Tune in for about an hour for a return interview with Los Angeles constitutional lawyer Edward Tabash by Freethinker Podcast host Edouard Tahmizian about the future of equal rights for nonbelievers and adjacent threats to the US Constitution. Ahead of general election, Tabash argues, we stand on the threshold of two possible futures. One is an expansion of the Enlightenment values of the equality of believers and nonbelievers before the law and of the passage or upholding of evidence-based laws and regulations unhindered by ideological hostility to modernity and commitment to theocracy. The other is an onslaught of oppressive laws passed by the US Congress, various state legislatures, and other local branches of government that overtly favor religious belief over nonbelief and ignore science to appease special interest groups. Back in 1987 (in Edwards v. Aguillard) a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught in the public schools alongside evolution was overturned by the US Supreme Court in a 7-2 vote. Now we have a 6-3 supermajority on the Court and a quarter of all federal judges sympathetic to the aims of the Religious Right. Anti-science decisions, like Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2021), have seen the Court strike down health regulations designed to limit the spread of COVID. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the Court ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. And contrary to the promise of limited government intervention into the personal lives of citizens, the Court has made a number of decisions undermining abortions rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. That year the Heritage Foundation also took up restructuring the executive branch to undermine the federal government's authority over public education and allow more religious proselytization in the K-12 classroom. The Project 2025 plan to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal existing LGBTQ protections centering around marriage equality and workplace anti-discrimination laws is just the tip of the iceberg. Quiet efforts to replace the US Constitution by invoking Article 5, such that two-thirds of States can call for a Constitutional Convention, have continued unabated. To date 19 state legislatures have fully passed a resolution calling for such a convention, and in 7 other states at least one state house has passed it; if successful, such a convention could easily establish a new Constitution that declares the United States a Christian nation and revokes the civil rights of atheists, among other things. Tabash urges every American citizen to treat every presidential and US Senate election as a referendum on the Court: whether future justices to the Court will uphold the separation of church and state and advocate for science depends on who the US president is and who is in the Senate when a Court vacancy arises.
In this roughly two-hour conversation, Skeptic Magazine founder Michael Shermer and constitutional lawyer Eddie Tabash discuss the history of the relationship between church and state in the United States, the Founding Framers of the US Constitution and their arguments for separating church and state, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, how most of the 13 colonies had government-sanctioned religions and religious tests for office, the Constitutional Convention and the First Amendment, the push by some Republicans to hold a new Constitutional Convention and redesign the entire US Constitution, the religious beliefs and attitudes of the current US Supreme Court, and much more! Check out this alarming discussion of the rightward turn that the American experiment has taken in recent years!
Check out this about an hour return interview between host Edouard Tahmizian and Los Angeles constitutional lawyer Edward Tabash about two US Supreme Court cases decided at the end of June 2023 impacting the separation of church and state. In Groff v. DeJoy, the Court decided that a federal civil rights law requires employers to make substantial accommodations to federal workers’ religious views, forcing nonreligious workers to work on otherwise off days to cover religious workers observing the Sabbath. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court decided that a Christian graphic designer has a special right to avoid complying with Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws by refusing requests to design websites for the weddings of same-sex couples. The new Court has developed a two-pronged strategy in dealing with First Amendment religious exercise cases, with Groff v. DeJoy exemplifying openly allowing government promotion of religious ideals, and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis allowing religious exemptions to laws (such as anti-discrimination laws) that apply to institutions that serve purposes that are not religious. But as Tabash conclusively shows, the Founding Fathers clearly intended that nonbelievers be treated equal under the law to believers, undermining Religious Right claims that either the United States is a Christian Nation, or else that the First Amendment permits legal favoritism for religious belief generally over nonbelief. Tabash then turns to upcoming free exercise cases on their way to the Supreme Court and more pressing threats to nonbelievers’ constitutional rights.
