Here I am, last but not least, in the “amazing guest star vacation week” of The Wild Hunt. Jason will return tomorrow, hopefully rested, revitalized, and ready to once again provide us with breaking news of Pagan interest.

Vacations change our consciousness by shaking up the mundane rhythm of our lives. They are, in and of themselves, magic. I am glad Jason took one, and I’m honored to be part of the shape-shifting roller coaster of this guest star week.

Jason included in my bio that I teach at Reclaiming Witchcamps. Witchcamp, vacations, and the value of taking time out, even from our own communities, is the focus of this post. Wrestling each year with whether I want to spend my vacation at a witchcamp, I’ve become acutely aware of the spiritual balancing act of intensity and repose. This balancing act is a challenge for many of us as individuals, but it also a challenge to the Pagan and activist communities I’ve been a part of. This year, I’m jumping out of the box of my past experience and doing something new. I’m not going to teach at an intensive but instead, at a restorative.

In 1986 I attended the first Reclaiming Witchcamp Intensive for my summer vacation. This week long getaway was held at Jug Handle Creek Farm on Northern California’s Mendocino Coast. It was the beginning of the culture shift of the fledgling San Francisco based “tradition” that was then the centerpiece of my life. I had no idea just how many of my summers witchcamp would come to shape. I had no idea how this getaway would come to shape Reclaiming.

At the time, I was in coven with Starhawk and Rose May Dance, among others; both a women’s coven and one that was focused on mixing magic with activism. Due to the popularity of Starhawk’s books, there was a growing demand that we teach our particular kind of magic outside of San Francisco. We took time off to meet that demand, and twenty two years later there are witchcamp intensives across the United States, Canada and Europe. A big slice of Pagandom has attended at least one Reclaiming witchcamp, and there are plenty of newcomers each year. There are plans for new camps in Israel, Crete and also Australia. In the course of serving up our particular kind of magic around the world, our particular kind of magic changed. Mix together old time revival,magical skill sharing, Pagan ecstatic encounter group, and anarchist circus and you have what comes close to resembling a Reclaiming witchcamp.

We’ve forged ahead, creating new witchcamps hither and yon, with little looking back. Reflection is not the strong suit of the Reclaiming tradition. Reclaiming is high on intensity and low on contemplation. There are a growing number of communities that have been built around witchcamps, like Spiralheart, and the one in British Columbia, that have come to value examining the “why” of what they are doing. But, getting to this has meant breaking away from some of the bad habits and community patterns inherited from the Bay Area. Here, due to the crisis based paradigm of the early days of the tradition – the world is about to end and can only be saved by our magic – there is little time for self-reflection or questioning community dynamics. Recruitment is in service of this magic, and in order to bring in people we can’t appear to be flawed. Hence, acknowledging community shadows is potently resisted, as is taking any break from action.

I’ve learned from my years teaching witchcamps and my many years in Reclaiming and activist circles just how important breaks from intensity are and just how important it is to slow down and take the time to envision there is time. Sometimes, pulling back from the fray of Pagan and/or activist community is the only way to stay in it.

Here in the Bay Area, some of us laughingly call ourselves more “Remaining” than “Reclaiming”; we’ve become a strange Greek chorus ambling in and out of local community. We utter our reflections and advice from the blogosphere, occasionally attending meetings and events. From our seasoned teaching guild we send out proposals to the wider community for things we hope will help the tradition, like policies of transparency and accountability. And then, we let go and go off and tend to other areas of our lives. We step outside the insular confines of tradition and join the greater Pagan world. When we step back in, we come back with a wider perspective that signals a vacation well spent.

This summer I will be taking a vacation from a teaching a witchcamp intensive. Instead, along with others, I’m creating an equinox restorative. It’s aimed at those who feel called to a retreat that is deep, restful, and reflective. With three nights away instead of a full week, we also leave free more vacation days for other pursuits. Among us are those who are Feri and Gardnerian as well as Reclaiming. We welcome working and playing with those outside of our respective traditions.

Planning the restorative has been transformative, as it’s called for us to do the very process we hope will occur at the event – reflection and review. When we first started out, we named it aptly “A Fool’s Journey”, as we knew we were stepping into new territory. We are sorting through our past experiences, witchcamp among them, sorting through what we want to leave behind and what we find valuable enough to gather in the Fool’s sack. We’ve noticed that the Fool’s posture is not one of rushing ahead. It’s the posture of taking time to smell the roses. What’s the point in rushing to save the world and all its roses if you never take time to smell them?

