Citizens Project

Freedom Watch Online May 2010
Human Relations Commission: What it is and why it matters

The Colorado Springs City Council will vote May 24, 2010 on whether to consider reinstating the Human Relations Commission by placing it on the agenda of their formal council meeting June 8th. We need their support to put it on the agenda, and to adopt the ordinance. They need to hear from you that our city needs a Human Relations Commission.
 
What is the Human Relations Commission?
  • Most cities have a Human Relations Commission (HRC) to mediate disputes, help businesses, individuals and agencies resolve issues involving discrimination, and provide city government a greater understanding of how policies and funding affect less vocal minorities. Our city's HRC was disbanded in the 1990s and it's time to bring it back.
  • The HRC is an all-volunteer committee of nine residents, appointed by the City Council, who have diverse backgrounds and skills in mediation, cultural competency, community leadership, and human services.
  • The HRC requires no funding, does not have regulatory power, and will operate like most other city boards and commissions. 
 
HRCHow will the Human Relations Commission benefit our community?
  • The HRC will hear grievances from any resident or business involving discrimination, and will use mediation and reconciliation to resolve disputes without litigation. Unresolved conflicts may be referred to the Colorado Civil Rights Division.
  • The HRC will conduct informed advocacy, and educate the business community, nonprofits and the public sector on how to avoid illegal discrimination and work constructively with employees, clients, customers and citizens with diverse backgrounds.
  • The HRC will be a resource for residents affected by the loss of services from recent budget cuts, connecting people with existing services or identifying new needs that nonprofit agencies could address.
  • The HRC will promote public-private partnerships to find solutions to community problems and will improve police-community relations by promoting constructive dialogue. 
 
What can I do to help?
  • Get informed! Read the ordinance, download the brochure and learn more at Citizens Project's web site
  • Be an advocate! Reach out to friends and organizations and ask them to endorse the HRC ordinance
  • Be a voice! Contact City Council members and let them know the HRC is an important step for our community. Learn how on our web site!
 
Join Citizens Project for the sixth annual Creating Community Breakfast!

Save the date and join Citizens Project at the 6th annual Creating Community Breakfast!  This fun and free fundraising breakfast will feature speakers, musical entertainment and a few surprises.
 
Creating Community Breakfast
Thursday, June 3, 2010

7:30 - 8:30am (check-in begins at 7:00am)
Bigg City Event Center, 5825 Mark Dabling Blvd (south entrance)

View the invitation

Learn more about the work Citizens Project is doing in the Pikes Peak region to promote equal rights, diversity, religious freedom through separation of church and state and civic engagement, and learn how you can help! RSVP now to reserve your seat.

Church-state separation as seen by a religious conservative

By Ken Burrows
 
The battle lines over church-state separation are often cast as nonreligious liberals vs. conservative faith advocates, with the former defending separation and the latter attacking it. This, despite the fact that the principle of separating religion and government has its origins among founders known to be believers, albeit not predominantly of the Christian brand, who vigorously advocated such separation. They saw separation of church and state as a way to avoid governmental favoritism in religion, which they knew-because they had seen it happen in their own lives-could spawn sectarian strife and even religious persecution. So these founders embraced separation as a principle that would allow diverse believers to live in harmony in the pluralistic political system they were creating.
 
This perspective is lost on the religious conservatives of today who lambast church-state separation as being inimical to religion and who use the principle as a lever to sow divisiveness, thereby everting the very goal the founders had set for the principle. But among the conservative faithful there have been exceptions-individuals who depart from "the party line" to evaluate the separation issue with more objectivity, more balance, more insight, and more sensitivity. One such individual who did this was John Danforth, a former three-term Republican Senator from Missouri and, later, President George W. Bush's Representative to the United Nations. Danforth laid out his views in his 2006 book Faith and Politics. His words are as relevant today as when the book was published.
 
Danforth, who is also an ordained Episcopal priest, not only recognizes the need for church-state separation, but he also presents nothing less than a religious defense of it. He sees his Christian faith as a "ministry of reconciliation" and believes the divisiveness engendered by entangling government with religion subverts that ministry. In his view, right-wing religious extremism makes reconciliation impossible because it has no room for respecting divergent views that people with differing opinions can hold, both sincerely and morally. He points to yet another religious concept-lack of humility before God-as being a core error by those who seek to merge church and state by calling on government to codify selective religious beliefs or positions.
Writes Danforth: "If we believe that we know God's truth and that we can embody that truth in a political agenda, we divide the realm of politics into those who are on God's side, which is our side, and those with whom we disagree, who oppose the side of God. This is neither good religion nor good politics.
 
Reconciliation depends on acknowledging that God's truth is greater than our own, that we cannot reduce it to any political platform we create...and that God's truth is large enough to accommodate the opinions of all kinds of people, even those with whom we strongly disagree."
 
Danforth served in public office while also being a member of the clergy and was often asked how he reconciled the two roles. Of his many years in office in Missouri, he said, "the people hired me to be their attorney general [and] their senator. They did not hire me to be their pastor. My job was to serve all...so it would have been inappropriate to foist my religion on them."
 
In his book, Danforth engages several of the hot-button church-state issues, assessing them from standpoints of religion, law, and politics while often taking time to also probe aspects such as motive and logic as well. He's skeptical at best of public displays of religion, believing they harbor risks of exclusion. He also questions their very usefulness. "An innocuous prayer has no power to make us more godly," he writes. "A display of the Ten Commandments will not make us obey the commandments. What public religion can do is create an appearance that faith is a formality contrived to impress people more than God."
 
