put on an entertaining and pedagogically useful winter concert.” 

"A Madison Area Technical College professor promoted religion in class and encouraged a student to have 'a personal relationship with a living God'..."

... according to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

After one student wrote about rejecting religion for a class assignment, [Hiep] Van Dong wrote in an email that the unidentified student should take care of his or her “spiritual health.” Van Dong then told the student “not to forsake your faith and spirituality because of ineffective spiritual leaders in your life,” according to the foundation.

Here's a PDF of the letter sent to the school, which has more extensive details and may shift your opinion.



Freedom From Religion demands "an immediate investigation" and "written assurances that Prof. Dong will not promote religion in his classroom in the future."

"But what if someone sincerely believes that he is obligated by his own religion, or at least motivated by that religion, to assist suicide?"

Asks Eugene Volokh.

What if, for instance, he believes that the parable of the Good Samaritan commands him to help his patient, or his wife, or anyone else to escape pain — or what they feel to be indignity — by helping them end their lives? (Assume that the target of this help wants to die, is in pain and is already near death. And assume that we’re in a state that forbids assisting suicide.)...

The federal Free Exercise Clause doesn't require accommodations, but there are statutes and state constitutional law provisions that give relief from substantial burdens on the exercise of religion unless the government has a compelling interest that can only be served by imposing that burden.

[T]he government [could say] that it has a compelling government interest in preventing people from being pressured into giving up their lives, and that a total ban on assisted suicide is the least restrictive means of preventing such pressure.... [S]ubtle pressure can happen even while the relatives are denying to themselves that they actually want the person to die... [O]nce assisted suicide becomes just another choice... families might subtly or overtly threaten to withdraw their affections, and the ill person may find life no longer worth living.... Is there a compelling interest in preventing such emotionally or psychologically pressured choices (even if not forcibly coerced choices) in favor of suicide?

I have an old Religion-and-the-Constitution exam somewhere — not in this computer — where I made up a religion that had an "assisted suicide" belief, basically a ritualistic killing of persons who had reached a certain stage of debilitation in proximity to death. My hypothetical went beyond a religious belief that one ought to help a dying person die when that person wanted to die. In "my" religion, the dying person also had an obligation to depart. I explained these religious beliefs with such dry neutrality that not one student expressed any outrage or disgust.

I wonder what Professor Volokh would say if the dying person's desire to die rested on religious obligation.

ADDED: In my exam hypo, the individuals who were killed were members of the religion, sharing the killer's belief system. In Volokh's hypothetical, the killer could be a real Dr. Death Reverend Death, ministering to everyone who wants to die (and is in pain and near death). Dr. Kevorkian, but with religion.

AND: Kevorkian, much criticized by religionists, was hostile to religion:

In his keynote address at the Freedom From Religion Foundation annual convention in 1990, Kevorkian told convention-goers: "Religion is telling law what to do, and law is telling doctors what to do. Religion dictates to law, and law dictates to ethics. No wonder we have problems. That's insanity!"

"Big Mountain Jesus" survives an attack by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

The 3-judge 9th Circuit panel was split, with Judges N.R. Smith and John Owens in the majority.

Smith and Owens found that the U.S. government had a secular purpose: "the statue’s cultural and historical significance for veterans, Montanans, and tourists; the statue’s inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places; and the government’s intent to preserve the site 'as a historic part of the resort.'"

And the majority had 6 reasons for rejecting the notion that the government was "endorsing" religion:

(1) there is nothing in the statue’s display or setting to suggest government endorsement; the twelve-foot tall statue is on a mountain, far from any government seat or building, near a commercial ski resort, and accessible only to individuals who pay to use the ski lift; (2) the statue’s plaque communicates that it is privately owned and maintained — “it did not sprout from the minds of [government] officials and was not funded from [the government’s] coffers”; (3) besides the statue’s likeness, there is nothing in the display or setting to suggest a religious message. The mountain’s role as a summer and winter tourist destination used for skiing, hiking, biking, berry-picking, and site-seeing suggests a secular context...