We’ve found a retreat center in Northern California built decades back to serve the Jungian community that seems perfect for our intent. Its large swimming pool, library full of spiritual texts, meditation room, art house, acres of woodland and meadow designed for ritual and ceremony seem to invite restoration to take place. As a priestess well trained in whooping the energy up, I welcome the challenge of invoking sacred lounging around the pool.

With the spirit of the Fool as my guide, I am open to anything. The Fool’s Journey could become an annual event, part of the community of witchcamps, or purely a one time thing. For all I know, next year I might search for the spirit of Elvis and end up vacationing in Las Vegas.

Taking breaks from the ordinary is important. I’m grateful that Jason and The Wild Hunt had one. Welcome back, Jason! Whether your vacation was restorative or intense, I hope you got what you needed. And now, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming…

guest posted by Deborah Oak of the roots down, branches up blog

Guest post by Chas S. Clifton

Before there was the Internet, there was Green Egg.

Published since 1967 (with interruptions in the late 1970s and early 2000s), Green Egg shaped American Paganism, provided bridges between different groups, and, I think, went a long way towards nudging Wicca, in particular, which had crossed the Atlantic as a small-group mystery religion, into a broader and more eclectic “nature religion.”

The only other publication (that I know of) nearly as long-lived is The Cauldron, a Witchcraft zine published in England since 1976.

In pre-Web days, Green Egg’s lively letters forum let people know who was out there and what they were doing. I found my first coven that way, by responding to a letter the HP and HPS had posted, telling about their activities.

Green Egg was the official house journal of the Church of All Worlds, but it carried everyone’s news: Gardnerian Witches, Druids, Egyptian Reconstructionists, and Pagans of all sorts.

Nowadays Green Egg comes as a PDF file.

But if you don’t have all those earlier issues on your bookshelf, help is on the way!

Oberon Zell, the founding editor, is putting together a “Best of Green Egg” anthology, due out in December from New Page Books.

I am happy to say that I have been involved in this project since the beginning, which involved reading all the back issues and swapping selection lists with Oberon and others. Yes, the project’s code name was Omelet.

It is amazing how well some of the articles hold up. People and groups come and go, some of the current-events mentioned may seem dated now (e.g., the Vietnam War), but the vision is still inspiring.

So we have chosen articles, short stories, poetry, music, art that still speak to a Pagan vision, gathered in such chapters as “Pagan Culture: Family and Tribe,” “Gender and Sexuality,” “Power & Politics: Changing the World,” and “Gods of Nature; Nature of Gods.”

We will be announcing it when it goes on sale, but right now, I need to get back to writing chapter intros!

(Thanks to Jason for letting me post here!)

My mother died early last Friday morning.  She was 97.  Her body was worn out, but not her spirit.  I’ve had the privilege of sitting vigil with the dying in the past, and I was with my father during his dying days in a hospital 19 years ago, but this was the first time I’d ever been with someone dying of old age.  Besides, one’s relationship with one’s mother is the closets and in most cases the most complicated.  It certainly was in our case.

What does community mean to you? Is it a place of magic? A gathering of like-minded people with a single goal? A place to get taken care of? A place to belong? Singing and drumming around the fire? Doing good work with others?

Come closer. I will tell you my vision. It is a vision of the present, and a vision of the future. All time is now, and magic is here, so everything is possible. The moment is reality. We breathe together, and the vision opens:

You have studied, and danced the spiral many times. You have walked the pathways of sun and moon. You have been guided, and rebelled a time or two. Slowly, you come to recognize your power, the power you’ve always been told was within you. Still, you study. You work. You play. You practice. Eventually, you come into your own work. You recognize the rhythm of the divine heart within your animal body. We stand and cheer. We celebrate your beauty and your power. You teach us what you know. We dance awhile to the beating of your drum. If others are called to similar work, they will join you, forming a coalition that creates something beautiful, that does meaningful work together, that is of help to all involved and to the rest of us.

