This week the “God Machine” offers a key update on one of the more entertaining recent stories from the world of religion.
Last month, we learned that the Rev. Lonnie Latham, a far-right Oklahoma pastor and a member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee, was arrested after propositioning a male undercover police officer outside a hotel. After being charged with offering to engage in an act of lewdness, Latham insisted he was only “in the area pastoring to police.”
This week, Latham received some legal help from an unlikely ally. (thanks to MW for the tip)
The American Civil Liberties Union told an Oklahoma city judge Wednesday that a pastor who frequently speaks out against homosexuality and was arrested last week for propositioning a male police officer was charged in violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay sex.
In a friend-of-the-court brief the ACLU argues that the law used to arrest the Rev. Lonnie Latham contravenes the Supreme Court ruling that overturned sodomy laws.
“The Supreme Court has made it crystal clear that, when it comes to their sex lives, consenting adults are free to do whatever they please in private,” said Joann Bell, Executive Director of the ACLU of Oklahoma.
“According to the police report, Rev. Latham did nothing more than invite another man to his hotel room for consensual sex. It is not a crime merely to invite someone to have completely lawful sex. If it were otherwise, every bar in the state may as well shut its doors.”
I have a half-serious question: which bothers Southern Baptists in Oklahoma more, Latham propositioning a male undercover officer for sex or Latham getting help from the ACLU?
And speaking of updating previously-mentioned stories, lawmakers in Wisconsin swiftly passed legislation this week to ban protests at funerals after a deranged pastor, Fred Phelps and his unhinged Westboro Baptist Church, protested the funerals for troops killed in Iraq, literally celebrating their death with signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “Thank God for IEDs.” (Phelps and his followers believe soldiers’ casualties are God’s revenge on a country that is insufficiently hateful towards homosexuality.)
Wisconsin lawmakers moved swiftly yesterday toward banning protests at funerals in an effort aimed at stopping members of a Kansas church who have disrupted military services.
The state Senate voted 33-0 yesterday to criminalize protests that take place within 500 feet of a funeral one hour before or after the service.
In a surprise move hours later, the Assembly added the measure to its calendar and quickly approved the bill 92-3. Gov. Jim Doyle, who attended a funeral in October disrupted by protests led by the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, told the Associated Press he would sign the legislation soon.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Wisconsin will join Kansas as the only states in the country with funeral-protest restrictions, though a dozen others are considering similar bills — all in response to Phelps and his followers.
Fred Phelps’ daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper is a lawyer who has pledged to file a First Amendment challenge to the Wisconsin law if Doyle signs the bill.
And in religion-meets-science news, Slate’s Peter Dizikes noted this week that advocates of intelligent-design creationism have rallied behind “their favorite scientist,” Galileo Galilei.
Yes, that Galileo. In opinion pieces, speeches, and interviews, ID advocates commonly cite the 17th-century Italian astronomer and physicist as a forebear. It’s not his views on biology they want a piece of, but rather his plight as a man before his time. “In my opinion, we must train students in the 21st century to do exactly as Galileo did … think outside the box,” says William Harris, one of the key players in Kansas’ rebellion against evolution last year. In his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, leading ID-er Michael Behe calls the idea of a heliocentric universe, proposed by Copernicus and backed by Galileo, a prescient “assault on the senses.” So, too, Behe says, will his own work be vindicated. Last fall, an interviewer for the British newspaper the Guardian asked Behe if the criticism of ID he faces brings Galileo to mind. The self-appointed science rebel had a simple answer: “Yeah. In a way it’s flattery.”
Welcome to creationism’s absurdist history of science. During the inquisition, the Catholic Church put Galileo on trial in 1633 and forced him under threat of torture to recant his belief, presented unapologetically in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, that the earth revolved around the sun…. That is not exactly a problem today’s ID backers face.
And yet, the ID crusaders have latched onto Galileo anyway. “Galileo was not considered reputable when he came out with his theory,” said Kathy Cox, Georgia’s schools superintendent, while backing creationism in 2004.
Apparently it’s not enough for these poor people to embarrass themselves with stunning ignorance when it comes to science; they have to further humiliate themselves when it comes to history, too.