Expert on separation of church and state to speak Sunday at Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane

Eddie Tabash has been advocating for the separation of church and state for decades, a right laid out in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that Tabash said has been increasingly eroded.

Tabash, a constitutional lawyer who sits on the board of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, will be speaking at the 9:15 and 11 a.m. services Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane, 4340 W. Whistalks Way. His talk is titled “Separation of Church and State Requires Equal Rights for Everyone, Including Atheists.”

Many people are familiar with the wording that starts the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Tabash said that also applies to atheists, those who don’t believe in any of the established religions. Tabash said when the U.S. Senate was considering the Bill of Rights, they twice rejected language that would have favored religious belief over nonbelief.

“They were rejected and never brought back,” he said.

Tabash traces his concern with personal freedom to his childhood. His mother was an Auschwitz survivor from Hungary and his father was a Rabbi. He said his mother often had flashbacks and had a difficult life because of her experience in the concentration camp, experiences that she shared with him.

“I was always concerned with individual liberties,” he said. “I became very, very afraid of oppression based on differences that should be meaningless.”

Tabash said the current push toward an evangelical Christian theocracy dates back to 1980, when Ronald Reagan ran for president as an evangelical and there was a push to bring religion into government.

“I realized something was wrong,” Tabash said.

The next year, he began volunteering with the California branches of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. He argued for free speech and against including religion in government. He’s been an advocate ever since, volunteering with various groups and traveling the country giving talks and appearing in courtrooms.

“Had the religious right not come to power like that, I wouldn’t have gotten waylaid like this,” he said. “I felt like I had to commit to this. I actually can’t think of anything more horrible than a theocracy in control of America.”

Tabash considers himself an atheist, but said he has no problem with people living according to their religious beliefs. The problem, he said, is he and others being forced to live according to those beliefs.

“The issue is, should this be the law of the land?” he said.

Tabash points to laws regulating abortion and same-sex marriage. In 2007, he wrote a brief in support of same-sex marriage on behalf of the Council of Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry for a California court, arguing that the ban on same-sex marriage was a violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment. He argued that the ban was based on religious belief.

“There’s no secular reason to limit marriage to heterosexuals,” he said.

The push toward theocracy has only accelerated in recent years, and Tabash points to several recent decisions made by the “religious right-wing super majority on the Supreme Court,” including the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

“It shouldn’t be so hard to keep law and religion separate,” he said. “What the religious right wants is to take over.”

Tabash said he hopes to convince people that they should come together on the issue of the separation between church and state even if they disagree on political issues.

“Nobody in America should lose their right to a liberty because of the religious belief of someone else,” he said.

He acknowledges that the work to restore the separation of church and state may take years, but that he and others still need to put in the time and effort.

“We may not live to see the restoration of church and state separation, but we need to work on it anyway and till the soil for future generations,” he said.