The National Coalition on Religious Freedom and Human Rights has sent this letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez:
February 15, 2005
Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001Dear Mr. Gonzalez:
We congratulate you on your confirmation as Attorney General of the United States, and wish you well as you begin this new role. You will undoubtedly face many challenges; we trust that you will meet them with grace and integrity.
One of the challenges you will encounter as Attorney General will be how to guide our nation along the fine line between, on the one hand, preserving the peace between persons and groups holding different religious or ideological views and, on the other, protecting the rights of all persons to express themselves freely in the public square. The tragic case of the Armaniouses, a Coptic Christian family in Jersey City, New Jersey, sets both of these concerns in bold relief. This family of four was brutally murdered last month in what may have been a hate crime stemming from a religious dispute.
This case holds special relevance to the work of our coalition. As a national coalition on religious freedom and human rights, we have been troubled by allegations that Mr. Armanious”s expression of his religious views in an Internet chat room may have contributed to his death and the deaths of his wife and daughters. The media have reported that Mr. Armanious received death threats from Muslim chat room participants as a result of some of his comments. We do not know the content of Mr. Armanious”s remarks, and we hasten to note that the investigating authorities have as yet drawn no conclusions about whether or not the murders were religiously motivated, but if these allegations do prove to be true, our concerns are obvious.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every citizen freedom of speech. Regardless of how one interprets that phrase, we believe it is safe to assume that it means one should be free to express his or her opinions and views without being killed for them. For a family to flee religious tensions in Egypt only to meet death for expressing their religious views in the United States, the “land of the free,” is worse than a bitter irony. It is a tragedy and an offense to the ideals we Americans hold most dear.
This tragedy comes at a delicate time in the history of our nation and the world. Inter-religious strife is rampant in places as far-flung as Turkmenistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. These conflicts have in some cases led to profound suffering, loss of life and destruction of communities. We must do everything possible to address the misunderstandings and conflicts among adherents of different faiths in our own nation, to prevent them from leading to similar results.
As we do this, however, we must not succumb to the temptation to abridge the freedoms the Bill of Rights grants to all citizens. Our fear is that the murders of Mr. Armanious and his family, if they prove to have been religiously motivated, will lead to a curtailment of religious speech. As a free society, we must not allow this to happen. In other, more repressive societies, victims””usually religious minorities””are often blamed for bringing upon themselves hate speech, violence or persecution, but this is not the case in the United States. Here every person should enjoy the right to speak his or her mind without fear of violent retaliation. And when such retaliation takes place, as it has in the Jersey City case, if the allegations are true, each person should expect the legal system to hold the perpetrators of violence accountable.
We therefore urge you, Mr. Gonzalez, as Attorney General, to take a strong leadership role by insisting that the federal investigation into the Armanious murders be carried out professionally and thoroughly and by ensuring that the particulars of this case do not lead to policies or decisions on the part of the Justice Department that will have a chilling effect on religious expression in our country. We prevail upon you to uphold the rights of every citizen to express his or her religious, political or moral views both privately and publicly without fear of violent reprisals or official apathy to such violence that would serve to stifle free speech.
Sincerely,
Members of the National Coalition on Religious Freedom and Human Rights
Robert S. Turner
Jubilee Campaign USAet cetera
cc: Senator Jon Corzine
Senator Frank Lautenberg
Representative Robert Menendez
Peter C. Harvey, Attorney General of New Jersey