CHURCH AND STATE.

The Maine Issue

A referendum of great national importance, which nonetheless received little national notice, took place on November 2, 1999, when 45 percent of Maine voters--an unusually high turnout in an off-year election--defeated 55 percent to 45 percent a ballot initiative aimed at banning late-term abortions. Often incorrectly called by the nonmedical term partial-birth abortion, intact dilation and extraction (D&X) has become the latest target of the religious right campaign to ban all abortions. (This campaign is discussed by ethicist John Swomley in his new book, Compulsory Pregnancy: The War Against American Women, from Humanist Press, 1999.)

The Maine referendum is important because it marks the third voter defeat in one year for an attempted ban on late-term abortions. In November 1998, voters in Colorado and Washington State defeated similar proposals, despite massive propaganda campaigns by the religious right and opinion polls supposedly showing majority support for such bans.

The Republican-dominated Congress, catering to the religious right, has repeatedly passed such bans, only to have them vetoed by President Clinton for failing to include an exception for physician-determined medical necessity. The Senate has subsequently been unable to cobble together the two-thirds vote needed to override these vetoes.

The Maine vote was a defeat for the Christian Civic League of Maine (which succeeded in 1998 in defeating a state gay rights law in a referendum that pulled in only 30 percent of eligible voters), Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. The failure of the anti-choice side to attract the state's considerable French Catholic vote is perhaps related to the implosion of the Catholic church in neighboring Quebec, Canada. Portland pollster Patrick Murphy said, "I knew a few priests who did not plan to send the yes message to their congregations."

Maine's pro- and anti-choice sides each spent an estimated $1 million on their campaigns--a lot of money for a small state. Political scientist Richard Maiman wrote in the November 3 Portland Press Herald:

   The [pro-choice] No on 1 Campaign's single most effective move was to
   transform the election from a referendum on [late-term] abortion into one
   on abortion itself, by asserting that the ban would really be much more
   sweeping than the Yes Campaign claimed. This put the supporters of the ban
   in the painful and somewhat embarrassing position of having to argue that
   they did not intend to eliminate all abortions, or even most abortions, a
   claim that many Maine voters may not have found all that convincing.

      Why would the pro-life forces spend so much money challenging a
   seldom-used medical procedure if they didn't have something bigger in mind?
   It may well be the case that the Yes on 1 Campaign started out wanting
   nothing more than a symbolic victory, a demonstration of its grassroots
   strength. Their opponents appear to have used that very strength to help
   defeat the ... ban by suggesting an ulterior motive behind the ballot
   question.

Maine Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky said that more people voted on the abortion rights referendum than on any of the other eight measures on the ballot, including one to permit medicinal use of marijuana, which passed 61 percent to 39 percent.

The bottom line is that Maine voters--like those in Colorado and Washington State in 1998--showed that people from coast to coast, whatever they may personally think about abortion, prefer that government keep its nose out a woman's decision whether or not to continue a problem pregnancy and away from a physician's clinical judgment as to the best way to look after a patient's health. The Maine vote was also a vote to protect women from governmental imposition of sectarian medical codes.

But winning a few battles doesn't necessarily mean winning the war. Reproductive freedom is far from safe. State laws continue to impinge upon that freedom, many communities have no medical facilities for abortions, and poor women are increasingly disadvantaged in obtaining adequate reproductive health care. In November 1999 the Republican Congress succeeded in burdening U.S. foreign aid with unreasonable restrictions on family planning. The 2000 presidential and congressional elections could determine whether reproductive choice remains a constitutionally protected right.

Bible and School

The Bible and Public Schools: A First Amendment Guide is a pamphlet released November 11, 1999, by the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center and the National Bible Association and endorsed by eighteen religious and educational organizations. The guide is primarily the work of the Freedom Forum's Charles Haynes, who was the spark plug of similar guides issued in recent years on religious issues in public education.

Haynes declared at a press conference that the guide is a "historic breakthrough," adding that, "after more than 150 years of bitter conflicts, we finally have a broad consensus on the constitutional and educational place of the Bible in public schools."

In all fairness, I must say that the guidelines aren't really bad. They state that "any study of religion in a public school must be educational, not devotional"; teachers for a "Bible class" must be selected in the same way as other teachers; "the Bible may be used as a primary text, but preferably not the only text for a course"; "supernatural occurrences and divine action described in the Bible may not be taught as historical fact"; and "students should be exposed to a variety of religious and secular biblical interpretations and translations."

As far as they go, the guidelines make sense. But they don't propose adequate safeguards to ensure balance, fairness, objectivity, and inclusiveness. Nor do they provide educators with the tools to prevent "Bible classes" from being merely Pollyannaish fluff or low-key indoctrination. Educators aren't helped to deal with the stormy controversies over the evolution of the Bible in its assorted variations. And placing the Bible itself at the center of what ought to be taught "about" religion is itself seriously out of balance.

Yes, public schools should do more to alleviate ignorance about religion, but it must not be done unless the resulting curricula are completely balanced, fair, objective, and inclusive--religious warts and all.

Haynes and Company have not shown that they can do this, as I have previously pointed out in this column. Furthermore, while Haynes has stated that all "stakeholders" should be heard in the shaping of policy on religion in public schools, once again he has demonstrated hypocrisy by purposely ignoring the humanist, Unitarian Universalist, and freethought portions of the religio-philosophical spectrum.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association, executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, and the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on church-state separation.