Posted on 07/12/2005 3:42:19 PM PDT by CHARLITE
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Legislators may be asked to decide if the Quran and other religious texts can be used for courtroom oaths, said a spokesman for the agency that manages state courts, as the ACLU pressed for a response on the texts' use.
The legal foundation of the ACLU of North Carolina has called on the state Administrative Office of the Courts to adopt a policy allowing the Quran and other religious texts for oath-taking in North Carolina courtrooms.
The request came after Guilford County's two top judges decided that Muslims could not legally take an oath on the Quran.
"We think they are dragging their feet," said Jennifer Rudinger, the state ACLU's executive director.
In addition, a Washington-based Islamic civil rights organization and Greensboro-area religious leaders have called on the AOC to act. The ACLU wrote a formal letter to the state agency June 28 but has not received a response.
An AOC spokesman said Monday a judicial conference last month and vacation schedules have kept key decision-makers from working on the issue.
"Nobody has had time to do that around here," spokesman Dick Ellis said.
Informally, Ellis said, most of the agency's lawyers believe the issue should be resolved by legislators.
"They are beginning to lean toward the interpretation that it's not our responsibility," he said.
The issue surfaced after Muslims from the Al-Ummil Ummat Islamic Center in Greensboro tried to donate copies of the Quran to Guilford County's two courthouses last month. Guilford Senior Resident Superior Court Judge W. Douglas Albright and Guilford Chief District Court Judge Joseph E. Turner decided that they could not accept the texts for courtroom use.
Both said an oath on the Quran is not a legal oath under state law, which refers to someone laying his hands on the "Holy Scriptures." The two judges interpret that to mean the Christian Bible.
Albright declined to comment on the matter Monday, saying he didn't think it would serve any purpose.
The ACLU of North Carolina says an 1856 state Supreme Court decision sets a clear precedent for oaths on the Quran. The court noted that North Carolina's oath-taking statutes were written for Christians but do not limit others from swearing in the way they deem most sacred, an attorney for the state ACLU said.
That lawyer, Seth Cohen of Greensboro, said a change in the law in 1985 further supports his point.
Prior to that time, the law was called "Administration of oath upon the Gospels," he said. It stated that someone to be sworn was to lay his hand on "the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God." That year legislators took out "the Gospels" in the title and changed the language to simply read "Holy Scriptures," Cohen said.
He argues that legislators were trying to be more inclusive.
"They've made an effort to take the Christianity out of it," Cohen said.
If a court decided "Holy Scriptures" do not include the Quran, then that would violate the First Amendment's establishment clause by favoring one religion over another, he said.
Char (:
Are these folks in NC nit-wits or what?
Isn't swearing to tell the truth on a religious text that specifically instructs you to lie to infidels sort of counterproductive?
I thought Muslims weren's supposed to touch the holy book? And what about the "infidel" baliff? Gee, maybe the ACLU will suggest that all court proceedings be held in a mosque in order to preserve the rights of the "oppressed." Gag.
That's pretty darn insightful. And funny.
Muslims can, but not infidels... you raise an interesting point. This is sort of a non-issue since atheists are not required to swear on a Bible... just swear to tell the truth.
Their ultimate aim is to have everyone swear with their hand on the Godless Communist Manifesto.
You got a little overly involved in the Saudi prince's body functions, if you ask me.
fisrt step towards Sharia. Muslims are very smart, they are incrementalists.
Once they have this and it becomes accepted by americans, it will be Please apply Sharis in civil cases, only for Muslims though. Then criminal ones, Only for Muslims though. then eventually for everyone.
The Left are the Muslims useful idiots
Ding...ding...ding...we have a winner.
T'was not a kiss. He was telling him that his fly was unzipped.
Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884–August 26, 1981) was a noted civil libertarian, pacifist, and left-wing social activist who held Communist views in his youth. He was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and its executive director until 1950; many of the ACLU's original landmark cases took place under his direction.
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Biography
Roger Nash Baldwin was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts to Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing Nash. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Harvard University; afterwards, he moved to St. Louis, where he worked as a social worker and became chief probation officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court. He also co-wrote Juvenile Courts and Probation with Bernard Flexner at this time; this book became very influential in its era, and was, in part, the foundation of Baldwin's national reputation.
In St. Louis, Baldwin was also greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman; he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and developed a lasting sympathy for the Soviet Union and Communism that lasted until 1939, when he was disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact and broke off all radical ties.
Baldwin was also a lifelong pacifist; he was a member of the American Union against Militarism, which opposed World War I, and spent a year in jail as a conscientious objector rather than submit to the draft. It was out of the American Union against Militarism (specifically, its legal arm, the National Civil Liberties Bureau) that the ACLU formed after the war, with Baldwin as its first executive director.
As director, Baldwin was integral to the shape of the association's early character; it was under Baldwin's leadership that the ACLU undertook some of its most famous cases, including the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. Baldwin retired from the ACLU leadership in 1950.
In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur invited him to Japan to foster the growth of civil liberties in that country, where he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government. In 1948, he was invited to Germany and Austria for similar purposes.
Baldwin was awarded the Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter on January 16, 1981.
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Quotes
I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.—Harvard Class Book of 1935, spotlighting Baldwin's class of 1905 on its thirtieth anniversary
Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise...We want also to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.—Baldwin's advice in 1917 to Louis Lochner of the socialist People's Council in Minnesota
So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.—quote on American Civil Liberties Union's webpage
I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching. . . . I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.—statement at his draft trial.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin"
In ancient Rome oaths were sworn by clutching the testicles...hence the word testify. Of course this would discrininate against females and the transgendered.
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