Creche Clash: Religious Right Launches Another Bogus Persecution Claim
Yesterday was the 350th anniversary of the hanging of two Quakers by the Puritan establishment in Massachusetts Bay Colony.
William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson had come from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution. But on Oct. 27, 1659, they became the first Quakers in America to be executed because of their religious beliefs.
These men paid with their lives for merely wanting to practice their own faith. Now that is religious intolerance and persecution to the extreme.
That’s why it’s laughable when some right-wing Christians claim they are being persecuted when the government refuses to allow Nativity scenes on public land. Yet the Religious Right has just anointed its latest Christmas martyr, Michigan resident John Satawa.
For 63 years, the Satawa family at Christmas has displayed a depiction of the birth of Jesus on the median of a public road in Warren, Mich.
Last year, the city’s road commission rejected the creche because Satawa had never requested a permit. This year, when he asked ahead of time, he was officially turned down because the scene “clearly displays a religious message” and would violate the First Amendment.
On Oct. 23, the Thomas More Law Center filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the city’s decision on behalf of Satawa.
“Every Christmas holiday,” Law Center President and Chief Counsel Richard Thompson told the Catholic News Agency, “militant atheists, acting like the Taliban, use the phrase ’separation of church and state, ‘ — nowhere found in our Constitution — as a means of intimidating municipalities and schools into removing expressions celebrating Christmas, a national holiday.
“Their goal is to cleanse our public square of all Christian symbols,” he continued. “However, the grand purpose of our Founding Fathers and the First Amendment was to protect religion, not eliminate it.”
Let’s just get a few things straight.
Telling someone to move a constitutionally dubious religious display from public land to private property – how about a church yard? – hardly equates to Taliban rule. I think that’s rather ridiculous.
And though our Founding Fathers’ purpose was to protect religious freedom, it was not to favor or prefer one religious belief over others (or religion over non-religion). That’s why when Thompson and others cry persecution for not receiving privileged treatment, it’s a little hard to take them seriously.
Satawa is free to have his display on his own land – just as all Americans have the right to celebrate their faith in their own homes, houses of worship or public areas that are free-speech forums. It just so happens that this street median in Michigan seems not to be one of them.
Big deal.
What is a big deal is what happened 350 years ago in Massachusetts Bay Colony before our Constitution was written. Back then, mixing religion and government undermined religious liberty and led to severe persecution.
Our country has come a long way since then, and that’s because of our Founding Fathers’ vision. Without our Constitution, it’s scary to think that a debate over where to place a Nativity scene might be the least of our worries.