The ACLU's Battle for Perceived Value: Being on the Right Side of a Contentious Issue

I recently received an email from a close friend of mine. Now this friend and I get along very well because I am, as he would describe me; a hippie, welfare-state, bleeding-heart liberal (although I dress more conservatively then he does and believe strongly in hard work) and he is, in my opinion; a NASCAR, red-state, made-in-America conservative (although I don't think he's actually a race fan and he lives in California). As you can imagine this ideological polar-opposite relationship makes for some pretty spirited conversations.

For my readers who already know me here is just a little bit more about him. He's the kind of person that will only own an American car and loves to make fun of my Honda while I'm driving us to lunch. No surprise, he's a proud member of the Republican Party. Now I don't think he's so loyal to the GOP that he won't admit there have been some bad Republican politicians and policies over the years (although very few if you ask him) but he is enough of a loyalist to say that shy of a few Dem-superheros (JFK comes to mind) there are no good Democrats. Suffice it to say he is a hard-core conservative.

Now this email he sent me was of a kind that I'd received numerous times from him before. These emails cover many different subjects but they are always; dripping with patriotism, very often include a religious agenda and unfortunately, consistently light on reasoning. This particular one was a list of all the state preambles, the majority of which included a reference to God. As well it had a statement at the end that attacked the ACLU (a common theme in these literary masterpieces) and “"out-of-control federal courts"” for being “wrong” on their position in the separation-of-church-and-state debate. Wrong? I'm sorry; I thought America included the right to think as you pleased.

This email hit on two issues that I absolutely can't stand the prevailing American opinion of. First is the mission and value of the American Civil Liberties Union. Most Americans, primarily due to bad press, think that the ACLU is made up of a bunch of Godless, liberal, commie, religion-hating attorneys and that all they do all day long is look for ways to stifle religion in this country. Quite to the contrary the ACLU stands for one thing and one thing only which is the preservation of the civil liberties guaranteed to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution. And as far as their efforts, they are fighting for equality, civil liberties and fair treatment under the law, now how can that be a bad thing? And by the way after they put in all the work fighting for our rights all Americans, even the hard-core conservatives that love to hate them so, receive the benefits. The ACLU should be applauded for it's commitment to the preservation of the principles in our constitution and not vilified by those not sophisticated enough to understand what they are doing.

The second issue is one that the ACLU has been intimately involved in over the years which is the separation-of-church-and-state debate. Of course the ACLU's position is that religion should never cross over into or influence matters of the state, a position I agree with. But what most people in America think when they read about the latest ACLU case is that they are stifling religious belief and worship and in a country as saturated, even obsessed, with religion as America is it is no surprise that the ACLU does not have mobs of fans knocking down their doors to join.

Nothing could be further from the truth about their mission; quite to the contrary the ACLU through its efforts is protecting religious freedom. But it is misguided communications such as the email my friend sent me that spread the wrong message and influence public perception and unfortunately for the ACLU perception is reality.

Now, the author of this email, not my friend mind you, is clearly a member of the “connection-of-church-and-state” crowd. Unfortunately, he is also less then a stellar logistician as he makes a blatant reasoning error in his conclusion. He assumes that because the state legislators choose to include a divine reference in their preambles that they were somehow endorsing state sanctioned religion. I concluded this because the author attacks the ACLU and our federal courts and they're common position on this issue has been to defend the separation of church and state clause in our constitution. What the author doesn't understand is that in so doing they are again defending all American's rights to worship as they wish and not have another's beliefs imposed on them.

Quite to the contrary of the author's assumption, the writing of each state's preamble and constitution was an endorsement not of religion but of statehood and subsequently the federal constitution which included an abolition of state sanctioned religion. The first amendment (written on December 19, 1791 – before most of the preambles were drafted) clearly states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"”

When these statements were being written – the majority of which in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries – this nation was significantly more religious and so including statements of their nature in official documents, although mildly inappropriate, would have been easily justified as they represented large swaths of the state population's opinion at the time. That said they still did not change the nature of the documents they were pre to or the federal document their larger body swore to uphold.

Because I'm mildly obsessed with this issue and that I have no life outside of blogging I did a simple tally and found that of the fifty state preambles only forty of them actually use the term “God” and of those only thirty-three say “Almighty God” (not a major difference except when you consider that most of the founding fathers of this nation were not Christians but Deists). The remaining ten preambles use broader titles to address their deity such as:

Author of Existence

Creator

Divine Guidance

Great Legislator of the Universe

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