Last week we looked at the Indian half of the Dalai Lama’s claim that China had a lot to learn about religious harmony from its neighbor to the southwest. Try to find stories about recent events in China similar to India’s Gujarat massacre, India’s burnings of Christian churches, India’s Muslim bombings, India’s continuing religious warfare in Kashmir, India’s heavy-handed Puritanism of Hindu Taliban thugs. You won’t find much. In a country of 1.3 billion people there is a little bit of almost everything, but “infinitesimal” would be a good word to describe the level of religious violence in today’s China.

The 20^th century revolutionary movement in China started at about the same time it did in India, but against a historical backdrop of theocratic violence that young intellectuals were determined not to repeat. In the 1850s, a lunatic Christian named Hong Xiuquan persuaded followers that he too was the son of God, sent to save the East as his brother Jesus had saved the West. The tale of what became known as the “Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping” is far stranger than fiction; Hong conquered most of southern China, ruled as its emperor in the old imperial palace at Nanjing for many years, and was ultimately overthrown only at the cost of some 20 million lives. That’s a lot of bodies, even for China.

On top of that, the communists saw that their rival, Chiang Kai-shek, had converted to Christianity, and that the corruption of his government and his perceived sellout to Western interests were inextricably entangled with foreign efforts to Christianize and colonize China. If there was one thing the often-bickering Chinese communists agreed on, it was that religion was not going to undermine their campaign to modernize the nation.

That never meant banning religion per se. It did mean bringing religion under firm control of the state, so that it could not pose a political threat. The approach is quite different from that of India and America, where religion is respected as a power in its own sphere equal to that of the civil government. China has five government-approved religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, and Taoism. Anyone can worship in any of these faiths to his heart’s content. Catholics, for example, are free to believe in Purgatory, indulgences, and the magic power of relics; free to attend Mass whenever they want, sing their hymns, and receive all seven sacraments. So why do the Vatican and its American Christian allies complain about China all the time?
Read on…

Update: Yesterday CFI issued an updated statement affirming support for religious freedom and stating “CFI’s unequivocal support for the legal right of Muslims to place a community center near Ground Zero does not imply that CFI views the new center as an event to be celebrated…On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere. ” However, the statement makes it clear that CFI believes that there should be no prohibition against building the Cordoba House or any other religious building closer to Ground Zero, and it no longer features the language of the previous statement suggesting that it would be better if the vicinity of Ground Zero was a faith-free zone.

The original post follows:

Should lower Manhatan be a faith-free zone?

The Center For Inquiry thinks so. In a statement released today, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) affirmed its support for freedom of religion but nevertheless called for a moratorium on new faith-based institutional buildings to be constructed in the vicinity of Ground Zero:

The Center for Inquiry is troubled by the rhetoric of some of those protesting the proposed Islamic religious center and mosque near Ground Zero, and it especially deplores the growing politicization of the dispute. CFI also holds that the focus of the protests is too narrow; it would be inappropriate to build any new house of worship in the area immediately around Ground Zero, not just mosques. “The 9/11 attacks were an example of faith-based terrorism, and any institution that privileges faith above reason is an affront to those who were killed and injured in those attacks,” observes Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of CFI.

I suppose that CFI thinks that this is a nuanced position on this contentious issue, but let’s get one thing straight: this is an issue that leaves little room for nuance. You either support free exercise for all religions, or you don’t. It is true that CFI affirms multiple times in the statement that they support the First Amendment and see no legitimate legal mechanism for preventing the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (actually, it’s an Islamic community center that will be two blocks away from Ground Zero), but it is still utter nonsense to declare that the area close to where the World Trade Center towers once stood should be somehow sacred or should be some kind of faith-free zone.

First, let’s make it clear that this statement is still singling out Islam above all other religions. How can that be? After all, they do state that no new religious buildings should be constructed around Ground Zero, not just Islamic religious buildings. But this is a moot point, because the only project under consideration right now, and the only one that is at the center of a contentious national debate, is the Cordoba House. Period. Therefore, any discussion of any other religion is a red herring. Sure, we could all agree that, as long as we’re opposing the Cordoba House, then we’re also opposing building a Mormon temple, or a house of Scientology, or even a Catholic Church. But all of that is meaningless, because right now no one is proposing to build any of those houses of worship close to Ground Zero. So let’s leave aside the idea that CFI’s statement is doing anything different than singling out Islam, which is what all the other organizations who oppose the project (organizations whose rhetoric CFI finds troubling) are doing.

But to the extent that CFI does try to make all of religion their target in this statement, it is unreasonable to portray all people of faith as kindred spirits to the 19 fanatics who attacked the United States and murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001. One of the most common talking points against the Cordoba House project is that all Muslims bear some sort of special responsibility for the actions of the few murderous fanatics who claimed to commit their crimes in the name if Islam; while CFI seems to condemn painting Muslims with such a broad brush, nevertheless by condemning the construction of any house of worship in the vicinity of Ground Zero, they seem to only be making the brush even wider by pointing the finger at all people of faith. The vast majority of believers in this world hold no truck with fanatics who would use murder to advance their cause. Why should they all be punished by a sudden declaration of “no-faith zone” for lower Manhattan?

Frankly, the idea of banning all religious construction around Ground Zero doesn’t even make sense. The Cordoba House is proposed for the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory two blocks from Ground Zero. How wide, exactly, would CFI like the no-faith zone to be? How many blocks are enough to show sufficient deference to the families of the victims of 9/11, many of whom are people of faith themselves? Do we condemn them too if they make faith a part of their lives, because faith may have played a part in motivating the 9/11 hijackers? Where does this end?

Religious freedom, like any freedom, is not absolute, but neither can it be restrained in mere symbolic gestures. Declaring lower Manhattan to be some sort of faith-free zone is a non sequitur; if people of faith aren’t collectively responsibile for 9/11, why should they bear responsibility for keeping their religious institutions away from Ground Zero? And if we are meant to believe that all people of faith indeed do have a collective responsibility for the actions of terrorists, then how can we even have a meaningful discussion on religious fanaticism? How can we address the problems caused by religion without making a distinction between most people of faith and the people who are actually causing the problems? We’d be redefining the enemy to be bigger and bigger.

We live in a world of religious people and non-religious people. By all means let those of us who stand outside of organized religion make criticisms and work to counter its harmful influence when necessary. Let us advocate for our own different visions for the future of the world. But to do this most effectively we need to employ the scalpel more and the hatchet less. The 19 people (and the many more who supported them) who attacked the United States on 9/11 received a lot of their motivation from hatred and religious ideology, but they were not acting on behalf of all Muslims, and they certainly were not representing all people of faith in their actions. Making lower Manhattan into some kind of faith-free zone would be an affront to religious liberty and would make no sense in the face of the challenges that we do face today regarding religious extremism.

As a secular humanist, I dispute that ground can be declared sacred, and lower Manhattan is no exception. Cordoba House should be built right where its sponsors have the legal right to build it.

Yesterday both opponents and supporters of the Park51 Islamic community center project in lower Manhattan gathered for competing rallies. The New York Times was there and reported on some ugliness that took place:

Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.

Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.

The police eventually removed Mr. Rose for his own safety.

Salon.com commentator Glenn Greenwald points to a video of another confrontation that took place at the same anti-Park51 rally. An African-American man wearing a cap that fit tightly over his head walked through, and members of the crowd quickly decided that he must be a Muslim and started shouting anti-Islamic slogans at him. If you watch the video at YouTube (warning: strong language, poor sound quality), you can see the hostile tone of the demonstration. The man who is singled out seems to be simultaneously angry and baffled. For what it’s worth, he denies he’s even a Muslim, but also expresses bewilderment that the crowd singled him out without knowing his opinion on the subject. But his very presence activates the deep hostility of the crowd in a way that looks downright frightening in the video.

In light of all this ugliness, it disappoints me to see that Mother Jones is reporting this morning that several commissioners from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have come out strongly against the Park51 project. The USCIRF is federally funded and was created by Congress in 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world and advise the president on the issue. But apparently many of its commissioners lose sight of this mission when it comes to addressing religious freedom at home. According to the Mother Jones report:

In a recent piece for National Review Online, Nina Shea, one of USCIRF’s nine commissioners (who are selected by the president and congressional leaders), wrote that instead of “a cultural center for all New Yorkers,” the “mosque” project could be “a potential tool for Islamists”—suggesting it would be a hotbed of jihadism that, among other things, spreads the literature and ideas of Islamic extremism. She compared the leaders of the Cordoba House project to convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the “blind Sheikh”) and accused Fort Hood and Christmas Day bombing coordinator Anwar al-Awlaki. (Shea’s piece, as of Monday, was no longer showing up on the NRO site.)

Mother Jones goes on to point out that at least two of the other eight commissioners also have spoken out against the project, including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who compared the project to a hypothetical Shinto Shrine at Pearl Harbor and believes it should be moved several more blocks away from Ground Zero.

Never mind that Imam Rauf, the religious leader behind the project, indubitably holds moderate religious and political views. Never mind that the First Amendment to the Constitution is not conditional based on which religion is asking for free exercise. Never mind that one of the lead opponents to Park51 has unabashedly and repeatedly lied about the project. Nina Shea and Richard Land are here to tell you that religious freedom doesn’t exist in lower Manhattan…or that it shouldn’t.

But while many opponents of the Park51 project claim it’s a matter of the land around Ground Zero being somehow sacred, it is nevertheless evident that—as one of the project backers, Daisy Khan, stated yesterday—the opposition has to do with hatred of Muslims more than anything else. As the Washington Post reported today, Mosque construction is facing tough opposition all over the nation, including in Murfreesboro, TN, where opponents to a local Islamic center’s expansion plans carried signs that said “Keep Tennessee Terror Free.”

