Not yet, but we are getting close. And it just may happen by default. Hundreds of diaries each day describe the urgent need to resist the excesses of the Bush administration. I will forgo the litany of issues, noting only that we all suffer from outrage fatigue and reluctance to throw just one more abomination onto the pile. But I'll throw this in anyhow, since it could just slip in under the radar:
A month ago I wrote a diary
Onward Christian Soldiers, that had a poll with close to 500 responses. It was about two bills that would move us closer to being a de facto Christian country.
The first bill, now signed into law, was the federalization of the site of the Mount Soledad cross in the city of San Diego. The existence of this cross on public land has been ruled unconstitutional by numerous courts over a seventeen year period based on the California constitution, so a few Republican Reps came up with a scheme to have the feds grab it. It passed the house with 73 democratic dissenters, and I figured it would be stopped in the Senate where we had enough votes to bottle it up. When I found out that a unanimous senate had approved this transfer by eminent domain a few weeks ago, I was livid, but mostly saddened, that every Democratic Senator had caved in on this.
The second part of the two bills that I wrote about was a regulation inserted into the House version of the Defense Appropriation Bill, that would result in all military personal, no matter what their belief, to be required under certain circumstances to listen to Christian proselytizing. It was labeled a bill to preserve the freedom of speech of Christian chaplains, to rid them of the constraints of political correctness, but the results would be as I described. This articlein the Washington Post is worth reading to understand exactly what this would mean, and how it is fairly described as a right wing thrust to fracture the church-state consensus that has long existed in this country.
The fate of this chaplain provision, since it is only in the house version, will be first decided in the secret chambers of the conference committee. If it is reported out of conference, it will then be up to the Senate Democratics to either accept this provision or make a stand. If there is no public awareness of this; if the Democrats feel that this battle will be wasted political capital, they may very well decide that it is not worth the cost.
There is an organization, secular.org that is lobbying on this issue. Let me share parts of an exchange of letters with the director,
Lori Lipman Brown
Director, Secular.org
Lori,
The Democratic approval of the federalization of the Soledad Site was completely demoralizing. How are Nancy Polosi, and the 72 other democrats who voted against this in the house, not to mention contenders in the upcoming election going to defend the concept of separation of church and state, when not a single Democratic senator was willing to do so.
Al Rodbell
Lori responded that it was not a recorded vote, rather the Republicans simply slipped it in after it was previously objected to by the Democrat who was supposed to be taking care of his party's interests. When I said how incredible this seemed she wrote back in part :
Unfortunately, a lot of this is procedurally a mess ... and purposely so for those who exploit procedure. For example, by waiting until no Senator was there to object to passing Soledad by "unanimous consent" there is no on record vote of who was even in the room, much less in support(unanimous consent could include five members present -- and it wasn't the first time they tried; earlier on there was an objector.)
As for the proselytizing, it is going to a joint committee to iron out differences between the house and senate bills -- that's where we are working hard to make sure the house provision doesn't come back in. (There likely won't be an on-record floor vote regarding the final consensus.)
So, the historical decision to expand eminent domain to protect a Christian icon only was taken because the secular opposition (to the degree we have one in this country) was asleep on the switch. Maybe. Or perhaps once they decided not to take a vote that would pin the anti-Christ label on them, this was the best excuse available.
If you feel that unleashing evangelicals on the captive military audience is an affront to our nation's principles, and you want to register this, then answer the poll, which is in the same format as the one from last month. This will provide some data to Lori Brown who is going to try to get the attention of our guys on Capital Hill. You also might consider a recommend, so that this diary will hang around a while.
Who knows, maybe we can make a difference.