That's not the usual way we spell "sight-seeing," but I guess it's a site... and here comes a cite:

... the location “does not readily lend itself to meditation or any other religious activity,” and the setting “suggests little or nothing of the sacred,” Van Orden, 545 U.S. at 702 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment); (4) the flippant interactions of locals and tourists with the statue suggest secular perceptions and uses: decorating it in mardi gras beads, adorning it in ski gear, taking pictures with it, high-fiving it as they ski by, and posing in Facebook pictures; (5) local residents commonly perceived the statue as a meeting place, local landmark, and important aspect of the mountain’s history as a ski area and tourist destination; and, (6) there is an absence of complaints throughout its sixty-year history, see Van Orden, 545 U.S. at 702 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (reasoning that the monument’s forty-year unchallenged history “suggest[s] more strongly than can any set of formulaic tests that few individuals … are likely to have understood the monument as amounting … to a government effort to favor a particular religious sect, … to ‘compel’ any ‘religious practic[e],’ or to ‘work deterrence’ of any ‘religious belief’” (alterations in original)).

Note the emphasis on Justice Breyer's concurring opinion in Van Orden, which was the case about the 10 Commandments monument next to the Texas state house. This emphasis is justified, as Breyer was the deciding vote in that case and another 10 Commandments case that came out the same day and went the other way. Following Breyer, you end up with multifactored, contextualized judgment.

The dissenting judge in the 9th Circuit was Harry Pregerson. He didn't go for the Breyer-style multifactored analysis but asked whether a reasonable observer would perceive "a message of religious endorsement."

Lawprof Eugene Volokh — at the first link, above — approves of the outcome. He says "the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence" is "not quite right" because: 1. It's too "tricky" to look into "government’s supposed motive" ("[M]ost things that people do — and even more so most things that multi-member government agencies do — have many different motives, whether policy motives or political motives"). 2. The lack of complaints "might simply reflect that complaints about such things are often highly unpopular in many circles, and that many people can be quite upset and yet still not want to fight a thankless and uphill legal battle." 3. It's "unrealistic" to take account of "divisiveness." And what about history? Volokh says: "[T]he Big Mountain Jesus isn’t quite the Bamiyan Buddhas, but 60-year-old items are still pretty historical by American standards," and even though Big Mountain Jesus wasn't really treated like your usual historical monument: "[T]his sort of historical monument ought not be ordered off government land."

The litigation goes all the way back to 2011. Here's my original post on the subject from then. I said:

... I think removing the statue is not necessary to comply with the Establishment Clause. I go back to what Justice Breyer wrote in one of the 10 Commandments cases that the Supreme Court decided in 2005 [Van Orden]. Breyer... was the only member of the Court in the majority in both cases.

Justice Breyer quoted the 1963 school prayer opinion written by Justice Goldberg: "[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious."

And Breyer concluded that taking down the old stone monument in Texas would "exhibit a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions" and "encourage disputes concerning the removal of longstanding depictions of the Ten Commandments from public buildings across the Nation," which would "create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid."

Big Mountain Jesus is a 50-year-old part of the landscape, so it's probably a good idea to take Justice Breyer's advice seriously and ski clear of divisiveness and a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular.

"We truly thought it would only take a few years to remind the nation of America's secular roots, and that reason would prevail and we could get on with our lives."

Said  Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, quoted in an Isthmus article with a subtitle that puzzles me: "The nation's largest group of freethinkers strives to improve the image of atheists."

This slow trickle of religion into one-prohibited places [sic] creates a slippery slope that Gaylor fears could bottom out in a full-blown theocratic society. Fundamentalist Protestant groups and Roman Catholics are the top offenders pushing for a government governed by God, she says.

"These denominations may invoke state-church separation by crying it's being violated when they don't like a government action, such as Obamacare's contraception mandate," she says. "But they essentially believe in theocracy and believe their religious dogma should be legislated in our laws. They want to tell the government what to do so it conforms to their doctrines."