Meanwhile, she makes her music and he writes his epic stories. She sits high amongst the branches to save a patch of forest. He campaigns for clean water. She teaches. He plants a garden. They come together to leap the fires in spring and to gather canned goods for the food bank come the autumn. This is community, this coming together and this moving apart. Nothing is static, the rising and falling belongs to a living, breathing, being.

Why does this image come to light so seldom? Why are we so worried about jockeying for position, and fighting over scraps? My answer: because, as communities, we are afraid of autonomous power. We seek to uphold the status quo. Her unique expression may rock the carefully balanced boat. His deep study is seen to take away from what the group needs in the moment. Anything different becomes a threat. We fight for what we have, instead of reaching for what we can become. We tear each other down instead of supporting someone else’s rise.

There is no need for this. Here is the secret: if we all have power, there is no need to fight for scraps. If each has a role to play, there is no need to jockey for position. The quiet bring in listening. The noisy bring in liveliness. Some grind incense and others teach our children. We can all be equal, but this means we cannot be equivalent. Every biosphere needs diversity and the ways of magic are no different. Not any one of us holds the fabric, but each holds a vital thread. Your thread does not trump mine, nor mine, yours. What is this fabric? It is the fabric of the Limitless Divine. God Herself flows in each thread, and we color these with our lives.

Community does not mean we all do the same thing. Community is not about who gets the biggest role in ritual. Community, for me, is what I have with my best peers. It is something we’ve been hard pressed to learn ourselves, after many years of our own squabbles and power plays. We finally reached a point where we went off by ourselves for awhile to discover our deeper talents and interests. We sought the magic that welled up from within, rather than always seeking the magic outside. We would come together periodically, to toast the longest night, or dance up the spring flowers. But mostly, we studied, practiced, and prayed. And now we are strong and beautiful. We each have something valuable to share.

I celebrate my friends: the artist, the dream-worker, the medium, my friend who helps heal sexual wounds, she who priestesses the dying, he who teaches. I toast my friends: the mystic, the poet, the singer and she who dances down the Gods. This is my community. These are my peers.

We all still seek out teaching. We celebrate together. We eat and laugh and raise a glass of wine. We do our work apart. We ask for help during the planting of something new, and we share the gifts of our harvest, knowing that there is plenty to go around.

This, for me, is community.

What do you wish for yours?

- guest posted by T. Thorn Coyle

Oh good, I hoped the title would get your attention. Above all, I do not want Jason’s blog traffic to suffer while he goes gallivanting and leaves some of us less disciplined bloggers to mind his site. I mean really, writing a post every day on important Pagan issues? Relevant, researched, and heavily linked? Frankly, he puts the rest of us to shame, and I for one am glad to pitch in to give Jason a much-needed break.

My topic today was brought on in part by an incident that happened to me last Fall, when I was dropping off my teenage daughter at another Pagan household. Exiting their house through the garage, I came upon—literally almost bumped into—an enormous…sculpture I guess is the word.

It was a three-dimensional thing, its heavy wire frame mounted to a base and standing about eight feet tall. The frame was maybe three feet in diameter around the middle, narrowing to a point at the top and bottom, and was wrapped in deep magenta crushed velvet.

I was looking at it from the back, and even from that angle I started to have a bad feeling about it. Slowly I circled to the front of the structure, fearing the worst. Sure enough, the front had a long vertical slit down the middle, almost from top to bottom but not quite, and it was lined in purple velveteen and bordered with a purple feather boa. Yes, that’s right, a purple feather boa. At the top of the slit was a white flower made of fabric petals, decorated with rhinestones or beads or something—I seem to have blocked out the details.

I stared at it as the realization sank in: I have just dropped off my daughter at a house with a giant plush vagina in the garage. What possible explanation could there be for its presence here? Was it a prop for a Code Pink action? Perhaps a piece of scenery from a play—The Little Shop of Horrors (Feed me! Feed me!), or a remake of The Velveteen Rabbit?

