On Monday 14 January 2008 House Resolution 888, sponsored by Congressman Randy Forbes...has in it a proclamation that states, "Whereas in 1777, Congress, facing a National shortage of 'Bibles for our schools, and families, and for the public worship of God in our churches,' announced that they 'desired to have a Bible printed under their care & by their encouragement' and therefore ordered 20,000 copies of the Bible to be imported 'into the different ports of the States of the Union'."
Rodda first discovered the resolution after researching Congress's legislative web site for work she has been doing on behalf of MRFF.
"House Resolution 888," said Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, a nonprofit watchdog group which aims a close eye on the military to ensure it abides by the law mandating the separation between church and state, "...is a myriad of tortured and deliberate historical fictions, fused by it's Congressional-member drafters into a ....Christian exceptionalism and triumphalism, and clearly illuminate its private sector and legislative sponsors' desire to spare absolutely no effort to complete the transformation of our country into "The United Christian States of America."
Weinstein was a former White House counsel during the Reagan administration, former general counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time presidential candidate H. Ross Perot and a former Air Force Judge Advocate General.
In House Resolution 888, Rodda says Forbes has grossly misrepresented and distorted the historical record he references in the 75 proclamation of H. Res 888.
"This resolution, which purports to promote 'education on America's history of religious faith,' is packed with the same American history errors found on the Christian nationalist websites, and in the books of pseudo-historians like David Barton," Rodda wrote on the Talk2Action web site.
"It lists a total of seventy-five 'Whereas,' leading up to four resolves, the third of which is particularly disturbing - that the U.S. House of Representatives 'rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation's public buildings and educational resources,' which is a considerable travesty considering that most of the 'history' this resolve aims to promote in our public buildings and schools IS NOT REAL!"
One example, says Rodda, is the proclamation by Forbes that "Congress pursued a plan to print a Bible that would be 'a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools' and therefore approved the production of the first English language Bible printed in America that contained the congressional endorsement that the United States in Congress assembled ... recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States."
"Congress did not 'pursue a plan to print' this Bible, as Mr. Forbes claims, nor did they 'approve the production,' Rodda said.
"Robert Aitken was already printing his Bibles as of January 21, 1781 when he petitioned Congress. All they did was grant one of several requests made by Aitken by having their chaplains examine his work, and allowing him to publish their resolution stating that, based on the chaplains' report, they were satisfied that his edition was accurate. The words 'a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools' are taken from a letter written by Aitken, not the resolution of Congress."
Forbes did not respond to a request for comment.
Congressman Forbes is using the resolution to circumvent the The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights which says Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion.
Forbes has also introduced two bills, one that would protect the rights of lawmakers to express "their religious beliefs through public prayer by removing all establishment clause cases involving prayer by public officials from federal court jurisdiction to the jurisdiction of state courts." The other legislation Forbes introduced "would bar judges from awarding legal fees to groups that sue municipalities for violating the Constitution's ban on government establishment of religion."
Forbes and two other congressmen held up passage of the defense budget for several weeks over the removal of a military chaplain prayer provision that sought to authorize chaplains to pray in the name of Jesus Christ at military invocations.
The guidelines, rewritten in 2005 after Weinstein exposed the religious intolerance and anti-Semitism carried out by fundamentalist officers, staff and cadets at the AIr Force Academy in Colorado Springs against those at the academy who refused to accept Jesus Christ as "their personal Lord and savior". Weinstein wrote about the issue in
Forbes, along with congressmen Todd Akin of Missouri, and Walter Jones of North Carolina, threatened to block passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2007 unless Congress passed the bill with their proposal intact and the proposal was eventually withdrawn, and in exchange, Forbes and his colleagues were handed a deal abrogating the Air Force and Navy guidelines on religious expression, essentially giving evangelical military chaplains a loophole to proselytize, an issue Weinstein says he intends to fight in court.
Last year, MRFF filed a lawsuit in federal court against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and US Army Maj. Freddy Welborn, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The complaint, filed in US District Court in Kansas City, alleges Jeremy Hall, an Army specialist currently on active duty in Combat Operations Base Speicher, Iraq, had his First Amendment rights violated when Welborn threatened to retaliate against Hall and block his reenlistment in the Army because of Hall's atheist beliefs."
Church historian Gary Dorrian has a commentary about Mitt Romney's speech -- and the political ripples since -- over at the web site of Union Theological Seminary.
"When Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, the Catholic Church was still officially opposed to religious freedom. Kennedy's adviser on the church and state issue was American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, who approved the Houston speech a few hours before it was delivered. But Murray's views on this subject, while important to Kennedy's campaign, were contrary to church doctrine. In 1955 the Vatican had silenced Murray on this subject, forbidding him to write about religious freedom. In 1965 Murray's view prevailed at Vatican Council II, as the church changed its teaching on religious freedom. Had Kennedy allowed himself to be drawn into a discussion of Catholic doctrine in 1960, it would not have gone well.
Romney keenly understands that the same thing is true in his case, only more so; thus he ruled out option two. The option that he took was the generic one of devoting an entire speech to the issue while saying as little as possible. He stood up for his Mormon faith without saying what it was. With only slight tweaks he gave a generic religion-in-public speech that any Republican or Democratic candidate might have delivered. The only section with an edge was his shot at "the religion of secularism."
In Romney's telling, the difference between the 1960s and today on this subject is that secularism has grown powerful. Secular types are trying to strip the public sphere of "any acknowledgment of God," he warns. However, that is far from the whole story. In 1967 George Romney could run for president without having to defend or even mention his Mormon religion. Mitt Romney surely realizes that something has gone wrong in American politics and culture since then, even as he does a delicate dance with the very movement that changed the rules and made his theology the issue. If Romney thinks he has put that issue to rest, he has a rude surprise coming."
