I had the honour of interviewing the Rev Barry Lynn from Americans United for Seperation of Church and State.

Interview with Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (7/4/06)

Isis:  Hey, so I am talking with . . .

Barry Lynn:  Barry Lynn, the Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  It’s an organization that’s been around for fifty‑two years, and contains within its membership everyone from some evangelical Christians to nonbelievers to free thinkers, everybody in between.

Isis:  So you . . . are you . . . is your, you know, your office based here in DC?

BL:  We’re here in DC, we have about seventy‑five thousand members.  We have fifty chapters around the United States, not necessarily one in every state, and our goal is to preserve the separation of church and state as the real guarantor that we’re going to have religious freedom in this country.  That people will be able to be treated as first class citizens no matter what religion, if any, they have and hold dear.

Isis:  So what, uh, issues are you working on now?

BL:  We’re been fighting the president’s so‑called faith‑based initiative, which is a highly, uh, derogatory method of funding some religious groups but not others.  It’s also, unfortunately, become a program where the beneficiaries of government grants are able to discriminate in their hiring against people who don’t share the religion of the group.

Isis:  Which representatives do you believe are the hardest, I mean who are really you see as the ones really getting in the way of your, your purpose.

BL:  Well, the so‑called religious right in this country . . .

Isis:  [indecipherable] who is?

BL:  Yeah, the so‑called religious right has virtual control of this White House.  I mean you can’t get a nomination to the United States Supreme Court unless you vet it through groups like the American Center for Law and Justice, which is headed by Pat Robertson and his legal team, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Focus on the Family.  These are people who have no real respect for religious freedom.

[snip]

Isis:  Now, okay, let’s let’s jump back, a little bit back to . . . we’re going to jump over a lot of stuff here and go back to the purpose of the rally.

BL:  Yes.

Isis:  Now, this is basically to bring awareness to a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan who is either Pagan or Wiccan.  Or one or the other, I’m not sure.  Is, uh, I think Pagan?  Wiccan?

BL:  Pagan.

Isis:  Pagan, okay.  Which is almost the same anyway.  And they would like a tombstone with a pentagram to be placed at his headstone, and the VA’s not allowing it.

BL:  This issue involves what should be a very simple matter.  There are thirty‑eight different belief systems, including atheism, that have a symbol that can be used on the plaque on the headstones for veterans who have died.  Unfortunately this administration seems to draw the line at thirty‑eight.  They refuse to have a pentacle, which is a simple, five‑pointed star within a circle, as a Wiccan or Pagan symbol.  There is no excuse for this.  There’s no basis in the Constitution for deciding that this one religion cannot be memorialized in a gravestone in a Veteran’s Administration cemetery on any veteran’s memorial.

Isis:  Well, you know, and I’m totally with you.  In fact, I have sort of a Pagan/Wiccan home..  But I also, I’ve been studying a lot of different kinds of groups in the past year with my photography and  I’ve been following alot of the grass roots activist. In this project there are a lot of various other types of politcal and religious groups and a lot of other religious symbols that if we allow the pentagram, do we allow those?  For instance, the swastika?

BL:  You know it’s an interesting question, but we’ve already allowed thirty‑eight, so I think we’re way down the road.  If we didn’t want to have religion identified on these plaques, we should never have had the first religion identified.

Isis:  So you think it should, it should be just all or nothing?

BL:  Well, I certainly think that when you have, as, Paganism is, one of the largest and fastest growing religions in the country with more and more people serving in the military, I think this is about time to recognize the truth.

Isis:  Yeah, but but what I’m trying to say too is there is religious significance in the swastika.  I’ve been studying, for instance, the National Socialist Movement.  Within the National Socialist Movement is a religion called "Odinism", and Odinism honors as their religious symbol Adolph Hitler’s swastika.  Now if one of these guys from the National Socialist Movement goes to Iraq and gets killed, is he allowed to have that swastika on his tombstone?

BL:  You know, I’m enough of a First Amendment purist to say that what that even that, as offensive as it might be to some, is permissible.  If this was the man’s religious faith, the government, including the Veterans Administration, shouldn’t be deciding which which symbols are good, which ones are bad, which ones will disturb some people.  Frankly, everything disturbs somebody.  This may disturb them in a more profound way, but I think that once you open the floodgates to thirty‑eight religions, thirty‑nine, forty, forty‑one, you must let them in if you want to be consistent, not picking favorites as a government agency.

Isis:  Oh, excellent.  Very right on

(snip)

BL:    I’m also coming out with a new book in October called “Piety and Politics:  The Right Wing Assault on Religious Freedom” from Random House and, I hope that people can pick up even some pre‑ordered copies by going to Amazon or their local book store.

Isis:  All right.  Well thank you very much.  Awesome.