From Roxanne (who’s restarted her own blog), I see that, just as we critics of faith-based programs predicted, the attempts to use government power to push fundamentalist Christianity are only intensifying. Now federal prisons are quietly purging religious books that come into conflict the Christian Fundies Uber Alles.
Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.
The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.
Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
As you can imagine, the government is hiding behind September 11th to justify this, since exactly 0% of the terrorists that caused the events of that day became jihad-minded, America-hating Muslim extremists in prison. But it’s hard to take the “OHMIGOD ISLAMOFASCISTS” excuse at face value, considering some of the books that were purged.
The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.
The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller. …..
Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”
“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.
There’s also some evidence that the list makers favored Orthodox Judaism over other forms. But for our purposes, the fact that the list makers have an idea of what “Christianity” is and it has nothing to do with the mainstream Christianity practiced by most Americans (thus the word “mainstream”). There’s no telling what this purge has done to hurt access to materials about non-mainstream and pagan religions.
What’s really alarming to me about this is it shows how thorough the Bush administration is in shoving its pro-theocracy beliefs on the public. Defining down what you get to call your religion to 150 texts* is a level of control over someone’s most basic personal life imaginable. This one decision is unlikely to have broad social impact, but it’s clear they are taking a theocracy-of-a-thousand-cuts approach. Which is, in one way, scarier than trying to mandate it openly. The hope is clearly that theocracy will sneak up on us and we’ll have it without even realizing when exactly we made the switch over from a free society.
*I shudder to think of how they tried to narrow down Hindu teachings to 150 books.
39 Responses to “Theocratic water torture”
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As a brief mental exercise - does Chinese water torture actually count as torture, in Gee Dubya’s America?
Yeah, I saw that one too. This is swerving so close to breaking the establishment clause that I wonder how the hell they think they can get away with it.
I guess, given the Dem congress’s unwillingness to exert even token authority, it’s a good thing we have activist judges to serve as a firewall.
An ever-shrinking, ceaselessly-embattled firewall.
I thought books were like the one thing you could actually get in prison. When I was young and continually hassled by the police for no reason, it was a great comfort to me that even if they managed to put me away, I’d still have books. It is a small comfort that I’m at least old and clean-cut enough that I’m no longer hassled by the police for no reason, just as they take away that one thing that could possibly make an inmate’s life worth living. Other than, of course, the only kind of rape it’s totally okay to laugh about in nearly any company.
I guess they discovered that too many inmates were actually improving their minds and bettering themselves while behind bars. The only things you’re allowed to learn in the slammer are smokin’, rapin’, and keepin’ your head down when the boss is looking.
This isn’t swerving close to violating the Establishment Clause, IMO (and IAAL). I think this is a clear violation, to any judge not drinking the kool-aid. How can you say, “these are the approved religious texts” without, as an arm of the State, putting a stamp of approval on particular religious beliefs and not others?
The key is a “good plaintiff.” Someone whose beliefs are non-threatening and are disfavored. So if, for example, famous Quaker or Anabaptist or Mennonite texts are left off the approved list, get someone from that denomination. Christians are better, because even the Federalist Society judges generally acknowledge that the Establishment Clause had as its original purpose keeping government from picking the side of one set of Christians over another. And pacifist sects are better because it takes “security concerns” off the table. Nobody ever killed a prison guard after falling under the sway of radical pacifism. Failing a good Christian plaintiff, maybe a Ba’hai or Buddhist.
What’s so freaky about this is that anyone conceived the project at all. As the article points out, prisons already get to reject any book or other publication that advocates violence or otherwise can be claimed to pose a threat to order and discipline. So they didn’t need this list to keep potentially bad (even by their standards) stuff out.
They might have wanted it to eliminate the need to think about new requests (except that the lists are ostensibly updatable), but they certainly didn’t need to use it to purge existing libraries, all of whose books have already been vetted by prison officials.
So it’s just some crazy exercise in anti-literate beancounting. I also wonder about the “experts” that the Bureau of Prisons consulted to create these lists. If they were fully informed about the use the lists would be put to and still participated, they must know their souls are pretty much done for.
Like the Christian Bible, by any chance?
