Tag: Wicca

The other day the DesertNews reported on a Wiccan practitioner who is suing a parish in New Orleans to overturn a ban on fortune telling. Like many local areas, Terrebonne Parish has an ordinance punishing fortune telling and palm reading with up to a $500 fine and one year in jail.

Plaisance owns a museum dedicated to witchcraft and in August had a visit from a city detective who said he was acting on complaints about fortune telling being conducted at the museum.

In a related story, the Miami Herald recently reported on a new law in Florida that requires people who work for telephone psychic companies to sign documents swearing they really are psychics. If they are later found to not be psychics, Florida can prosecute them for fraud.

This is absurd, and such laws seem to me to be obvious violations of the First Amendment. What’s next? Can a municipality pass a law saying the local Christian church has to prove that Jesus really offers salvation or else spend time in the local jail? Give me a break.

Personally, the scary thing about the psychic telephone businesses is not that they aren’t really psychics, but that there are actually people who apparently call these services thinking they are (obviously this must be a persistent money maker given that there are regularly new entrants into this market).

I don’t happen to believe the Wiccans or the telephone psychics or even the Christians are able to deliver on their promises, but the last thing anybody should be contemplating in America is using the force of law to go after non-violent people just because they’re religious beliefs are outside the mainstream (especially since some of them, such as Wicca, are becoming surprisingly mainstream everyday).

Surely governments have bigger things to worry about than fortune tellers.

Source:

Wiccan wants anti-pagan law to disappear — ACLU agrees. The Associated Press, October 7, 2000.

USA Today ran a small blurb the other day about banned books (today they have a small piece about a CD compilation of banned songs), noting that because of its popularity a small group of parents and concerned citizens around the country have tried to have the Harry Potter books removed from libraries, usually at public schools. Some Christians are uncomfortable with the magical imagery and other aspects of the books. Some fans of the series have formed Muggles For Harry Potter to keep track of the attempts to ban the book and fight for its reinstatement.

This is all well and good, but I cannot help but notice there’s a reeking hypocrisy here, driven largely by how the media chooses to cover these sorts of stories. When parents try to ban a Harry Potter book from their school, USA Today covers it in their entertainment section and columnists weigh in with pieces on the intolerance of “hard right” fundamentalist Christians. On the other hand when some bureaucrat tells a young child that he can choose to read any story he wants to his class except for an excerpt from his favorite Biblical story, this gets buried in the news section and columnists either ignore it, or they tend to write how it represents the intolerance of “hard right” fundamentalist Christians.

For several years there was an ongoing controversy of the children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommie,” and the author of that book actually appeared at the university I work at to give a speech about the “reactionary” efforts to suppress her book. The liberal left press had a field day with that topic. But when, several years ago, a young man was prevented from giving his valedictorian speech because he planned to thank Jesus for helping him get through difficult times, nobody in the media seemed to care. Of course if he had been prevented from giving the valedictorian speech because he planned to talk explicitly about safe sex, that would have probably earned him a Time magazine cover.

Hey, I am an atheist and my wife is Wiccan, but it strikes even us as odd that students can talk about Hogwarts, condoms, and Heather having two mommies all day, but in many schools the most important book in Western culture, the Bible, has become verboten.