Last month, the Americans United Legal Department sent a letter to the Reno County Commission in Kansas. A resident of that area had been attending Commission meetings and noticed that just about all of them opened with Christian prayer. That didn’t seem right, so this person contacted us.

Sure enough, our attorneys did some research and found that Christian prayers were used nearly 90 percent of the time to open these government meetings. They promptly wrote a letter to the Commission, letting its members know that this was very problematic from a constitutional standpoint.

Some good news: The Commission has directed its attorney to draft a new policy covering invocations. The policy will ask guest clergy to use non-sectarian prayers.

Naturally not everyone is happy with the change. Robert Noland of the Wichita-based Kansas Family Policy Council (a group that, according to its website, “champions a biblical worldview”), groused that “This effort is to single out Christ. Jesus Christ is the only target.”

Well, no. If the commission had been offering up regular supplications to Allah, Shiva, Zeus or even the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Americans United would have objected to that as well. Our belief is that government must represent people of many different faiths (as well as those who don’t believe in deities) and should refrain from sponsoring any type of religious activity.

To be clear, we would have preferred that the Reno County Commission drop official invocations entirely. Members who felt the need for spiritual guidance would still be free to pray privately on their own before the meeting, but they would no longer presume to pray in everyone else’s name. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to government use of non-sectarian prayers in a 1983 ruling, so this is probably the best we can do.

This issue stirred up emotions on both sides in the area. I was pleased to see a local minister bring some much-needed clarity to the issue in a column that ran in the Hutchinson News.

Bob Layne, a retired Episcopal priest (and former member of the Kentucky state legislature), urged a reexamination of the entire issue of government-endorsed prayer. He doesn’t see much value in it.

Layne noted that he and his wife begin each day with prayer and Bible reading. It’s obviously meaningful for them. But he recalled that when he was in the Kentucky Senate, the daily prayer ritual was anything but meaningful.

“Often during the somewhat lengthy praying of the chaplain, the senators would roll up the desktops, place the daily newspaper in the well, stand with heads bowed, and just read the news until the preacher said ‘Amen,’” wrote Layne. “Most paid little attention to the prayer. Also, quite often the preacher invoked the Almighty to nudge or knock the lawmakers into approving whatever agenda the preacher was advocating. Of course, this was usually very subtle, but it was there, always accompanied with a veiled threat of dire consequences if ignored. But even that had little effect. When I prayed over the Kansas Legislature, I basically felt like spiritual veneer being spread over the session to somehow sanctify the proceedings, which often were anything but holy.”

Layne advised the Reno County Commission to follow the advice of Jesus in the Book of Matthew: “Do not pray like the hypocrites. Whenever you pray, go into your room, shut the door and pray to your Father in secret.”

Observed Layne, “I honestly believe that praying in our homes is much more powerful than public prayers, school prayers, or official prayers of any sort. Far too often, the focus of public prayer is on the one praying rather than the deity toward whom the prayer is so loudly and passionately voiced. (Tim Tebow, take note.)”

I can only say one word to that: “Amen!”

Related articles:

1. Dumfries, Virginia takes half-step forward, half-step sideways on Council prayer
2. NC county commission votes to keep praying to Jesus

Last month I wrote about Religious Right pseudo-historian David Barton’s new book The Jefferson Lies, which attempts to prove that Thomas Jefferson was an orthodox Christian and not really a strong advocate of church-state separation.

Reading that thing just about drove me bonkers. Barton wrenches material from context, tells half of the story and sometimes just makes things up. It’s an appalling example of what I call “historical creationism.”

I’ve been debunking Barton’s revisionist history since 1993 – and pointing out repeatedly that the man is not a qualified historian. He has a bachelor’s degree in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University.

But to be honest, I’ve felt a bit hamstrung myself because I’m not an academic either. Neither is another prominent Barton critic, Chris Rodda of Liars for Jesus. Chris does great work, but it’s just too easy for some to dismiss her research (and mine) because it doesn’t come from the academy.