Oh good. For a moment there I thought that they might actually allow people like Eric Robert Rudolph access to materials similar to those that caused him to take a radical and violent turn.
Oh.
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” — Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
norbizness:
I doubt Paine is on the approved list.
And I’m damn sure he’s foreign to Bush’s nightstand-reading stack.
After all, Paine never mentioned goats.
I am a prison librarian in a Southwestern city. The state-employed prison chaplains are mostly a bunch of Christian zealots who do everything they can to interfere with non-Christian faiths. Most effected are Wiccans, Asatru-ers, and Native Americans. In some prisons in the northern parts of the state, Mormons are in charge and even most Christians are treated like shit.
The ridiculous claims used to justify the stifling of non-apprived faiths are absolutely unbelievable. Here’s an example: the Azure Green catalog is banned because it has depictions of knives. Never mind that it’s just a picture, the items in question can’t be ordered and received by any inmates, and it’s only a small part of the contents of the catalog. No, the catalog is banned because the pictures may cause inmates to have an imaginative moment and make a shank that looks just like a ceremonial dagger. Honest. And absurd to a heavy degree, if you ask anyone other than those seeking any justification to stifle paganism. And never mind the fact that dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almost every fantasy book also has depictions of knives, swords, and axes.
The most dangerous time is at the beginning or end of a war AND in the months counting down to the end of this administration and hopefully republican control.
Prisoners have always been stripped of rights. Want to stop this? Stop the prison industrial complex. Wanna stop that? Figure out ways to increase the gpop’s ability to engage in compassion. I know, I know, tough to do, but figuring out ways that society incentivize the masses to be intolerant probably could help.
Incidentially, I’m getting not a little fed up with all the mostly nekkid women to the side of my comment-viewing. I don’t mind, and very much enjoy looking at pretty women. I do mind when it’s an explicit grab on my attention when I’d rather do something else. Pictures of bulls with a bra hanging off the horns do lead to unusual states of intellectual contrast and discomfort. ?:~) I do not see these ads in most other places. Perhaps a joke is being played at someone’s expense?
“As a brief mental exercise - does Chinese water torture actually count as torture, in Gee Dubya’s America?”
No, it’s been redefined a brain massage technique for reducing a prisoner’s stress…
Maimonides was one that was removed
Love this quote ….
You can read Maimonides actual works, but you can read ABOUT Maimonides so that should be just as good
Should read:
You can’t read Maimonides actual works, but you can read ABOUT Maimonides, so that should be just as good
Jihad watch (like many evangelical christians) will miss that isn’t not the Christian books were removed but liberal christianism was removed
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/018105.php
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=29311
Ah! Right!
clytemnestra:
I think you just nailed it — how the Fed will try to worm around the establishment clause. After all, a digest version is as good as the actual work in question, right? Even if the digest reads something like:
—
JESUS: Follow me. Or, follow those who say they follow me. Or, follow those who have bumper stickers saying Follow Me. And remember, George (and his pet goat) follows me.
JHVH: Uh, what he said. You know, my Only-Begotten Son. Or whatever. PILLAR OF SALT!
BUDDHA, MOSES, MOHAMMED (PBUH)*, SHIVA, KRISHNA, GAIA, MAMINODES: Well, you can follow us if you want, but we really Followed Him, even when in actual historical fact some of us preceded him by quite a number of centuries.
DARWIN: Aaagh! The Devil is in me! Everything I ever said is a lie! Follow Him! (My Deathbed Repentance, Signed, Chas. Darwin. PS: Salt! SALT, I tells ya!)
BEETHOVEN: Mehr Licht!
JESUS: So anyway. Get it?
—
Yep. That’ll show them namby-pamby activist judges how sincere the Fed is in giving Fair and Balanced Coverage™® to all comers.
====
* = We Have To Be Politically Correct, Even When We’re Dissing Others’ Religions In a Big Way.
150 books to sum up a religion? That’s it? Oh my freaking god. 150 books is nothing. Teeny tiny drop in the bucket. You probably couldn’t narrow a decent bibliography about sheep shearing down to 150 books, much less a whole freakin’ religion!
