Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Debaters tackle religious freedom

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published October 19, 2005

Religion, politics and a room full of lawyers sparked a heated debate at a Hillsborough County Bar Association lunch downtown Tuesday.

On the right: conservative Orlando attorney John Stemberger.

On the left: Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU's Religious Freedom Project.

"The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion," Stemberger said.

"One of the countries where there is the most respect for freedom of religion is the United States," Gunn said.

The debate, moderated by Tampa Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth, focused on the question "Is religious freedom in American under attack?" The two attorneys debated whether religion and the Constitution are at odds and what the First Amendment really says about the separation of church and state.

"The First Amendment was written to protect religious groups from government interference, not to protect nonreligious persons from religious persons," Stemberger said.

He said the move toward neutrality about religion is actually "hostile to religion. It's to establish a de facto dogma of secularism, whereby that becomes the official religion of a state, the very opposite thing that was intended by our founders."

"Why is that such a terrible thing?" Gunn asked. "We are a secular society. What is wrong with a secular society being neutral toward religion?"

"We're an intensely religious society, both culturally and otherwise," Stemberger said. "Even the Supreme Court said we are a Christian nation in one of its decisions in 1892."

That statement brought opposition from the audience about Stemberger's reliance on the nation's history to support his stand:

What about Plessy vs. Ferguson, someone asked. It established segregation in 1896. What about prohibition? The United States has evolved from that stand. A Jewish attorney said he was insulted by Stemberger's notion that America is a Christian nation.

"Nobody is suggesting we enact laws that you have to believe a certain way about God," Stemberger said. "We're talking about the regulation of human behavior and that impact on society. At the time our parents grew up, there was a moral consensus in society that we no longer have - truths that were self evident on what is a human life, what is the definition of marriage, all these cultural issues."

"No truths are self evident now?" Gunn asked.

"None that we can agree on," Stemberger answered.

One pressing issue Gunn planned to speak about later Tuesday evening at the John F. Germany Library was Intelligent Design, which replaces the Darwinian notion of natural selection with the idea that there is an intelligent designer behind creation.

It's at the center of a federal court case in Dover, Pa., where 11 parents sued the school district for offering ninth-grade biology students a four-paragraph statement on Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.

"They're trying to get a religious belief endorsed as science and taught at the schools, and that's just wrong," Gunn said.

Gunn said ACLU opponents wrongly portray the organization as a "caricature," one bent on getting religion out of the public square.

Alexandra Zayas can be reached at 813 226-3354 or at azayas@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 19, 2005, 00:29:13]