Is "freethinker" a term of art? I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and found a single definition: "A person who professes to or is known for independence of thought, esp. one who withholds assent to widely held beliefs or ideas; spec. a person who refuses to submit his or her reason to the control of authority in matters of religious belief; (chiefly with capital initials) any of the rationalists, prominent from the early 18th cent., who rejected Christianity on the grounds of reason (now hist.)." Among the historical examples of the usage of this word:

1708   Swift Sentiments Church of Eng.-man i, in Misc. (1711) 100   The Atheists, Libertines, Despisers of Religion..that is to say, all those who usually pass under the Name of Free-Thinkers....
1836   H. Smith Tin Trumpet I. 227   Freethinker..has come to be synonymous with a libertine and a contemner of religion....
1968   A. J. Ayer Humanist Outlook 4   Present-day humanists are in fact the intellectual heirs of those nineteenth-century free-thinkers.

The Christmas scene at the Wisconsin Capitol today.

We were on a downtown fog-walk and stopped in to see the Christmas tree. There were carolers singing, and a rather interesting array of religious and anti-religious displays.

I had a religious experience there myself. I was scampering down the stairs as the carolers were singing "O Holy Night," and 2 steps from the bottom, I thought I'd reached the floor and took a misstep that caused me to fall on my knees exactly at the line "Fall on your knees!"

ADDED: The tree was decorated with ornaments made by school children. The assigned theme was: honoring Wisconsin veterans:

City invites kids to paint the snowplows, ends up with an Establishment Clause problem.

It's hard to believe anyone would want the face of a snowplow covered with religious material. If religion is important and sacred to you, why would you want it on a snowplow? But 2 of the 27 snowplows in Sioux Falls, South Dakota got designs with the words "Jesus Christ" or "Happy birthday, Jesus."

Patrick Elliott of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sent Sioux Falls City Attorney David Pfeifle a letter Thursday telling him that the [Siouxland] Freethinkers want the religious artwork removed....

"It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for a government entity to display proselytizing Christian messages to its citizens, including on government equipment and facilities," he wrote...

Pfeifle indicated Friday that he hadn't read Elliott's letter yet. "I'll review it," he said, "kick it around a few days and respond."

"It is a misunderstanding of freedom... to suppose that choice is not free when the objects between which the chooser must choose are not equally attractive to him."

"It would mean that a person was not exercising his free will when in response to the question whether he preferred vanilla or chocolate ice cream he said vanilla, because it was the only honest answer that he could have given and therefore 'he had no choice.'"

Wrote Judge Posner (in a 2003 case that comes up in my Religion and the Constitution class).

Atheist churches.

I found out about atheist church today. I was listening to the oral argument in the 7th Circuit in a case called Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Jacob Lew, about a federal income tax provision that lets religious ministers exclude their housing allowance. The case was mainly about standing, with the government's lawyer arguing that only someone who sought and was denied the exclusion could challenge it. Somehow that took a detour at one point into whether there are atheist churches, and the government's lawyer said there were, but couldn't name any.

I found this video about an atheist church called The Sunday Assembly:

At the elite level, the Supreme Court cogitates about the subtle psychological pressure to pray when a private chaplain performs an invocation at a government meeting.

Here, for example, is Justice Kagan dissenting in the Supreme Court case Town of Greece v. Galloway:

A person goes to court, to the polls, to a naturalization ceremony — and a government official or his hand-picked minister asks her, as the first order of official business, to stand and pray with others in a way conflicting with her own religious beliefs. Perhaps she feels sufficient pressure to go along — to rise, bow her head, and join in whatever others are saying: After all, she wants, very badly, what the judge or poll worker or immigration official has to offer. Or perhaps she is made of stronger mettle, and she opts not to participate in what she does not believe — indeed, what would, for her, be something like blasphemy. She then must make known her dissent from the common religious view, and place herself apart from other citizens, as well as from the officials responsible for the invocations. And so a civic function of some kind brings religious differences to the fore: That public proceeding becomes (whether intentionally or not) an instrument for dividing her from adherents to the community’s majority religion, and for altering the very nature of her relationship with her government.

