The Fugitive Atheist Act (posted June 28, 2002)

[arendt]

The Fugitive Atheist Act
by arendt (June 28, 2002)

"No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law
or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,
but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service
or labor may be due."

- U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 2
(the basis for the Fugitive Slave Law)

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Fast forward to tomorrow: a bill submitted to Congress by the Sons of the
Biblical Confederacy, a.k.a. the Grand Hypocrisy Party:

Whereas, our first Big Lie , that the founders of the U.S. (agnostics
almost to a man) thought of America as a "Christian nation", has
been repeated often enough to brainwash the church-going
fundamentalist masses;

and, whereas, our second Big Lie, recently expounded by Tom
Delay, that "separation of church and state is a myth", is currently
being parroted by a supine media and rammed through packed
courts with well-funded test cases (we especially enjoyed the
specious and distracting economic apologetics of the Supreme
Court's 5-4 School Voucher decision);

therefore, it is now time to declare that theocracy shall know no
restraints in our benighted country.

Hence, we promulgate the Fugitive Atheist Act:

"No atheist or non-Christian residing in the U.S., relying upon the
guarantees of the First Amendment, shall be discharged from
funding the ancillary operations of Christian sectarian religions,
but shall be forced to tolerate these 'takings' of organized religions
upon the public purse and to submit to sectarian dogma delivered
under the pain of denial of public service. This act validates, as the basis
for these takings, the unfounded and anti-historical claim of 'religious
intent' of the Founders of this country put forward by self-interested
religious sects, who covet the American government's property as
much as Henry VIII coveted the Catholic Church's property when he
set up the state religion of Anglicanism."

By this act, we openly declare war on separation of church and state and on
public literacy - two of the bulwarks of American democracy. It is our intention
to create religious schools like the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas where
children will be taught a cartoon-like version of Christianity and distrust and
hatred of anyone not equally fundamentalist.

By this act, we equate secular or a-religious activity with atheism, just as John
Ashcroft has already equated criticism with treason. We also declare all non-
Christians, be they Buddhist, Hindus, or Moslems, to be second-class citizens.
We re-affirm our designation of gypsies, homosexuals, and feminists as vermin.

By this act we create a specially-privileged class of corporations, known as Christian
churches, which are given tax exemptions while still being allowed to engage in
partisan political activities, such as the recently reported event of a teacher taking
a class on a field trip to picket abortion clinics.

By the deliberately vague phrase "ancillary operations", we invite religious leaders
to press for further handouts from the government and further intrusions of religious
dogma into the government, such as "faith-based health services".

However this act, shall in no way be interpreted as applying against those anti-
environmental groups which have invented the concept of "takings" to prevent the
necessary protection of endangered commonly-held environments.

------------------------------------

It would be a refreshing bit of honesty if the Republican counter-revolutionaries
would introduce the above mock legislation. At least then their agenda would be
clear, without the endless obfuscation of their anti-democratic intentions. But, the
Republican Party is the most prominent American example of Scott Peck's "People
of the Lie" since the slave-owners, who were also masters of denial, self-justification,
and intricate dissembling. Witness the quote at the beginning of this article, which
the historian James M. McPherson calls "the typical oblique language of the
Constitution on slavery". Or recall that the epithet "wage slave" was used by
slave-owners against Free State working men long before Karl Marx had written
Das Kapital.

Today's Republicans have set themselves a much harder task than the slave-
owners. The word "god" does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. And the word
religion only exists in the First Amendment prohibiting the establishment of any.

On the other hand, slavery was "obliquely" written into the Constitution. Slaves had
been held for the entire existence of the U.S. prior to the Civil War. So, slave-owners
had law and precedent on their side. Their mistake was the arrogance with which
they enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. They rubbed the faces of the Free States in
their powerlessness to prevent their own residents from being kidnapped by, as
McPherson puts it, by "professional slave catchers (who) did not always take pains
to make sure that they had captured the right man". The result was Abolitionism
and war.

To accomplish their task, today's Republicans have propaganda tools unavailable to the
Confederate fire-eaters. They have raised to the level of an art form the use of religious
venues to convey hard-right political messages without loosing their tax exemption.
They have bought and paid for the mainstream media, which daily insults our
intelligence with its partisan refusal to pursue criminal wrongdoings by Republicans
at all levels of government, while blaming Bill Clinton for every problem since tooth
decay. They have funded a veritable menagerie of right-wing think tanks that churn out
the party line on matters great and small. By laundering and repeating the rantings of
marginal fundamentalist and neo-Nazi cranks, they have steadily dripped the poisonous
lie of "a Christian nation" into the public discourse.

