Same result though; Thursday was a federal holiday, and pretty much no one showed up on Friday, so: Four day weekend.


That is the sort of thing I had in mind: It seems at least marginally discriminatory. Really, it means those of non-Christian religions are expected to work on even their holiest days, and unable to work on Christian ones unless they happen to work for the minority of private employers who share their religion. Meanwhile, their Christian co-workers not only receive exclusive special treatment from Christian employers, but from the very government their taxes support and their votes nominally determine.

Maybe I just imprinted too heavily on minority rights as a limit to majority rule, but that seems a little odd, and a little wrong. I am all for observing Christianity, but distinct from the government; again, I support that if only to prevent state CONTROLLED religion, as the recent change in Norwegian law intends. After all, I was just last month treated to the annual spectacle of "civil confirmation" (as/to what I am still unsure) yet have already witnessed two federal religious holidays in the short time since.


Until recently I do not think the US violated it much, at least not explicitly; most ultimately religious laws at least maintained a facade of some additional secular benefit/necessity (though, once pinned down, those benefits/necessities often turned out to be religiously motivated.) Prohibition and abolition are good examples; in both cases activists successfully argued for laws against things they insisted harmed the public, on the basis of religious views they often invoked, but the arguments, and their success, were ultimately from the alleged public harm rather than religion itself.

It is only since the rise of the so-called self-proclaimed "Moral Majority" (and their usurping the Southern Baptist Convention for purely political reasons, purging anyone and everyone who did not share their agenda) that things have gotten really heavy-handed. I doubt even William Jennings Bryan would have questioned the First Amendments non-establishment clause, but those who declare themselves his modern heirs consider its repudiation part of their catechism, and are thus not only reluctant but eager to undermine it. So we end up with a bunch of contemporary Puritans who view anything and everything through the lens of their personal religious views (or think they do; more often they view everything through religion in turn viewed through politics.)

I agree taxpayer funded religious officers is a bit extreme, but the devil is the details, so to speak. It might even be legal in the US, provided it was merely a policy rather than an official law and/or did not formally "establish" any religion(s,) but only implicitly subsidized one or more of them. Nothing is ever simple in government, which perhaps is the best explanation for the incongruity continually perplexing me.