Particularly disturbing are signs that the Religious Right is attempting to replace the existing US Constitution with a version that would undermine First Amendment rights by invoking Article 5, in which two-thirds of States (all Houses of 38 legislatures) can call for a Constitutional Convention. 19 States have already fully voted on this in all their legislative Houses, and 7 additional States already have one legislative House that has voted for this convention. The former include Nebraska, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and South Carolina, and the latter include New Mexico, Iowa, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. Tabash believes that those in Nebraska or States where both houses have passed the Convention should contact their legislatures in both Houses (or the one House in Nebraska) asking them reverse the decision and repeal the convention call, while those in the latter should contact their representatives in the one legislature that has already voted for it and ask them to consider reversing their decision, and contact the representatives in the other, yet-to-ratify House and urge them not to ratify it. Those in remaining states, Tabash urges, should call members of both Houses of their state legislatures and urge them to vote against the resolution or decline to consider it.
Tune in to Edouard Tahmizian's one-hour-and-twenty-minute interview with Los Angeles constitutional lawyer Edward Tabash as he surveys how the religious right-wing majority on the US Supreme Court is imposing religious tyranny and discarding science in the United States. The Court has demonstrated its disrespect for civil liberties precedent and overtly tried to impose a theocracy by, for example, ordering the state of Maine to make available its public education funds for the purpose of funding tuition specifically earmarked for religious indoctrination. In his dissent to Carson v. Makin, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that there's no meaningful difference between the state paying the salary of a religious minister and that of a teacher who proselytizes to children. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent that in the last five years, the Court has systematically dismantled the separation between church and state by shifting from a rule that permits states to decline to fund religious education to one that requires them to subsidize it. This, she notes, is leading us in the direction of treating those who uphold the separation of church and state as having engaged in a constitutional violation. The current Court's attack on Enlightenment values gives power to inherently unreliable voices to have sway in court and even permits the inadmissibility of scientific evidence under the guise of the "free exercise of religion," using the free exercise clause as a sword to wield against groups, rather than as a shield to protect them. Tune in as Tabash canvases growing threats to government neutrality in matters of religion, such as cases authorizing prayer at public school events, whether atheists could be excluded from testifying in court, whether states could have an official church under the new Court, the religious footing for anti-choice laws on abortion, and how voters' choice of the members of the US Senate directly affects who sits on the Court.
Tune in to Edouard Tahmizian’s two-hour-long interview with atheist debater Edward Tabash, a
constitutional lawyer in Los Angeles who chairs the board of directors of the Center for
Inquiry and has amicus briefs with the US Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court to
preserve the separation of church and state. Tabash lays out how the new religious right-wing
majority on the US Supreme Court (and other right-wing judges) are threatening government
neutrality on matters of religion. The dangers posed to atheists' legal rights (such as
religious organizations gaining the right to endorse candidates for public office while secular
ones cannot) are compounded by those that flow from giving special legal privileges to
religious special interests and no one else (such as churches being exempt from COVID
restrictions placed upon all other establishments, or being able to bar same-sex couples from
becoming foster parents who would otherwise be protected by antidiscrimination laws). What is
particularly under threat today is the long-established principle that no branch of government
can favor religion over irreligion, or aid all religions against nonbelievers, but there is
also no shortage of attempts to allow religious individuals (and no others) to jeopardize the
health and safety of the public or prevent government from meeting its obligations. In the
second half of the hour the discussion turns to religious opposition to abortion rights, which if fully successful would represent the first time in history that the US Supreme Court has retracted a constitutional right that it had once granted.
In this nearly hour-long speech to the Center for Inquiry, constitutional lawyer and secular activist Edward Tabash warns of the consequences of the horrific two-thirds religious right-wing majority on the United States Supreme Court: a rapid move toward ever-greater legal privileges that only the religious can enjoy. Religious objectors are quickly becoming the only members of society who are now permitted to discriminate against third parties. The Court is allowing them to use their faith to avoid complying with our country's anti-discrimination and employment protection laws.