It is the height of bigotry to blame an entire population for the actions of a few. Mosque opponents are acting as though Islam itself (and therefore all Muslims) attacked America on 9/11, rather than a small band of violent and hateful fanatics. When they say that building the Park51 project is “insensitive” to the 9/11 victim’s families, they are acting as though the very existence of Muslims is what’s offensive.

The conflict over Park51 points to a larger battle over our country’s future. Will the USA be a nation that respects the First Amendment, that is tolerant (and even accepting) of religious minorities, that truly practices the ideal that people should be free to practice their respective religions without interference? Or will xenophobia triumph, fanned by the flames of polarizing political and media figures, leaving the nation as a sort of exclusive zone for the one chosen Christian religion?

It’s a battle we cannot afford to lose. The Park51 project must be allowed to proceed, unhindered. Now is the time for concerned citizens to speak out in favor of the universal principle of religious freedom, which benefits all of us, no matter how we may individually feel about different organized religions. Or will secular humanists one day be saying our own version of Pastor Niemöller’s famous statement? They came first for the Muslims…

The Dalai Lama was sounding off again a few days ago, this time recommending that China should learn about religious harmony from India. “When I see conflicts in various parts of world I try to tell them that people belonging to different races and following different religion can live in harmony.” He boasted that India was known all over the world for non-violence and religious harmony, adding that “People in China very much need to know this.”

What on earth is he talking about?

Is he talking about the Gujarat riots of 2002, where Hindus enraged over what turned out to be an accidental train fire killed an estimated 2,000 Muslims and drove another 100,000+ from their homes, with the connivance of the local government? Only 11 people have been punished for this so far – they must have been awfully industrious. That’s fewer than the 14 people handed life sentences for the slaughter of another thousand Muslims at Bhagalpur in 1989, but that process took 17 years to complete.

Is he talking about the mass violence directed against Christians in Orissa at Christmas in 2007? Read on…

Two candidates for “Man Bites Dog” headline of the year surfaced last week.

“Town Protects Tavern from Church.” No, this is not a typo. In Hampshire, Illinois, just west of Chicago, the Faithway Baptist Church sought permission from the village board to open a youth center. Normally, that would be a no-brainer, but in this case the youth center would have been across the street from The Kave, a comfortable neighborhood watering hole offering karaoke, shufflebowl, and Cubs baseball. Illinois law prohibits issuing a liquor license to any establishment operating within 100 feet of a church. Although it doesn’t prohibit a church from opening near a tavern, the village board realized that if The Kave were to change ownership in the future, it would be unlawful to grant the new owner a license, so The Kave would be gone. In a stunning display of common sense, the Board decided that would be unfair, and told Faithway Baptist to look elsewhere.

That decision probably violated federal law, as we’ll see in a minute. But first the other headline: “Strippers Protest Church.” The Foxhole is a business establishment in Warsaw, Ohio, offering entertainment a little edgier than karaoke and shufflebowl. For the past four years, though, Pastor Bill Dunfee of the New Beginnings Ministries Church – which is not across the street, but four miles away – has led a campaign of harassment against The Foxhole, its employees, and its customers. Dunfee and his congregation would show up outside The Foxhole, sometimes with bullhorns, snapping photos of customers and their license plates to violate their privacy online, and berating them for being evil as they entered and left the premises. Dunfee has also been pursuing legal remedies, including zoning laws, to throw The Foxhole employees out of work. “You can’t share territory with the Devil” growls Pastor Dunfee, who says he is intent on glorifying Jesus. Read on…

The night Obama was elected, my roommates and I huddled around our beaten and battered television amidst term papers and study guides to watch a rare, if not once-in-a-lifetime event occur: history catching up to our own ideals.  Obama appealed not only to the “bleeding-heart liberals,” but the youth who needed to believe that change was possible. A clichéd concept, but to a generation watching their parents lose their jobs, their grandparents lose their houses, and their peers die in Afghanistan, change was salvation.  Obama was our savior.  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sharron Angle.

His speech was moving, carrying all the themes and meaning we expected from a man of such deep intelligence and passion. I doubted we’d be disappointed, but a simple statement left us stunned:

Its the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

“Oh my gawd!” my roommate shrieked, “did he just shout out to the gays??”

He did, and understandably so.  A large portion of the LGBT community threw all their weight behind his campaign, thrilled to root on a man who had no apparent moral objections to homosexuality (a claim that couldn’t be made for the McCain/Palin Bible camp).  It was assumed Obama would, with the magical flick of his wrist, give gays their rights.  All of them.  Stat.

What some members of the LGBT community failed to remember was that Obama’s agenda wasn’t driven by the 10 percent of the population who smacked his campaign logo next to their rainbow bumper stickers.  He never claimed (once running for President) to be a proponent for gay marriage.  He still needed to take into consideration the moderates and conservatives of the country who couldn’t sit through an episode of Will and Grace without squirming.  And they were out there.  The country was reminded of this when news quickly broke of the Proposition 8 victory in California.  An initiative Obama opposed.  See how this works?

Obama has managed to theoretically support the LGBT community without completely ruffling the feathers of the Christian right.

“Yes, the Defense of Marriage Act is wrong.”

“No, marriage is between a man and a woman.”

”Yes, Prop 8 is divisive.”

“No, give them civil unions.”

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is wrong.”

“Now hold that thought.”

Obama is not an advocate, but an ally of the LGBT community, and a meek ally at that. Wednesday’s enormous Prop-8 smack-down victory (hopefully the first of more to come) gave gay rights advocates a reason to celebrate, but left the more critical thinkers to contemplate Obama’s impending moment of truth.  As gay marriage rises from the shadows of the states and begins to enter federal territory, how will Obama respond?

Maybe two years ago, when the country was crawling out of its George W. hole, a vague nudge of support from the president would have been briefly sufficient.  Some bread, water, and a charismatic nod were more than the Bush administration had ever bothered to give.  But in the months to follow, as a flood of hostile bigots came barring down on local street corners and assembly halls, and the Christian right’s disgusted disapproval began to border on abusive rage, bread and water were no longer enough.  The scraps being fed in the form of partner benefits and a glacially-paced repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell only served as a reminder of what was truly deserved: equal rights.  All of them.

Much has changed within the country since the Obama campaign. Hope has sunken with his approval rating, and many have thrown their hands in the air, branding him a failure and a disappointment. Though I’ve not given up on Obama, this country certainly isn’t where I envisioned it to be on that inspiring night in November.  It has warped, mutated, and blistered into a nervous “before” picture of a crumbling empire.  That’s changed its citizens.  It’s changed me.

And yet, somewhere deep down, I’m still that liberal arts college student who waited five hours in a line to hear Obama speak about “hope” and “change” and the possibility of me and my friends becoming adults in a world that wouldn’t tell us, “No.  Who you are is not good enough.”

In these times deprived of Martin Luther Kings and Harvey Milks, my fellow students and I believed that Obama was supposed to fill the void.  He was supposed to save the world.  He was supposed to be everything to everyone.  But as it turns out, he isn’t a super hero or a miracle worker; he’s simply a person.  Just like the gays and lesbians who want to get married to the people they love. We’ll accept that you’re only human, Obama, if you acknowledge that we’re all human, too.

The reaction of the Catholic Church to last week’s court decision striking down California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 was swift and to the point. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George mourned that “It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage.” On the Protestant side, Focus on the Family chimed in that “Judge Walker’s ruling raises a shocking notion that a single federal judge can nullify the votes of more than 7 million California voters.”

This sudden Christian solicitude for the will of the people should make anyone familiar with the history of Christianity gag.

Democracy was invented by the Pagan Greeks; there is some reason to believe that Pagan Germanic tribes practiced a rough form of democracy as well. It certainly isn’t found anywhere in the Bible; when 250 “men of renown” complained to Moses that he was being overly autocratic, God obligingly opened a pit in the earth to swallow them up.

After Christianity seized control of the Roman Empire, democracy vanished from Europe altogether; Middle Ages society was founded on Augustine’s iron notion of rule by God, not by man. The Middle Ages Church did all it could (and that was quite a bit) to snuff out any glimmer of democracy before it could take hold. When the Emperor Frederick II published his “Constitution of Melfi” in 1231, it provided among other things for a representative assembly, with each town sending two delegates to inform the Emperor about local needs. A livid Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick and called him the Antichrist. That should not have been surprising, for only a few years earlier Pope Innocent III had declared England’s Magna Carta, the first written expression of the English people’s rights, null and void because it purported to rein in the power of a divinely ordained monarch and vassal of the Pope.

The Protestant Reformation did nothing to advance the cause of democracy; neither Luther nor Calvin had the slightest intention of giving the common people any more power than the Pope had. By the 1640s, when the English Civil War broke out, the rebels were a curious mix of proto-democrats, heavily influenced by John Lilburne, and radical Calvinists, led by Oliver Cromwell. Lilburne’s goal was simple: he wanted all adult males to be able to elect Parliament, rather than just a small handful of the propertied class. Cromwell’s goal was equally simple: rule by the God experts, to impose morality on a sinful island. Cooperation between the two camps was easy when both were simply warring against the status quo, but once the king was defeated the incompatibility of their goals quickly surfaced. Cromwell ordered Lilburne’s arrest for treason, but after a dramatic trial before a jury Lilburne was acquitted. Didn’t matter; Cromwell threw him back in jail anyway, without bothering to file charges. Cromwell proceeded to expel the elected members of Parliament who voted against him – so much for democracy. Read on…

The Utah Supreme Court this week reversed the conviction of Warren Jeffs for his role in the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Viewing the facts of the case through the prism of Utah’s religious history reveals an ugly picture indeed.

