It's Day 16 of the Year 2019 CE, meaning that it's January , 2019

Religious freedom is something worth celebrating because it is something greatly to be desired, and, boy, do I ever greatly desire it. Today was no doubt deemed an auspicious date for this celebration because on January 16, 1786, Virginia (not yet a state) enacted the Statute for Religious Freedom that had been authored by Thomas Jefferson. This was actually a bit late in the day, because we'd already seen witch trials and executions, people expelled into the wilderness or tortured for wrong thinking and a ton of stuff along those lines. Nonetheless, better late than never, I guess.

At the bottom, that law and the religious liberty clause in the much later First Amendment were really about foreclosing the possibility of religious wars such as had roiled all of Europe for so much of its history. The elitist colonists running the show back then were very well aware of those wars and their repercussions and did not wish to see them repeated here. It pretty much worked except for serious flare-ups against the Mormons, which were still not genocidal like the Albigensian Crusade. They certainly did not ensure religious freedom at the time of their enactment nor for most of the rest of the nation's history. A dive into Con Law history and court decisions quickly reveals how much religion has been and still is part of our laws and regulations.

Blue Laws In my childhood I learned to use "Blue Laws" to all of the religiofascist laws designed to impose Christianist restrictions and behaviors upon all persons. It turns out that, as I later learned, the term really only applies to Sunday laws, of which there have been and still are tons, with the blessings of the US courts. They have forbidden conducting business, working as employment, mowing lawns, buying and selling specific items like alcoholic beverages, groceries, cookware and cars. The courts have relied upon the idea that everybody needs a day off for health and safety reasons as grounds to say that such laws have a secular purpose, piss poor illogic that lost any questionable validity it ever had ages ago. Many of these laws have fallen by the wayside because they became a pain in the ass to too many nominal Christians and never succeeded in forcing non-Christians and non-mainstream Christians to respect the mainstream Christian sabbat, let alone keep it holy. So long after the 5 day work week was widely if not generally adopted and the absolute prohibition on employment and business on Sunday were mostly repealed, there is still a putative secular purpose for certain locales to prohibit the selling of specific items.Riiiiight. These laws were never anything other than an attempt to force all residents of this country to abide by the mainstream Christian Sabbath and refrain from desecrating it with secular activities whether they liked it or not.

I mentioned my youthful misunderstanding assigning the term "blue laws" to the whole gamut of religion based prohibitions, proscriptions and mandates. As you might guess from the fact that the courts have ruled as they did with respect to Sunday laws, they have not challenged any of these on the basis of religious freedom and religious liberty but have ducked the issue entirely with rare exceptions even though the wellspring from which they flowed is clearly religious. To some extent it is a characteristic of at least some religions to proselytize and be dominionist. The US seems to have attracted colonists and later immigrants who were overly zealous in this regard, determined that all should follow the behavioral rules and mores that they believed their god mandated. In addition, a great number were particularly twisted up over human sexuality. This led to clusters of laws derived from their respective sects' beliefs on what was forbidden by their god's decrees as well as what was mandated by them.

* Laws against "Adultery" and cohabitation outside of wedlock abounded, including such things as unmarried adults sharing a hotel room.
* There were laws against "Sodomy", which had numerous definitions, and some even outlawed some consensual behaviors between married heterosexual couples within the confines of their own bedrooms.
* Parallel and in addition to those were tons of laws prohibiting "Unnatural Acts", which also often included acts between consenting married couples.
* There were local, and eventually national laws against Plural Marriage, as distinguished from Bigamy, both polygamy and polygyny, which, no matter what one thinks of them, need not be abusive and are not logically per se abusive.
* All forms of Birth Control have been restricted at times as to who might obtain it, how, when and where and whether a permit was required. Today's laws still allow pharmacists to withhold birth control in some places based solely upon their personal religious beliefs.
* Need I really mention laws against Abortion?
* There was the outlawing of homosexuality and even when and where that was relaxed or repealed, homosexuals were accorded a very limited set of "inalienable rights" and subjected to unequal treatment under the law including being persecuted
* There's the continuing refusal to acknowledge the existence or even the possibility of transgender and intersex persons because "god does not make mistakes. They are incessantly persecuted with shit like refusal to issue papers and documents, bathroom bills, insistence that gender be defined by primary sexual characteristics at birth and the like.
* With respect to all GLBTQ persons, the police and other John law types are extremely lax to investigate or even take cognizance of crimes against them, and are especially lax in classifying violent attacks on them as hate crimes. This has to at least somewhat abet the fact that they are among the top victims, right after our Indian brothers and sisters.

All of those and more are drawn from puritanical forms of Christians religions, lack any legitimate public purpose and baselessly overrule and override the rights of people to engage in various acts and practices derived from the ownership by each person of their own bodies. There is and never has been any legitimate justification for any of those laws, and they were vast in number and extent in every conceivable jurisdiction. The are outright violations of each of our individual personhood all because some religiofascists want to ram their religious beliefs and practices down everybody's throats.

Possibly less obvious are the multitudes of laws prohibiting Swearing & Cursing. The fact that these have been stretched to include any and all "bad words" somewhat confuses the issue, but their origins are religious all the same. god, in various manifestations, cursed many beings and things and it is his sole prerogative, but, nonetheless, the evil one also has that power and can confer it to his minions such as witches and hence it is as evil as they are. Swearing, the taking of Oaths, is correctly done in the name of god, which shall not be taken in vain and hence idle swearing goes against god's will. Blasphemy, of pretty obvious religious origin, and Profanity also clearly a religious peeve have also at times been outlawed here and there.

