US Elections

These may be good campaign sound bites, but they ignore what Obama has actually said about the complex relationship between politics, religion and public life. Consider these comments from a 2006 speech at the Call to Renewal Conference.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical - if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.

[...]

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.

So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And later in the same speech he explained how laws alone could not create social change.

I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws. But I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation's CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. They have more lawyers than us anyway

[....]

I also think that we should give [children] the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished

But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman's sense of self, a young man's sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

These hardly sound like the remarks of a hardened secularist, but maybe Obama just pays lip service to these ideals while ignoring them in practice. However, the evidence does not bear out this claim. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman explains that the Obama administration has actually been very accommodating on issues of religious freedom.

Most notably, Chapman points out that the administration has not repealed the Bush administration policy of allowing religious organisations who receive federal funding to “only hire people of their own faith.”

In this instance, Obama may be accused of ignoring the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which forbids government support of religion. But if so, it's because he has given too much deference to religious freedom rather than too little.

Chapman goes on to list numerous other instances in which the White House has sought to defend religious liberty.

His commitment is also on display in defending churches against municipal governments that would prefer to do without them. Under federal law, houses of worship are assured equitable treatment in land-use decisions. But mayors and community groups often tell churches to go to the devil.

When that happens, they often find themselves at odds with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Last year, it forced the town of Schodack, N.Y., to retreat after it barred an evangelical church from renting space in a commercial area where nonreligious meetings were allowed.

It filed a brief in support of a Hasidic Jewish congregation's lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, which had forbidden it to hold services in a private home. A federal court ordered the city to back off.

The administration has also intervened in cases where prisoners are denied religious literature. After a South Carolina sheriff prohibited inmates from getting devotional materials and other publications in the mail, the Justice Department sued. In the end, the county agreed to let inmates receive Bibles, Torahs, Qurans and related fare.

There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Obama on these issues. I felt that the contraception mandate went too far in curtailing religious freedom. But to claim that the president is actively hostile towards religion is to be ignorant of his statements and actions.

Hide

The New York Times reported last week that Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder have "outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions," charging run-of-the-mill whistleblowers under anti-espionage laws. This is not OK. It was not OK when the George W. Bush assigned five prosecutors and 25 FBI agents to work out who told the Times about the National Security Agency's warrantless wire-tapping program, and it's not OK now. The United States is a nation that guards the freedom of the press so jealously that it enshrines that freedom in its first amendment. Governments that hunt down whistleblowers with this intensity instead of addressing the problems they revealed are not only working against the spirit of the First Amendment, they're badly serving the public that elected them to office.

This photograph shows Obama signing the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act. That law requires the State Department to determine whether foreign governments are violating the rights of a free press. That's a good thing for the State Department to do. But the U.S. needs to maintain the freedom of its own reporters, as well as of the sources who deliver them information. The President has already reversed his stance on a badly-needed Federal shield law for reporters. Obama, like every president before him, should worry less about reporters and the folks delivering them their info, and more about the job he was elected to do.

Hide

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says that the Internet is not special, and just as Australia censors books, television programs, magazines, and movies, it should be able to do the same for online material. The bad news for opponents of Conroy's filter is that he sort of has a point.

In Australia, unlike the U.S., we think it perfectly reasonable for the government to control what speech we are allowed to see or hear. To sell a movie or a book or a video game in Australia, you need to get the government's permission. If it refuses to classify the work in question, then too bad; it's illegal to distribute it. And apart from the occasional complaint Margaret Pomeranz makes when an artsy European flick gets banned, Australians don't bat an eyelid at this.

Even opponents of Conroy's filter seem OK with the government banning other forms of speech. The Herald article I linked above quotes the University of Sydney's Bjorn Landfeldt splitting hairs over different form of censorship:

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the difference between submitting a book for classification and having an organisation classifying and blocking websites without anyone's knowledge was that, in the book case, "it is well known that the book was censored and there can be a debate about the correctness of the decision."

The U.S. has a much more robust conception of freedom of speech, and even though the U.S. Supreme Court does not consider it totally illegitimate for the government to ban certain types of non-political speech, in practice it tends to side with the First Amendment's sweeping instruction that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." That's why in America, there is no equivalent of Australia's Office of Film and Literature Classification. Classification bodies like the Motion Picture Association of America are industry-run and submission of content to them is voluntary. Even the infamous Federal Communications Commission, which is a government agency, has authority over a very small slice of American media; it can ban content from network television and radio, but it has no authority over cable.

In America, people consider it far less legitimate for the government to decide what sort of speech is acceptable for adults to make and hear. That's why the U.S.'s own attempt at Internet censorship, the Communications Decency Act of 1996, was found to breach the First Amendment in Reno v ACLU. 

I disagree with Conroy; the Internet is special. It combines content distribution with telecommunications in a way that makes it comparable to neither magazine publication nor telephone discussions. But it is not that special. The reason Australia is even considering joining dictatorships like China and Iran in online censorship is that, unlike the U.S., we consider it fundamentally reasonable for the government to control our speech. It is no wonder the U.S. and Australian governments disagree on this issue; they are operating from different cultural assumptions as to what constitutes free society.

Hide