At the non-elite level, say Winter Garden, Florida, the mayor himself performs the invocation, calls out a citizen who fails to rise on his order, chastises the citizen who quietly cites his desire and right to decline to participate, and — when the man also declines to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance kicks the man out of the meeting. Witness Mayor John Rees:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation settles with the IRS about investigating tax-exempt religious groups that get involved in politics.

AP reports:

"This is a victory, and we're pleased with this development in which the IRS has proved to our satisfaction that it now has in place a protocol to enforce its own anti-electioneering provisions," said [Freedom From Religion] co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor....

The FFRF argued that churches and other religious organizations have become increasingly more involved in political campaigns, "blatantly and deliberately flaunting the electioneering restrictions."

("Flaunting." Somebody — AP or FFRF — made the old flouting/flaunting mistake.)

Anyway, the point is — as we know from the big IRS scandal about Tea Party groups — if a group is too political, it doesn't qualify for a tax exemption. The same degree of enforcement should apply to all groups who seek tax-exempt status, whether they are conservative or liberal and whether they are religious or secular.

The IRS had said publicly in 2012 that it was not investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.

Perhaps you think religious organizations should get special treatment from the IRS or, at least, you may not be comfortable with this issue getting resolved in a settlement between the IRS and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I prefer applying the same rules to everyone and not giving special deference to religious groups, but the Religious Freedom Restoration Action requires the federal government to justify substantial burdens on religion with a compelling interest and narrow tailoring, as we saw in the Hobby Lobby case.

You can't expect the Freedom From Religion Foundation to push that point, however, and nothing about this settlement prevents other parties from raising that question in their own lawsuits. In any event, the IRS has a moratorium on investigations right now, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the future with this FFRF-satisfying "protocol" if some church that's used to telling its parishioners how to vote gets surprised by a deprivation of its tax-exempt status.

Please take my Establishment Clause test.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued to have the motto "In God We Trust" taken off U.S. money. The federal judge, applying a familiar old doctrine, dismissed the suit, saying "the Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the motto's secular purpose and effect."

Here's my test: You have 30 seconds. Don't read the article and don't look anything up. Write one sentence articulating a secular purpose for having "In God We Trust" on the money. Do the best you can — that is, be on against the Freedom From Religion side for the purposes of this exercise.

ADDED: I will read all the comments later today and pick some winners, but after reading a few, I feel like saying that the requirement that a law have a secular purpose can be diminished to nothing if you accept the proposition that there is a secular purpose for religion. Government can always say it is using religion to mollify/control/improve people for worldly ends. The argument would be that as long as religion is the means and not the end, it's a secular purpose. Note that complete atheists could embrace this kind of religion (and I assume they have throughout history all over the world).

CORRECTION:  The original post said "on" where it should have said "against." That was confusing, and I'm very sorry. It makes no sense — perhaps you noticed — to articulate the FFR side, which is there is NO secular purpose. The idea is to come up with a secular purpose, and I wanted you to do your best at that, even if you'd prefer to see FFR win this.

"Ball State already has a serious issue with creationism being taught as science by an astronomy professor, Hedin."

"Now they've hired another astronomy professor and creationist to teach science at their university, Gonzalez," says a Freedom From Religion Foundation lawyer.

Professor Gonzalez responds:

"As I communicated to members of the department during my interviews, I plan to continue my research on astrobiology and stellar astrophysics. I will not be discussing intelligent design (ID) in my classes (I didn't discuss ID at ISU either).... In my opinion, the controversy surrounding my hire is artificial -- largely generated by one activist blogger who is not an astronomer... Lastly, I need to reiterate that I was denied tenure at ISU not because of poor academics on my part, but for ideological and political reasons."

