Birds on the Brain

abaldwin360:

Louisiana State Rep. Valarie Hodges used to be a big fan of school vouchers. “I liked the idea,” she explained, “of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school.”

Then last month Hodges got a First Amendment reality check when she discovered that Christian schools wouldn’t be the only religious schools getting tax dollars.

“Unfortunately, it (vouchers) will not be limited to the Founders’ religion,” she said. “We need to ensure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.”

Although Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher plan passed last month without her support, Hodges vowed to keep looking for alternative ways to “support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools.”

Beyond the fact that some of the Founders were not Christian, Rep. Hodges appears confused — to put it mildly — about the implications of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for all, including American Muslims.

She is not alone.

Last week, state Sen. Kevin Grantham of Colorado worried out loud about the proliferation of mosques in America. Fresh from hearing an anti-mosque speech by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders (outspoken opponent of all things Islamic), Grantham said that “mosques are not churches like we would think of churches.”

In an apparent attempt to remove mosques from the First Amendment protection afforded Christian churches, Grantham claimed that Muslims “think of mosques as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches — we don’t feel that way, they’re places of worship, and mosques are simply not that.”

Beyond the fact that mosques are indeed places of worship, Sen. Grantham also appears confused about the meaning of religious freedom in America.

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I hate it when people talk about the Founders as some monolithic group. Granted, most of them were extremely wealthy white males, but that doesn’t mean they all had the same ideas about religion and its relationship with the government.