Warren Jeffs helped run a small Mormon sect called the “Fundamentalist” LDS that is not a part of Utah’s dominant Mormon establishment, the LDS. Elissa Wall spent her entire childhood being brainwashed by this sect; recordings of Jeffs’ teachings were broadcast throughout her home on a speaker system. When Elissa was twelve, she discovered what happens to people who defy the FLDS prophet: her father’s disobedience was punished by having his family stripped from him and sent to another city, where her mother was “married” to an FLDS leader who already had several other wives.

When Elissa was fourteen, Jeffs ordered her to marry her nineteen-year-old first cousin, Allen Steed. According to the opinion, Elissa was aghast, and flatly refused to go forward with the wedding. Even her older sisters, who were already married to the reigning FLDS prophet, tried to plead her cause, but to no avail. At the time of the wedding, a devastated Elissa refused to say “I do” – but Jeffs pushed and pushed, until she finally mumbled “Okay, I do.” Jeffs then proclaimed “Now go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good priesthood children,” at which point Elissa ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

When Elissa resisted her husband’s sexual advances over the following weeks, Jeffs gravely informed her that she had to “repent” and be “submissive” – she “needed to go home and give [her]self to [Steed], who was [her] priesthood head and husband, mind, body, and soul and obey without any question.” Allen proceeded to rape Elissa repeatedly over the next two years.

Jeffs was charged as an accomplice to rape, which is defined as any sexual intercourse where the victim “expresses lack of consent through words or conduct,” or where the victim is younger than eighteen and a perpetrator who is more than three years older “entices or coerces the victim to submit.” It makes no difference whether the parties are married – though that’s irrelevant here, because no marriage license was ever issued. The accomplice liability statute is equally blunt: “Every person … who solicits, requests, commands, encourages, or intentionally aids another person to engage in conduct which constitutes an offense shall be criminally liable as a party for such conduct.”

I have now read the court’s opinion several times, and I must confess that I simply can’t follow the logic. Maybe you can. It seems to say that Jeffs lacked the “mental state” to cause a nineteen-year-old to have sex with a fourteen-year-old, even though that’s exactly what he ordered them to do, over the girl’s most strenuous objections. My purpose here is not to debate the legal reasoning, but to paint the religious background that I believe contributed to a bizarre result.
Read on…

A humanist analysis of bullying.  See link:

http://open.salon.com/blog/dave_niose/2010/04/10/understanding_bullying

Last Friday the U.S. Attorney for Hawaii announced grand jury indictments of 14 people for conspiracy to distribute marijuana. Not earthshaking news, but for the fact that the individuals freely admit what they are doing, and claim their activity is protected because they are part of a church, called the “THC Ministry.” THC is the abbreviation for the active chemical in marijuana; the THC Ministry proudly uses marijuana smoking as a sacrament.

Roger Christie, age 61, is the chief minister of the church. “We provide cannabis sacraments and we’re happy to do so. And it’s a sacred thing to us. I think that I am a legitimate, exempt ministry,” Christie said. “We’re standing for religious freedom, using cannabis in private, at home or church. And it’s a blessed, beautiful thing.”

U.S. Attorney for Hawaii Florence Nakakuni is unmoved by this argument. “There is a state medical marijuana law. There is no law that protects his allegations of using marijuana religiously,” Nakakuni said. But Nakakuni must know (or if she doesn’t, she should be disbarred) that the Supreme Court of the United States as recently as 2006 unanimously ruled that it was perfectly ok for a group claiming to be a South American Indian religion to import and use a hallucinogenic tea containing an illegal drug called dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Not only is there substantial scientific evidence of the brain damage caused by DMT, but the United States has entered into an international treaty in which we promised the rest of the world to ban it. Doesn’t matter. Every major religious authority, from the Southern Baptists to the Anti-Defamation League, lined up in favor of special breaks for drug abusers, because they (correctly) saw the issue as one of enhancing their own power against that of the elected civil government. So if you or I get high on DMT, we’ll be thrown into prison; because these people say they are God experts and God wants them to break the law, they go free. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict what kind of defense THC Minister Christie is going to present.

To get around the Supreme Court case, the prosecution will have to argue that THC Ministry is not a religion, but a fraud. And what exactly is the difference? A Toronto court is wrestling with exactly this question right now, in a case involving an organization strikingly similar to THC Ministry that calls itself the “Church of the Universe.” Just last month a government expert witness presented a report listing ten factors common to religions, and finding the Church of the Universe lacking in most of them. Defense attorneys quite properly ridiculed her, though, when she admitted that she had never actually spoken to anyone belonging to the Church, but had just read its website. They also quoted William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, who wrote that religion simply “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.”

What none of the reports about either case mention is the Rastafari movement centered in Jamaica, which probably scores pretty well on the ten-factor list. It’s as old as the religion involved in the 2006 case, it has something around a million followers worldwide, and its principal sacrament is the smoking of marijuana. Why don’t the Church of the Universe and the TMC Ministry just claim to be Rastafari affiliates?

The connection between religion and drug use is actually older and deeper than the THC Ministry may imagine. Rock paintings from 7,000-9,000 years ago preserved in the Sahara desert depict religious rituals involving hallucinogenic mushrooms. In one of the scenes, masked dancers hold a mushroom-like object in the right hand, with two parallel lines coming out of the object to reach the central part of the head of the dancer, apparently showing the effect of the mushroom on the mind. Rock paintings from the Stone Age period in eastern Siberia show mushroom gatherers with ornate earrings and an enormous mushroom on their heads, and figures with the stance of people trying to keep their balance. Stone carvings found in Guatemala also point to a mushroom cult which flourished there as long as 3,500 years ago. Read on…

Caner was Liberty University’s seminary dean, a position he rose to after only two years as a member of the faculty.  He was Liberty’s star player, booking speech tours and selling over a quarter of a million books.  He injected charisma and vitality into what he once referred to as a needlessly dry field of study.  So what made him different from all the other hyperactive Evangelical enthusiasts?  Caner was raised Muslim.

Born in Turkey, he claimed, he spent years in an Islamic extremist environment, even going so far as to confess himself a member of the Islamic youth jihad.  A child trained in the manner of the 9/11 assailants, he said.  Upon moving to Ohio as a teenager with his family, a friend brought him to a Christian church and thus he was “saved.”  How droll. 

In a post 9/11 country, Caner’s story of “redemption” was scooped up by the Christian right and worshipped on high.  He provided so-called insight into the seedy Muslim world and an assurance to terrified Christians everywhere that Muslims could see the “error of their ways” and convert.  He lectured, he pontificated, he told the Christian right what they wanted to hear about the religion they equally feared and despised.  How convenient, to be a Muslim guru and a Christian hero!  At the same time!

One problem: Caner wasn’t born in Turkey, but in Sweden, a fact he forgot to consider while penning a later book with his brother, inadvertently exposing the original fib.  Furthermore, it was revealed that his family had moved to Ohio years before Caner previously claimed. A little difficult to be a member of the youth jihad when you’re shoveling snow in the Midwest and listening to Peter Frampton like every other Ohio teen, wouldn’t you say? 

Suspicious observers were already on to him.  A web of controversy cropped up across the internet as curious Muslims and scholars detected error after error in Caner’s library of Islamic knowledge (if you want a laugh, search Ergun Caner on YouTube and watch an array of clips of Caner botching basic terminology and confusing customs).  Whispers culminated into action this spring as Liberty University launched a formal inquiry into Caner’s past.  Following a curt statement from Liberty University regarding the disappointing findings, Caner’s position as seminary dean was up for grabs. 

Caner was a used car salesman of Christian conversion hawking busted parts.  Mangled, dishonest and cheap, reeking of fraud and agenda.   Is he the first of his kind?  Most certainly not.  But his attempt was so shoddy, so arrogantly full of holes and awash in anti-Muslim hostility, his blunder seems like a well-timed, shrewdly planned investment in the culture of fear.  If this were the ’50s he’d be selling you hula-hoops (probably decorated with Red Scare propaganda and anti-communist slogans).  

Entertainers and artists have been known to stretch truths in the name of creation.  Though James Frey’s partially fictionalized (and fantastically written) memoir was shredded by the media, his defense in Vanity Fair was a relatively fair one:   “The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book. It’s just a story.”

But James Caner—excuse me, Ergun Caner—was not selling literature.  He was selling a religion, Christianity, wrapped tightly with an anti-Muslim bow, inspiring more fear and hatred in a climate already awash in prejudice.  He was peddling his life of redemption at the price of Liberty University’s tuition.  (And the man knows how to sell—under his guidance, seminary enrollment tripled.)  He was loved.  He was talented.  He was lying. 

Ergun Caner’s relationship with Islam is one I cannot comment on with any authority, but I believe that while attempting to make an example of Islam, he has made a mockery of the very religion he claimed to be promoting.  Just another zealous charlatan, he turned out to be a disappointment to the students who valued his teachings and a disgrace to non-violent Muslims attempting to live their lives free of harassment.    

Though Liberty University has not completely washed their hands of him—Caner will continue to serve as a member of the faculty this fall—his reputation has been considerably damaged and his credibility destroyed.  So what’s left for Ergun Caner?  I think he should focus on his strengths, seek out further education in an institution where he belongs: NYU’s Tisch School of Performing Arts.

We just passed the 175^th anniversary of an episode, inconsequential in itself, that kicked off a fascinating chain of events that may well have an impact on the 2012 election.

On June 30, 1835, a traveling showman named William Chandler rolled into the little town of Kirtland, Ohio. Chandler had purchased from the estate of a French adventurer named Antonio Lebolo a collection of genuine Egyptian mummies and hieroglyphic writings on papyrus, that Lebolo had stolen during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. Chandler’s investment was profitable, as Americans were willing to pay good money to gawk at such exotic artifacts. The problem with the hieroglyphics, though, was that no one knew what they meant. Except for one man: Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, who claimed to have a divine gift for translating “Reformed Egyptian.” So Chandler made his way to Kirtland, where Smith was then operating, to see if Smith had any interest in his collection.