Now the academy has spoken – and Barton is not going to like what it has to say. Two Grove City College professors holding doctorates have just released Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Our Third President.

Authors Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor, and Michael Coulter, a humanities and political science professor, are both conservative Christians. (Grove City is a private Christian institution where, according to its website, the “ethical absolutes of the Ten Commandments and Christ’s moral teachings guide the effort to develop intellect and character in the classroom, chapel, and cocurricular activities.”)

I started the book last night after dinner and couldn’t put it down. To be blunt, it’s a hammer. Throckmorton and Coulter look at numerous pieces of disinformation spread by Barton and give the real story, usually backing up their claims with words from Jefferson’s own writings.

Here are three examples:

* Barton says Jefferson helped found the Virginia Bible Society. Did he? Nope. Jefferson made a one-time contribution to the Society because a business associate asked him to. In reality, Jefferson wasn’t too keen on Bible societies, criticizing them in letters to friends for meddling in the religions of other countries.

* Barton says Jefferson added the phrase “In the Year of Our Lord Christ” to official government documents. Did he? No. The documents referred to were called “sea letters,” a type of passport that enabled ships to move between nations. By the terms of a Treaty with Holland ratified in 1782, Jefferson was obligated to use language on pre-printed forms provided by that nation. Officials in Holland added the “Lord Christ” language.

* Barton says that while Jefferson was a state legislator in Virginia, he proposed a bill that would have punished anyone who worked on Sunday. Did he do this? He did not. Jefferson was part of a committee charged with the task of revising Virginia’s law after the Revolution. Rather than start from scratch, the committee took 126 existing laws and revised some of them. The committee’s work actually liberalized the Sabbath law. They added a huge loophole allowing work done “in the ordinary household offices of daily necessity, or other work of necessity or charity.” The law Barton sees as favoring Christianity actually liberalized a provision that had been much more stringent.

There is much, much more in this book. It’s first-rate scholarship.

So why did Throckmorton and Coulter write it? Their answer is remarkably refreshing: “The duty of Christians as scholars is first to get the facts correct…. Engaging in scholarship as a Christian is not about who is on our team; it should have as an aim of uncovering the facts about a subject, whether it is a historical figure or a theory of social science, and following the data where they lead.”

See more on Throckmorton and Coulter’s website. You can learn there how to download the book, which is a bargain at $4.99. For the price of a cup of fancy coffee at Starbucks, you can get a book that utterly demolishes Barton/Religious Right “scholarship.” (And if you don’t believe Barton has influence, check out his recent appearance on “The Daily Show.” I was really annoyed that Jon Stewart never laid a glove on him. Throckmorton and Coulter should be invited on to set things right.)

If Barton has any shame, he would disappear in the wake of Throckmorton and Coulter’s book. He won’t do that, of course, and millions of right-wing fundamentalists will continue to believe his version of “history” over the real thing.

But thanks to Getting Jefferson Right, the truth will be out there for anyone who takes the time to look for it. 

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Yesterday Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (FRC), issued a rather hysterical email appeal for funds. No news there. Perkins does that all of the time.

This particular message, headlined “Help stop secular tyranny,” took a line that’s increasingly popular with the Religious Right these days: “Woe is me! We’re being persecuted.”

The message contained this bizarre assertion: “Recently, a top liberal attorney – the head of the anti-Christian Americans United for Separation of Church and State – said that COMMUNIST CHINA was a good model for how to deal with conservative Christians.”

Wait a minute. I work closely with that “top liberal attorney” and head of Americans United. He’s my boss, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn. It’s my job to keep tabs on his comings and goings, and I don’t remember anything like this.

It turns out Perkins was referencing a recent debate Barry took part in during the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville. That city is the home of Vanderbilt University, a private institution that requires all campus clubs to be open to all students. Fundamentalist Christians have been complaining about this, saying it will require Christian clubs to admit gay students.

Barry, noting that Vanderbilt is a private school that is free to determine its own policies, advised the crowd to “stop whining.”

