CULTURAL RELATIVISM

A man in Egypt was arrested for beheading his 25-year-old daughter. According to news reports, Marzouk Ahmed Abdel-Rahim refused Ashrah Mohammed Ahmed's request for the hand of Marzouk's daughter Nora, so Ashrah and Nora ran off and tied the knot anyway. Seven days later Abdel-Rahim hunted down the honeymooners and chopped off Nora's head. However gruesome this incident, activists says this type of violence against women is not isolated, that many women are beaten, or even killed, by male family members for such deeds as pre-marital sex, eloping, or being seen publicly with a man who is not a relative. About the same time Abdel-Rahim killed his daughter, another father in a village south of Cairo was arrested after he doused his 19-year-old daughter with gasoline and set her on fire for marrying someone whom the father deemed unsuitable. Abdel-Rahim, meanwhile, who turned himself in to the police, first carried the freshly severed head of his daughter down the street, where he told aghast onlookers that "Now the family has regained its honor." Congratulations to the Abdel-Rahim family.

THE MARLBORO MEN

Consider the following one-liner from Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things: "I don't know if the world would be a better place if nobody smoked." Father Neuhaus doesn't know if the world would be a better place if nobody smoked? Perhaps the Catholic priest was calculating the added financial strain on Medicare and Medicaid if the 400,000 people a year who died from smoking quit and lived longer? Or maybe he was thinking about the Mercedes-Benz dealerships potentially hurt by the income doctors would lose from having less heart disease patients to treat, or fewer lung cancer operations to perform? Perhaps he was expressing concern for the health-care industry as a whole, which receives about $50 billion a year from the government to treat tobacco-related medical problems? Or maybe he was expressing pastoral concern for poor Joe Camel, now having to find some other occupation than luring teenagers into an addiction that will eventually kill them as adults by the millions?

Who knows what was on Richard John's mind? But for a man whose magazine constantly espouses the cause of life-particularly in regards to the unborn-and which takes an unequivocal stand against doctor-assisted-suicide, his ambivalence about a product that kills more than 1,000 Americans daily is curious. It's one of those paradoxes of politics that many of the same people (labeled "conservatives") who-supposedly out of concern for the spiritual well-being of the young-are ready to legislate prayer in public school don't have much to say about the latest anti-smoking crusade except to mock it. Why don't those so worried about what kids watch on television worry about what poisons they put in their bodies? Why are the loudest in defending the "smoker's rights" the loudest in attacking "gay rights"? After all, it would seem that smoking does a lot more damage to society than homosexuality. Perhaps these good folk are too busy boycotting Disney, even though the now-defunct Joe Camel posed more of a threat to our children than Mickey Mouse ever did. There's no question-not only would the world be a better place if nobody smoked, it would be even better if people like Neuhaus would be honest enough to admit it.

FREEDOM IN THE (FEDERAL) WORKPLACE

Depending upon your perspective, the new guidelines issued by the Clinton administration regarding religious expression in the federal workplace will either help remedy an existing problem or make it worse. The guidelines are an attempt to define, among other things, the point at which religious expression on the job becomes harassment, not always an easy shot to call. The impetus for the guidelines came from a furor caused a few years ago when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) attempted to issue rules that many interpreted as hostile to any form of religious expression in the workplace. The EEOC backed off, and two years later, the Clinton administration produced these new guidelines for federal offices.

According to these guidelines, "Employees should be permitted to engage in private religious expression in personal work areas not regularly open to the public to the same extent that they may engage in nonreligious private expression," which means that a federal employee now has the right to keep a Bible, a Koran, or the Vedics on his or her desk without being accused of forcing religion on fellow co-workers. Another guidelines states: "Employees should be permitted to engage in religious expression with fellow employees, to the same extent that they may engage in comparable nonreligious private expression, subject to reasonable restrictions," which means that federal employees have the right to talk about their faith in the hallway or cafeteria, with the same freedom they would have to talk about the Redskins or the latest Harrison Ford flick. No doubt, some sort of guidelines were needed to protect workers who truly have faced religious harassment in the workplace. And the guidelines do require a federal agency "to accommodate an employee's exercise of his or her religion unless such accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the conduct of the agency's operation" [whatever "undue hardship" means, and according to current U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, it doesn't mean much]. Nevertheless, you still have to ask, What has happened to this country that we need federal guidelines to ensure that a person can "engage in private religious expression in personal work areas"?