Chandler hit a gusher. Smith instantly pronounced the writings to be the work of the biblical prophet Abraham himself, written in his own hand, and yes indeed he could translate them if given a little time. Shrewd businessman Chandler wanted cash; Smith raised the then-staggering sum of $2,400 from his congregation to buy the entire collection, including the mummies.

It took Smith several years to complete the translation, during which time he was occupied with other matters such as establishing a fraudulent bank, marrying dozens of wives, and touching off a minor civil war in Missouri. But when it finally was published in 1842, The Book of Abraham had a huge impact on Mormon theology. Among other things, it firmly established Mormon teaching on race.
Read on…

The Catholic Church is baring its teeth.

The first snarl came from Pope Benedict himself. Feeling his oats after a victory against gay marriage in the European Court of Human Rights, the pope slammed the door on glasnost in the sex abuse scandal, ordering his subordinates not to speak ill of their colleagues. Ironically, the target of the pope’s wrath had actually been defending the pope himself. Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna had been sticking up for Benedict, telling reporters that long before Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, he had sought a full investigation of the allegations against Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who was widely suspected of sexual abuse of young seminarians. Ratzinger’s initiative had been squashed, though, by Cardinal Angelo Soldano, who then served as the Vatican Secretary of State, and who is now dean of the College of Cardinals. So was Benedict pleased that Schoenborn was defending him? He was not; he sternly reinforced the chain of command, growling that “only the pope has the authority to accuse a cardinal” and that Church officials need to “show due respect” for one another. An institution genuinely committed to reform might encourage its members to go public when internal procedures fail to produce results; the Catholic Church censures them.

The Church slammed another door as well, filing a brief in a Kentucky case to prevent plaintiff’s attorneys from taking depositions of the pope and three other senior Vatican officials. The Church’s two arguments are downright silly. First, they say there has never been an official Vatican policy of hushing up sex abuse cases. But how can the court know what the Vatican policy is unless the plaintiffs are allowed to complete their discovery? The second argument may not be silly under the law — the brief says that Vatican City is a “nation,” recognized as such by American diplomacy, and allowing a court to subpoena its officials would be “akin to a foreign plaintiff seeking a foreign court order compelling the depositions of the United States President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and ambassador.” Legally, the sovereign immunity argument is probably a winner — which is just the latest evidence of the absurdity of recognizing Vatican City as a state, on the level of France or Japan.

With one European Court victory in its pocket, the Church pressed on for another, arguing that the government of Italy has the right to brainwash Jewish, Muslim, humanist, and other children by installing a Christian crucifix in every public school classroom. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re called the crucifix “an emblem of a universally shared humanity” — an odd description of an instrument of torture. Rather than just dealing piecemeal with one symptom after another, though, the Church launched an initiative to attack the root of the disease — secularism itself. “The process of secularization has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church,” the pope complained, and thus announced a new bureaucracy to combat “a progressive secularization of society and a sort of ‘eclipse of the sense of God.’” If the Church proclaimed a special campaign to target Jews, or Muslims, or Mormons, or Methodists, wouldn’t there be a storm of indignation? But targeting humanists gets a ho-hum from the press. What would they say about a humanist effort to target Catholics, on the grounds that they suffer from a sort of “eclipse of the sense of reality”? Read on…

Over the weekend, the number of people killed or hospitalized by a falling tree branch in Central Park increased to three so far this year. This is in addition to several individuals who were lucky enough to escape serious injury from falling branches. And it’s only June. At this rate, the park’s trees could easily claim a dozen victims by the end of the year. The public—understandably filled with anger, fear, and questions—is unlikely to be satisfied by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s response, who, quoted in the New York Times, called this weekend’s incident that killed a six-month-old girl “an act of God.”

This statement can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that the mayor was being imprecise. While its’ not entirely uncommon for someone to refer to a natural disaster euphemistically as an act of God, doing so assigns blame to an unseen entity rather than stressing the accidental nature of an event. If every mandated precaution is taken and still an unavoidable accident occurs, then one should say so rather than offhandedly blaming a God who will not speak out to explain. If, however, the accidents in Central Park were due to negligence then the situation needs to be investigated and the guilty parties should be held responsible.

The phrase “act of God” is often used in reference to life or death situations. At best it describes a wonderfully unlikely occurrence like winning the lottery or even the welcomed death of a suffering loved one. At worst the phrase is used hatefully to indicate God’s punishment for certain behaviors like blasphemy or homosexuality. In both cases the person who says it seems to believe in its literal meaning. Did Mayor Bloomberg believe that God himself used a tree to kill an innocent baby and destroy a young family? If that’s the case, I have to ask, where are the Christians on this one? They say that God is perfect and that we are made in his image; our national motto tells us to trust in Him. So when the newspaper headlines quote Bloomberg calling an infant’s death an act of God, why aren’t more people defending God? Especially given the park’s recent history, it seems that the accusation uses God as a scapegoat, portrays him as violently irrational, and suggests that no matter how innocent you are you could be struck down at any moment.  

Say that God doesn’t exist and you’ll be met with an angry mob but say he’s serially killing zoo goers and you’ll be met with a shrug.

I think the mayor’s statement should offend everyone. If you believe in God, he’s perverting your religion. If you don’t believe in God, he’s insulting you with false answers and may as well be blaming the boogeyman. Even if you don’t take his words literally, he’s still brushing off the issue and taking it less seriously than he should. Rather than looking to console the families, comfort the public, and prevent future incidents, the mayor is clearly more focused on the political aspect of absolving various organizations of guilt and directing blame away from officials. To convince the public that this incident was beyond human control makes it easier not to examine current protocols or make changes to prevent similar accidents in the future.

Bottom line: when an atheist cries, “don’t blame God!” perhaps it’s time to listen.

Yesterday was the last day of the US Supreme Court’s 2009-2010 term, and it was a busy one. Among the four decisions reached was one of the most important church-state separation cases in recent history, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

The case concerns a public university, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, a campus of the University of California system. Like all colleges, Hastings allows students to form organizations and officially register them with the school, which in return gives them access to certain resources, including preferential meeting room space, campus communication tools, and access to student activity funds. In return for this official status, however, Hastings requires registered student organizations to adhere to the university’s nondiscrimination policy, which forbids discriminating on a basis of, among other things, religious beliefs and sexual orientation, and requires student organizations to accept any Hastings student as a member.

And therein was the problem for the Christian Legal Society, a national organization that asked in 2004 that its Hastings chapter be exempted from the nondiscrimination policy because all its members are required to sign a statement of faith that, among other things, would forbid him or her to be gay or lesbian. Hastings declined to issue such an exemption and denied official status to the Christian Legal Society chapter, and a lawsuit shortly followed.

The Christian Legal Society’s argument that it had been discriminated against by Hastings College didn’t seem to hold any water with the lower courts: both the US District Court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Hastings, finding that there had been no discrimination against the Christian Legal Society. And so it came to pass that the US Supreme Court heard the case on April 19th, 2010 and issued its 5-4 ruling in favor of Hastings yesterday, on the last day of the court’s term.

In the ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority (PDF) that (emphasis added):

In requiring CLS—in common with all other student organizations—to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy. The First Amendment shields CLS against state prohibition of the organization’s expressive activity, however exclusionary that activity may be. But CLS enjoys no constitutional right to state subvention of its selectivity.

In other words, as the nondiscrimination policy applies to all student organizations, what the Christian Legal Society was actually asking for was preferential treatment that Hastings was not obliged to give.

In a succinct concurring opinion, retiring Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

Although the First Amendment may protect CLS’s discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them.
…
As written, the Nondiscrimination Policy is content and viewpoint neutral. It does not reflect a judgment by school officials about the substance of any student group’s speech. Nor does it exclude any would-be groups on the basis of their convictions. Indeed, it does not regulate expression or belief at all.

In other words, the real issue here isn’t whether or not Hastings allows the CLS to discriminate, but rather, whether or not Hastings must endorse that discrimination by making the CLS an officially registered student organization, with access to all of the university and student funded benefits therein. And the answer to that question from the five justice majority was a resounding “no.”

Divided as the current court almost always is, the three other conservative justices on the court joined Justice Samuel Alito on his dissent, in which he stated:

The proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”…Today’s decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.

But it is not at all clear from the case just how the freedom of expression of the CLS was hindered. At no time was freedom of speech denied for the CLS or its members. The organization was even allowed to meet on campus and hasn’t been inhibited from sponsoring events. But it will have to do so with less access to the resources provided by Hastings to official student organizations. The key is that Hastings College applies its anti-discrimination requirement equally and across the board to all student organizations, not just to the CLS, so if they refuse to comply with it, how can they then claim that they have been unfairly singled out?

Secular and civil liberties organizations all over the nation, including the American Humanist Association, Americans United, and the ACLU, applauded the ruling and celebrated this victory in such a vital separation of church and state case. To understand the significance, consider for a moment if it had gone the other way, and if the Supreme Court had ruled that Hastings was discriminating against the CLS by requiring them to adhere to the university’s anti-discrimination code. This would actually set aside religious student organizations as a special class that did not have to adhere to regulations that apply to other student organizations. It would have been a disaster for the separation of church and state, because students at Hastings would have been forced to support, through their own required student activity fees, an organization that would not even necessarily admit them as members!

Given the nature of the Hastings anti-discrimination policy, which is described as an “all-comers” policy, meaning that student organizations must accept as members all Hastings students who wish to join, rather than the more common university policy of disallowing any student group to discriminate based on certain criteria, it is not clear if this ruling will have far-reaching implications for universities across the United States. Ultimately the court stuck to the “all-comers” policy in its ruling, which it found to be viewpoint neutral when applied to all student organizations at Hastings, and the court did not rule on the broader question of other types of anti-discrimination policies.