*Short break to hyperventilate and pound head on desk*
I guess it makes sense though. These lists were probably compiled by those idiots who insist you only need the One Book. That they allowed in another 149 is supposed to be gravy.
I’m going to go hug my bookcases now. While I’m still allowed to have them.
So if they can’t have any depictions of knives, they certainly can’t have books depicting such brutal things as crucifixion.
Sadly this is not new. When I was an inmate of a county prison in the northeast during the mid 1990’s the prison chaplin rigorously controlled all religious books available in the library.
Anything that wasn’t to the liking of his denomination would not appear there (sorry mormons, catholics, muslims, etc). He was quite proud of this fact.
He was also very upset when prisoners recieved non-approved religious books from outside sources, though there was little he could do about it.
Keep in mind that this was a far less strict minimum security county facility. This makes me suspect that what we are seeing now is a worsening of already-existing abuses.
I could support this list as an exercise in guaranteeing that prisoners at least have access to a minimum of these books in all prisons. In other words, using it as a shopping list to supplement any existing collection, and guaranteeing that, for example, Bahai gets some shelf space no matter what.
But using it as a list to purge everything else is unconsciounable. Just proves that there is no longer even any lipservice to the idea of prison being a place for people to turn their lives around. Didn’t see this one coming, but can’t say I am shocked.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Peter,
It wouldn’t be a good idea to have minimum collection requirements for prison libraries. Not for the staff, not for the facilities, not for the budgets, and not for the inmates. Having a minimum requirement in a prison locks the small budgets we have into uses the inmates usually don’t need. The inmates at my prisons like to read fantasy, westerns, and things about World War Two the most. They usually don’t care about the classics, but romance (especially the sleazy stuff,) horror (again, especially the sleazy stuff,) and suspense and war stuff is what the inmates want most. They and I would much rather spend our money on that than Bahai, Buddhist, Sikh, Asatru, and Zoroastrianist texts. I’d accept donations, but I can’t guarantee much shelf space if I have to choose between that an a Laurel K. Hamilton vampire sleaze fest or the lastest R. A. Salvatore.
Also, in prison a minimum requirement usually turns into a way for the facility to spend nothing more than that. Look up the history of a lawsuit called Lewis v. Casey sometime, and you’ll find that inmates can lose big by actually winning in the Supreme Court.
I wonder if the Fundie Christian orgs have the list (the one that NYT hasn’t and maybe won’t, and maybe can’t, publish) and are in the process of using their federal funds to make sure prison libraries have all their approved books.
I really don’t wonder, I’m pretty sure they do and are.
I wonder if the works of John Wesley are on the list of approved material. . . and if they aren’t (and I’m pretty sure they aren’t) how can the United Methodist church still condsider Dubya a member of their flock.
Though the right wingers/dominists have been working to take over the church since they had one of the first openly gay minister, Rev. Julian Rush http://www.rmnetwork.org/convo2007/speakers.asp
But then the RMC of the UM seems to be one of the most radical.
My dad does a lot of volunteering through Catholic prison ministries, which consists of him doing general life-skills counseling (like how to apply and interview for a job, how to make a budget, etc.) and donating clothes and kitchen stuff to recently released prisoners, and not doing any preaching. Believe me, I know my dad and he would not take part in anything that wanted him to push his religion on people.
Yet I remember a lot of sideways conversation about a new warden who was forbidding Catholic groups to enter the prison, but would allow his favorite evangelical Protestant groups free access. I guess the Catholics are so dangerous that even though they’re not trying to convert people, you can’t let them in!
So sadly, I’m not surprised by this news. I’m saddened, though.
Some at least tangentially related news re the status of religions and religious freedom:
At the monthly Advocates for Social Justice meeting at my Unitarian Universalist Santa Rosa congregation, I learned that our congregational press releases had been de facto censored by the Religion editor of the local big newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, because the editor did not consider UU to be “a religion,” so she just consigned the releases to the circular file. (We plan to work around by submitting PRs to a different editor.)
Since both Unitarianism and Universalism descend, in terms of demoninational geneology, from those wacky fun-loving Puritains, I pointed out “hey, they didn’t have a problem calling us a religion back when we burned witches!” I nominated myself as token witch to be burned to reinstate ourselves in the good graces of the local Religion Tsar.
