Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (7 page)

Organizations like the Officers Christian Fellowship (OCF), the Military Ministry of the Campus Crusade for Christ, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), and the Christian Military Fellowship (CMF) encourage soldiers to proselytize. The OCF Web site states, “Our purpose is to glorify God by uniting Christian officers for biblical fellowship and outreach, equipping and encouraging them to minister effectively in the military society.” They “call on Christian officers to integrate biblical standards of excellence” into their professional responsibilities. They think “local or ship-based chapel activities offer prime venues for Christ-centered outreach and service to a military community. . . . By cooperating with and assisting chaplains and lay leaders, we seek to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ throughout the entire military society.”

The OCF operates on almost all of our bases worldwide and counts 15,000 U.S. military personnel as members. This organization seeks to coopt military resources and personnel to market religious fundamentalism. This active proselytizing leads soldiers like Specialist Hall to seek support from Jason Torpy, a West Point graduate and president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers.

On bases and ships, chaplains, attached to commanders, work as close advisers on morale, giving them a special status within the chain of command. According to the only federal court decision directly dealing with the military chaplaincy’s constitutionality,
Katcoff v. Marsh
, chaplains are
to “meet the religious needs of a pluralistic military community.” Army chaplains, the court observed, aren’t authorized “to proselytize soldiers or their families.” Chaplains must not advance one religious viewpoint over another, whether monotheism over other types of theism or theism over nontheism, yet there is no education in religious diversity during the Chaplain Basic Officer Leadership Course.

When my father served in the military, the idea that the military itself would foster religious discrimination or favoritism was unknown. America’s military includes a diverse citizenry. That fundamentalism could become embedded as a quasi-official military religion was antithetical to real military values. It still should be.

Religious Bias Hurts Our Health

Women’s Health

In 2005, after being raped, a twenty-year-old woman in Tucson, Arizona, made frantic calls to pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception. She finally found a pharmacy carrying the prescription, but was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense the medication because of the pharmacist’s religion. By the time a willing pharmacist was found, the optimal time for taking the medication had passed.

The Guttmacher Institute reports that fundamentalist pharmacists in several states get special permission from state legislatures to ignore their professional duties and to even deny rape victims emergency contraception. Pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, including emergency contraceptives, in over fifteen states. Since emergency contraception became available without a prescription for women over the age of seventeen, refusals to provide nonprescription emergency contraception have also been reported.

Pharmacists work in the health-care profession, not in a church. They have the right to consider their own religious beliefs in determining what medical decisions they make for their own care, but their religious bias should never impede fulfillment of their professional duty to patients. The trauma of rape should never be compounded by the denial of access to emergency contraception. Each year, approximately 25,000 women in America become pregnant as a result of rape. Timely access to emergency contraception could help many of these women avoid the additional trauma of an unintended pregnancy.

We must pass the Access to Birth Control Act, which would require prescriptions to be filled without delay; if a pharmacist has a personal objection to filling a legal prescription, the law would require it be filled
immediately by another pharmacist. We must also pass the Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act, which would mandate that hospitals guarantee rape victims access to emergency contraception, regardless of the religious bias of health-care providers.

Unjust, religiously biased laws pertaining to sexual health have a deep, pervasive, and harmful effect not just in the United States, but also abroad. In 2003 in Ethiopia, Yemmi Samta didn’t know that her fourteen-year-old-daughter, Saron, was pregnant until she found Saron unconscious and bleeding profusely on the dirt floor of their hut. Samta begged a neighbor to load Saron onto a donkey cart and take her to the nearest clinic, twelve miles away. The girl died on the journey from blood loss, the result of a back-alley abortion.

In places like Ethiopia, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often provide the only option for women and girls who need abortions. Unfortunately, a U.S. policy created under Ronald Reagan often restricts foreign NGOs that receive U.S. family-planning funds from using their own non-U.S. funds to provide clinical abortion services. The NGOs are also often prohibited from advocating for abortion-law reform in their own countries and even from providing accurate medical counseling or referrals regarding abortion.

This global “gag rule” restricts access to basic, accurate women’s health information and services. Its existence demonstrates the power of American theocratic forces. These groups view foreign aid funding as a form of leverage, enabling them to impose their religious bias on people in other countries, including many of the most vulnerable and impoverished people on earth.

Since President Reagan initiated the gag rule, women across the globe have been denied health-care services and information they rightfully need and deserve. The global gag rule prohibits a woman from knowing her medical options because to allow her comprehensive information and care would encourage what religious extremists label as immoral actions. Neither Congress nor the president should deny women accurate medical information. To impose a gag rule is to mandate a particular religious bias and to promote religious propaganda based on the views of specially privileged religious groups—and to use tax dollars to do so.

Who sits in the Oval Office determines whether or not the global gag rule stands. Both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama overturned the policy, while Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush imposed the gag rule. The lives and rights of women should not hang on one man’s edict (or, when we get there, one woman’s edict).
Congress must permanently repeal this gag rule, so no matter who’s in the Oval Office, federal funds can go to hospitals and clinics that provide comprehensive reproductive information and services, rather than only to those that restrict informing women of all their choices and rights.

