Biden Administration Enabled Religious Right’s Victory in Bible in a Box Case
Democrats Did Nothing to Prevent Rollback of Constitution’s Establishment Clause Mandating Separation of Church & State — OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — The Friends of President Joe Biden might criticize the Supreme Court Justices who intend to overrule Roe v. Wade for not honoring the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state for allegedly allowing their religious views to dictate their interpretation of constitutional law, but when it comes to federal facilities such as Veterans Health Administration Hospitals, Biden is OK with Trump Administration rules that allow religious displays and proselytizing on government property.
The religious right’s “War for Religious Liberty” won a huge victory when the Biden Administration failed to rescind the rollback of separation of church and state regulations enacted under the aegis of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. Eroding the separation of church and state was a cause championed by Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence.
Then Vice President Pence injected himself into a fight over a veterans group’s placement of a Bible on a POW/MIA “Missing Man Table” at a Veterans Health Administration facility in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The placement of the “Bible in a Box” was the opening front in the Trump Administration’s ultimately successful attack on the doctrine of the separation of church and state. The Biden Administration has permitted the Trump-Pence overturning of precedent in federal government facilities to stand. This likely led to the dropping of a federal lawsuit protesting the Bible placement.
President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland allowed the government’s intervention in the case on the side of right-wing religious freedom advocates to go on.
Apparently, this wasn’t the kind of issue — since it does apply to veterans — that the Biden Administration and the newly woke Democratic Party gives a damn about, as it likely cannot be weaponized into a national campaign finance platform.
Thus, old, well-established constitutional rights such as the separation of church and state are ignored.
It continues a trend started during the Bill Clinton Administration, when the Comeback Kid signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
Controversy
Placing the Bible on the POW/M.I.A. table engendered opposition by veterans who used the Manchester VAMC, who objected to the privileging of Christianity in a healthcare facility that serves people of all faiths, and those with none. The Manchester VAMC hosts mental health services, and some veterans could be offended by so obvious a display of religion, as the table was located in the main entrance way.
People who entered at the other entrance on the main level of the VAMC can see the display when going to the elevators to go to appointments, including those with mental health care professionals.
Multiple veterans contacted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which champions the separation of church and state at military facilities. The MRFF reached out to the Manchester VAMC leadership, and the Bible was removed from the table, before a backlash from Washington made the local apparatchiks put it back.
The group that erected the POW/M.I.A. “Missing Man Table,” the Northeast POW/MIA Group, responded to the opposition of dissenting vets by putting the Bible in a plexiglas box secured by a large padlock. The head of the organization claimed that this was to prevent the Bible from being stolen. If anything, such a claim — as well as the ungainliness of the transformation of a book placed simply on a table into the V.A.’s “Bible in a Box” — made the display even more intrusive.
It was the beginning of a two-year-long fight between the forces for freedom from state-mandated religion and those proclaiming themselves warriors for “religious liberty.”
Federal Lawsuit
In May 2019, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation filed suit in federal court against the Veterans Administration for violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. It was a case that attracted the involvement of Vice President Mike Pence.
In a speech Trump’s Vice President gave at the 2019 American Legion Convention, he declared that the Manchester VAMC’s Bible in a Box would stay were it was. “V.A. hospitals will not be religion-free zones,” Pence said.
Mikey Weinstein of the MRFF subsequently denounced Vice President Pence as “one of the most repulsive and repellent fundamentalist Christian supremacists and bullies on the scene today.”
Weinstein said that he was not surprised that Pence was ”lending his ugly bigotry and pervasive prejudice in support of keeping that Christian Bible bolted down on that POW/MIA table….”
Under a ukase issued by the Department of Veterans Affairs, no other text but the “Bible in a Box” can adorn that table. It is the only printed matter, sacred or profane, that is allowed to be displayed on the “Missing Man Table” at the Manchester VAMC, other than a photocopy explaining meaning of the table’s symbolism. And even that is in dispute.
Attempts to put other sacred texts from non-Christian religions and a token notebook to legitimate non-believers were rebuffed by the V.A.
Ultimately, the Religious Right won the two-year long battle when the MRFF dismissed it’s lawsuit. It is highly doubtful that that would have happened had Joe Biden shown respect for separation of church and state when it comes to veterans.