Yesterday’s ruling was a great victory for the separation of church and state, and it was also a high note for the end of the final term of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is now retiring after a nearly 35-year long distinguished career of defending the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. He will surely take his place in history alongside other heavyweight rights-defenders of the Supreme Court, including Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall. He is truly a great American, and his presence will be sorely missed on the nation’s highest court.

Just over a week ago, Muhammad Parvez, and his 29-year old son, Waqas Parvez, were sentenced to life in prison by an Ontario court for the murder of Muhammad’s daughter and Waqas’ sister, Aqsa Parvez. Aqsa was a rebellious 16-year old, the youngest of 8 children. She objected to her father’s demand that she wear a traditional Muslim hijab, and wanted to get a job so she could have the money to lead a normal teenage life. After she ran away from home and then returned, she told her friends she feared for her life, because her father had sworn on the Koran that he would kill her if she ran away again. She was right. Three months later, after another battle royale over her disobedience in attending her first movie, Aqsa ran away again. Her brother picked her up from a school bus stop and took her home; half an hour later, she was dead.

In an interview with police, Aqsa’s mother, Anwar Jan Parvez, said her husband told her he killed his youngest child because “My community will say, ‘You have not been able to control your daughter.’ This is my insult. She is making me naked.” This evidence of what he called “a twisted and repugnant mindset” led Judge Bruce Durno to find it “profoundly disturbing that a 16-year-old could be murdered by a father and brother for the purpose of saving family pride, for saving them from what they perceived as family embarrassment.”

Nevertheless, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations refused to admit that this was a Muslim “honor killing,” saying it was just a case of domestic violence that can happen in any family.

Domestic violence happens everywhere, including the most secular of families. What Canadian CAIR and other defenders of Islam deliberately choose to ignore, though, is that a substantial body of Muslim scripture and tradition teaches people like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez that it is God’s will for them to impose this kind of punishment on disobedient daughters.

It is true that there is nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad that flatly states “Thou shalt kill thy unruly daughters.” There are even some passages in the traditions that can fairly be interpreted as encouraging lenience and mercy in cases of violations of the sexual code. The trouble is, the Koran and the traditions are a jumbled mess of conflicting commandments, and there is plenty of ammunition there to turn a case of wounded pride into homicide.

First, there is the extensive Muslim authority that females in general are subhuman; their testimony counts as half the testimony of a male [Koran 2:282], their inheritance rights are half those of males [Koran 4:176], and they need to be covered up and kept inside as much as possible to avoid tempting males into sin. Men can have multiple wives, but women cannot have multiple husbands. [Koran 4:3] God said in the Koran that “Men are in charge of women, because God hath made one to excel the other,” while ordering back-talking women to be scourged. Muhammad is reported to have added that: “Women are naturally, morally, and religiously defective.” You don’t see many alleged honor killings of males; daughters and sisters are the principal targets.

Then there are the laws commanding death for illicit sex. Sharia is a mass of contradictions on this point, but there is plenty of support for Muhammad’s saying that “For a fornicator, there is stoning.” Sometimes the punishments for men and women are equal, but sometimes they are not. In one notable case, Muhammad ordered an adulterous man to receive 100 lashes and exile for a year, while the woman was stoned to death.

Then there is the teaching on apostasy. Here Muhammad did not mince words: “If a Muslim discards his religion, kill him.” Even closer to the honor killing point is the Koran’s approving discussion of the murder of a boy by a God expert, in order to prevent the boy’s apostasy from corrupting his parents. [Koran 18:74-80] According to tradition, Muhammad himself opposed the killing of children, except where the killer knew that the child would grow up to be a non-believer. The evidence is pretty strong that the sum of Aqsa Parvez’s actions were tantamount to abandoning her religion; what’s a devout father to do?

A 12^th century Muslim legal manual of Umdat al-Salik, certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, today’s most respected authority in Sunni Islam, carries the logic one step further. It notes that normally “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” The province of Ontario is thus being highly un-Islamic in imprisoning Muhammad and Waqas Parvez.

All these ingredients make it easy for Muslim God experts to justify honor killing as divinely ordained, as many of them do. Savitri Gooneskere has carefully documented the honor killing teachings of imams in Pakistan. A Gaza journalist was refreshingly candid:

Deep down, we know that when a woman has disgraced her family, nothing will restore honor except by killing her. This is understood in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, the Gaza strip and the West Bank. So why are we Arabs telling the Western press that honor killing is cultural, that it is not really part of Islam? Our way of life is based on maintaining our honor. And make no mistake about it: a woman does tarnish her family’s honor by engaging in pre-marital sex, or by getting herself raped, when she seeks divorce and when she marries against her family’s wishes. And keeping our women pure is a big part of our honor. So there’s no point saying honor killing isn’t really part of our religion. Honor and Islam are inextricably bound; they are what give our life meaning. A strong religion demands we choose to maintain our honor.

So was the Islamist President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Commenting on the discovery of the bodies of seven women found by a roadside last year, he explained that they had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings. “If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them are killed,” he said, adding for good measure that “No one can tell us not to be Muslims. If anyone says I cannot be a Muslim, he is my enemy.”

Honor killing is not an isolated phenomenon. A United Nations study estimated the number of honor killings at 5,000 per year. Many arise from a daughter’s resistance to an arranged marriage, as occurred in Atlanta last year. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali went on a one-woman crusade to get the Dutch police simply to keep track of the number of honor killings in Holland, she was scorned for exaggerating the problem – until a pilot program in just 2 of the country’s 25 regions found 11 such killings from October 2004 to May 2005. After we “liberated” Iraq from the secular Baath Party regime and handed it to the Shiites, there were 47 documented honor killings in 2006 in Basra alone. Ayman Udas was killed by her brothers in Pakistan for bringing disgrace on the family by singing on television. A 4-year old Palestinian girl who had been raped by an adult was allowed to bleed to death, to preserve the family’s honor.

In Jordan, the Penal Code states flatly that “he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” A proposal to repeal this law failed when Jordan’s Islamic Action Front issued a fatwa saying that doing so would “destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity.” Syrian and Egyptian law also permit judges to reduce penalties in honor killings cases.

People like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez may or may not be able to cite any of these passages, much less traditions that lean the other way. That’s not the point. The point is that the God experts who do study these things and who have a stern paternalist view of the world spread the message, explicitly and implicitly, that a God-fearing father does not allow his daughter to run wild, and does whatever it takes to keep her in line. Putting the stamp of God’s approval on a dark impulse drives the Parvezes of the world over the edge. The ultimate answer is to wear down the credibility of the God experts themselves, so fewer and fewer people like the Parvezes care about what they say, leaving common sense and the common values of human society as their only guides.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) voiced disappointment yesterday in a US District Court verdict allowing a council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to occupy a building owned by the city of Philadelphia rent-free, despite the city’s attempt to end the lease because of the BSA’s discriminatory policies. The verdict was handed down after the scouting council sued the city for attempting to end the lease due to BSA’s discriminatory practices.
 
“The AHA is suggesting that everyone step back for a moment to consider how aggressive the BSA is willing to get in imposing its discriminatory policies on the public,” said David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association. “This shows that the BSA not only wants the right to discriminate, but that it still expects special treatment despite its unfair prejudices.  As the scouts sue the public to obtain special privileges that other groups don’t enjoy, we see in many ways that the BSA is no longer an example of model citizenship.”
 
The BSA has historically remained unapologetic and deliberate in its exclusion of gay youths and troop leaders, and has also banned the participation of atheists and agnostics. Many groups, including the AHA, have urged the BSA to adopt inclusive policies, such as those of the Girl Scouts of America, that would allow participation by gays and nonbelievers. 
 
The BSA argued that the city’s eviction attempt, which was based on a disagreement over the BSA discriminatory policies, was a violation of the BSA’s own constitutional rights. The BSA further protested the city’s offer to allow the group access to the building on the condition that rent be paid. 
 
“The BSA should be ashamed to demand free rent while at the same time continuing policies that discriminate against nonbelievers and gays,” said Niose. “If they want to discriminate, they should have enough decency to pay their way like everyone else.  As a defiantly discriminatory organization, the BSA has lost its exalted status.”
 
Though the city of Philadelphia cannot force the local BSA chapter to renounce the organization’s policy banning homosexuals, reports state that the possibility of negotiation still remains as the city decides what step should be taken next. 
 
“We believe that the City of Philadelphia’s non-discrimination policy fully comports with the American principle of equality and expect that the jury’s decision will be reversed on appeal,” said Bob Ritter, staff attorney and legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “It is totally indefensible for the Boy Scouts to discriminate against atheists and gays and receive substantial governmental benefits for doing so.”

Oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for two months now, and there still isn’t an end in sight. And day by day, the news seems to keep getting worse.

Faced with what very well may be the worst environmental disaster in US history, it is understandable that people feel frustrated, angry, and helpless, especially those who live on the Gulf Coast and are watching their livelihoods sink into the black muck that is lapping at their shores. And even as the black blob grows in the satellite photos, most people have nothing to do in response but wait as BP and the Coast Guard work to counteract the oil flowing out of the hole a mile below the surface of the ocean.

So I cannot sit here and tell people how they should or shouldn’t react to the spill and what actions they should take to try and do something about it. But still, there is something about this that rubs me the wrong way:

A resolution encouraging people to pray for an end to the BP oil spill crisis has been approved by the Louisiana Senate.

Sen. Robert Adley, a Republican from Benton, won unanimous approval of the resolution last week. The resolution made this past Sunday a state-designated day of prayer in Louisiana, during which people of all faiths in the state and around the nation will be encouraged to seek divine intervention to end the crisis.

As Senator Adley explained after the measure passed:

As the resolution details, “citizens are urged to pray for a solution to this crisis, each according to his or her own faith, to pray for God’s continued guidance and protection and to join in the observance of a day of prayer, seeking God’s blessings upon both our state and nation.” The resolution also calls upon the people of Louisiana to join together to pray for an end to the crisis which is threatening our environment, our culture and our livelihoods.