In other news–if I understand this correctly, and I may have something garbled here, as part of a denomination-growing campaign, the national (or is it continental?) UU conference has made a deal with Time magazine, in which we, the UUs, will undertake to archive and make available online the magazine’s “religion” stories and related materials, and in return we get both to comment on all religions from our perspective, and have a certain number of columns for religion-related general commentary as well.
My head again ’sploded. I think UUs would be cool and fair doing this but I’m amazed any arm of the Mainstream Media would hand us this opportunity, and I fully expect some kind of nasty backlash from reactionaries in both religious and secular guise.
In light of the first item above, I wonder how UU materials fare in the BigBrotherful Index for prisoners.
If we aren’t censored, I would echo/paraphrase Thoreau’s remark to that Unitarian, Emerson, who bailed the younger Transcendentalist out of the hoosegow he was thrown into for not paying special taxes for the War on Mexico and asked the scamp “why are you in jail?”
“Emerson,” Thoreau replied, “why are you not in jail?”
Well, actually, if they’re getting all Calvinistic on us, those crucifixes are mighty Papist, so they should probably go. Leads to idolatry, you know.
Oh I forgot this URL
http://www.rmcumc.org/News/Communications/1032ad.htm
The fact that he’s still an active minister (at least in 2005) and not defrocked as they (fundie christians and the far right of the UM church) wanted, must be irksome. heh, heh, heh
you know those crosses can be whittled down to a shiv
Mark Foxwell,
I wonder if your dumb down editor knows that the 2nd and 6th president of the United States are buried in an UU church http://www.ufpc.org/
(”Although I know fundies like to say “Well if they knew what the church has become, they’d have no part of it.” — like they’d know, just like people know Casey Sheehan would have disapproved of what his mother is doing.)
And actually the fundies don’t consider any sect that’s not them, Christian. Dobson’s assitant confirmed that when he talked about whether Fred Thompson was qualified to be president.
Unfortunatly, prisons are often a black hole of Establishment Clause protections, with the power dynamic so massively skewed. In places with thoughtful wardens and a diverse population, things might be okay. But a zealous warden or regional “religious” culture can become ridiculous.
As one example, my brother was in jail in Virginia and part of his sentence was a addiction treatment program. He either had to do it while he was locked up, or pay for it himself (and it had to be a full-time residental program approved by the state) when he got out. Obviously, you want to do the one that’s paid for, and is offered while you have nothing else to do. The program was one giant Establishment Clause violation- it was all very AA (which is not overtly Chirstian but contains tons of specific Christian belief) and they actually had to start every day with the Lord’s Prayer. And because those running the program were very fundie, there was not way to get around it- even one write-up for questioning or non-compliance by the fundie staff could get you kicked out of the 11 week program. Because accepting authority and giving into the higher power are very AA requirements. Since he “could” have done an outside program, it wasn’t a “required” activity. However, that would never stand up in court based on other EC jurisprudence. I wish he had sued when he got out, but he didn’t want to touch the penal system again with a ten foot pole.
BTW, if Jeezub can walk on water, why does he need ice skates? He doesn’t need a mouth guard or helmet…
Dang it, why hasn’t anyone put the list up on the internet yet? I demand that it be leaked posthaste!
clytemnestra:
“It’s not a shiv! really! It’s a relic of the true cross!!”
Would someone then get solitary for being a papist and an idolator?
-.-;
lol … dispensations anyone
The picture reminds me of a joke: “Jesus saves. Rebound Gretzky - Score!”
the catalog is banned because the pictures may cause inmates to have an imaginative moment and make a shank that looks just like a ceremonial dagger. Honest.
Well, it’s obvious that without that catalog, inmates would have no way of knowing what a knife looks like or how to make one out of materials at hand.
It’s for their own safety, you know.
clytemnestra: If it wasn’t registered only I would point out the obvious to them. This isn’t an anti-Christianity-and-Judaism thing, it’s a Fundie-Christian-Only thing.
This afternoon I got this from a friend I sent the NYT story too
know any liberal ministers, chaplains, priests, rabbis, imams, monks, etc. etc. that you can forward this story too?
There are ways of getting around that.