Word: religion
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Those damned liberals are at it again. As a recent letter to the editor reminded us (Letters, Dec. 9), these no-good, un-American spoil-sports are continuing their long tradition of showing prejudice against religious people. "Among liberals, bias against religion may be one of the last acceptable prejudices," the author boldly generalized...
...accusations against liberals go, anti-religious fever is among many conservatives' favorite standbys. According to these conservatives, religion in the United States suffers at the hands of liberal elites who run an obsessively secular society. For some reason, the specific names of the anti-religious, liberal bogeymen of the political world never get mentioned. Perhaps the fact that there are so many of them obviates the need to identify specific individuals. But we may rest assured, they tell us, that there exists a wide variety of such specters...
Meanwhile, most Americans have a strong dislike for non-religious people; only 18 percent of Americans would allow atheists the basic right to assemble in a community's civic auditorium. But somehow, perhaps by a miracle, the nefarious liberal elites still manage to repress religion and exclude it from the political dialogue and the legislative process...
Naive political spectators will tell you that religion strongly influences policy and electoral politics. For evidence, they point to the fact that nearly every member of Congress professes some form of traditional faith and that no atheists ever run for public office because they would automatically lose. They call our attention to events like Congress' vote in the 1950s to put the word "God" onto our paper money, into our national motto and into our Pledge of Allegiance; the Congress and President Reagan's formal declaration that 1983 was the "Year of the Bible"; and the recent increase...
...Supreme Court ruled for the first time in history that taxpayers' money can be used to support sectarian religious proselytizing. In this decision, the Court mandated that a state run university must subsidize an evangelical Christian student newspaper titled Wide Awake, which aims not only at discussing ideas about religion, but also at converting its readers and persuading them to repent and avoid hellfire by initiating a personal relationship with Christ...