I'd say Gonzalez has the better side of this argument. Otherwise you'd be disqualifying even the most ordinary, mainstream religious believers from teaching science, creating fear of expressing the belief in God lest you become unemployable in your field.

(Notice that the FFR lawyer uses the term "creationism," and Gonzalez says "intelligent design.")

AND: Here's an old Slate article: "Creationism vs. Intelligent Design: Is there a difference?"

"Typical observers of [Big Mountain Jesus] are more interested in giving it a high five or adorning it in ski gear than sitting before it in prayer."

Said the District Court, rejecting an Establishment Clause challenge by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and prompting the First Things blog to say:

It’s unfortunate that current doctrine favors the trivialization of a religious symbol as evidence of its constitutionality, but that’s where we are. (Remember the candy canes and reindeer around the creche?)

Yeah, well, you know how to keep religious symbols from getting trivialized? Keep them away from the government. 

Roger Williams, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered” (dated 1644):

When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World.

But you may enjoy the wilderness, when you're out there skiing on Big Mountain and you encounter Jesus and give him a mitten or a high 5.

"Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion."

"People of faith too often feel they can't express their faith publicly. And if they dare display it, they find themselves under attack from individuals and organizations that have nothing to do with them or their communities for that matter," said Rick Perry, signing the "Merry Christmas" bill.

One might wonder why such a law is necessary. Republican state Rep. Dwayne Bohac, who introduced the bill, explained how he had become upset upon hearing from his 8-year-old son that the Christmas tree at his public school was referred to as "a holiday tree."

Bohac said he brought his concerns to the school district office, where he was told words like "Christmas" weren't used at the school because officials were afraid of being sued.

As if, now, no one's going to get sued. Or is that the point? If the school officials avoid saying "Merry Christmas" and having Christmas trees because they are litigation averse, there's never a lawsuit. I think Perry et al. would love to have a lawsuit about this, even if they think they will lose it. There's political gain in any legal outcome.

And yet, even with this law, those officials might still avoid saying "Merry Christmas" and having Christmas trees because of timidity about lawsuits. It's not as if the new statute requires Christmas trees and Christmas greetings.

Perhaps all that ever happens is this political theater with Rick Perry celebrating Christmas in June. Perhaps that was the point.

ADDED: Perry's phrase "organizations that have nothing to do with them or their communities" is sending out the bat-signal to Madison's Freedom From Religion Foundation. 

Shouldn't the Freedom From Religion Foundation sue the Madison school district for the extensive celebration of a religious holiday?

From the Madison Metropolitan School District website:

Kwanzaa celebrated at two schools

Students and staff at Falk and Lowell Elementary Schools recently performed and displayed art projects that reflect the principles of Kwanzaa. The culmination of a semester’s work incorporating Culturally Relevant Practices, the celebration also featured the donations from the schools' service learning project to help build a school library in Ghana. Four MMSD elementary schools (also Hawthorne and Mendota) are working together to provide Culturally Relevant Practices and experiences for all their students.

Video of Madison teachers and children celebrating Kwanzaa at the link.

The school district will surely say that Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday, but what constitutes religion for Establishment Clause purposes? It's not an easy question. I say that as someone who has taught a law school class in Religion and the Constitution for many years.

I once gave an exam that challenged students to think about Establishment Clause problems inherent in an invented state program pushing environmentalism, defined by statute to mean "the belief in the importance of honoring and conserving the Earth’s resources, minimizing the impact of individual human beings on the Earth, and understanding one’s personal duty to inspire others to honor and conserve resources and to minimize human impact on Earth." In my hypothetical, schools were required to stage day-long Earth Day celebrations every year, praising nature and inspiring conservation, and teachers had to begin each school day with a "solemnification exercise" that included "a recitation enforcing the values of environmentalism along with a set of symbolic gestures," with this example, described in the state law:

On a small table, the teacher unfolds a green cloth to reveal a twig, a small stone, an egg, and a small box of good soil. The teacher opens the box, takes out a bit of soil and sprinkles it on the stone, egg, and twig, and says: "This is our Earth, which is given to us, to love and preserve, for all time." The students then repeat that phrase aloud, and the teacher carefully closes the box, rewraps the items, and puts them away.

