“Religious liberty” as doublespeak

Conservatives and evangelicals have gotten value for money out of their new playbook strategy: “religious liberty.” This term would make a master of “doublespeak” (as in Orwell’s 1984) proud.

Marma Alvarado’s op-ed in the January 23rd Spokesman (“High court should erase laws curbing religious freedoms”) shows the kind of egregious distortion of facts — and attacks on the basis of separation of church and state — that characterize this strategy. Alvarado casts state Blaine Amendments that prohibit government support for sectarian schools run by religious organizations as inherently discriminatory to immigrants, the poor, and Catholics.

That’s nonsense, because it rests on the ludicrous view that if one doesn’t get one’s first choice in education, one’s right to religious devotion has been denied. To use my tax dollars to support someone else’s belief system is a basic violation of conscience.

Alvarado even goes so far as to say that for many students with learning disabilities, religious education options are better — when these programs are not bound by expert policy and as scrupulously overseen by professionals in the field. Alvarado also fails to mention that tax monies for religious vouchers would further debilitate our public schools, which have been struggling while being defunded by lawmakers since the 1980s.

Help me to expose this strategy for what it is: chicanery in the service of transferring your tax dollars to unaccountable institutions that continue to promote cultural exclusion and domination in what could be a much more free and democratic society without so-called “religious liberty.”

Kevin S. Decker

Spokane