And here’s the real kicker:

“Thus far the efforts made by mortals to try to solve the crisis have been to no avail,” Adley explained. “It is clearly time for a miracle for us.”

It is true that all that mortal humans have attempted so far has failed to fully quell the massive leak from the seafloor. I can see how a believer might decide that it’s time to pray for a miracle. And while I object to state legislatures passing prayer resolutions, because I think that they’re an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, that’s not even the point I want to raise here.

Rather, I think that this prayer resolution, and other similar calls for prayer, are removing focus from where it needs to be. In short: God didn’t do this. Humans did. And only humans can fix it.

What’s happening in the gulf is not like an earthquake. It’s not a natural disaster, no matter what anyone says. The evidence for BP’s inadequate safeguards, negligence, and even recklessness, is growing. And beyond the specific instances of negligence that caused this particular disaster, it is reckless to risk such a spill occurring when it is clear that neither BP nor the US government had the tools and means to contain and control it after the well suffered a blowout.

So this call to prayer is really a request for God to save us from ourselves. And as he’s made clear in the past, all too many times, God is unable or unwilling or unavailable to do that.

So people may pray, if it makes them feel better, but at this time, it is vital that we remember what I would call one of the fundamental tenets of humanism: we should never gamble with the health of our planet, and we can’t count on anyone but ourselves to save us if we do. There’s nothing in this universe worth trading the Gulf of Mexico for, and if it is to be restored, humans will have to do the hard work (and BP better pay for it!). Over the decades ahead, we might be able to finally sop up most of the oil from the shores of the Gulf, but let’s never forget the lesson of just how much destructive power we hold in our (unclasped) hands.

As noted a month ago, the Texas Board of Education voted 8-7 against adding James Madison to a short list of thinkers who influenced the American Revolution, while adding Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin instead. Had they included Madison, Texans would have had a special opportunity to celebrate yesterday’s 225^th anniversary of one of his (and America’s) most important documents: the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which first appeared on June 20, 1785. But don’t let its age deceive you; many of its arguments appear to have been freshly written about issues facing America today.

James Madison was America’s most powerful exponent of the separation of church and state. He even tried, without success, to add a condemnation of officially established religion to the Declaration of Independence. As a member of the Virginia legislature at the height of the war in 1779, Madison supported Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which, among other things, would have eliminated taxpayer support for the Anglican Church in Virginia. Virginia’s legislature felt it already had its hands full opposing the British crown, and was unwilling to antagonize anyone else while the battle raged.

After Jefferson left for diplomatic duties in Europe, Madison became the bill’s prime sponsor. But even after the victory at Yorktown in 1781, legislators were still reluctant to step on the clergy’s toes – until, that is, Madison took his case, in the form of the Memorial and Remonstrance, directly to the people.

What moved Madison to action was a counter-proposal by his fellow revolutionary Patrick Henry, who disliked the Anglican establishment as much as Madison did. But instead of simply cutting off its funds, Henry proposed to have the taxpayers finance its competition. Under Henry’s proposal, a small tax for the support of the Christian religion in general would be imposed, and each taxpayer would be able to designate which Christian denomination his funds would support. Non-Christians, of course, would get nothing.

To Madison, this moved government in exactly the wrong direction. As he expressed so eloquently in the Memorial and Remonstrance, the proper function of government was not to promote fairness of division of spoils among the sects, but to keep out of the God business altogether.

The Henry-Madison fight generated intense interest throughout Virginia. More than 13,000 people signed petitions about it, in a state with fewer than 100,000 eligible voters. That would be the equivalent of nearly a million petition signatures in the state today – at a time when communication and transportation were exceedingly difficult. Among the petitioners, opponents of government support for religion outnumbered supporters by 12:1, and Henry’s proposal was defeated. The momentum generated by the defeat of the Henry bill carried over into final passage of Jefferson’s Statue of Religious Freedom:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

What makes Madison’s argument even more compelling is that it applies to so many issues of church and state that we confront today:

• “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” Did the Texas Board of Education have this in mind when it ordered school children to begin studying Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin?
• “The Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” We now have a president who insists on opening all of his appearances with a prayer, pre-vetted by a White House bureaucrat, who occupies the position of “competent judge of religious truth,” precisely so that the p Read on…

It’s not that often you can find Anglicans, Catholics, and Muslims presenting a united front. It takes a truly threatening common enemy to achieve that. This week in Australia, such an enemy arose: ethics.

Students in New South Wales, the nation’s most populous state, have been offered classes in the scriptures of a variety of religions for many years. The classes are not compulsory, out of respect for the wishes of families who do not want to have their children brainwashed with supernaturalism. There has been a stiff price to pay, though, for those willing to buck societal pressure and pull their kids out of religion class. For the only alternative offered to religion class has been no class at all. Children of humanists who opt out of religion class have been given only empty time, which they undoubtedly fill with exploring innovative ways of getting into trouble.

Someone in the New South Wales school bureaucracy decided that this was unfair, and that the same amount of taxpayer resources ought to be devoted to the children of humanists as to the children of supernaturalists. So they devised a class in ethics, in which students are encouraged to engage in discussions about fairness, honesty, care, rights and responsibilities. The class is now being tested in ten schools before being rolled out statewide.

From the reaction of the churches, you would think Satan himself was running the education department. The Anglicans are now even trying to stack the local Parents and Citizens Associations (equivalent to our PTAs) with people who otherwise wouldn’t participate, in order to get the trial cancelled. Why? Anglican Bishop Davies put it best:

It’s not about ethical instruction at all. It’s not about distinguishing between right and wrong. It’s more about ethical inquiry or metaethics. It’s a philosophy of ethics, and if you’ve seen clips of children in classes, they’re trying to express their point of view and they’re welcome to their point of view, but there is no education of right and wrong. It’s just what I think in my situation.

In other words, there is no catechism! There is no top-down instruction, for example that huge families are RIGHT and oral sex is WRONG. How are children supposed to figure out for themselves what is right and wrong unless they read God’s instructions in 2,000-year-old books?

God experts are especially outraged because students previously enrolled in scripture classes were allowed to switch to the new ethics class, contrary to what they claim was a promise when the program started. Free choice? Where in scripture does it say that’s a good idea? As the representative of the Australian Catholic Church put it, “They’re offering something in competition with SRE [Special Religious Education], and we don’t think that’s fair.”

Worse yet, the class actually encourages “thinking” about what is right and what is wrong in a given situation, rather than obediently following the dictates of the God experts. What could be better calculated to undermine the public’s willingness to pay God experts for answers than the realization that they can provide these answers for themselves? If children cannot be forced to sit through scripture memorization classes, far better to let them smoke in the lavatories than to encourage habits of probing and questioning on matters that God has already decided.

Australia is not the only country where this issue comes up. Four years ago in Bolivia, President Evo Morales introduced a proposal to replace Catholic religious instruction in state-run schools with ethics courses. Though Morales succeeded in implementing other radical ideas, he could not defeat the power of the Church, which threatened to take to the streets – supernatural brainwashing remains firmly planted in Bolivian schools. Two years ago in Quebec, compulsory religious instruction classes offered separately by each denomination were replaced by a generic “Ethics and Religious Culture” class, dealing even-handedly with all of the province’s major religions. The specter of young people being given the information with which to make their own choices about what, if any, set of supernatural beliefs they ought to adopt was so horrifying to Catholic authorities that they encouraged a boycott of the classes, even though it meant suspension from school. Even Rome got involved: Cardinal Grocholewski of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education fumed that “Talking in the same way about all religions is almost like an anti-Catholic education, because this creates a certain relativism.”

Here in the United States, the tradition of ethics education in the public schools goes back a long way, even if we didn’t call it that. Public schools in the 19^th century had more of a Protestant flavor than 21^st century humanists would prefer, but compared to the rest of the world they were quite tolerant and secular. Though they didn’t have a specially constructed course in ethics, they did have the McGuffey reader, which was explicitly intended to communicate moral values at the same time it taught children to read. (This used to be called “efficiency.”) We can argue about the relative merits of the moral values taught and omitted by the McGuffey readers, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that they ought to be resurrected in their original form. But that’s just the point: we can ARGUE about them, we can improve them, we can use our gray matter to see what works and what doesn’t and steer things in better directions over time. That’s exactly what happened with the McGuffey readers; scholars write books about how their moral messages evolved in a more humanist direction over the decades. We don’t have to let experts inform us what God’s will is on every ethical issue that comes up.

Of course, the leading opposition to the McGuffey reader concept was – you guessed it – the Catholic Church. Canon law made it a grave sin for a Catholic family to send its children to a public school in a place where a Catholic school was available. Archbishop John T. McNicholas, general president of the National Catholic Educational Association, explained that: “There must be no wall of separation between God and the child. The secularistic educators who raise this wall are, in reality, fascist educators, who, perhaps without realizing it, are planning to give our country millions of uncontrolled juvenile criminals.” For decades on end, Catholic congressmen blocked the idea of federal aid to education on the grounds that under our Constitution, Catholic schools would be excluded from it. In 1953, the Church even encouraged Catholics to violate the law by refusing to pay taxes to support public schools that did not include Catholic religious instruction:

An example in our land of what might be called an unjust law opposed to a human good insofar as it burdens a special group excessively is the legal tax arrangement whereby Catholics contribute a large amount in taxes for educational purposes but do not receive anything from these collected funds for the support of their own parochial schools. … Since these laws are unjust, Catholics could not be held bound in conscience, in light of the demands of legal justice, to pay the excessive taxation, except in order to avoid scandal or disturbance. … If because of the injustice a particular Catholic should refuse to pay a portion of his taxes, his portion of that set aside for schools, and as a result be brought before the court in contesting the law, the Catholic judge should do what he can to show the law’s injustice and to avoid its application.