The Christian Post picked up the story and quoted Barry as saying: “I would suggest that people in this position – to use a phrase on a button in my dentist office that he always wears when he works, it says, ‘stop whining.’ I’d say stop whining here. Why not do what evangelicals do: Go out into the world, out into the community [and] have your meetings, if you have to, off campus. Show your faith [and] meet with students not in a club room somewhere in the university, but in those home churches that kept Christianity alive during the darkest days of communist China.”

I think it’s pretty clear from the context what Barry was saying here: If Christianity can survive official persecution in China, fundamentalists in America will probably endure, despite this policy at Vanderbilt.

Perkins surely knows this, but I guess he felt compelled to distort Barry’s meaning to stir up his rabid followers. He may have had another motivation as well: Perkins is trying to draw attention away from his antics. You see, the FRC chieftain has hit a rough patch lately.

On Friday, Perkins was slammed for saying that the “birthers,” perhaps the biggest kooks in the right wing’s cacophonous collection of crackpots, have raised “a legitimate issue.”

A few days before that, Perkins was ridiculed nationwide when he attacked Mike and Ike, a popular fruit-flavored candy made by the Just Born firm of Bethlehem, Pa. As part of a publicity stunt to spark new interest in the brand, the company’s owners announced that Mike and Ike are splitting up over creative differences.

Just Born never said Mike and Ike (who, by the way, don’t actually exist) were doing anything other than ending a business arrangement. Perkins immediately assumed it was a case of “gay divorce.”

On a radio spot, Perkins fulminated, “The duo is staging a gay divorce as part of a new ad campaign to draw in younger customers. In this society, even candy has an agenda!”

The Perkins salvo led to an amusing response from the Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart, who mocked Perkins while lurking behind a “Perkins Cam” that took the shape of a giant penis. (Beware: If you are offended by off-color humor, best skip this clip.)

Perkins also came under fire after he weighed in on the Secret Service prostitution scandal. According to Perkins, the fiasco was caused by the decision to drop the military’s “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy on gay service members.

“You cannot maintain moral order if you are willing to allow a few things to slide,” Perkins intoned.

The connection was so strained that one blogger observed, “I am not sure how to react to this. It makes absolutely no sense at all, but apparently, gay people – the mere presence of us – causes straight people to do all kinds of heterosexual naughty stuff. I don’t know. I am trying but it hurts my brain too much to attempt to make sense of this.”

So, yes, it has been a tough couple of weeks for Tony Perkins. But that’s nobody’s fault but his. He said crazy stuff and is being called on it. Going psycho on Barry Lynn won’t change that.

P.S. One more time, Tony: Americans United is not an “anti-Christian” organization. As you know, Barry Lynn is an ordained Christian minister. AU supports the right of all Americans to join the house of worship of their choice (Christian or non-Christian) or to eschew religion entirely. We simply insist that the government stay neutral on theological matters. If that makes us “anti-Christian,” we’re in good company because the Founders believed that too. 

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This weekend, Americans will rally all over the country to speak out against what is being called the “War on Women.” Much of this “war” springs from fundamentalist Christian groups and the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which are determined to control the reproductive lives of Americans.

Naturally, this hits women the hardest. They are the ones who get pregnant, after all.

Americans United has endorsed the rallies, and I’ll be speaking at one here in Washington, D.C. When I mentioned this the other day on Facebook, a conservative friend took issue. The war on women, he insisted, is a media creation and isn’t real.

That assertion might surprise the women living in states where legislators have passed laws requiring women seeking abortions to first sit through paternalistic lectures or undergo an invasive ultrasound. It might surprise the women living in states where pharmacists have been given a right to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions. It might surprise the women who watched the U.S. Senate deliberate (and defeat, thankfully) a law that would have given any employer a “religious freedom right” to cut off contraceptive coverage for any employee.

It might also surprise the women who live in states where taxpayer funding is being shifted away health clinics that offer comprehensive care for women toward “crisis pregnancy” centers that are little more than proselytizing agencies for fundamentalist Christianity.

