This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:
In just the last four years, the ACLU has filed over 20 lawsuits defending the rights of Christians to express themselves publicly. This includes the rights of students to wear T-shirts baring religious messages, distribute Christian literature on school grounds, to sing “Awesome God” at a second grade talent show, and to prevent schools from censoring religious yearbook entries.
Despite this activism, I do not consider the ACLU an organization with a Christian agenda, trying to replace the Enlightenment values on which America was founded with a Christian Theocracy. The ACLU embodies the principle most eloquently voiced by the French revolutionary author Voltaire, that “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
By contrast, a City Council and School Board that would usurp the Bill of Rights on purely religious grounds is a governing body that will prevent teaching biology, evolution, and inconvenient historical facts that conflict with their sectarian dogmatism. This is the intellectual blight and authoritarianism that invariably follows religious fundamentalism.
The ACLU will easily defeat any attempts to trample on our citizens’ First Amendment rights, because the same principles of free speech, free assembly, and free belief that protect our public school student’s after school Bible Study and Fellowship of Christian Athletes organizations, are the same Enlightenment principles that will ensure a Gay-Straight Alliance organization. Otherwise, we forsake our cultural heritage and the moral values on which our Founding Fathers established this great country.