Supporters of the idea that the US should be a Christian country have a foothold in politics – and are growing bolder
In the Alabama state supreme court case that dubbed embryos “extrauterine children” and imperiled the future of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state, the first reference to the Bible arrives on page 33.
“The principle itself – that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification – has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God’,” the Alabama supreme court justice Tom Parker wrote in an opinion that concurred with the majority. Attributing the idea to the Book of Genesis, Parker’s opinion continued to cite the Bible as well as such venerable Christian theologians as John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.
For experts, Parker’s words were a stunningly open embrace of Christian nationalism, or the idea that the United States should be an explicitly Christian country and its laws should reflect that.
“He framed it entirely assuming that the state of Alabama is a theocracy, and that that is a legitimate way of evaluating laws and policies,” said Julie Ingersoll, a University of North Florida professor who studies religion and culture. “It looks like he decided to just dismiss the history of first amendment religious freedom jurisprudence at the federal level, and assume that it just doesn’t apply to Alabama.”
You should get on that yesterday as petitioning citizenship through ancestry can take up to several years in most European countries.
We have been working on it for about six months. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it before then. We do also have dual US-UK citizenship available to us, which I stupidly have not taken advantage of making official until about then too.
Here’s the very weird situation in my family if you’re curious. My great-grandfather was English but married a German woman and they lived in Berlin, where my grandfather was born. He married my Grandmother, who was English, and they lived in London, where my father was born. My grandfather became a British subject and you have to renounce your German citizenship if you gain citizenship elsewhere. However, he did so several years after my father, who then emigrated here to the U.S., was born, making my father a de facto German citizen, which would, if we get all the papers together and get through the German bureaucracy, make he and I and my daughter German citizens based on the shit ton of research my brother has done.
We’re both unhappy and happy that my father never knew, because he was both Jewish and grew up in London during the Blitz, so he wasn’t especially fond of Germans, an unfortunate bigotry he carried to his death (he excepted German Jews because “the Nazis didn’t consider them German.”) and if he found out he was German, it would have killed him. Or at least he would have ranted about it non-stop for about three years and none of us wanted to deal with that shit. On the other hand, it would have made this whole thing so much easier.
I feel like:
Is a pretty strong case for you to be granted citizenship.
Maybe. It was 1936 that he renounced his citizenship, so that may or may not be considered. However, my great-grandmother did own an apartment building with business spaces below it in East Berlin which was confiscated by the Nazis and my grandfather and father spent about a decade trying to get it back after the Berlin Wall fell (they finally did but had to sell it for a very low price because there were price caps due to the poverty in East Berlin) so that might be considered?