I'm sorry for your treatment at the hands of that idiot bigoted fundamentalist, who not only cannot be seen as typical of people of faith, but also has no claim to even be called a lawyer. (Even watching "Perry Mason" you would learn a lawyer is not supposed to ask a question in court unless he knows the answer. That fool had no idea how you would answer the question about the book.)

But the problem is that it wasn't just that one attorney (whom, I agree, shouldn't be an attorney... so why is he?). It was a whole cultural mindset of the area in which I lived. The attorney, the Judge who accepted the case, the various people in the community who sided with the attorney who took me to court. The Christian right has a very firm grip on the whole cultural and political climate of that area. Even the few Jews who live there are keep a very low profile about their religion. It is not a freedom of expression or freedom to practice their own religion issue when the religious right expects to be able to have power over other people in their midst, rather than just being good Christians with regard to their own behavior.

who not only cannot be seen as typical of people of faith

You say "people of faith" as though you think Christians are the only people whose spiritual beliefs qualify as "faith".

I agree that there are as many kinds of Christians as there are Christians. My husband is of the sort who prefer to mind their own business and to give other peope the benefit of the doubt (what I would tend to see as a genuinely "Christian" attitude). Christians like my husband are not the problem. It's the Christians who believe they have a divinely ordained right to meddle in the lives of others who are the problem. There really isn't anything you can tell me about these kinds of fundamentalists that I don't already know. And I must say, that attorney really is very typical of a significant percentage of fundamentalists. My own mother was a fundamentalist, and some other members of my family are as well. At my mother's funeral, the pastor spent at least fifteen minutes beating us over the head with exortations to join his church or burn in hell. And he was a Presbytarian minister. That's utterly dispicable behavior, in my opinion. And I told him so after the funeral. He looked a bit puzzled at first, and then he just made it clear that he didn't really care because, as far as he was concerned, he was right and I was wrong.

However, in your post of 8 Oct 2005 10:06, you're stretching. Does not compute. That sort of reasoning is why I am not a Democrat. Though for damn sure no Bushite either.

I assume you mean 8, April, and not October, Ron. It may not compute for you, but then you don't seem to understand the problem. And I wouldn't really expect you to. I would have to say, based on what I have seen in your posts to this thread, you appear to be a part of the problem. And I am not a Democrat, either.

You really should be reimbursed court costs--can't a legal aid society help?

No, they would not help. But it was more than ten years ago. I have moved on with my life, and chalked the whole thing up to experience. I do not expect to ever be reimbursed for any of it.

I don't think the posting of the 10 Commandments will be determined to favor one religion over another by the Supreme Court.

We shall see.

Avoiding that was the goal of the First Amendment, as I said earlier--primarily to avoid the Church of England situation, with its particularly noxious Test Act, etc. The point never was to expunge religion from public life.

Well, now that I understand (from what I have learned from Dave) that Pagans are well represented in the symbolism and in the philosophy of the legal system in the US, I guess maybe you're right about that. But we'll have to stop calling the foundation of our society and form of government "Judeo-Christian", because it is quite clearly just as much Pagan as it is Judeo-Christian

You are not only bashing your head against a brick wall, but you have also disturbed a very large hornets' nest on the wall.

Sometimes you have to get the hornets out of the nest before you can knock it down. And I'm quite used to bashing my head against brick walls. If I weren't ever willing to make the attempt, brick wall or no brick wall, I never would have won either the custody battle, or the home schooling battle. Both of them were lost causes. But I let my "faith" carry me through and, in the end, my faith did not let me down.