Health Education

Policies based on religious bias affect women’s health and our children’s health and health education. Religious ideology, not medical science, now targets many public school children in health-related curricula across the country. For example, in May 2009, using federal “abstinence-only-until-marriage” funds, the State of Mississippi held a teen abstinence summit. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “The 2009 summit featured religious themes and overtly Christian messages, including a lengthy presentation about the Ten Commandments by Judge John Hudson. Judge Hudson told the audience, ‘Abstain, God says, from promiscuous sex. . . . Why would He tell us not to do it? He’s not. He’s telling us that He created this great and wonderful gift for a special and unique committed relationship that is to last forever.’ The program also included several prayers.” Yes, that’s our tax dollars at work.

Consider what experts say about such programs: the American Academy of Pediatrics states that “abstinence-only programs have not demonstrated successful outcomes with regard to delayed initiation of sexual activity or use of safer sex practices. . . . Programs that offer a discussion of HIV prevention and contraception as the best approach for adolescents who are sexually active have been shown to delay the initiation of sexual activity and increase the proportion of sexually active adolescents who reported using birth control.” Similarly, researchers who studied the National Survey of Family Growth to determine the impact of sex education found that teens who received comprehensive sex education were 50 percent less likely to get pregnant than those who received abstinence-only education.

Since 1997 the federal government has allocated more than $1 billion for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Making matters worse, by law, abstinence-only-until-marriage programs can’t provide lifesaving information about the health benefits of contraception and condoms for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS and unintended pregnancies. Sex education programs for teens should protect the health and safety of children—not promote a particular religious bias.

Fundamentalists oppose pediatricians, preferring propaganda to information. As the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, medically
accurate sex education programs free from religious bias must be supported. No federal dollars should fund abstinence-only programs. Tax money should go to programs that work, tell the truth about health issues, and respect the separation of church and state.

Life-Saving Health Research

For a worldview that often references God’s love, where is the compassion in failing to provide lifesaving information about AIDS? Where is the compassion in prohibiting lifesaving research?

Did you ever know someone who faced leukemia? About a quarter million children and adults in the world develop some form of leukemia every year. Many die. But there’s hope. Through embryonic stem cell research, scientists may develop a special type of white blood cell that destroys leukemia cancer cells.

Did you ever know someone who faced diabetes? Millions upon millions face this horrible disease, often resulting in amputation, disability, and death. But, because of embryonic stem cell research, there’s hope for the development of cells that produce insulin for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. Stem cell research could prolong the lives of millions of diabetics.

Maybe you know of someone who faced Lou Gehrig’s disease or a stroke or Parkinson’s disease or a spinal cord injury. Millions of people face these deadly challenges. Embryonic stem cell research offers real hope, but there is a catch. Theocratic extremists object to such basic research. Thousands of embryonic stem cells from fertility clinics across the country are destroyed every year rather than used to advance what the National Institutes of Health says is “one of the most promising areas of research.”

Legislation in Congress would allow stem cell research, limiting such research to stem cells from fertility centers that would otherwise be thrown away. And, thankfully, in 2010, the U.S. government authorized trials that could lead to meaningful treatment for spinal cord injury using stem cells that would otherwise be thrown away. But religious extremists want to block even this use of stem cells.

Religious extremists talk about choosing life, yet they halt research that could save millions of lives. Religious extremists say their interpretation of the Bible belongs in our laws, and that human life is less important than their desire to impose their interpretation of the Bible on the rest of us. These religious extremists simply refuse to choose life. We must consistently speak for the health of our fellow human beings born into this
world. By speaking out for stem cell research, we are choosing life. Sadly, the fundamentalist theocrats are doing the opposite.

Religious Bias Promotes Discrimination

“Faith-Based” Initiatives

It is unconstitutional to allow religious organizations that get federal funds to hire and fire employees because of their religion. It is unconstitutional to allow religious institutions that get federal money to proselytize to recipients of their government-sponsored social services. It is unconstitutional to send taxpayer dollars to houses of worship. The George W. Bush administration permitted each of these unconstitutional activities, labeling them “faith-based” initiatives. Despite his promise, President Obama has failed to reverse this unconstitutional policy.

President James Madison—Father of the Constitution—vetoed a congressional bill that gave an Episcopal church in the District of Columbia the authority to care for and educate poor children even though the legislation allocated no public funds to the congregation. Madison said it would “be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

The constitutional rights of taxpayers and social service recipients stayed protected from discrimination until President Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001. The office funneled tax money to religious groups and gave financial advantages to religious institutions over secular nonprofits competing for government funding. Religious institutions have unique advantages in applying for federal money over secular institutions. Houses of worship can get federal funds without first creating a nonprofit 501(c)(3) service organization to separate their sectarian and secular activities. They can also (1) receive grants without segregating the funds from private sources; (2) provide tax-subsidized services in spaces replete with religious symbols; and (3) discriminate in hiring based on religion. This is not an abstract concern. At least one qualified individual was fired from a “faith-based” initiative because he was Muslim. Indeed, Christian fundamentalists have been fired because they are not the right type of fundamentalist.