22 September 2006 - Friday
Candidate attacked for religious beliefs
Yesterday, I received the following message in an email from the Republican Party of Texas (the text is also available here):
"...So Help Me God."I'm not sure where to begin. I don't know what to say about this.Candidate for the Sixth Court of Appeals, Ben Franks, is reported to be a professed atheist and apparently believes the Bible is a "collection of myths."
During debate over a plank in the State Democrat Platform, members of the Platform Committee debated dropping "God" from a sentence on the first page of the document. The plank stated: "we want a Texas where all people can fulfill their dreams and achieve their God-given potential."
According to an article published in the El Paso Times, Ben Franks states: "I'm an atheist..."
All elected or appointed officials in Texas must take the oath prescribed by Art. XVI, Section 1(a) of the Texas Constitution:
"I, _____ , do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of _____ of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State, so help me God."
Should Franks be elected in November, one would have to conclude that he will hold true to his out of touch "atheist" belief system and ignore the laws and Constitution of Texas. Mr. Franks is a personal injury trial lawyer practicing in Texarkana, Texas and is the Democrat nominee for the 6th Court of Appeals.
Actually ... yes, I do.
First of all, putting the word atheist in scare quotes is a particularly strange touch. Does the author doubt that atheism is real? Does the author suspect that Franks is only pretending to be an "out of touch" (sic) atheist? Maybe the author simply had never heard of atheism before; he or she was apparently shocked to discover that atheists don't believe that the Bible is God's word.
Next, the second paragraph of the article is irrelevant to the rest. Shoddy work.
Third, article 6 of the United States Constitution strongly suggests that excluding atheists from the bench is unlawful:
[...] all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.Given the common conservative insistence that atheism is a religious position just as much as Christianity is, it would be difficult to avoid concluding that the Texas GOP is advocating an illegal "religious test" for office.
Obviously, this email isn't about upholding "the laws and Constitution of Texas." It is instead a display of naked prejudice. It is an attempt to turn the public against a candidate because of his religious convictions, which the Republican Party of Texas feels free to ridicule. And that displeases me.
| Posted by Wilson at 13:26 Central | TrackBack| Report submitted to the Power Desk
Well of course he would cross his fingers in some juvenile way in order to fail to fulfill the duties of the office as an appellate judge. He is, after all, a Democrat.
Good ol' Benny Franks. What a guy. He'll tell reporters at the El Paso Times that he's an atheist, but when he gets confronted on this in Bowie County, smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, he'll deny ever making that claim. He'll tell the good voters what he thinks they want to hear.
It's not about atheism, lack of morals, or his desire to be elected. It's about how he won't even stand by his own convictions. How can we trust a man like that to make sound decisions that affect the daily lives of Texans?
The thoughts of Linda on 18 October 2006 - 12:05 Central+ + + + +
Inconsistency could be a serious charge here, Linda. Unfortunately, you've provided no documentation for your claim. Furthermore, your claim was never advanced in the GOP press release I quoted.
So I just spent about five minutes trying to track down substantiation. What I found was a Law.com article by "Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer" advancing an argument -- which I find very believable -- that Franks was misquoted from the start:
The Republican Party's allegation that Franks is an atheist stems from a June 18, 2002, article published in the El Paso Times, after the Texas Democratic Party held its state convention in the far west Texas city.That sounds entirely plausible to me. Certainly, it gives me plenty of room to believe the man about his own religious beliefs. (That article even explains why the GOP press release mentions the Democratic platform, which until now seemed totally irrelevant.) So now you've raised the possibility that the GOP article is not only prejudicial but also inaccurate. Thanks for pointing that out. The thoughts of Wilson on 18 October 2006 - 15:31 CentralAs noted in the article, Democrats on the party's platform committee debated whether to drop "God" from a sentence on the first page of the committee's platform report that read: "We want a Texas where all people can fulfill their dreams and achieve their God-given potential."
The article quotes Franks, a member of the platform committee, as saying, "I'm an atheist, [and] this does not bother me. I'm a pragmatist."
Franks says the article misquoted him and what he said was, "Let's say I'm an atheist. I still have no problem with this platform, because I'm a pragmatist." What he was saying, Franks says, is that, if he were an atheist, he would not be offended by the reference to God in the platform.
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It seems, in effect, to be saying that he'd be taking the oath with his fingers crossed . . . an amusing and rather sophomoric (though obviously non-existent) loophole.
The thoughts of Blame Jared on 22 September 2006 - 17:43 Central+ + + + +