Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It Read Online Free Page A

and safety statutes that apply to secular child-care centers do not apply to religious child-care centers. As the head of the Alabama Christian Coalition said, “The pastors and the congregations are our quality control.”
    Let’s consider for a moment this “quality control.” Under Alabama law, (1) secular child-care centers must keep medications locked up, while religious child-care centers are exempt from medication-safety regulations; (2) secular child-care centers must follow food-safety regulations, while religious child-care centers are exempt from food-safety regulations; (3) secular child-care centers must submit to unannounced state inspections, while religious child-care centers are exempt from such inspections; (4) secular child-care centers must obey child-staff ratio laws, while religious child-care centers need not obey child-staff ratio laws; (5) secular child-care providers must participate in safety training that, for example, covers proper child tracking, while providers at religious child-care centers are exempt from such training.
    Was Amiyah’s death an anomaly? Perhaps. And yet a three-year-old named DeMyreon Lindley, who attended a different religious child-care center in Alabama, was left alone in his center’s van for ten hours before he died.
    No politician, in the context of Alabama child-care laws, has argued that it is a positive characteristic to actually consider killing a child at the behest of a deity. But Alabama law is similar to the story of Abraham in this respect: they both share the concept that religion justifies a separate moral code. Put another way, by providing an exemption to a basic code of safety simply because a business invokes religion, modern Alabama law stands united with the tribal Abrahamic code in its willingness to endanger children in the name of religion. While Alabama law is particularly extreme, there are more than ten states that provide for some form of religious exemption from laws governing child-care centers.
    Now consider a religious practice of the Incas from five hundred years ago. The Incas would take children to the mountains, drug them, then kill them as a sacrifice to their gods. That was part of their Pre-Columbian religion. Primitive? Perhaps. Brutal? No doubt. But at least they tried toanesthetize the children and killed them swiftly. Contrast that with what happens in twenty-first-century America.
    Jessica Crank was fifteen when a tumor began to grow on her shoulder. The tumor was treatable with modern medical science, but Jessica’s mother did not believe in modern medical science. She treated her child with the Epistle of James. Had a secular parent neglected his or her child’s medical needs, the law would have unequivocally authorized the government to remove the endangered child for proper medical care. Jessica’s mother and her pastor could correctly point to the “faith-healing” exemption in Tennessee’s child-protection law as providing their actions with wider latitude. Jessica’s tumor grew and grew until it was the size of a basketball. Jessica suffered extended, agonizing pain—then she died.
    In so-called faith-healing homes, children with otherwise treatable maladies have needlessly vomited fecal matter, bled from giant eye tumors, and gasped for water as a result of untreated diabetes. And, yes, children have died and continue to die in agonizing torture. It is unconscionable that, in most states, there are so-called faith-healing exemptions to basic child-protection law.
    Many Americans, including perhaps readers of this book, protested or spoke out against the U.S government’s use of waterboarding. As bad as waterboarding is, waterboarding usually does not lead to permanent injury and is rarely fatal. Compare waterboarding to what happened to—and what continues to happen to—these innocent children: Vomiting fecal matter? Bleeding from eyes? Tumors on children so festering and large that people, even at a