(Cross-posted at www.bluecommonwealth.com)
VA-GOV: In attacking Bob McDonnell’s reactionary views and record, the Creigh Deeds campaign has focused on McDonnell’s opposition to the rights of women – an attack that he has slickly parried by pointing to his working wife and daughter.
But it is an understatement to portray McDonnell as simply a throwback to the 1950s. He would in important ways be a throwback to 1786 – to before our state passed Thomas Jefferson’s landmark Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. What is most scary to me about Bob McDonnell is his belief that it’s okay for the government to favor fundamentalist Christianity over all other religious and non-religious beliefs.
And no, I’m not just talking about his now-famous Master's thesis.
Below, I discuss two times as Attorney General in which he brazenly put Virginia state government in the position of siding with the evangelical Christian movement rather than staying impartial on matters of religion, as the First Amendment requires.
Of course, as he revealed in his thesis, McDonnell interprets the First Amendment a little differently from the way mainstream public opinion has for the past two centuries. As he says on page 62 of the thesis:
...with the new Republican administration under George Bush, and a conservative leaning Court, leaders must correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state. Historically, the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment were intended to prevent government encroachment upon the free church, not eliminate the impact of religion on society.
In other words, Bob believes that the First Amendment exists only to prevent government interference with religion, not to protect those with minority religious or non-religious viewpoints from oppression or abuse by the majority. Nor does he apparently believe the "folklore" that the First Amendment requires a separation of church and state. If the only role of government in regards to religion is to not encroach upon it, then the government is free to favor particular religious beliefs or institutions as long as it does not actively get in their way.
It’s also worth noting that the thesis talks about "government" vs. "the church" without acknowledging that there could be more than one church, or (God forbid!), temples or mosques in American society – e.g., (p. 13): "God has ordained the institutions of civil government and the church as the foundation of order in society." This formulation might’ve worked fine for Medieval times, but is now a few centuries out of date.
One of the notable times in which, as Attorney General, McDonnell attempted to use the power of his office to support the religious groups he favored was in January 2008, when he filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit between the Episcopal Church and the conservative congregations (including those in Falls Church and Fairfax) seeking to break away from it based on the Church’s more liberal interpretations of Scripture on homosexuality and other matters. The Washington Post noted at the time how unusual it was "for the state to get involved in a civil case when it was still at the circuit court level rather than waiting for a judge to rule." McDonnell, needless to say, favored the side of the breakaway groups, whose congregations included a number of Washington-based conservative heavyweights.
A second example was AG McDonnell’s efforts early this year to force the Virginia State Police to stop directing its chaplains to offer nonsectarian prayers at public ceremonies. No, Backwards Bob and his allies insisted that the name of Jesus Christ be invoked at public, government-funded ceremonies.
And, again showing how his unorthodox interpretation of the First Amendment guides his actions, McDonnell hypocritically used the language of religious freedom to support government favoritism of a particular religion, saying that he was only supporting the right "of religious officials to freely practice their faith". Perhaps in his skewed version of the law and society that’s how he sees it, but in fact, if my tax dollars are supporting public officials to favor Jesus over Buddha, Allah or the Hebrew God, then the rights of everyone other than Christians are being profoundly diluted.
Since at least 1786, Americans have had a strong tradition of keeping the church and state separate, as they must be for religious freedom to prevail. If Bob McDonnell wins, perhaps bolstered by a right-wing Republican House, LG and AG, then they may just try their hand at reversing Jefferson’s work of so long ago, and begin to put our government on the side of born-again Christianity. The implications of that would be profound, as a first step on the road to American theocracy.
We have 16 days left to prevent that experiment from beginning.