November 2, 2004.

Clearly, November 2, 2004, will be the most pivotal day in many Americans lifetimes and perhaps even in the history of the United States. On that day voters will go to the polls and decide (hoping that the Supreme Court doesn't mess things up as it did in 2000) whether the most powerful position in the country, indeed the world, will be held by a mediocrity who has shown little but contempt for our priceless heritage of religious freedom and church-state separation or a challenger who has demonstrated far more respect for that heritage.

Whoever is elected--George W. Bush or John F. Kerry--will be in a position to shape the future of this country and perhaps even the world for generations to come. It would be inappropriate for me to tell anyone how to vote but I can certainly discuss how the two major presidential aspirants stand on church-state and related concerns, as well as economic and geopolitical issues.

Bush has made clear that his two favorite Supreme Court justices are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the latter having been appointed to the Court by his father. Since both Scalia and Thomas have frequently attacked the First Amendment church-state separation principle as the Court has long interpreted it, expected vacancies on the Court during the next four years would be filled by Bush-nominated clones of Scalia and Thomas and church-state separation would most likely become a dead letter. Kerry would appoint justices far more in tune with constitutional crafters Thomas Jefferson and lames Madison, certainly not justices and judges hostile to separation and reproductive rights.

Furthermore, whichever candidate wins will undoubtedly have coattails that will have a strong bearing on the kind of Congress that results: a national legislature that is either more friendly or more hostile toward church-state separation. In general the two parties have largely polarized: Republicans now favoring tax support for faith-based schools and charities and opposing reproductive rights, with Democrats leaning strongly the other way.

Readers of this column for the last thirty-plus years know where I, the vast majority of Humanists, and most Americans generally stand on these issues but it is useful to reiterate and recap.

Tax aid for faith-based schools, through vouchers or tuition tax credits (tax-code vouchers) or some other mechanism, would wreck democratic public education; increasingly replace education with sectarian and ideological indoctrination; drive educational costs up and overall quality down; favor larger religious groups over all others; fragment our school population along creedal, class, ethnic, ideological, and other lines; and show contempt for the voters who in twenty-five separate referenda from coast to coast since 1967 rejected vouchers or their analogues by two to one.

Although some tax aid for faith-based charities has been provided for well over a century and will never entirely disappear, it was not until then-Senator John Ashcroft (defeated for reelection in 2000 by a dead man) in the late 1990s and President George W. Bush began trying to loosen the rules so that tax aided faith-based charities could discriminate in hiring along religious and gender orientation lines and promote sectarian views. Unless brought to a halt, Bush's faith-based initiatives, absurdly described as "compassionate conservatism," will create, as I have pointed out in the New York Times, a "growing proliferation of unregulated, unaccountable charities of uncertain efficacy competing for scraps of a shrinking public pie" and also violate Madison's timeless 1785 warning against using "religion as an engine of civil policy" The Texas Freedom Network (www.tfn.org) produced in late 2002 a study of how tax aid for faith-based charities worked in that state under Governor Bush.

Although Kerry goes too far for me in his support for tax aid to religious-run charities, at least he opposes discrimination in hiring and gross violations of church-state separation. That is probably the best we can hope for in the near term, given the Supreme Court's recent wavering on the establishment clause.

(Let me note, in passing, two important recent court rulings that received scant media attention. On June 28 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the state's new school voucher law in Owens v. Colorado PTA, which the Republican-controlled legislature passed in defiance of the voters' strong rejection of vouchers in Colorado referenda in 1992 and 1998. Then, on July 2, in American Jewish Congress v. Corporation for National and Community Service, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps may not constitutionally finance volunteers who teach religion in Catholic schools. The ruling was fairly narrow and will surely be appealed but is nonetheless a commendable victory for church-state separation.)

Reproductive rights have been eroding slowly since the ink dried on Roe v. Wade in 1973. That erosion will continue if Bush is reelected. Reproductive rights would surely suffer a severe if not fatal blow if Bush has a chance to name one or two justices to the Supreme Court. But that isn't all. Bush and his allies in Congress have been promoting largely ineffective abstinence education programs and trying to outlaw certain abortion procedures. On the international scene Bush since 2002 has blocked congressionally approved funding for the UN Population Fund. That piece of nastiness is increasing maternal mortality and poor health in the underdeveloped world, exacerbating the population/resource problem, and condemning countless children to misery and early death.

All the while Bush is seeking political backing from the Vatican, to which only a minority of Catholics pay attention, and the Protestant fundamentalist right with its legions of televangelists and media outlets. The Bush team is even trying to turn evangelical and Catholic churches into political arms.

November 2, it cannot be stated too often, will mean the life or death of religious freedom and church-state separation in the United States of America.

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