Trying To See Like William Bartram [It’s not easy to keep up with my fellow-traveler/Spirit Guide, Friend William Bartram. He just can’t stay on the beaten path. . . .] But here he is again, talking about plants, and especially trees. And one kind of tree jumped out at me from his list, the Live … Continue reading What Do You See In What You see? Ask Friend William Bartram
“At first blush, this matter deals simply with a motion to dismiss a civil rights case with pendent claims as Defendants claim protection under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution. However, the attack amounts to something much more, something dangerously precedent-setting were it to be approved, namely that a private school and those affiliated with it are exempt from the reach of Federal and State Civil Rights Acts. This is all despite Friends Central’s professed adherence to notions of responsibility, equality and diversity. When the rubber meets the road, these Defendants are insisting that they are untouchable and above it all.
However, Defendants fail any applicable test. In no way do Plaintiffs’ claims require inquiry into religious tenets of Quakerism. Plaintiffs do not make any claims or counts based therein. Rather, Plaintiffs Complaint references guidelines and policies set forth by the school so as to depict the environment in which Plaintiffs worked and to justify their adherence to those guidelines and policies. . . .
Should this Court accept Defendants’ arguments, then there is nothing to keep any purportedly religious school from claiming immunity from the Civil Rights laws, or any other laws for that matter, taking us back to the dark ages in American jurisprudence. . . .
Prelude & Update Before this summer camp story, a bit of background. Until 2015, Friends Music Camp gathered at the Olney Friends School, in Barnesville in eastern Ohio. Barnesville is the Mecca, the (old) Jerusalem, the place of pilgrimage where all roads converged for the scattered survivors of the Conservative or Wilburite strain of quietist … Continue reading Friends Music Camp Stories #4: Old Plain Peter – The Ghost of Elders Past
Fea’s piece is not just timely, it’s also important. He homes in on the fact that the “Christians” in Trump’s base are operating on a specific religious reading of American history, one that’s not new, but which has always been false.
In fact, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that our struggle today for a democratic American future is also a fierce struggle to confront & root out a false so-called “Christian” pack of lies about our past. Unfortunately, at the moment the false history charlatans are way ahead, and it makes a real difference. And it could soon make much more.
For many of us it might be a horrifying truth: sometimes to make a revolution (or preserve one; the US was born as a revolutionary idea), we have to sit down and do some serious homework, lots of it, about stuff like history.
The FCS attorneys are from a heavyweight Philadelphia firm (three names before the ampersand), and on June 3, they submitted a motion for dismissal of the lawsuit, and a supporting memorandum of law. (The full text is here.) In the memorandum, they spend 29 pages asserting, in numerous carefully-phrased ways, that “There’s nothing to see here — and you shouldn’t be looking at it anyway.”
Why not? Because, the biggest objection is that all the plaintiffs’ complaints are essentially religious, and thus out of bounds for civil courts . . .