Gathering storms.

in the thirty-five years I've been writing this column I don't think I've seen as much activity on the "church-state battlefront" (as long-ago Humanist editor Edwin H. Wilson entitled his column in these pages) as I have in recent years and months. This was especially apparent in the September/October 2004 Humanist, and the pace is quickening. What follows is a summary of some of the latest developments.

1. Reproductive Rights. Between June and September of 2004 federal courts in California, New York, and Nebraska all ruled unconstitutional a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion enacted last year by Congress and gleefully signed into law by George W. Bush in the photo-op presence of an all-male cheering section. President Bill Clinton had vetoed such bills and the Supreme Court ruled a similar Nebraska law unconstitutional in 2000. All four courts faulted the laws for failing to provide an exception for instances where a woman's health is at stake. The Bush administration will undoubtedly appeal to the Supreme Court. (I pointed out last December in a speech at the Women's National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C., that if women had their fair share of seats in Congress, as they come close to doing in Scandinavian parliaments, such intrusive measures would never pass.)

2. D.C. School Vouchers. Although District of Columbia voters rejected a voucher-like program in 1981 by an 89 percent to 11 percent margin, and although the district's single nonvoting delegate to Congress opposed the move, the Republican-dominated Congress voted in 2003 to impose a school voucher plan on the defenseless district, the last "colony" of the United States. President Clinton had vetoed a similar plan, and several years earlier Catholic Senators Ted Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) and Chris Dodd (Democrat, Connecticut) led the fight to defeat a voucher bill that had been introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman (Democrat, Connecticut) and Dan Coates (Republican, Indiana). Although a Gallup poll in August 2004 showed continued popular opposition to vouchers--and vouchers or their analogues have been defeated at the polls by two to one in twenty-five statewide referenda--sectarian special interests and ultraconservatives can be counted on to keep the pot boiling for years to come, encouraged by a mistaken Supreme Court ruling in June 2002.

3. "Under God" in the Pledge. Congress is considering a bill, H.R. 2028, the "Pledge Protection Act of 2003," which would strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance. In September 2004 a coalition of religious, civil rights, civil liberties, and other groups--including Americans for Religious Liberty and the American Humanist Association--sent a letter to members of the House urging defeat of the bill. These groups, which had been on every side in Michael Newdow's failed challenge to the "under God" phrase added to the Pledge in 1954, said that H.R. 2028 would violate the constitutional separation of powers and also "undermine the longstanding constitutional rights of religious minorities to seek redress in the federal courts [in cases] involving mandatory recitation of the Pledge." The letter referred to the Supreme Court's 1943 Barnette ruling against such compulsory recitation.

4. Pledge Harassment. A thirteen-year-old "A" student in West Bend, Wisconsin, was harassed by her eighth grade teacher and school principal for declining to participate in the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance because of its religious reference. After protests by the Madison-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, the school superintendent indicated that the principal of the school is to make an announcement "informing all students of their right to remain seated and to participate, or not participate, in the Pledge of Allegiance."

5. Faith-based Fraud? In August of this year the state of Texas shut down For Children's Sake, a self-described Christian-based charity founded in 1995. According to the Dallas Morning News, state regulators had complained for years about FCS and found, records show, "problems ranging from forged doctors' signatures and faked medical records to fake claims that foster parents had received required training to ensure they could care for neglected, abused, and severely disturbed children." FCS was paid about $7.1 million in fiscal 2003. The mess came to public attention in October 2003 when several FCS employees filed suit in a state court alleging they "were wrongfully fired after refusing to commit illegal acts and trying to get the nonprofit's leadership to put a stop to fraudulent practices ranging from faking documents to hiding books from state licensing inspectors."

According to the Dallas paper, "as investigators began dosing in, several of the key officials at For Children's Sake created Legacy, a for-profit company, and signed a service contract with their old agency." The contract paid them more than $1.1 million as of August, when a state court judge issued a restraining order to block payments "because of evidence that they might be fraudulent asset transfers." According to FCS's website, it now operates in Virginia and may also start operating in Maryland.

6. Lone Star Sex Ed. The Texas state Board of Education is supposed to vote this November on whether health textbooks should focus on "abstinence only" or also include instruction about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Fundamentalists and ultraconservatives want the texts to promote abstinence while the Scripps Howard Texas Poll found recently that 90 percent of adult Texans favor "age-appropriate, medically accurate sex education that includes information on abstinence, birth control, and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV."

Edd Doerr is president of Americans for Religious Liberty and immediate past president of the American Humanist Association.