The South Dakota blogosphere is alive with discussion of these proclamations and the meaning of Patriot Day:
- Doug Wiken, "PATRIOTDAYISM is the Next to Last Refuge of Scoundrels," Dakota Today, 2007.09.08 (warning! cuss words!)
- Mary Garrigan, "When Does Grief Become History?" Mount Blogmore, 2007.09.07.
- Bill Harlan, "Patriot Day (and a Pitch for One More)" Mount Blogmore, 2007.09.07.
- Todd Epp, "Gov. Rounds Calls for Patriot Day Observance," S.D. Watch and Epp Law Report, 2007.09.07
For details, see the original article [Laurie Goldstein, "Prisons Purging Books on Faith from Libraries," New York Times, 2007.09.10] and my commentary at Patriot Act. Short form: out of fear that certain religious tracts might promote radical religious views that could promote terrorism, Bush's Bureau of Prison has drawn up a list of acceptable religious reading material for prisoners and ordered all unapproved books to be removed from prison libraries. In the constant fear of terrorism, the Bush Administration is sacrificing these Republican, Constitutional, and American principles [adapted from my Patriot Act post]:
- Freedom of religion. While convicted felons deserve their punishment, denying them access to religious reading material that can help them rehabilitate and find peace, if not salvation, goes too far. For Bush, freedom of religion, too, must be subordinated to national security.
- Limiting big government. The Bush Administration doesn't trust the prison chaplains who know their prisoners to make their own decisions about acceptable reading material for their charges. The Bush Administration prefers instead a big-government, Big-Brother solution.
- Presumption of innocence. The Bush Administration is throwing out presumption of innocence for all theological authors. No one has to show that a particular book has caused any harm to censor it. To make the prison reading list, a panel of anonymous and thus unaccountable experts must judge an author's work acceptable.
- Faith in faith-based initiatives. The Bush Administration expounds the value of faith to help solve social problems. Prisoners atoning for their crimes and getting their lives back on a positive track is certainly a solution worth pursuing, and organizations like the ELCA, with its sponsorship of the St. Dysmas congregation in the South Dakota State Penitentiary recognizes that. Yet the Bush Administration's "Standardized Chapel Library Project" complicates St. Dysmas's efforts to educate (rehabilitate, save, bring to the Lord's grace -- whichever outcome you prefer) prisoners by prohibiting any reading material that doesn't have the government's seal of approval.
Tell me again -- what principles are our soldiers fighting for? Our government is embracing patriotism and fear so tightly that it is squeezing out all other ideals and freedoms. Maybe we do have cause to fly our flags at half-staff... or upside-down.
But instead of remaining silent at the government's request, at 8:46 tomorrow, we should all make more vocal expressions of our patriotism. Post a blog entry, tell your neighbor what you love about the Constitution, read the Declaration of Independence aloud, maybe even say a prayer for your country and your government... and don't bother to check whether your prayer comes from an approved text.
Upside down flag in distress as you suggest would seem more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteCUSS WORDS?? Doggone it anyway. At time there are just no really good anglo-saxon alternatives.
"Fertilizer" just doesn't carry the same punch in that common expression.
))) Doug Wiken --- Google/Blogger identity not working today..must have lost a cookie.
What's this "constitution" you speak of?
ReplyDeleteI wish someone were educating young people about it.
Just last week, ICE (the cooler, newer name for INS) raided a local business.
Long story short, I blogged about it, if you really care a young man stormed out of the building and demanded to know what right I had to report that on the news.
"Don't you know you'll destroy people's lives," he said.
Seems more than a few people could use a refresher course on the constitution.
Just what book is it in particular that felons are being deprived of? You generalize too much.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to publish titles, but according to the NY Times article, the government won't make the list public, so we can't check which theologians have the government's seal of approval. But the article states that the list does not include any books by "theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller."
ReplyDeleteIt's not I but the government that is generalizing. Even prisoners deserve freedom of conscience and intellect, and that freedom requires access to information. Sure, there will be limits in prison -- prisoners don't get to read "How to Build a Bomb" or "How to Break out of Prison" -- but the government still has a burden to idenitfy specific titles that are inappropriate and to tell us what clear and present danger those titles present. Instead, in this case, the government has made a list of books it says are o.k., with some clear biases toward certain religious viewpoints, and has made the blanket declaration that any other book its bureaucrats and anonymous experts haven't had the time to read is bad. That's the deadly generalization here, one that we shouldn't allow to stand.
from Goldstein: "The lists 'show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,' he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations."
ReplyDeleteThere's a problem with establishing a list of approved texts: through the inclusion of a handful of texts and the exclusion of a majority of extant scholarship, the government inevitably ends up sanctioning one or another religious viewpoint or persuasion and downgrading another. That would be violation of the First Amendment Establishment Clause.
Thanks. I figured the argument was coming from Muslims being denied Muslim texts.
ReplyDeleteNonnie, I gotta ask: does your comment suggest that it's o.k. to violate the Establishment Clause, as long as the only folks denied freedom are Muslims? What about the mainline Protestant prisoners who won't be able to get texts from their preferred theologians?
ReplyDeleteI'm with you there, Nonnie. If the government can demonstrate that a particular religious text poses a clear and present danger within the prison walls (and I recognize that'll be a lower standard for censorship than outside the prison walls), then it should restrict prisoners' access to it. The problem here is that the government has come at it backwards, designating a list of acceptable books rather than a list of unacceptable books. Therein lies the Establishment Clause violation and all the other problems.
ReplyDeleteCory, I consider it a wide gap between an unconstitutional censorship of books or violating the separation of church and state and book selection. It may be a sledgehammer applied to a fly but Prisoners and everyone else are not entitled to having the books they want in their library, regardless of their government-provided living quarters.
ReplyDeleteI frequently find myself looking for books at Lincoln Public Libraries that for whatever reason they just never obtained. I wish they had been there and I'm glad religious books are provided in prisons but there isn't a constitutional right to preferred literature. The personal bias of the selection group in what books were going to be available is not establishment of religion unless the criteria for the choosing of the books is a religious one.
Mr Laycock says the government needs compelling evidence to limit the accessibility of religious books, but the government was never obligated to provide them in the first place. So as long as the criteria for removing the books did not involve the religious content of the books, it is absolutely constitutional.
When you say "The Bush Administration doesn't trust the prison chaplains who know their prisoners..." you ignore reality and when you stop short of the ridiculous blood for oil accusation my always high esteem of you dips just a little. Even if your loathing of the man utterly founded in truth, it doesn't alter the justifications for the people who supported (and still support) the war. Even if it was 'blood for oil' to Bush, it never was to the rest of us and the absence of a smoking nuke didn't even touch my reasons.