August 1, 2018
Although the start of Paul Manafort’s first trial has been dominating the news, it would be a mistake to focus our attention and energy on following every detail. Aside from the schadenfreude we feel at the prospect of seeing a vain kleptocrat spend the rest of his natural life in prison, the truth is that Manafort’s conviction will not necessarily hasten Trump’s fall.
We should be much more focused on the alarming announcement late Monday that serial perjurer, committed racist and gleeful child torturer, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, was forming a Religious Liberty Task Force. In a speech Monday, the diminutive martinet announced that the task force would combat the “dangerous movement” of secularism which “must be confronted and defeated,” (Source: “Jeff Sessions announces a religious liberty task force to combat ‘dangerous’ secularism,” by Tara Isabella Burton, Vox.com, 7/31/18).
Sessions appointed Assistant Attorney General Jesse Pannuccio and Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy, Beth Williams, as heads of the Task Force. Pannuccio is infamous for having represented the proponents of Proposition 8 in California, which “banned same-sex marriage for nearly five years,”(ibid). This brazen move shows that Sessions plans to use the DOJ to codify his ahistorical and retrograde view of the United States as a “Christian nation,” conveniently forgetting our origins as a haven for those fleeing religious persecution. We will have to remind these Christian nationalists that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states plainly that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”
Students of history know that the Establishment Clause has its antecedent in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, authored in part by Thomas Jefferson and shepherded through passage by James Madison. That law, adopted in 1786, provides in relevant part, “civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry….” It goes further to state that “all men shall be free to profess…their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities,”(Source: “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,” ThomasJeffersonFoundation.org).
Sessions and his fellow Christian nationalists ,turn the meaning of the First Amendment on its head to support their contention that they cannot be compelled to respect the rights of those who differ from them. That is because they have greater fealty to their cramped, punitive interpretation of the Bible than to the Constitution. The fact that Sessions cited the same biblical verse, Romans:13, to justify the separation of children at the border, as was used to justify slavery tells you everything you need to know about Sessions’ policy views (Source: “Sessions cites bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families,” by Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan, The Washington Post, 6/15/18). The only “liberty” these Christian nationalists seek is the liberty to oppress people that are not like them. The only freedom they desire is the freedom to discriminate against everyone who isn’t a straight, white, fundamentalist Christian man. Make no mistake, Sessions and his supporters plan to wage a modern day Crusade, making their virulent homophobia, racism and misogyny the law of the land. It is our patriotic duty to stop them.
#FirstAmendment
#ACLU