When neo-Nazis invented "holocaust denial", the Jewish community understood
what was at stake. They raised the alarm and pursued the deniers with publicity,
and, when their denials impuned genuine historians, with lawsuits. Surprisingly, no
similarly clear and motivated defenders of the genuine definition of religious freedom
by our Founding Fathers have made a similar impact. Perhaps it is because no
one is still alive to testify in the first person about the Founders' intentions. Or,
perhaps it is because it is easier to get away with saying some thought that didn't happen
(Christian nation) did happen than that some fact that did happen(holocaust) didn't. In
the first case, all you have to do is concoct phony evidence; in the second case, you
have to destroy real evidence. Or, perhaps its because "theocratic subversion" isn't
a catchy-enough phrase for our sound-bite happy media. Whatever the reason, the
alarm has not been clearly sounded; and the barbarians are inside the gates, courtesy
of the self-avowed aristo-phile and Opus Dei member Antonin Scalia.

The assault on public education is a core tactic of these theocrats. Democracy
is impossible without a genuine free press and a citizenry educated enough
to supply the context to judge the news that press reports. The Republicans have
already hijacked the press, and they have been out to hijack the educational system
for quite a while.

Over the past twenty years, we have witnessed the propaganda campaigns for
creationism, creation science, home schooling, charter schools, school vouchers,
moments of silence, use of public school buildings after hours for religious clubs,
displays of the ten commandments, to name the most prominent. Some have succeeded,
and some have failed. But the movement has never faltered. It has delivered a relentless,
distracting, expensive, and chilling assault on the ability of the public schools to carry out
their function. The contortions and missteps caused by responding to this assault are
then cited as further reasons to defund the schools.

That we are well on the road to the evisceration of education about true and vitally
important American history can be made clear by asking a random American adult
to explain the Fugitive Slave Law and its role in the genesis of the Civil War. You
might as well ask him to derive Einstein's theory. (You needn't bother to ask about
Darwin's theory. That has already been "disappeared".)

When history is gone, we will be in the land of George Santayana, doomed to repeat
the worst brutalities of the twentieth century and the worst inequities of the Robber
Baron Era while fighting over the same worthless "my god is bigger than your god"
turf as the seventeenth century wars of religion and the eleventh century crusades in
the Holy Land.

Before they are burned, here are some historical reflections by just two of the countless
authors who witnessed and fought the moral and social carnage of World War II. As you
read them, recall the fire brigade in Fahrenheit 451, but give them the moral values of the
Saudi Arabian religious police who locked girls in a burning school to "save their virtue" :

"Every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by
an epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were debased...In such moments
(when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming
power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions
and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the
greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax...Thus reduced to nothing more than an
ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist...this ideology will
no longer be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine."

- Jacques Ellul "Propaganda"

Frank Zappa put it less deferentially and more colloquially when he said that "organized religion
is nothing but a real estate scam" - declare yourself a religion and get tax-free property. Also
germane is the sentiment that a cult is just a religion which has yet to acquire pollitical power.

"Equality of condition...is not sufficient for totalitarian rule because it leaves more or
less intact certain nonpolitical communal bonds between the subjects, such as
family ties and common cultural interests. If totalitarianism takes its own claim
seriously, it must come to the point where it has 'to finish once and for all with the
neutrality of chess', that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever...
From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to chess for the sake of
chess is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for
for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as a new type
of man who under no circumstances would ever do 'a thing for its own sake'."

- Hannah Arrendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

So, just as in the Dark Ages (when Catholic peasants were taught to see every element of
their miserable lives as merely a prefigurement or a symbol of their heavenly life to come
and were told that this world was merely a test for the next) get ready for the theocrats to
reduce our society to third-world sweatshop levels of poverty, all the while proclaiming a
great religious crusade against moral evil. (Oh, my mistake, Bush the Younger already
announced the crusade last September.) Expect executions of evil-doers instead of football
in your stadiums. (You can bet Mr. Ashcroft is studying this Taliban innovation.) If you want
a prefigurement of this world to come, you can go work for Wal-Mart and attend a Christian
Identity church.

Or, you can get as tired of the in-your-face arrogance of these fundamentalist mandates as the
Free State Abolitionists got with the slave-catchers and the Southern-dominated Federal courts
that supported them. You can go out and do something about the unconstitutional insertion of
fundamentalist Christian dogma into the government of our modern and decidely diverse/secular
society.

Never forget that the Abolitionists were deeply religious and, at first, a villified minority.