One novel idea the Australians might want to consider would be to let the voters have a voice. In 2006, the city of Berlin approved a program in which ethics became a compulsory subject for all high school students. God experts hated this, for all the usual reasons, and last year won the right to a referendum on their alternative plan of offering separate classes for Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims, who would each get their own particular supernatural flavor. The referendum was supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, and generated intense coverage by the press with lots of paid advertising on both sides.

Under Berlin’s referendum rules, it is necessary for a proposal to win both a majority of the votes cast and at least 25% of the total registered voters in order to pass. Thus, staying home was almost the same thing as voting “No.” Even though this referendum was held on a Sunday, when churches could most easily maximize their turnout efforts, staying home is exactly what 70% of the Berliners did. Even among those who voted, a majority opposed introducing religion classes into the schools. American politicians who think that kowtowing to God experts is always smart politics should take note.

Luis Granados

Last week, heavily armed forces attacked a defenseless convoy of ships in international waters, temporarily seized its cargo, and stole the cash and personal effects of some 500 passengers. In the process, dozens of passengers were wounded, and at least nine were shot at close range and killed. A number of other passengers remain unaccounted for; some report that several persons were thrown overboard.

The convoy was carrying medicine, medical equipment, food, and toys for the people of Gaza, now suffering through their third year of an Israeli blockade. After a thorough search of the ships, the “weapons” the Israeli attackers found were kitchen knives (in the kitchen) and a safety razor.

Among the passengers who were tasered, shot in the face with paintballs at pointblank range and generally roughed up were two women journalists from Australia, whose cameras recording the mayhem were then confiscated.

One of the passengers who was shot through the forehead and killed was an American citizen, 19 years of age. Other Americans who were injured before being arrested included a retired engineer who planned to help rebuild private homes destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers. Another humanitarian aid ship that was seized by Israel on Saturday was named the Rachel Corrie, after a fearless young American woman crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza in 2003. Read on…

On Friday the meeting of the Texas Board of Education began with a prayer offered by member Cynthia Dunbar, a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Dunbar prayed “in the name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” on behalf of “a Christian land governed by Christian principles…I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses,” she said, adding that “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it.”

With the tone properly set, the Board proceeded to give final approval to a new set of standards to be taught in the state’s public schools. Voting strictly along party lines, the Republican majority decided, among other things, to remove a reference to Thomas Jefferson from history books, replacing him with the study of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.

The old standard:

Explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.

The new Republican standard:

Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.

I am all in favor of adding John Calvin to the list. The more students learn about his bigotry, his burning of heretics, and his dumbfounding notions of predestination, the better. His ideas certainly had an impact on New England’s Puritans; students should learn about the Massachusetts statute of 1641 providing the death penalty for blasphemy, or, for a lesser offense, mutilation of the tongue. They should also learn about the Massachusetts Calvinists who executed four people in 1659 for the crime of being Quakers.

Aquinas is a different matter. I’m drawing a blank on what relationship he has to the founding of America; his opus was more concerned with theological niceties like the different categories of grace and the nature of limbo. I suspect the board is just being politically correct here, tossing a bone to the Catholics if they were going to add the rabidly anti-Catholic Calvin. Being generous, I suppose Aquinas’ teachings in favor of slavery could have some relevance.

Part of the argument for leaving out Jefferson was that he didn’t have many original ideas, but merely implemented the ideas of others. Stretching my generosity to the limit, I could agree with that. Besides, he was a slaveholder, which ought to subtract a couple of points. But instead of omitting him altogether, how about replacing him with the guy who inspired many of his ideas, who has the added advantage of being one of America’s first abolitionists?

Jefferson planned the inscription for his own tombstone, and it mentioned only three of his accomplishments. Two of them were authoring the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Independence for the colonies wasn’t really his idea, though. At the dawn of 1776, almost no one was in favor of that. Greater local autonomy for the colonies, yes, but not outright independence. When full-scale warfare broke out, though, Americans didn’t appreciate being shot at by their benevolent British masters, and at this “teachable moment” a little pamphlet by Tom Paine, written at Ben Franklin’s suggestion, took America by storm.

Common Sense was written in the unflowery language of a non-professional educated in the school of hard knocks. Among simple colonists it struck a nerve, arguing not only for independence, but for the even more radical idea of not having a divine-right king at all, but a republic governed by elected representatives of the people—an idea not advocated by any of the other thinkers included in the new Texas standard. More than 500,000 copies of Common Sense were printed—not bad in a total population of 2.5 million, and by far the number one seller in America for the entire 18^th century. It changed minds. Washington himself wrote that the “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning” of Common Sense was working a “powerful change … in the Minds of men.” Even John Adams, never a Paine ally, admitted that “without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Six months later, the Continental Congress jumped on the bandwagon Tom Paine had set in motion, and assigned Jefferson the scrivener’s task.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, while highly important, also carries out ideas expressed more fully by Tom Paine in what by my reckoning is the most profound religious work ever written: The Age of Reason. From the outset, Paine rejects the atheist certainty that no supernatural force exists. “I believe in one God, and no more.” Yet he spends most of the book debunking the Christian Bible, in a manner rather contrary to Ms. Dunbar’s belief that the “Good Book” is our guiding genius. The Gospel story “has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. … [I]t is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with His wisdom, more contradictory to His power, than this story is.”

Paine finds God not in the glibness of the God experts, but in the world around us: “It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. … It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. … It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

Calvin and Aquinas based their entire systems on “revelation,” the idea that God communicated his will to certain experts. Calvin insisted that revelation was contained solely within the books selected for inclusion in the Bible; Aquinas taught that God also sends revelation telegrams into the brain of the Pope. Paine’s treatment of revelation is essentially unanswerable:

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.

Paine then dwells on the evil that God expert power has done the world across the centuries: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” He instead stresses reason and morality, eliminating the theological speculation of people like Calvin and Aquinas. But he shrewdly identifies the political problem with this simple approach:

Pure and simple Deism does not answer the purpose of despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming, like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state.

Which, of course, is precisely the kind of two-step Texas Republicans are trying to bring to the public education dance.

So instead of just shaking our heads about how backwards these new standards are, maybe there’s an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons here. A campaign, perhaps, to develop a lesson plan asking students to compare and contrast the ideas of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas with those of Tom Paine. That could surely get some minds moving.

UPDATE: Lacking in the divine guidance that enables God experts to be infallible, I made a rather egregious error in yesterday’s “Texas Two-Step” entry, which I regret. The Texas Board of Education, back in March, had approved preliminary standards removing Thomas Jefferson from a list of political philosophers to be studied in Texas schools, replacing him with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. On Friday, May 21, the board made a number of changes to the proposed standards, and then voted final approval. When researching my post on Saturday I reviewed a number of news articles about the events of Friday, none of which mentioned any change to the Jefferson decision, so I assumed that portion of the March draft had remained unchanged. It is now evident that I didn’t look hard enough, because in fact Jefferson has been reinstated to the list. Aquinas and Calvin are still in, but an attempt to add James Madison failed.

On the one hand, had Saturday’s search revealed that Jefferson had survived the cut, I would have arranged the post differently, noting that if the God experts get two additions to the list, our side merits at least one, and nominating Paine as a substitute if they don’t like Madison. On the other hand, now that the deed is done, I still think the single best choice for young Texans to study is Paine, that contrasting Paine with Calvin and Aquinas is a wonderful exercise, and that almost any opportunity to spread the ideas of Tom Paine is well worth taking. Admittedly, that sounds a little like Bush defending the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that even though we didn’t find any WMDs, the world is better off anyway. But at least I didn’t kill anybody.

Luis Granados

A woman is alive today in Phoenix, Arizona, and the “pro-life” Catholic Church is busily doling out its maximum punishments as a result.

The woman, whose name is not public, was 11 weeks pregnant. She was also seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension, a condition that does not go well with pregnancy – in fact, the combination is probably fatal. An Ethics Committee at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix convened to consider her case. The Committee, which included a Catholic nun named Sister Margaret McBride, determined that it was necessary to abort the fetus in order to save the life of the mother, and the procedure was quickly performed.

As a result, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, publicly announced that Sister McBride is automatically excommunicated from the Church, its gravest punishment. What does excommunication mean? She has already been demoted within the hospital, and I imagine she will be expelled from her order of nuns. If she has earned any pension rights within the order, they will probably be lost as well, since churches are exempt from the laws that govern the pensions of everyone else. No good Catholic may eat, play, or do business with a moral leper who has been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. If she is inadvertently buried in a Catholic cemetery, she must be dug up as promptly as possible and moved away. Until she is moved away, the whole cemetery where she is buried is considered defiled.

Bishop Olmsted is not deviating from Catholic policy here. He is following it to the letter: Canon law 1398 says that “A person who procures a successful abortion incurs an automatic excommunication.” According to canon lawyer Colin Donovan, quoted in a Spero News article of July 2, 2008,

Conspirators who incur the excommunication can be defined as those who make access to the abortion possible. This certainly includes doctors and nurses who actually do it, husbands, family and others whose counsel and encouragement made it morally possible for the woman, and those whose direct practical support made it possible (financially, driving to the clinic etc.).

In a similar case in Brazil last year, a girl who had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather since the age of 6 became pregnant at the age of 9 – with twins. Neither the girl’s mother nor her doctors thought that either the girl or the fetuses had the slightest chance of surviving a pregnancy, so a legal abortion was performed. Both the mother and the doctors were then excommunicated. Interestingly, the father was not – church authorities specifically pointed out that his sin was not nearly as heinous as that of saving the child’s life.

Such a procedure could not have been legally performed in Chile, Nicaragua, or El Salvador, where the Church has succeeded in criminalizing abortion even where necessary to save the mother’s life.

