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Observing Lieberman: Religious practice in public

A few days before the 1988 election that sent him to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, Joseph Lieberman heard an encouraging story from one of his friends. According to the account in his book In Praise of Public Life, a supporter overheard his mother and her friends (all Christians) saying they were going to vote for Lieberman (a religiously observant Jew) because he was “a religious man.” The friend realized then that Lieberman’s decision not to campaign on the Jewish sabbath could be a political strength.

A cereal offense

General Mills recently tucked a CD-ROM containing the Bible into 12 million cereal boxes and then had to issue profuse apologies for having done so as it withdrew the offensive inclusions. GM pleaded not guilty: “we didn’t know it was loaded” with scriptures, they said. “A flat-out lie,” says the CD-ROM packager, who knows, as we do, that the cereal-buying public became a late-test market.

It included enough customers who protested. And when they did, GM rushed to declare, “It is the company’s policy not to advance any particular set of religious beliefs.”