Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It Read Online Free PDF Page A

inauguration and who, commenting on the famous Florida legal battle over Terri Schiavo (the woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state), compared her husband to a Nazi. Preacher Rick Warren is worth something approaching $10 million. Yes, Warren and his organization benefit from special legal rights.
    Surely Ted Haggard’s former organization doesn’t get special rights, does it? You remember Ted Haggard, the Colorado Springs megaminister who preached against gay sex while having gay sex jacked up on meth. His former organization still controls many millions. Yes, religious organizations like his old one get special rights.
    What types of special rights do these individuals and groups enjoy? To begin, nonprofit organizations must apply for tax-exempt status; religious groups are tax exempt by a less rigorous assertion of religious status. Nonprofits get audited by the IRS whenever the IRS chooses; churches are not audited without a special IRS decision.
    Perhaps more insidiously, religions enjoy legal privileges that corrode our most basic American values. In most states, religious groups can say in one of their child-care centers: “You’re a Jew? You’re fired.” Similarly, in one of their charitable organizations, they can say to the administrative assistant or janitor: “You’re gay? You’re fired.” This is true even in states that generally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. You’re agnostic like Albert Einstein? Fired. You’re atheist like Brad Pitt? Fired.
    These same businesses, like the ones run by megachurches, can exempt themselves from many land-use laws other businesses must obey because federal politicians chose to exempt religious organizations from those laws in the 1990s.
    Where’s the investigative journalism on the scandals I’ve described above? Pat Robertson said that he believes Jesus is currently the Lord of government, business, and education and wants his version of Jesus to be the “Lord of the press.” Robertson needn’t be concerned, because religious ideologies and bias are too often treated with kid gloves in the media.
    Although I like to think this is not the case, there is a tendency in journalistic writing to treat religion with timid deference, even when the situations or public conduct would otherwise set off alarm bells for reporters in any nonreligious context. This timidity is so pervasive it is sometimes hard to notice. In a February 2, 2011,
New York Times
article, for example, a Muslim religious leader in Afghanistan was depicted rather like a moderatebecause he favored stoning with small stones rather than big stones as punishment for sexual activity. In any other context, the big-stone versus small-stone barbarism would be unequivocally labeled as such, but, when it comes to religion, reporters back gingerly away, swaddling even the most extreme statements in words like “faith.”
    But fundamentalist Muslims have no real political clout in America. No, the real political power is held by fundamentalist Christians. Give Christian fundamentalists their due. They organize. They meet. Their supporters give money to the cause. And they have been hugely effective in electing their own. Indeed, at no prior time in American history have so many politicians with such expressly theocratic views held high public office.
    Here’s a sampling: Congressman Tim Walberg, who chairs the work-force protection committee, which oversees labor laws, embodies much of what America has become in the twenty-first century. Congressman Walberg is the one who objected to a law prohibiting discrimination based on religion within Head Start programs because of his concerns about the threat posed by Wiccans and Muslims. Senator Marco Rubio embodies our times too. He has dismissed Jefferson’s “wall of separation of church and state” and supports teaching creationism in school. Then there’s Congressman Ralph Hall, chair of the science and technology committee,