But I knew it was none of these things. It was, I am fairly certain, made for some ritual Goddessy-womanly-sacredy-sexuality altar. And as surely as I knew that its presence was embarrassing for the teenagers who lived here and visited, I also knew that any critical mention of it would lead to the accusation that I was not “sex-positive.“

Needless to say, since this incident I have thought long and hard (ahem) about Pagans and sexuality. I have good friends who teach sacred sexuality and personal boundary work, and help women and men recovering from incest and abuse. Over the years I have advocated for children of all ages, as a mandated reporter in the schools, as parent, relative, neighbor, and concerned adult friend. I get how damaging it is to have one’s sexuality stigmatized or invaded at any stage of life, and I have seen how Pagan culture, with its welcoming and accepting attitudes toward sexuality in all its forms, has been a source of healing for so many.

Against the backdrop of mainstream society, sex-positive activism continues to play an important role in getting accurate birth control, safe sex, and STD information to youth, removing the scourge of sexual and gender oppression, and helping people accept themselves and lead fuller, more joyful lives. Pagans have taken this mandate and re-framed it as part of our spiritual birthright: to join with Nature in ecstatic union, to increase our capacity for pleasure through the body, and to use the energy of eros to power our desires in all the worlds.

What’s not to love? Yet there is a disturbing side to it, too. For many years I didn’t question the ubiquitous “sex-positive” workshops in the Pagan community, and merely rolled my eyes at some of the stories I heard from participants. Of course, I never went to any of them; they just weren’t my thing. Having spent all of my twenties and the better part of my thirties coming to terms with sexuality, childbirth, intimacy, relationships and all the rest, I felt like it was time to move on to other matters. Besides, it was my policy to never attend anything where I had to use words like “lingam,” or pull a Meg Ryan in a group of any size.

Over the years, though, I have gone from shrugging my shoulders and thinking “not my thing,” to being genuinely concerned about what goes on in the name of some “sex-positive” and “sacred sexuality” work. I know many people who have been hit on, manipulated, and used by workshop leaders. Some Pagans who do this work seem to claim “sex-positive” as an excuse for having really bad boundaries—ironically, while supposedly helping others create healthy boundaries. And such an edgy field naturally attracts narcissists, who are more interested in pushing limits than encouraging authentic sexual expression—and yes, there is a difference.

After my close encounter with the Velveteen Vagina, in fact, I started thinking that it might not have anything to do with positive sexuality at all. And if thinking that made me un-sex-positive, what did that even mean? Had the Pagan sex-positive movement devolved into a freedom of speech test for exhibitionists? In that case, what we were doing was not revolutionary at all; it was reality television.

Paganism, for all its easy entry and near-universal acceptance of difference, is riddled with minefields if you scratch below the surface. For instance, we value self-empowerment and individualism, yet we loathe leadership, which is a natural outcome of being empowered. Diversity itself becomes a trap when, in upholding the principles of relativism, we are unable to set basic standards of accountability.

By equating sexuality with liberation, we create a rhetorical climate where any reasonable questioning of sexual behavior can be characterized as a campaign of oppression. As far as I can tell, this is where the discussion of sexuality and Paganism is currently stuck.

Yet in order to progress as a New Religious Movement or whatever the heck we are, we must resolve these questions in some way. If everybody’s mileage varies, how are we to determine whether Workshop Leader A is a power-hungry predator or a brilliant, unorthodox teacher? If Pagans as a rule don’t trust leaders, are we fated then to end up with leaders who are fundamentally untrustworthy?

The ecologist James Gould writes about striking a balance between “the unprofitable extremes of blinding skepticism and crippling romanticism.” I have travelled quite far from the romanticism of my first encounters with Paganism, and obviously I am skeptical of much of the rhetoric around “sacred sexuality.” But after so long in the mosh pit of relativism, I am comfortable erring on the side of skepticism—without the blindness—for a while.

What I most long to see is a thoughtful discussion of these issues that isn’t ended by setting into motion Brock’s Law. Sex is sacred. It can be empowering, liberating, ecstatic, life-changing. It can be sweet rain in a time of drought, a spark of fire that lights up the world. But even great sex does not change the world, trust me. There is still plenty of work to be done once we rise from between the sheets.

—Guest posted by Anne Hill of the Gnosis Café blog

Let me make a pitch for one of my favorite Pagan causes: being rooted in experience.

We like to say that Paganism is not about following a creed or obedience to commandments written in an ancient book. It’s about lived experiences: direct encounters with our gods and our communities, with nature and with spirit.

