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Friday, March 21st, 2014

Why Does the Religious Right Think the Bible Should Trump America’s Laws?

Author:     NINA MARTIN
Source:     Pro Publica/AlterNet (U.S.)
Publication Date:     19-Mar-14
 Link: Why Does the Religious Right Think the Bible Should Trump America’s Laws?
Stephan:   This excellent interview with Professor Katherine Franke, Director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School articulates very well what the strategy of the Theocratic Right is about. What they are trying to achieve. There is a reason the Founders put up a firewall between the church and the state, and would not support any particular religion -- Ben Franklin paid for pews in a church of every major denomination in Philadelphia, and very infrequently attended any of them. The Founders understood that what is trying to happen today is exactly what they feared would happen if they did not build the firewall. In many cases they, their parents, or grandparents, or all three, had suffered because Anglicanism was the state religion of the United Kingdom, and the monarch was the head of both church and state.

As conservatives grapple with the reality of gay marriage and the Supreme Court weighs whether companies should be forced to offer birth control to employees, it’s very clear: The conflict between religious freedom and gender/sexual equality has become ‘the most important civil rights issue of this time.”

So says Professor Katherine Franke [3], director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School [4] and one of the driving forces behind the school’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a new initiative that seeks to shift the way people look at religious and secular values – and to bridge a divide that has come to seem insurmountable. Here, Franke talks with ProPublica’s Sex and Gender reporter, Nina Martin.
NM: Let’s start with why these two things – religious belief and civil rights – have come to seem so at odds.

KF: Part of the problem is the way we’re currently framing the issue. On the one hand, we have the free exercise of religion, which is largely based in an appeal to revelation, to the truths of religious texts and religious doctrine. And on the other hand we have rights of equality and liberty, which are based in rational arguments – […]

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