WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has atheists, humanists and agnostics worried.
Kagan, who has no previous experience on the bench, is undergoing confirmation hearings in the Senate this week in which she will field questions ranging from her stance on the military policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” to what she thinks about television cameras in the courtroom.
While Kagan, a Democrat, has faced the greatest criticism from abortion activists and Republicans, some hard-line secularists from the other end of the political spectrum also oppose her.
“From the evidence so far, she has too often sided with religious privilege over civil liberties, civil rights,” said Paul Fidalgo, spokesman for the Secular Coalition for America. “She favors free exercise over civil liberties.”
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The American Humanist Association, a Washington-based organization that advocates for secular governance and promotes a nonreligious beliefs, is one group calling for Senators to ask Kagan about her beliefs on the separation of church and state.
The coalition is an umbrella-lobbying group for atheist, agnostic, and humanist organizations, announced its opposition to Kagan’s nomination last week, more than a month after President Barack Obama nominated the current Solicitor General to the post.
Although she has so far proven to be a relatively non-controversial candidate, Kagan’s nomination has solicited a somewhat unlikely opposition from the coalition.
Atheists, humanists and agnostics see the Supreme Court as the highest battleground of church and state issues, such as prayer in schools and religious language in government. Humanists believe that humans can be good without believing in a higher being.
The coalition’s main concerns, Fidalgo said, are that in Kagan’s past she has not shown a consistent and strict understanding of the separation of church and state described in the First Amendment.
In a press release, the secular coalition cited statements Kagan made while working as an attorney for President Bill Clinton about a California Supreme Court ruling that stated a landlord could not refuse to rent to an unmarried couple because of the landlord’s religious beliefs about premarital sex.
Kagan sided with the rights of the landlord, and called the decision “quite outrageous.”
According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life, conducted for the first time in 2007, approximately 16 percent of Americans consider themselves unaffiliated to any church, and 5 percent of Americans say they do not believe in God.
And the secular sentiment is growing. According to a Trinity College report on the “Nones,” the religious population that does not identify with any specific religion, this group has grown at a rate faster than that of the regular U.S. population.
The Secular Coalition for America was founded in 2002 to promote secular government in the United States and give a voice to this growing variety of secular Americans, who call themselves anything from non-theists to freethinkers.
Even as more Americans subscribe to these beliefs, the country’s Supreme Court has become more conservative.
The secular coalition’s opposition to Kagan is one strategy to make the lobby’s presence felt on the Washington scene and protect the group’s interests in keeping government and religion separate.
The nomination of Kagan will not bring out any large-scale protests from atheist groups, leaders say, but concerned members will watch the confirmation hearings and her early decisions carefully.
With the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, the court lost a justice with a clear respect for secular government, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religions Foundation.
“Stevens was a stalwart,” she said.
Now, she said she fears secularists might stand a lesser chance of winning cases that make it to the Supreme Court.
“It’s going to be a weakened court,” she said.
The coalition of secularists is not taking issue with Kagan’s religion, Judaism, but they fear her vote on the court might lead to rulings that will limit the influence of secularists and atheists on government, Fidalgo said.
“We’re not arguing over whether or not God exists,” he said.
Most groups just want some reassurance from Kagan that non-believers and secularists will be treated with the same respect as people of other religions.
“We just want her on the record saying the freedom to not believe is a freedom guaranteed,” said David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association.