Sunday marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association and other groups that support the freedom to read, explore ideas and learn.
Not everyone is for that. Religious Right groups often spearhead censorship efforts seeking to remove material they deem “offensive” from public schools, libraries or even privately owned bookstores. Some ideas, it seems, are too dangerous to explore.
A Minnesota restaurant owner responded to a tragic stabbing at a shopping mall in St. Cloud in an unfortunate manner. After the revelations that the perpetrator was Muslim, he decided to put a “Muslims Get Out” sign outside of his restaurant Monday morning.
Thanks to recent events both abroad and here in the United States, many Americans are wary of Islam. As a result, innocent Muslims throughout the United States are facing restrictions on their religious freedom – particularly when it comes to the places in which they worship.
Yesterday, a federal court of appeals released a troubling decision in which the judges ruled, by a vote of 2-1, that a controversial government-prayer practice can continue.
In Rowan County, N.C., (not to be confused with Rowan County, Ky., home of the infamous Kim Davis) members of the county board of commissioners open their meetings by leading the board and the assembled members of the public in prayer.
When I was a college student many years ago, we could look forward to an annual spring ritual: an itinerant evangelical preacher would appear on campus, set up base in an open area near the library and cut loose with some hellfire sermons.
Every summer, I have the pleasure of attending the National Conference of State Legislatures annual conference. I am AU’s State Legislative Counsel and this conference, the biggest gathering of state legislators and staff in the country, gives us with the opportunity to educate state legislators and their staff, about AU, our mission, and how we can work with them to fight for religious freedom.
Whenever I attend Religious Right meetings like the annual Values Voter Summit, I hear a lot of talk about the U.S. Constitution.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Education will begin collecting data this year to track religiously motivated discrimination or bullying allegations from students.
“Students of all religions should feel safe, welcome and valued in our nation’s schools,” Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an announcement.
This week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent agency that works for Congress and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer money, released a new report on private school voucher programs. The report found that as private school voucher programs continue to spread throughout the states, taxpayers are contributing more and more money each year to programs that are plagued with problems.
