Iowa Republicans Are Afraid of the 1st Amendment
When are people going to get the message: They don't care about freedoms
Here we are again.
We saw this last year with them calling for the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s holiday display “objectionable”. We saw this in the last few years with Reynolds signing the “religious freedom act” that critics correctly claimed would privilege Christianity and religion over other faiths and irreligion. We saw this with the republican administration taking public dollars from public schools and sending them to unscrupulous and unaccountable religious institutions. We saw this with the state legislature mandating an oath to a deity in classrooms statewide with the pledge of allegiance in public schools. We saw this in the last 10 years with the Muslim ban from President Trump. We saw this in the last decades when the atheists wanted to run some bus ads or put up billboards.
Time and again we see the republican party, particularly the republican party in Iowa, finding new and ever more egregious ways to privilege their favored flavor of religion – Christianity – at the explicit expense of the public.
This latest story with the Iowa state capitol denying the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s family event this past weekend is another bullet point hammering home the republican party’s complete abandonment of equal protection under the law. The Satanic Temple of Iowa (TST) had already dodged their way through the quagmire of new rules that mandates only one public event in the capitol per year, and filed their request well in advance of the event. Furthermore, they even worked with the capitol personnel to ensure compliance and accessibility over the course of weeks. Rather than work with TST to ensure equal access, the administration chose instead to cancel the event at the 11th hour with no notice and no justification. Only after public objection was a short unsubstantiated response given citing “harm to minors” despite giving no justification or advance notice, with no further comment since. If you look at the calendar for the Capitol Complex, it is chock full of church events, Bible readings, and general theocratic lobbying, many of them explicitly Christian and explicitly proselytizing in the seat of the states power. It seems strange that there is a laser focus on one religious organization that is not applied to the other faith organizations.
Even if the administration allows an event to go on at a later date, the message is entirely clear: If you are determined to have a faith – or no faith – that is deemed undesirable by the explicitly Christian administration, then you have less rights and protections than others. The republican party and the republican led government of Iowa has essentially solidified their position on these issues: they are the party of Christian Nationalism and corporate greed, not the party of freedom of speech, religion, redress, or even public gathering. For them the 1st amendment isn’t a bedrock of American democracy, but something to be used as a cudgel. They’d rather wrap up a newspaper to smack a secular gadfly than read the paper and what it stands for, all the while making utterances about the importance of freedom of press and expression.
As a voting and purportedly publicly interested people, when is this going to be enough? When are we going to take the words of our state motto seriously and actually Prize our Liberties and do what we can to Maintain our Rights? Instead, at every turn republicans have made it a priority to enshrine Christian supremacy at every turn and doing their best to create a multi-tiered system of accessibility and justice for our citizens. Even if it is not a law or an executive order, the republicans continue to wield all levels of power in favor of their faith and against all others.
Ultimately the TST is one particular event on one particular day for one particular group, but that is how this starts. If the People’s House can be arbitrarily closed to one group on one day with no justification or evidence, then what is to say the next group can be denied? If only one flavor of faith is permitted to use a space unmitigated, then is it really equal access and a justifiable position for the capitol? As a champion of secular government this should not stand, and it shouldn’t stand for anyone that agrees with the first amendment of not only the United States but of Iowa:
The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing places of worship, or the maintenance of any minister or ministry.
This means ALL religions, even The Satanic Temple of Iowa, or NO religion and Iowans need to hold Republicans accountable to the constitution both with their vote and their speech.