About once a year or so, Justice Antonin Scalia gets in front of a Catholic school assembly and tells the students that there is no constitutional tradition that says the state must be neutral on religion or free of religion. At least he is consistent. He is consistently wrong about separation of church and state.
It didn’t take long for Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a radical Christian, to subjectively decide what is covered under the 1st amendment and what isn’t. He had a display from the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) removed from the capitol building after arbitrarily deciding it didn’t meet the criteria for putting up displays in the building.
Most Christmas seasons I’ve written blog posts about some religious freedom legal case involving a local or state government preference for Christianity during the holiday. Why haven’t I written many posts on it this year? I get sick of repeating myself and it seems like after each case, each year, we go back to square one somewhere else the next year. I needed a post this month so here are a couple of examples that show why some religious conservatives refuse to understand the first amendment.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is trying to run for President, gave a so-called national security strategy speech at The National Press Club on November 17th. What is Kasich’s strategy? Christian propaganda into non-Christian areas of the world. To Ohioans like me, this is classic Kasich – pandering to religious conservatives rather than offering sensible, rational, and secular policies to solve problems.
Election Day is Tuesday and many of us still travel to a polling place to cast our ballots in person. In many communities the polling place is located inside a church. It is not illegal to have voting in a church but the location still needs to meet election laws such as having no electioneering materials within a proscribed voting zone. What should you look for and what should you do to make sure a church follows the rules?
States differ in how their polling places are set up but I will use Ohio as an example.