Consistent with his conservatism, Danforth critiques the Roe v. Wade and even the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decisions (the latter is credited with first establishing a constitutional right to privacy), not for religious reasons but because he believes the Court overreached in both cases with a too-expansive reading of the Constitution. He says one long-term result of such decisions is that litmus tests are now applied to judicial nominees, and these tests are sometimes born of religious motivation, particularly with regard to abortion and how marriage is to be defined. In his view this again raises church-state issues and, he says, places some political operatives in an awkwardly ironic position because "A determination to impose one's own religious views on the law is judicial activism, the very thing pro-lifers said they were against" with regard to Roe v. Wade.   
 
Danforth cites the Terry Schiavo case as one of the most egregious efforts by politicians to force religious convictions into law and, in the process, insert themselves unjustifiably where they simply did not belong. He's equally vehement on the issue of stem cell research, saying blastocysts can be called human life only as a statement of religious doctrine "and advancing legislation to protect them can only be understood as attempting to enforce religion by resorting to law."
 
On gay marriage, as with Roe v. Wade, Danforth again shows his independent thought process. He sees the Massachusetts Supreme Court approval of gay marriage as "judicial activism in the extreme" because, he writes, the court prematurely interjected itself into a question of societal values. (He does not specifically address the issue of constitutional guarantees of equal treatment, a key factor in that Court's ruling.) But, he contends, the national reaction to the Massachusetts ruling has been worse, with efforts to amend the Constitution to define marriage being especially wrong-headed. He cites the same reasoning for why he believes this is so, which is that "the Constitution does not create social policy." He sees the only purpose of such an amendment to be "the humiliation of gay Americans, advocated by the Christian right." He observes that marriage amendment advocates may give their cause a loftier description, but "in reality it is gay bashing."
 
Throughout his book, Danforth emphasizes the theme of reconciliation-what it means religiously and how and why it relates to the ways citizens interact among themselves and with their government. "God transcends our ability to understand him," he writes, "much less our ability to impose our understanding of him on others through the power of government." The key question, he suggests, is, "Do we go into the world confident that our truth is, indeed, God's truth, with the idea of implementing that truth through legislation? Or is our approach more humble...do we believe our principal task is not to get our own way but to advance God's kingdom as best we can while holding together a fracturing world?"
 
Lest he leave any doubt about how he views the intermixing of religion and government, Danforth succinctly but passionately sums it up when he writes: "The notion that people with different religious views could co-opt politicians to the point of enacting their beliefs into law is more than offensive. It is a misuse of government to advance religion. It is a clear breach in the separation of church and state."
 
What Danforth has shown is that the value of church-state separation does not rise or fall out of reverence for one or another faith or out of reverence for one or another political outlook. Rather it emanates from reverence for our founders' history and the principles about separating government from religion that they espoused and then enshrined in the Constitution they handed down to us.
In This Issue
Human Relations Commission
You're invited!
Church-state separation as seen by a religious conservative
Recent CP Blog Posts
Join the Conversation
 
Time to Revive the Human Relations Commission
read it here 

Creating Community Breakfast
Articles of Interest
 
Schools shouldn't push religion
April 17, 2010
The Gazette
 
Focus Action says 'no' to any gay Supreme Court nominee

April 14, 2010
The Gazette
read it here

Army Symbol is religious and should be changed, group says
April 29, 2010
The Colorado Springs Business Journal
read it here

Gay couples challenge Defense of Marriage Act
May 4, 2010
National Public Radio

read it here

National Day of Prayer 2010 goes on despite controversies
May 6, 2010
The Huffington Post
read it here
Upcoming Events
  
No More Myths: Poverty
and Class in Colorado
Springs Today
Saturday, May 22, 2010, 2:30pm-4:30pm at the Marian House, 228 N Cascade. Parking at the corner of Bijou. RSVP to [email protected]

Courage to Remember: a free exhibit about The Holocaust

Every day through May 30 at the Fine Arts Center.
An event at The Fine Arts Center presented by the Greenberg Center for Learning and Tolerance.  A DVD featuring the story of Sara Hauptman, a Holocaust Survivor, Adele Obodov, a witness to Kristallnacht, and General Sidney Gritz, a liberator of Buchenwald, is running continually. Also view posters which offer compelling new insights into the Holocaust.

Community Center Conversations
Tuesday, May 25, 6:30pm-8:00pm at the Deerfield Center Community Center, 4290 Deerfield Hills Road.
Light refreshments, childcare, and the option of discussion groups in Spanish provided.
 
Summer 2010
Knapsack Institute:
Transforming Teaching and Learning
June 2-5, 2010 at the
University of Colorado
at Colorado Springs.
The Knapsack Institute provides educators with a framework for teaching about the matrix of privilege and oppression. Our interactive, collaborative Institute welcomes all educators (K-12, higher education, diversity trainers, non-profit staff, etc.). 
 For more information on faculty and curriculum please visit: www.uccs.edu/~knapsack or call Daryl Miller at 719-255-4764 
 

Everybody Welcome Festival: A Celebration of Culture
and Diversity

The Cotton Club
7:30pm - 10:30pm
Saturday August 7th, 2010 at
Stargazer's Theatre and Event Center. Festival from 10am - 4pm on Sunday August 15th, 2010 at
America the Beautiful Park. Experience diverse & cultural dance and music, cultural food & sales booths, children's activities cooking demonstrations and more. If you're interested in helping, please send an email to: [email protected]


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