My hypothetical environmentalism, like Kwanzaa, is at least a religion substitute, in that it attempts to capture the children's idealism and spiritual longings and to direct them into a particular ideology. It employs the devices of traditional religion: songs of celebration, symbolic gestures and rituals, incantations. In the case of Kwanzaa, based on what I've read, it was originally designed as an alternative to Christmas. And the 7th of the 7 principles of Kwanzaa is:

Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in God, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Presumably the God part is watered down for school purposes, but watering down religion is a problem in itself.

ADDED: I see that at something called "The Official Kwanzaa Web Site" — what makes it "official"? — the "Imani/Faith" principle has no "God." It is otherwise word-for-word the same as what I've quoted above. Without God, the statement of faith is puzzling: believe with all your heart in our people and the righteousness of our struggle. That sounds like the worst of what governments have done grabbing at the hearts of young people.

"Freedom From Religion Foundation sues IRS for not enforcing electioneering restrictions on churches."

"The lawsuit cites 'open and notorious violations' of these electioneering restrictions by churches since 2008, including 'blatantly partisan full-page ads' from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that ran in papers throughout the country leading up to the Nov. 6 election."

In the ad, Graham urges people to vote "for those who protect the sanctity of life and support the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman."

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, says, "Everybody knows what he was talking about: Obama endorsing same-sex marriage."

Full text of complaint at the link.

"Rosary rallies" at the Wisconsin Capital are partisan politics....

... according to some partisans of the side that is not the one the reciters of Catholic prayers are supposedly partisan for.

10 things wrong with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's atheist nativity scene.

(Here's my video showing the details of the creche, which is on the first floor of the Wisconsin Capitol, near some other holiday displays. You should watch the video to understand this list.)

1. Of the many figures in the display, only one is naked, ans it is a woman. This is the "clothed male, naked female" fantasy — promoted, presumably unwittingly.

2. The naked woman is Venus (the famous Botticelli Venus), and Venus is a goddess, a supernatural religious character, and therefore inconsistent with the overall theme of the display, which is that there is only the natural world and it's all we need.

3. The baby in the manger is huge in relation to the Venus figure, who is ostensibly the mother, so that is some scary cephalopelvic disproproportion, and yet naked Venus shows no signs of the C-section she would have needed to avoid death, unless we're to assume that baby got out of her body in some miraculous way, which is inconsistent with the theme of the display.

4. Atheism is promoted through a set of quotes from prominent figures — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and Mark Twain — in other words, by reference to the revered words of authority figures, which is the same method of arriving at beliefs used by religionists — whom we're invited to disrespect for thinking like that.

5. A sign says "may reason prevail" and ends: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," which is not even a remotely credible belief, because it is falsified by every example of a person who is moved to altruism and charity by religion. Reason doesn't prevail on the very sign that says "may reason prevail."

6. In 2 places, the display invokes the solstice as an occasion for contemplating the natural world as the totality of what is. We're told it's "the reason for the season." Reason is a buzz word for these atheists, but what reason is there for a reason-fixated atheist to pay any special attention to the solstice? It seems they've gotten their atheism mixed up with paganism, which betrays the religious component of their thought structure.

7. There's a sign saying "Thou shalt not steal" — a quote from God, as reported in the Bible.

8. Right behind the "Thou shalt not steal" sign, there's an array of brochures titled "About FFR's Natural Nativity," which I think they want you to take, but I didn't take one because of the intimidating God quote about stealing.

9. There's a sign that says "Heathen's Greetings," but "heathen" is a religious designation. "Heathenism" is Germanic neopaganism.

10. Unless only one heathen is greeting us, they've got the apostrophe in the wrong place in "Heathen's."