News: ACLU is at it AGAIN........

Sue, if you found out the pamphlets were sponsored by or influenced by the Catholic and/or LDS church would it change how you felt?
Gina

 

Last time I looked, the US had separation of church and state. What's the problem?

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

What's the problem?

The ACLU! Again.

 

Er...Sue, I don't think I'm the one complaining.

YOurs in Christ

Matt

 

You Go, Girl!

 

Matt, I have no clue government/religion works in your country. Do you have anything similar to the ACLU there? How does the government/church work together there?
Gina

 

Agreed.

I won't argue that people can't learn compassion from Biblical example, but the state shouldn't be sponsoring Christianity (or any other religion). If the DoH simply allowed different churches to create pamphlets and allow them to be distributed at clinics and offices, even if only one church took them up on it, there'd be no problem at all.

Oh, and this is the same ACLU that fought for the candy cane kids . . .

 

You've asked a massive question there, Gina, and time does not permit me to do it justice.

Officially, the Anglican/ Episcopalian Church is the state church - the Queen is officially head of that church with the Archbishop of Canterbury (Hairy Rowan) head in reality, he being appointed by the Prime Minister. Also, 26 Anglican bishops used to sit in the House of Lords (kind of but not really equivalent to your Senate) but I think that number has been chopped down recently and there are moves to include more representation from other churches and faiths in the Lords; anyway these guys have a limited legislative say. These are the only real links between Church and State that we have, the old parish councils, whilst still officially existing having very little political power outside the Anglican Church. Oh, and the Anglican schools which are state-assisted. (There's a big debate on at the moment as to whether faith schools are a Good Thing or not.)

Unofficially, and apart from the above instances, the trend is towards secularisation, and if a leaflet confusing religious and secular matters had gone out, there would have been trouble - in fact, if the goverment had anything to do with it, it like as not simply wouldn't have gone out in that format.

Re the ACLU. The nearest we have is a civil liberties organisation called Liberty, headed up by John Wadham who's a legal bod like me. It's a charity, not state-funded. They're more likely to get involved in miscarriages of justice, detention and treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and suspected terrorists than get upset about the sort of leaflet that is the subject of the OP. Most of the time I largely agree with them, but occasionally they can get carried away with bandwagon issues, like their opposition to the introduction of ID cards or the construction of a national database, neither of which I have a particular problem with.

Re government-church cooperation - the Blair goverment waxes and wanes on this issue but, broadly speaking, has shown itself to be more amenable than perhaps previous goverments to the idea of the state funding church-based initiatives (faith schools being but one example); there seems to be a grudging admission by the government that in certain circumstances the churches are better-placed to target state aid, and so these sort of joint ventures are becoming more commonplace. This phenomenon is also apparent with local government - county and city councils. For example, my former church lets Hampshire County Council social services use its building for therapy sessions.

Hope that helps!

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Yes, thank you Matt. It sounds like the boundaries have to be very confusing with that kind of set up, but it's interesting. It seems like they're intertwined but just keep secular and spiritual matters separate regardless.
Gina

 

I'm not a big fan of the ACLU, but in their defense, they have on many occaisions, especially recently, taken up cases where a person's religious liberties had been denied.

It's difficult to know the validity of the ACLU's complaint without seing the pamphlet. My biggest question would be, was it mostly a health information pamphlet, or mostly a prosthelytizing one? If it was the latter, then the complaint would have been a valid one. If it was the former, then it wouldn't.

 

Sue,

What if the Florida Health Department wanted to start marketing to the Muslim community by printing brochures that read "Allah is Our Hope" or Mohammed or Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Would you want your tax dollars to subsidize that?

Baptists are on record as the most strident defenders of the church from the state and the state from the church. That this is even a debatable issue for baptists amazes me.

Joshua

 

It doesn't sound like a health information pamphlet at all. It's a worthy pamphlet having to do with compassion ("A Christian Response to AIDS"), but certainly not a health info pamphlet.

 

Sue, the link referrs to the news story (thanks, btw), but I'd really like to see the pamphlet itself to judge for myself. The story doesn't make a judgement either way. It's simply reporting the indicent.

 

I think we'd really like to see it for ourselves to make the determination as to the quantity of its religions content. The report doesn't say one way or another.

I don't think that's unreasonable.