For the Church, the survival of the fetus is irrelevant. Ivory tower scholastics pick out one of the 613 commandments from the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not kill,” and apply it with ruthless disregard for particular circumstances. For example, consider the ectopic pregnancy, in which a fetus begins to grow outside the womb. It cannot possibly survive, and allowing it to remain will surely kill the mother. A mid-20th century book by Father Patrick Finney called Moral Problems in Hospital Practice, that was officially approved with the imprimatur of the Church, was crystal clear:

Question 35. In a case of ectopic pregnancy, which has been diagnosed as a case of unruptured tubal pregnancy, is it lawful, before the term of viability, to remove the unruptured tube with the living fetus, as a means of forestalling the danger to the mother’s life, upon the rupture of the tube?

Answer. No, it is not lawful. Such a removal is a direct killing of the fetus, and is therefore forbidden.

This was directly in line with a 1902 pronouncement of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome.

In his 1948 classic American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard attempted to estimate from the available data how many American women died each year as a result of the Church’s insistence that abortion is not allowed even where necessary to save the life of the mother. Though his methods were far from precise, they were not unreasonable. He concluded that the number was approximately 1,000 dead mothers per year. If he’s right about that, as an average across the century, that would mean that more Americans died from this Church teaching than died in World War I and Vietnam combined. That figure, of course, is just for America, which has only a small fraction of the world’s Catholics.

Remind me: Why is the moral authority of the Catholic Church thought to be even slightly higher than zero?

Luis Granados

Defenders of the Constitution lost another round in court last week. You may recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year, Michael Newdow and others filed suit to require the Chief Justice to administer his oath of office in the manner that is prescribed, word for word, in our Constitution. The Chief Justice had proposed, at Obama’s request, to modify the words by violating yet another rule of the Constitution, the one against government promotion of religion, by adding the prayer “So help me God” to the oath. The district court ruled against Newdow, and now the D.C. Circuit Court has affirmed that ruling.

In doing so, the court stated that every President since George Washington had added this prayer to the oath – a myth that I debunked last year. The court also said that it was too late for it to rule on a 2009 oath that had already happened, and too early to rule on future oaths that have not yet happened, a neat Catch-22 that appears to allow free reign for future violations without any judicial oversight whatsoever.

This matter brings to mind another situation involving religion in an oath of office, from 1775 France. For the preceding 250 years, officially Catholic France had been cracking down on its small Protestant minority. Six different civil wars were fought in the late 16^th century, which were finally put to rest when the leading Protestant prince agreed to unite the country by converting to Catholicism. A few years later, after being recognized as king, he issued the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing perpetual religious freedom for Protestants and bringing France unprecedented peace and prosperity. But the Pope called the Edict “the worst thing in the world,” and a zealous Catholic ultimately assassinated the king. Thereafter, the screws on France’s Protestants were turned progressively tighter. One favored technique, called the dragonnade, involved the forced quartering of French soldiers (who were often not nice young men) in the homes of Protestants, until their hosts would agree to convert to Catholicism.

Ultimately, in 1685, Louis XIV announced that there were no Protestants left in France, and thus repealed the “perpetual” Edict of Nantes altogether. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants then fled the country, crippling its economy just at the time when Louis was nearing hegemony over all of Europe, thus ruining his plans.

French Protestantism was ultimately saved by Voltaire, even though he despised it as being even more unreasonable than what was then an agreeably decadent Catholicism. In 1762 a Toulouse Protestant named Jean Calas was brutally tortured and executed for having murdered his son for allegedly having decided to convert to Catholicism, despite overwhelming evidence that the son had simply committed suicide. Voltaire made the case a cause célèbre, hammering away for years at the total lack of evidence of the son’s proposed conversion, and the physical impossibility that his death could have occurred the way the judges said it did. Ultimately Voltaire succeeded in getting the central government at Paris to review the case, despite its arguable lack of authority to do so; by a vote of 40-0, the review panel concluded that a terrible injustice had been done, while blaming the intolerance against France’s Protestant community for the outrage.

At a late stage of the Calas campaign, Voltaire published his brilliant Treatise on Tolerance, demolishing the folly of religious bigotry throughout recorded history. The Calas verdict and the Treatise both made a deep impression on French public opinion, and by the time the future Louis XVI was ready to be crowned in 1775 he had determined in his own mind to restore the freedoms of the Edict of Nantes. But there was one enormous problem: in the oath of office to be sworn before God and the nation at the time of his coronation, he had to swear to exterminate all heretics from his dominions. He wasn’t king yet, so he couldn’t change the oath. What to do, what to do …

History does not regard Louis XVI as being particularly intelligent or brave, as he blundered his way into what became the French Revolution. But his strategy at coronation, though ignominious, is hard to criticize. Before the assembled nobility and hierarchy of France in the majestic cathedral of Reims, as he solemnly intoned his coronation oath, when he got to the part about exterminating the heretics, he mumbled. (For those of us who have difficulty with a language that only pronounces half its letters, spoken French often sounds mumbled anyway.) To this day no one knows exactly what he said. The presiding cardinal was either too surprised, too inattentive, or too timid (or some combination thereof) to ask him to the repeat the words. Louis would never reveal what he said; but when shortly thereafter he began removing the legal disabilities on French Protestants, he was safe from the charge of having violated his oath.

How different the Obama approach! The words “So help me God” do not appear in the oath as it is delineated in the Constitution, a document notable for never using the word “God” at all. This was no accident; there was extended debate at the Constitutional Convention about whether the fundamental law of the land should refer to God, and the humanist side won. When George Washington first took the oath, he apparently said it the way it was written; there is no evidence that any other President until Chester Arthur in 1881 chose to re-write the oath. Obama was simply pandering to the God experts by ignoring the Constitution, as other politicians do.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn from contrasting these two oath modifications, it is that legal formality does not matter as much as culture. Voltaire and his adherents changed the culture of 18^th century France by making people ashamed of the prevailing intolerance. Once that happened, it made no difference what the law prescribed – even a creampuff like Louis XVI found the backbone to do the right thing. In 21^st century America, the God experts are allowed to have such unquestioned command over the culture that a smart fellow raised in a humanist household like Obama knuckles under, injecting a supernatural element into a civil oath where it does not belong.

So we need another Voltaire, right? Not going to happen. What can happen, though, was foreshadowed by Prince Talleyrand in 1815: “There is someone who is cleverer than Voltaire, cleverer than Bonaparte, cleverer than any of the Directors, than any Minister in the past or in the future; and that person is everybody (tout le monde).” In the 21^st century, tout le monde is empowered by this marvelous invention called the Internet, which has the same potential for weakening the stranglehold of supernaturalism as the printing press had 500 years ago. Écrasez l’Infâme!

Via Think Progress, I see that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) thinks he has a novel solution for the problem of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. The website Good As You posted the audio, which Think Progress helpfully transcribed, of a discussion between Rep. King and Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-gay religious right group Family Research Council. King was discussing how a Republican state senator from Iowa named Jerry Behn used to try and make LGBT activists guess his sexual orientation in order to make a point.

KING: And he said, ‘let me ask you a question.’ ‘Am I heterosexual or am I homosexual?’ And they looked him up and down, actually they should have known, but they said, ‘we don’t know.’ And he said, ‘exactly, my point. If you don’t project it, if you don’t advertise it, how would anyone know to discriminate against you?’ And that’s at the basis of this. So if people wear their sexuality on their sleeve and then they want to bring litigation against someone that they would point their finger at and say ‘ you discriminate.‘ …This is the homosexual lobby taking it out on the rest of society and they are demanding affirmation for their lifestyle, that’s at the bottom of this.

Rep. King unconsciously distilled the essence of what we could call straight privilege into an easily comprehensible form. He just explained how easy it is to be straight. He doesn’t have a clue how a person hides his or her own sexual orientation or what it feels like, because he doesn’t have to. He thinks that there is some insight to be gained from that story, but he is merely illustrating his blindness to his own straight privilege, along with the fact that upon first glance it may be difficult to ascertain the sexual orientation of some people.

But has he ever had a job where he had to hide a significant portion of his life from his colleagues, all the time, for fear of being fired for being gay? Has he ever had to lie or deny that he has a partner because he didn’t want his colleagues to know that he was living with another man? Has he ever had to tell his partner not to call him at work, because he didn’t want people figuring out that he had a boyfriend? Has he ever had to hide a significant part of his own identity, simply because bigoted co-workers might make his life miserable if they found out that he was gay?

This is what Rep. King is demanding that LGBT people do in order to be able to avoid discrimination in the workplace. And, as a matter of fact, this is what millions of LGBT people do at their jobs every day. Only 21 states, the District of Columbia, and over 140 cities and counties currently forbid discrimination in the workplace against gays and lesbians. Anywhere else, you can be fired from your job if your boss finds out about your partner, whom you were so desperately trying to keep secret, or finds out that you were seen walking out of a gay club on a Friday night.

Rep. King’s statement is just further evidence that federal protection is needed. The time to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is now!

One last point: Rep. King is clearly talking about LGBT living out of the closet when he refers to “people wear[ing] their sexuality on their sleeve.” But the truth is, straight people do this too. Straight people talk about their straight lifestyle, they talk about their husbands or wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, they hold hands in public, they put pictures of their families in their work spaces. Straight people are very open about their sexual orientation. Why? Because it is a part of their identity, and there are no harmful consequences in American society for being open about it. LGBT people are demanding the same thing; they want to live openly, as themselves, in America, in their jobs and in their private lives, without worrying about harmful consequences that come about from bigotry.

Many people’s anti-LGBT attitudes won’t change over night, but a huge step in the right direction would be passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to ensure that no one can be legally penalized at work simply for their sexual orientation. To learn more, and to see what you can do, visit the Human Rights Campaign’s action page on ENDA.