Posted on 07/21/2014 10:07:34 PM PDT by Huntress
In response to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, atheists are sitting around knitting. And in this time of national crisis, they are knitting bricks.
Worried about the supposedly crumbling wall of separation between church and state, the Secular Coalition for America (SCA) launched a “Knit a Brick” campaign to “harness outrage” at the ruling. The group will send yarn bricks to the Supreme Court, Congress, or White House staffers. Targets will be selected based on the number of bricks the Coalition’s high command receives by August 5, according to Religionnews.com. If organizers collect 400 bricks, they will send them to the Supreme Court. Eight hundred bricks will merit a bulk delivery to Congress. But the ultimate goal is 1,200, enough knitted bricks to deliver to President Barack Obama.
But first, there’s work ahead for Americans who want to keep off their bodies all the laws except the ones forcing other Americans pay for their abortion pills. All those bricks must be hand-knitted and assembled into a symbolic wall. The bricks should be six inches by three inches. If a participant doesn’t knit or crochet, he or she can sponsor a brick so someone else can knit it.
The original deadline was July 18, but it was extended to August 5 because of “overwhelming support.” In a July 18 tweet, SCA president Amanda Metskas indicated that at that time, the group was only a bit more than halfway to its 400-brick minimum goal.
Yay! #KnitABrick in @washingtonpost! We have 200+ bricks now! Sponsor or knit to take @seculardotorg over the top! http://t.co/NCmjBNwlxG — Amanda K. Metskas (@metskas) July 18, 2014
Atheists aren’t the only ones donating bricks to this campaign. Austin Cooper, the coalition’s director of operations, told the Washington Post that members of her traditional Catholic family demonstrated their commitment to secularism by making 19 bricks for the cause.
Mike Dwyer on Twitter clung to the patriarchal convention that a brick exists in three rather than two dimensions:
If a “brick” is 3×6 and completely flat, that’s not a brick; it’s a plate. 1200 plates won’t make an effective wall. #KnitABrick — Mike Dwyer (@solarguy17) July 18, 2014
Thomas Jefferson coined the term “wall of separation” between church and state in his letter to the Danbury Baptist association.
“Legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions,” wrote the author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president. Jefferson noted that keeping government from infringing on religious freedom preserves the “rights of conscience.” The wall of separation, as described by the originator of the term, prevents government from violating the consciences of people who have religious objections to government policy. Jefferson called religious freedom a natural right and declared himself “convinced [man] has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” The Hobby Lobby ruling was not about forcing others to obey one’s religious mandates; it was about prohibiting government from forcing religious people to obey mandates that violate their consciences.
The Secular Coalition should toss the bricks and start knitting a big scarf long enough to span the distance between the Affordable Care Act and the right to free exercise of religion.
— Celina Durgin is a Franklin Center intern at National Review Online.
“If a “brick” is 3×6 and completely flat, that’s not a brick; it’s a plate.”
This would work if they are going to Flatland. Perhaps they can find a Line Segment to represent them...or a circle.
Who uses a rectangular plate? I suppose it could be a trivet.
They have time to knit bricks? Don’t they have to go to work, do the laundry, take out the garbage, bathe the kidz, cook dinner? I could go on and on.
Let’s say I am a male who works for Hobby Lobby (or any large business). I like to have lots of sex. I need lots of condoms for my sexual escapades. I ask my company to provide me with a condom allowance to finance my sexual fun. The company tells me to pay for the condoms out of the wages it pays me. I cry and moan that my company is interfering with my sex life by not providing extra money to pay for the condoms. This is in essence the case of the females who want Hobby Lobby to pay for their abortions.
... call it “separation of STATE and church”!
You know, when one uses the phrase “separation between church and state”, while it is supposed to mean that both do not impose on each other, when you put the word “church” first, then it leaves the impression that the greater (or to some, the only) worry is with regard to the church imposing its will on the state, and not the other way around.
So I propose that our side should henceforth refer to this concept as the separation between state and church!
It seems like a minor difference, but it is also one that people will notice, and then may either try to correct or to question, at which time it can be pointed out that since the state has, by far, much more of an ability to breach that wall and impose its will on the church, it makes more sense then to put the word “state” first, since keeping the government’s power in check - as is the case in other areas - must be the primary concern.
If they are petitioning with their knitted bricks, a respectable petition would have 100,000 bricks. This is so lame.
To me it looks like she beat herself with the ugly stick. Between the tats, the horrendous taste in clothes, and her really ugly mind, I think your suggestion has a lot of merit.
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