So why is nearly everything we write in the form of a recipe book? Why so little in the way of lived experience? For a religion of direct, personal gnosis, we have remarkably little writing about what happens when we set out to practice rather than preach.

I propose we change that. Here is my challenge to you:

Don’t tell me how your tradition draws down the moon or performs a proper blot. Instead, tell me about the first time you led a public ritual: about how your knees were wobbly, and you began to sweat; about how you were afraid that nothing would happen. And then it did. And something in the sound of the drums took hold of you, and you felt different, and the world changed.

Don’t tell me that Paganism celebrates the body and honors sexuality. Tell me about the scent of pine needles in your hair when you kissed your lover under the stars, and about how the smell of pine sap and wood smoke can still make you dizzy.

Don’t tell me that community is important in Paganism. Tell me about finding your first Pagan community, and about that heady rush like first love you felt for it. And about the crushing pain that followed the first betrayal (the leader that was manipulative; the grove member who stole; the coven-mate whose oaths didn’t keep her from outing one of you) and how you came to terms with it. How you learned to embrace the Pagan world despite its flaws–or dedicated yourself to eradicating them.

Don’t tell me that Pagans find our gods in nature. Tell me about the time you climbed a mountain to celebrate with them, but it turned cold and foggy, and you thought you were lost forever until you spotted that raven that looked at you out of just one eye. Tell me about the taste of the meat from the deer you hunted yourself–or about the look of kinship in the eyes of the possum you accidentally killed, which made you give up meat-eating forever.

Tell me about how hot your sweat lodge was and how thirsty you emerged from it, when you explore whether or not Pagan sweat lodges are cultural appropriation. Tell me about the first time you saw an aura–or the time you were the only one who couldn’t see one, in your whole magical lodge–before you tell me about psychic phenomena.

Don’t give me your ideas on Pagan life, my sisters and brothers. I have ideas enough of my own. And don’t give me answers, because ours is a religious movement with hundreds of answers, thousands of answers.

Give me your experience. Give me the marrow and the meat of your spiritual life. Because, unless you write it down, no one else ever will. Only from you can I receive this gift: your own lived Pagan journey.

–Guest post by Cat Chapin-Bishop of Quaker Pagan Reflections.

Welcome to the last week of May! Due to vacation-oriented circumstances beyond my control, I will be unable to perform my regular blogging duties here at The Wild Hunt. However, just because I’m off to run and play doesn’t mean I’ll be depriving you of your daily fix of great Pagan-oriented content. I have somehow managed to assemble an all-star line-up of guest posters for while I’m away. Allow me to introduce you…

May 26th – Cat Chapin-Bishop

Wiccan since the late ’80s, Cat Chapin-Bishop has also been Quaker since 2001. Cat’s essays have appeared in Laura Wildman’s “Celebrating the Pagan Soul”, “The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies”, the Covenant of the Goddess newsletter, and “Enchante: The Journal for the Urbane Pagan”. In addition to her work as a Wiccan HPs, Cat is the former Chair of Cherry Hill Seminary’s Pastoral Counseling Department, and she currently serves on the Ministry and Worship Committee of Mt. Toby Quaker meeting.

Cat and her husband maintain Quaker Pagan Reflections, a blog dedicated to exploring the connections between Pagan spirituality and Quaker practice. They reside in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they attempt to live peacefully in the midst of chaos.

May 27th – Anne Hill

A skilled facilitator, author and teacher, Anne is on the faculty of Cherry Hill Seminary, hosts a weekly dream radio show, and writes an award-winning blog on dreams and spirituality. In addition to speaking at businesses and organizations, she has a private dream practice and is currently writing a book on dreams.

May 28th – T. Thorn Coyle

T. Thorn Coyle is a magic worker, mystic, musician, and author of “Evolutionary Witchcraft” and the forthcoming “Kissing the Limitless.” She teaches internationally. Her blog can be found at yezida.livejournal.com or www.thorncoyle.com/musings.htm

May 29th – M. Macha NightMare

M. Macha NightMare, Priestess & Witch, is an author, teacher and ritualist, with a penchant for collaboration. She is an initiate of two traditions of Witchcraft: Reclaiming and Faery/Feri, Reclaiming’s root tradition. Macha has authored, co-created, or contributed to, several books. Most notably “The Pagan Book of Living and Dying” (with Starhawk and Reclaiming), and “Witchcraft and the Web”. In addition, she currently chairs the Public Ministry Department at Cherry Hill Seminary, and serves on the Board of Directors at the Foundation for the Advancement of Women in Religion.

