Daily Archives: 23 June 2014

The Ground Zero Cross and Atheists

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American Atheists filed suit three years ago against having this symbol included in the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which officially opened late last month. Their suit was tossed forthwith as baseless; US District Court Judge Deborah Batts wrote

No reasonable observer would view the artifact as endorsing Christianity. [The museum curators] have not advanced religion impermissibly, and the cross does not create excessive entanglement between the state and religion.

The group appealed to the Second Circuit which responded by instructing American Atheists actually to make a case and not just bellyache, and to do so by 14 July. In so instructing, the Appellate Court cited an amicus brief provided by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty which argued among other things that

Courts should not allow people to sue just because they claim to get “dyspepsia” over a historical artifact displayed in a museum.

As Eric Baxter, Senior Counsel for Religious Liberty noted,

Taking personal offense is not an injury that warrants invoking the power of the courts to shut down everything you disagree with. The Constitution is not a personal tool for censoring everyone’s beliefs but your own.

Indeed.

Don’t Lead. Act. They’ll Follow, or Not

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Secretary of State (and Secretary of the Treasury) James Baker offered A Roadmap for Restoring American Leadership in a recent Wall Street Journal, and it’s worth a careful read. While his seven steps are entirely appropriate, though, it occurs to me that they must come as steps two through eight, instead.

There are many things we need to do first, and we need to do them unilaterally, without waiting on other nations to…follow. Consult, certainly. Attempt to persuade, certainly. Attempt to get others to act, also if not in concert, certainly.

But, to paraphrase a man, some things can’t wait.  Some things need prompt action. We’re still big enough, prosperous enough, strong enough to do those things alone, and where the urgency of the matter won’t pause for consensus, we have an obligation to act first and build consensus later. See Russia’s partition of Ukraine, ISIS’ dismantling of Iraq, if you doubt that.

There’s another aspect of leading that’s missed in the multilateralist, gotta have a UN imprimatur, gotta have European/Russian/Chinese/whomever agreement to our leading before we can…lead, also. That aspect is “by example.”

We can’t set any kind of useful example if we aren’t acting.