The Separation of Church and State

The birth of the United States was due, in large part, to the efforts of people fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Eventually, as the collection of settlements formed a government and became a nation, those early participants ensured, through the first amendment, that succeeding generations would be able to worship without the influence or intrusion of government. However, the increasingly diverse nature of the U.S. population has broadened the national religious perspective from the early European Protestantism to an array of some 1,200 recognized religious bodies ranging from the Judeo-Christian God to Egyptian cats. Today, we are confronted by the question of how much religion do we allow in government, and how much government do we allow in religion.

To Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Mormons, the concept of "God" as a supreme spiritual being of immense power and infinite love is universally recognized. Indeed, this is the "God" that is usually referred to on our coinage and in our Pledge of Allegiance. This concept might have been viewed as proper and widely accepted 200 years ago. But today the question must be must be considered whether that particular devine being has any deistic precedence over the Islamic Allah, the Shinto ancestors, or the earth-based gods of Wiccans, Native Americans, or Native Hawaiians. While the remote possiblity exists that all these divine icons could be one in the same, humanity, trapped within the limited prespective of 3-dimensional mortality, is nevertheless incapable of defining a broadly acceptable definition of God.

For many years, a universal feature of public school life was the morning prayer, led by a teacher or principal. Since this prayer was directed to the universally accepted and understood "God," there seemed to be littel objection to this daily rite. beginning in the 1960's there was a growing attitude which rejected traditional standards of discipline and ethics, which included not only societal norms and mores, but religion as well. On into the 1970's religion began a steady recession from the cultural mainstream. People turned to other forms of expression in their desire to seek spiritual fulfillment. Also feeding this movement was a kind of simple-minded rationalization that if there was in fact a God, then why was there so much suffering and misery? In the 1980's the pendulum began a swing back to the right, as religious conservatives fought to regain lost ground. The societal battles which erupted then continue today, alhtough more for political than theological reasons.

Those who resist religion do so no longer on the basis of a lifestyle choice, but out of a growing contention that Judeo-Christianity was not the sole arbiter of human salvation.

How Ideal was the "Ideal State?"

Throughout human history, philosophers witnessed the worst parts of man's inhumanity to man. In response, they strove to construct, at least in a theoretical sense, an outline for what was perceived at "the ideal state." One of the first of these efforts is embodied in Plato's epic work "The Republic."

This exercise, interestingly enough, grew out of a discussion centering on the nature of justice. Socrates and the elders quickly reached the realization that in order to properly define justice as it relates to the individual it was necessary to consider the larger question of the nature of the state's view of justice. The attitudes of the state shape the attitudes of its citizens, so in order to nail down what constitutes a just man, one must account for the state's definition of justice.

In our modern world, punishment for crime is meted out in accordance with the way the state's laws have been molded by culture. In Singapore, for example, theft is punished by caning; in Somalia, by the amputation of a hand; in America, by a stern lecture from an overburdened Judge and perhaps a few weeks in a climate-controlled corrections facility with satellite TV and three squares per day. In each of the above examples, the punishments reflect the respective culture's highly subjective view of justice.

Today, of course, we can take advantage of the long view not only of history, but through the images and impressions of other contemporary cultures through electronic eyes in order to properly contextualize these very basic questions. In contrast, the view of Classical Civilization was necessarily myopic, there being no GNN (Grecian News Network) to expand their limited view beyond the eastern Mediterranean.

Fairness Is As Fairness Does

Recently, the rumblings of support for the so-called “fairness doctrine” have begun to surface. The goal, according to the proponents, is to somehow legislate into existence some kind of counter to the 900-pound gorilla known as conservative talk radio. Air America was intended to be that agent of balance, but despite the infusion of millions of George Soros money and the Star Power of Al Franken, Air America has been unable to gain nationwide traction with listeners or advertisers. AAR has lost several stations and last October filed for bankruptcy.

Faced with this failure and the continuing strong growth of conservative talkers like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and Savage, progressives seem intent on legislating what the free market failed to deliver.

The Fairness Doctrine was adopted by the FCC in 1949 in a time when frequencies were limited and the Commission was being flooded by license requests for new stations. In 1949, media outlets were considered “public trustees,” instead of private businesses. As the Museum of Broadcast Communications explains, “…broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.” (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm)

The doctrine was swept away in the flood of federal deregulation instituted by President Ronald Reagan. Within a few years, it became apparent that the cries of conservatives who felt their point of view wasn’t fairly represented by what they termed “The Main Stream Media” were legitimate. Conservative talkers began cropping up, most notably Rush Limbaugh, and saw their market share and popularity explode. Now progressives want their slice of that lucrative pie.