Hobby Lobby's president, Steve Green, really, really does not understand religious freedom. We already know that Green's vision of "religious freedom" is not a personal freedom to believe what you like, but a "freedom" for a boss to impose his questionably moral viewpoint on his employees. He has demonstrated this with his lawsuit to impose his religious beliefs concerning birth control (itz evilz!!) on his employees, limiting their healthcare coverage based on his belief system. While this seems to be pretty clearly in the "your fist, my nose" realm of freedom (that is, where your "freedom" ends, as it impedes mine), Green is hardly done.
Hobby Lobby president Steve Green
Rather, Green is further illustrating his disconnect from any real understanding of the notion of constitutional freedoms by advocating a nationwide, public school Bible curriculum. While he claims the goal is not to proselytize, his own words on the subject very easily put the lie to such an assertion. Among other things...
"This nation is in danger because of its ignorance of what God has taught," Green said last year to the National Bible Association, announcing his plan for the high school course. "There are lessons from the past that we can learn from, the dangers of ignorance of this book. We need to know it, and if we don't know it, our future is going to be very scary."
That's not even the worst of it, though. Additionally,
before the National Bible Association, a group that encourages the nation's leaders to read the Bible, Green said his goals for the high school curriculum were to show that the Bible is true and that its impact, "whether (upon) our government, education, science, art, literature, family . when we apply it to our lives in all aspects of our life, that it has been good." (emphasis added)
There simply is no way around it -- that is proselytizing. The class is being offered as an elective in Mustang, Oklahoma public schools this fall; the stated goal is to push this evangelizing course onto thousands of taxpayer funded public schools by 2017. It goes without saying that public schools have no business acting as churches, attempting to convert students or otherwise "teach" them that one religion's holy books are "true". (You know, that pesky separation of church and state...)
But like the Cliven Bundy's of the world, who cite the constitution of a government they claim not to recognize as it suits them, the Greens of the world aren't concerned with religious liberty. They simply cling to the words whenever it seems convenient, and are perfectly happy to trample other people's liberties in order to foist their religion on the world.
Originally posted at Rachel's Hobbit Hole.