July 4th Reflections: Freedom for All?

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Happy Fourth of July 🇺🇸! As we celebrate America's Independence, our Unbelief Brief highlights threats to the nation's core ideologies and principles. We also bring you an important case in our Persecution Tracker Updates.

The Unbelief Brief

On this eve of America’s Independence Day, it is fitting that we move our focus over to ways in which the United States’ founding principle of secularism is being defaced by quasi-theocratic conservatives. Louisiana, which recently ruled that the Ten Commandments must be displayed in all public schools’ classrooms, has been one-upped by Oklahoma, whose Superintendent of Public Instruction has “ordered” that the Bible be taught in public schools and that such instruction is “mandatory.” It is a blatantly unconstitutional demand that flies in the face of the Establishment Clause and—as Oklahoma’s own attorney general’s office admits—is void of any actual legal authority [[link removed]]. But when have trivialities such as “the rule of law” ever stopped theocratic authoritarians?

At this moment in history, when religious conservatives are emboldened by a sympathetic Supreme Court, it would be good to reflect on how these officials are attempting to demolish one of the most important principles of the United States’ founding. Church-state separation does not exist solely to protect religion from the government; rather, the Framers saw secularism as critical to facilitating freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. Steven K. Green elaborates [[link removed]] on the role that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played in shaping this bedrock of the republic: a bedrock that is today being pelted with dynamite in the name of “patriotism.”

There is, of course, a long history in the Western world of binding religion and state: a European tyranny from which figures like Madison and Jefferson sought to free themselves in order to forge a new path. Echoes of this legacy still remain, seen in the European Court of Human Rights’ 2018 ruling [[link removed]] that right-wing Austrian activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff could be fined for calling the Prophet Muhammad a pedophile. Still, many countries in recent years have opted to repeal ancient blasphemy laws that remained, mostly unused, on the books. Northern Ireland remains one of the last holdouts.The UK’s National Secular Society has recently issued a renewed call [[link removed]] for the repeal of its antiquated “blasphemy” and “blasphemous libel” restrictions. EXMNA stands firmly behind this call in the belief that the very American ideas of free inquiry, freedom of conscience, and freedom of belief—in spite of recent setbacks—can still win the day on the world stage.

Persecution Tracker Updates

In Pakistan: a sectarian murder [[link removed]] of a Shia Muslim, accused of blasphemy, by a Sunni teenager. Read more about the incident here [[link removed]].

Until next week,

The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America

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