Quotes from Barry W. Lynn

A bedrock principle of religious freedom is that freedom is achieved only if it is achieved for all.

calling the Guantanamo prison "a gated timeshare community in the Northern Caribbean.

The "religious freedom" promoted by Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Religious Right of Ken Ham and Tony Perkins is a fraud and a scam; it is antithetical to true freedom of conscience and belief.

Government is supposed to be neutral on religion. It has no business telling people how, when, or where to pray—or even if they ought to pray. Government does lots of things well, but meddling in our private religious lives is not among them.

Furthermore, the National Day of Prayer has always been soaked in the kind of offensive "God and country" rhetoric that many of us find nauseating.

The government is, in fact, urging you to pray. That's simply not government's job.

have used it in a highly offensive way and drenched it in fallacious, right-wing "Christian nation" pseudohistory. Worse, they've sponsored "Christians only" prayer events that exclude millions of Americans. (And by "Christians" they mean fundamentalists. Progressive Christians like me got nowhere near the microphone.)

some of those who crafted the Constitution had serious doubts about tax-supported clergy. James Madison, for example, wrote that such employment was a "palpable violation of equal rights as well as Constitutional principles" and a "national establishment" of religion.10 He suggested that if Congress wanted chaplains to discharge religious duties, members should pay for them from their own pockets. "How just would it be in its principle!" he proclaimed.

because none of the wording is included in the artistic rendering. Moses is depicted cradling two tablets on a frieze that also includes historical lawgivers like Hammurabi, Solomon, Confucius, Muhammad, Napoleon, and the Roman emperor Augustus. The display represents the evolution of the law over the centuries. It's not intended to promote religion.

lawmakers reacted to the report by cutting off the funds to continue the testing of students so nobody would know if there was any improvement. This even turns free marketism on its head: Create an expensive government program with taxpayer money, and when the data suggests the program isn't working, hide the data and make sure consumers

we have now begun a wide range of case involvement at religiously connected hospitals and universities that are already exempt from having to cover contraception, in my view a completely unnecessary accommodation this administration doled up to such entities.

So refusing to say you won't do something is the moral equivalent of doing

AU investigated the Religious Right's most common examples of the "war on Christmas." Guess what? They're bogus! Two schools accused of banning red and green did no such thing. Another school was accused of rewriting "Silent Night." In reality, it was putting on an eighteen-year-old play that changes the words of familiar Christmas carols to fit the play's secular theme of homelessness.

Indeed, some legislators happily admitted they wouldn't promote Islamic, Wiccan, or Buddhist plates. The argument seems to be: no Muslim plates because we don't want to look like we are supporting that faith, but a Christian plate is great—although in court we'll say that isn't a sign of support. When you combine hypocrisy with bad constitutional law, little wonder you buy yourself a lawsuit!