For a full biography, click here.

May 30th – Chas S. Clifton

Chas S. Clifton has been blogging since 2003, when he converted his Pagan magazine column, “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek,” into a blog. A widely published Pagan writer, he is the author of “Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America”. He also edits “The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies”

May 31st – Deborah Oak

Deborah Oak is a psychotherapist, artist, gardener, aromancer, mother and earth-worshiping Pagan. She writes the popular Pagan blog Branches Up, Roots Down, maintains the Temple of Elvis, and teaches at Reclaiming Witchcamps all over the world. Oak was also featured, along with Thorn and Anne Hill, in the RE/Search Publications book “Modern Pagans”.

I hope you will enjoy their contributions to The Wild Hunt, and check out their respective blogs and published works. My deepest appreciation goes out to all of them for stepping in for me. I will return on June 1st with my usual daily dose of news, commentary, and links.

Author, journalist, and The Revealer co-founder Jeff Sharlet has written a masterful essay for The Nation that looks at issues of conscience, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. Sharlet reviews “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” by Martha Nussbaum, and “Founding Faith Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America” by Steven Waldman, and compares their approaches to ideas of religious equality and freedom.

“Nussbaum’s book, a fundamentally flawed but wise consideration of the subtle distinctions between “freedom” and “equality,” may help cultivate it in years to come. Meanwhile, Founding Faith–a new book by Steven Waldman, a former religion reporter–is the sort of carefully crafted crowd pleaser that trades [Roger] Williams’s liberty of conscience for the solace of centrism.”

Sharlet criticizes Beliefnet founder Steven Waldman for creating a false set of “extremes” that we need to “compromise” on to achieve harmony and peace between secularists and Christian conservatives.

“Waldman wins his centrist peace by dismissing Christian conservatives’ majoritarian bullying and secularists’ insistence on separation of church and state as “extremes” that can be reconciled by the former acknowledging pluralism and the latter accepting that separation is neither strict nor meant to be universal. Doing so, however, would require fundamentalists to give up the most important claim of their faith–its exclusivity–and secularists to ignore history. Significantly, Waldman pays only brief lip service to an essential development in American law, the principle of incorporation–the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension of the Bill of Rights to the states. Incorporation is the tidiest rebuttal to Justice Thomas’s antebellum legal dreams and Waldman’s contention that the protection of minority views as an essential function of separation is a ‘liberal fallacy.’”

In the end, both authors are criticized for minimizing the “Christian nationalist challenge” facing us, and overlooking many of the pitfalls of their respective “compromises”. But any encapsulation of this important analysis by me won’t do it full justice, I strongly recommend heading over and reading the entire thing. While I’m at it, check out Sharlet’s new book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”, a chilling look into Christian fundamentalism’s most elite organization.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging away with the “liberal fallacy” that religious minorities deserve protection under the legal and political principle of church-state separation.

Few could have envisioned that when Wiccan Darla Kaye Wynne first filed suit against the small South Carolina town of Great Falls in 2001, that it would spark a seven-year judicial and legislative odyssey that threatens to escalate into a full-blown national legal battle over public prayer. Yet, with this (initially) small suit over sectarian prayer at governmental meetings, that is exactly what happened. A slow-brewing conflict that has now spawned a legislative strategy designed to silence future Darla Wynnes, and will soon face legal challenges as the “South Carolina Public Invocation Act” shortly becomes law.

“The South Carolina General Assembly unanimously passed a bill Wednesday that provides guidelines to public bodies within the state regarding their right to open a meeting with prayer. The bill, which adopts a version of the Alliance Defense Fund’s model invocation policy, now awaits a signature from Gov. Mark Sanford to become law. Sanford has already indicated his intention to sign it.”

The Alliance Defense Fund’s “model invocation policy” was designed after two cases involving Pagans and sectarian prayer earned national attention. South Carolina is their first big test of the policy, which intentionally creates “constitutional confusion” over sectarian prayer and places legal roadblocks intended to dissuade future lawsuits. Needless to say, the ACLU is readying itself to challenge the law. The ACLU national board recently took over the local South Carolina chapter, after it became clear there was a crisis of leadership and fundraising hindering it from addressing these upcoming issues.

