Category: News

“The Demise of the Wall Between Church and State”, by Nelson Tebbe (Cornell Law School), Micah Schwarzman, and Richard Schragger (U. Virginia School of Law).

Ms. Stewart’s commentary in the Sunday, March 8 paper was titled “Don’t Let Trump Pay Back Evangelicals Like This”. The link is: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelicals.html.

Pulitzer Prize – winning journalist Linda Greenhouse recently wrote about the church/state issues likely to come up in the next Supreme Court session. Read her column that appeared in the September 12 edition of the New York Times.  Very informative, but scary.

Article VI, Clause 3 of the constitution guarantees that citizens are not required to have a specific set of religious beliefs, or any at all, in order to exercise their rights.  Nevertheless, Americans have an aversion to atheists in public life, as is described a thoughtful review, “Without a Prayer: Why are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism” by Casey Cep in the October 29 New Yorker of two books: “Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life”(Norton) by Cornell Professors R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick and “Seven Types of Atheism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by philosopher John Gray. If you don’t get to the books, the review is well worth reading. Click on the article link above.

Susan Jacoby’s op-ed with this headline appeared in the Sunday, July 8, issue of The New York Times. The official title is “The White House is Tearing Down the Wall Between Church and State“.  Click to read the article from the NYT website.

Be sure to read the op-ed in the Wednesday, May 22 issue of the New York Times, by Asma Uddin. Ms. Uddin is a Fellow (but not a fellow) at the Initiative on Security and Religious Freedom at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations.  She seems to be an excellent source on many of the issues of importance to us.

The national AU organization (https://www.au.org) has just increased annual dues from $25 to $35/year, effective immediately.  Your next renewal will be slightly more expensive, but still well worth it.  The dues were $25 for more than 30 years.

This is the case of Liberty Lutheran School, in Columbia, Missouri,  that asked for Missouri government support for their playground upgrade.  The AU comment on this is at:  http://au.org/media/press-releases/americans-united-dismayed-by-us-supreme-court-s-decision-in-trinity-lutheran.

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia would like to get public funding to improve their preschool playground. After their application to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources was denied, they sued in federal court, claiming that they had been discriminated against. They lost in that trial but appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled against them. In January 2016, the Supreme Court agreed to hear their case, and it has now been scheduled for arguments on April 19.  The details of the case are described in Church and State: http://au.org/media/press-releases/mo-church-has-no-right-to-taxpayer-funds-americans-united-and-allies-tell-us. The most recent development is that Missouri Attorney General Hawley has appointed James Layton, who served under previous Attorney General Koster to defend Missouri’s Blaine Amendment.