This opens the door to the bluenoses' attempts to censor damn near anything and everything that a sufficiently twisted mind can deem indirectly and remotely objectionable to god and the uber-godly, the prohibition of Obscenity. Vast quantities of linguistic and legalistic gyrations have been spewed across many volumes of writings to define, clarify and elucidate this evil or evils where our learned judiciary has deemed may be indeed outlawed, even though they don't have any fucking clue what the fuck it means. Sober, solemn learned jurists have been reduced to such cretinous drivel as "I know it when I see it" (Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio.) None the less, the godly among us will ever strive to impose their twisted narrow-minded vision of what is permissible for some to write, paint, sculpt, or say and others to read, see or hear.

Skin, from ankles and arms to shoulders, knees and thighs or even OMG, Nudity This goes back to the whole sex is dirty, hence sexual parts, etc, but also falls down here because of the naked body being obscene. As the great jurist Lenny Bruce once said: If something about the human body disgusts you, the fault lies with the manufacturer.

Clearly religious in origin, the case law in this cluster of illegitimate laws focuses exclusively on freedom of speech instead of the fact that there in no secular justification for any of this shit any more than there is for any of the first glob dealt with above.

There have been a lot of laws prohibiting atheists from running for or taking office. The supremes said that they don't fly, but a lot of places kept them on the books anyway, as a deterrent. If you run and win then you need to petition for a writ of mandamus, and appeal any adverse decision, etc.

School Prayer has been slapped down numerous times, but they keep working to bring it back and to find ways around the law.

Why not, legislative sessions and many government meetings of all kinds, official business and hearings that people often really have to attend open with a prayer, and it's all cool and perfectly legal, just as legal as the creche on the courthouse lawn.

The National Day of Prayer is an annual day of observance held on the first Thursday of May, designated by the United States Congress, when people are asked "to turn to God in prayer and meditation". Each year since its inception, the president has signed a proclamation, encouraging all Americans to pray on this day. (from Wikipedia)

They added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in many places forced kids to recite it in school until the Supremes ruled that kids could refuse to participate. They did so only because a particular Christian sect claimed that it violated some specific rules of their faith.

The same President officially made "In God We Trust the official motto of the country and of our currency and coinage
When I was a kid, the christofascists were always insisting that we only have freedom OF religion and not freedom FROM religion, and clearly they are right, because all levels of government constantly spew and display religion, its trappings and artifacts.

There has been open outright war on Indian religions, with conversion of the survivors of the physical genocide committed against them subject to concerted attempts at cultural genocide which continue to this day.

It's not like this is ancient history. This kind of shit is ongoing and part of our cultural milieu. When they had a draft, they provided for conscientious objectors, but insisted that their objections be based on religion, but not philosophy, ethics or morals. They further insisted that Buddhists and Taoists couldn't qualify, because a religion had to involve worshipping a god, though eventually the courts ruled that they had to accept Buddhism as a religion, godless though it was. No, this isn't a secular nation, it never was, and we don't have real freedom of religion, and never have. When you can't go to a zoning hearing regarding your own neighborhood without a fucking revival meeting breaking out, it is a mockery to speak of religious freedom. Worse yet, the government is now openly Partnered with religion.

William Ronald Jefferson Reagan Clinton, in addition to passing a law intended to permit religious groups to overrule and run roughshod over things like zoning and parking ordinances and, generally, any law which might apply to everybody else that in any way inconvenienced them, also created the Faith Based Initiative. It was embedded in his welfare reform, drug treatment, and job training initiatives. The so-called Charitable Choice provisions of his so-called Welfare Reform allowed for the direct financial support of religious institutions by the Federal Government and by State Governments in receipt of "block grants". Money earmarked for sex education could be instead given to religiofascists to teach abstinence only. Monies for nutritional support programs could be handed over to Churches ostensibly in order to fund bread lines, etc. A big fan of these diversions of funds, Governor George Warmonger Bush, took it a step further, and Al Gore's support of the idea made it ostensibly bipartisan. Bush expanded the reach and scope and made it clear that religious groups serving as the conduits or misusers of federal funds needn't in any way tone down their religious trappings, character, mission or agenda. Next up, President Obama created The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships which had a primary mission of working with the administration to fund the maximum number of such religious groups to the maximum extent possible with respect to the maximum conceivable possible types of services. In fact, Faith-Based Partnership ombudsmen were inserted within some line agencies with a directive to "help" those agencies find the most possible ways to avail themselves of the services of religious functionaries and organizations. So now, the actual peons who do the actual work must look out not only for ignorant misguided bosses, but also meddlesome priests. It's gone from "in god we trust" to "god's minions we have to trust, or else hide from".

So yeah, religious freedom, whoopie, let us jump and shout, or maybe, better yet, pray. Oh Eris, goddess supreme, is this your doing? Congrats and hail discord!

Ah yes, and it all goes back to Virginia, of all places. Sweet Virginia

Image is: "In God We Trust" Plaque
Placed 1961
Two identical bronzes:
(1) Longworth House Office Building, main lobby, east wall.
(2) Dirksen Office Building, southwest entrance, west wall.

-- Photo Credit goes to "Architect of the Capitol"

Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours
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