“If there is one state that can ill afford an ineffective chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union it arguably is South Carolina … in recent years [the SC ACLU chapter] been hampered by ideological squabbling among its board members, staff leadership turnover, lackluster membership and fundraising numbers and a virtually nonexistent media presence. Aware of the problems for some time, the national ACLU board has decided to step in and try to right the ship.”

At stake are the religious freedoms of religious minorities in South Carolina, and ultimately, all over this country. Those who live in smaller towns, rural areas, and states unfriendly to the sort of diversity we represent. The ones who aren’t lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, Salem, or Paganistan. A small prayer to Jesus may not seem like a big deal, until your realize that without the promise of a secular government, our rights to an equal place at the table are jeopardized, and we are ultimately afforded second-class status due to our non-Christian allegiance. Which is why Hindu, Buddhist, and Native American groups have lined up in the past to support Pagans fighting against “Judeo-Christian” sectarian prayer.

“As adherents of non-Judeo-Christian religions, Hindu Americans, Buddhist Americans, and Native Americans have a direct interest in this [Cynthia Simpson's] case. They, like all Americans, are guaranteed religious freedom by the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The ability of these minority religious groups to take part equally in American civic life, a fundamental freedom protected by the religion clauses, is threatened by the Fourth Circuit’s holding that the Establishment Clause does not prohibit governments from excluding non-Judeo-Christian clergy from eligibility to offer legislative invocations.”

So expect a big legal fight in the near future (which, once again, pits the ACLU against the Alliance Defense Fund), one that could very well head to the Supreme Court, and don’t expect too many South Carolina lawmakers to come out in support of religious minorities. South Carolina is a place where even Democrats don’t believe Wicca is a real religion. A loss here will mean similar prayer laws sprouting up anywhere the Alliance Defense Fund has enough pull (places like Texas and Oklahoma, for example).

If you were ever looking for proof that the small legal battles Pagans get involved in matter, or that issues over sectarian prayer are important, look no further than South Carolina, and the small town of Great Falls. Where a single Pagan stood up and fought for a local legislative body that worked for all its citizens, not just the Christian ones.

As Barack Obama gets closer and closer to being the official Democratic presidential candidate, some are wondering which groups are helping to get him there. Sure, we’ve all heard about the African American vote, and the “Starbucks voters” get mentioned quite a bit. But Beliefnet editor-in-chief Steven Waldman credits another demographic: Pagans and other religious minorities.

Pro-Obama bumper sticker by ‘tealcdupre’.

According to CNN polling, Obama won a crushingly huge margin of people in Oregon who check “other” in the religion box*.

“…among those voters who listed “other” as their religion, a group that made up 10 percent of the vote, Obama won by 42 points, 70 percent to 28 percent.”

It isn’t just in Oregon either, Obama won the “other” vote in Pagan-friendly states like California, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as well. Which leads to the question: is Obama the clear favorite for (Democratic-voting) Pagans? If so, it certainly wasn’t a sure thing. Back in February I blogged about a split within the feminist Goddess-spirituality community, with activist and W.I.T.C.H. co-founder Robin Morgan backing Clinton all the way, and “Why Women Need the Goddess” author Carol P. Christ backing Obama.

“Barack spoke out against the Iraq war when he was waging an uphill battle for the Senate and after he had been advised to keep his mouth shut. Apparently we knew something that Hillary Clinton didn’t. The fact that she didn’t know suggests to me that she will be quite capable of leading the nation into other ill-advised and unnecessary wars if she is elected.”

But since then it seems the tide has turned. He won praise from Starhawk, who said he evokes “powerfully appealing archetypes”, and openly Pagan Democratic party official (and one-time superdelegate) Rita Moran had nothing but good things to say about the candidate.

“I would overwhelmingly support Barack Obama. I feel his message of hope, his campaign which has been so incredibly inclusive, has inspired me.”

So, if the polling data is accurate, Pagan Democrats have made their decision. It’s Obama in 2008, and in a primary competition that has been as close as this one, that support matters.

* Speaking of the religious “other”, American Indians seem to really like Obama too.