Sofia Resnick of The American Independent has written a stunning article exposing these centers. It’s a long piece but well worth your time. Read it and be outraged. Your tax dollars may be funding these centers.

Resnick writes that at least seven states – Texas, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota and Pennsylvania – steer public aid to these facilities. A few have even received indirect federal funding through the stimulus package passed in 2009.

“Collectively, for the current fiscal year, they are allocating approximately $17 million to these anti-abortion centers,” she writes.

The centers are not supposed to use public money to promote religion, but let’s get real here. These places are owned, operated and staffed by people who believe the Bible says abortion is sinful and must be stopped. They can easily preach that message to visitors and say that portion is paid for with private donations.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that women can simply avoid these centers. In South Dakota and other states, pre-abortion “counseling” is mandatory. Several Christian centers are on the state-approved list to provide it. (I’m trying to imagine what would happen to a bill that required men to get religious counseling before undergoing a vasectomy or getting a Viagra prescription filled.)

These centers impose religious qualifications on all staff and volunteers. Here are a few examples from the Independent’s story:

* Care Net in Rapid City, S.D., says all staff, volunteers and board members “are expected to know Christ as their Savior and Lord.” Applicants must affirm a fundamentalist statement of faith.

* The Life Center in Midland, Texas, requires even its receptionist to abide by its “Common Christian Beliefs” and provide a church reference.

* PregnancyCare of Cincinnati wants to hire a manager who can demonstrate “mature Christian faith” who will “set a good personal example of Christ-centered servant leadership.”

* True Life Choice in Orlando, Fla., is looking for a director who is “committed Christian who demonstrates a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.”

As Resnick notes, “While federal law prohibits employment discrimination based on religious beliefs, there is an exception for religious organizations – a category that seems to include the Rapid City center and other [crisis pregnancy centers]. And in many cases, it’s perfectly legal for these groups to receive taxpayer funding, even if they practice religious hiring discrimination.”

This is more fallout from the ill-conceived “faith-based” initiative. For years, Americans United has warned that allowing sectarian organizations to take public funds and discriminate in hiring on religious grounds is unfair. This policy, combined with the rabid determination of lawmakers to control the private health matters of the people, has created this perfect storm.

The first step is to cut off all public money to these “crisis” clinics. They have the right to exist, but they should be treated like what they are, religious ministries, and denied tax aid. Let them get by on voluntary donations.

The second step is to end all laws mandating that women consult with these centers before they exercise a legal right to abortion. This is paternalistic and likely unconstitutional. (Portions of the South Dakota law are already being challenged in court.)

And here’s the final step: Recognizing that the war on women is real, that it’s led by powerful and ultra-conservative religious groups and that it’s spreading.

What’s our side’s best weapon in this “war”? It’s a proper application of separation of church and state.  

Hundreds of thousands of Americans (maybe even millions) will rally for that cause this weekend. Come and add your voice to that growing chorus.

Related articles:

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2. Humanists Call on Obama to Stop Taxpayer-Funded Religious Discrimination

Today is Earth Day, a time when a lot of us will be thinking about how we can better care for our planet to ensure it remains habitable for future generations. Well, not all of us. Some people will be thinking about how the Bible says it’s all right to pretty much do whatever we want with the Earth and not worry about a thing. Related articles:

1. Santorum and the ‘Green Dragon’: Faith-Based Attacks on Environmentalism Nothing New from the Religious Right
2. Evangelicals fight environmentalism, and an online poll
3. Grudem: "Among Male Homosexuals, The Rate of Sexual Faithfulness is Around 2 Percent"

When Southwest Dekalb High School (Decatur, Ga.) holds its graduation next month, one of the school’s top students won’t attend because the ceremony is being held in a church. Related articles:

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John F. Kennedy was willing to say that if the public interest clashed with his religious beliefs, he would put the public interest first. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention? Their actions speak louder than their words. Related articles:

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If you’re not willing to do what the job requires, you’re not likely to get it. End of story. Related articles:

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