Remember the news about the Florida legislature trying to create an “I Believe” license plate with a cross on it? That particular design went down to defeat once it got a little national media attention, but the exact same situation is underway now in South Carolina, and stands a better chance of passing unless the lawsuit filed by Americans United For The Separation Of Church And State can prevent it. Meanwhile, they’re not quite done in Florida: they’re also challenging some backdoor ballot amendments that would add public funding for religious schools and eliminate language barring public funding of religious institutions from the state constitution.
As “Ebon Musings” writes in this post at Daylight Atheism, confronting and challenging the chauvinism and sometimes outright bigotry of religious fundamentalists is nothing short of a public duty in my opinion. They set the tenor for far too many aspects of public discourse in this country and are given way too much credibility by more “mainstream” religious people who don’t want to appear to be sacreligious, even as they are being utterly hypocrtical in the process. Giving the religious right the unbridled leeway to engage in actions like approving Christian-only license plates may not sound like a battle for the ages, but creeping incrementalism is insidious and needs to be checked just as much as wholesale efforts to undo the secular state.