LOVE CONQUERS ALL (ESPECIALLY WITH SOME FORCE BEHIND IT)

Anyone wanting a glimpse of what "religious freedom" in America will become if Rep. Ernest Ishtook's (R.-Okla.) notoriously misnamed "Religious Freedom Amendment" ever becomes law can look no further than to Pike County public schools in rural Alabama, where a Jewish family has been subjected to harassment because they won't partake in religious exercises in the classroom-exactly the kind of exercises that would be legal if Ishtook's amendment were ever passed. According to a suit filed in federal court by the state chapter of the ACLU, the school system has violated the children's civil rights and persecuted them for being Jewish. Among the charges is that when Paul Herring, 14, was sent to the principal's office for disrupting class, he was ordered to write an essay on "Why Jesus Loves Me." When David Herring, 13, refused to bow his head during a school prayer assembly, a teacher allegedly reached over and lowered it for him. In another incident, after a minister delivered a fire-and-brimstone sermon at the elementary school, Sarah Herring, 11, said she had nightmares for weeks about burning in hell. The parents have also complained that their kids have been forced to attend what are "essentially Christian worship services in the guise of school assemblies," and that representatives of the Gideon Society are allowed to pass Bibles out in the schools. "We are still hearing in Pike County, 'We will excuse your children from religious exercises,'" said one of the ACLU attorneys handling the case.

Now, that might sound incredibly tolerant and open-minded, except for one small problem: according to the U.S. Supreme Court, religious exercises of any kind should not be going on in public schools, the idea being that because kids are required by law to attend, it's hardly fair that they should be subjected to religious exercises that violate their beliefs. And, though excusing the children from those exercises might sound so accommodating, it is in fact a bogus response. As a New York Times editorial in 1962 said, in regards to the Engel v. Vitale decision: "The Establishment Clause is a keystone of American liberty; and if there is one thing that the Establishment Clause must mean, it is that government may not set up a religious norm from which one has to be excused"-especially children in a public school classroom. It is precisely these types of problems that the law seeks to avoid, problems that would be avoided if only schools would obey the law-a law that would be turned on its head if something like Ishtook's proposal ever became an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION HANGS IN THE BALANCE-SO PLEASE SEND YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION NOW!

Though direct mail fund-raising letters are not usually examples of restraint and understatement, a recent one by Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries-who was trying to raise funds for the defense of Alabama Judge Roy Moore-takes the cake. Judge Moore, if you will recall (Liberty, November/December 1995), is the judge who, in defiance of a court order, insists on having religious exercises in his courtroom. According to Kennedy's letter, incredible issues are at stake in the ACLU suit against the judge, and he writes that "for the sake of our religious liberties, for the sake of our nation's future, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, and, yes, for the sake of my godly friend, Judge Roy Moore," you need to send money. Dr. Kennedy warns that, unless we protect Judge Moore's right to conduct religious exercises in a public courtroom, then "do not doubt that prayer will become a crime, the Bible off-limits, and sharing our faith in public forbidden." Of course, what Dr. Kennedy neglects to mention is that no one is telling Judge Moore that he can't openly pray or post the Ten Commandments, just that a public courtroom-where people are often there not by choice, and in which the judge acts as an agent of the state-isn't the proper place to do so. The assertion that public prayers or religious displays aren't appropriate in certain places doesn't mean that these aren't appropriate at all. After all, Dr. Kennedy would object if a Hare Krishna devotee wanted to place a picture of A. C. Bjaktivendanta Swami inside his church. But wouldn't that objection be just one step away from making Hindu prayers a crime, the Vedas off-limits, and sharing the Hindu faith in public forbidden? Kennedy is right about one thing in his letter though: the issue with Judge Moore is important. Will this country continue to protect the rights of all religions, or will it allow any one religion to co-opt the reins, symbols, and institutions of government?