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…

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 the rest of this entry &raquo

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 the rest of this entry &raquo

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 the rest of this entry &raquo

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 the rest of this entry &raquo

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.

Happy National Day of Reason! Today we commemorate that most vital of human faculties, the ability to reason, while maintaining vigilance against encroachment on the separation of church and state here in the USA. And it is not a coincidence that today also falls on the National Day of Prayer, the congressionally mandated prayer day that was instituted in 1952 and is implemented every year by presidential proclamation. While this year was no exception, hopefully the National Day of Prayer is not long for this world.

For this National Day of Reason, which is being celebrated around the nation with commemorative events, city proclamations, and even a visit to Robert Ingersoll’s grave, I wanted to consider for a minute an idea put forth in a Los Angeles Times op-ed by the writer Marc Cooper, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine. He humbly suggests, in light of the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, that rather than agonizing over the lack of protestants on the court, President Obama should do something completely different (and what some may even regard as radical):

Though the court without Stevens will be left with six Catholics and two Jews, the open seat should not go to either domination. Nor should it go to a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Muslim or even a Zoroastrian. If it did, that would make nine people who all have one religious principle in common: a belief in religion.

Clearly, the next person to take the bench should be an atheist.

An atheist on the high court? Is this guy crazy? Who would ever have supported such a thing?

While few sitting politicians have the political courage to name a declared nonbeliever, it is something that Thomas Jefferson (and several others among the founders) might well have done.

In an 1823 letter to John Adams, Jefferson was forthright about his views of religion, and Christianity specifically. “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter,” Jefferson wrote. “But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

In other words, Jefferson liked what Jesus, the man, stood for, but could definitely do without the rest of the bunk.

For those who do not support the separation of church and state, it is one of the most supremely uncomfortable facts in U.S. history that so many of our nation’s founders were skeptics on matters of religion. Besides coining the phrase “wall of separation between Church & State” in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson also edited his own version of the Bible, with all supernatural elements excised (perhaps this is why the religious-right dominated Texas State Board of Education recently demoted him within the state social studies standards). So I think Mr. Cooper is on pretty solid ground here when he asserts that President Jefferson would have considered such an appointment to the court.

So why appoint an atheist to the Supreme Court? Cooper says:

Having an atheist justice, however, would not primarily be a matter of identity politics and some sort of equal representation. Rather, a nonbeliever justice would be a mighty blow in favor of the secular principles of “reason and freedom” of which Jefferson spoke.

Heaven knows we could use some more of that stuff. Religion plays far too influential a role in our political and civic life as is. I personally don’t care what sort of superstition makes you sleep better at night, but I think we would all benefit if you left it behind closed doors and kept it as far away as possible from public policy. How about a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell?

Consider how many of the cases that go in front of the court directly impact atheists and other freethinkers and nonreligious people. For example, a stark reminder was provided last October as to just how obtuse a Supreme Court justice could be on the question of whether or not a large Christian cross on a government land preserve (ostensibly there as a memorial to the dead of World War I) actually constituted a religious symbol. At the oral arguments for the Salazar v. Buono case, the following remarkable exchange took place between Justice Antonin Scalia (a conservative Catholic) and the attorney representing the American Civil Liberties Union, Peter Eliasberg:

JUSTICE SCALIA: The cross doesn’t honor non-Christians who fought in the war? Is that — is that –

MR. ELIASBERG: I believe that’s actually correct.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Where does it say that?

MR. ELIASBERG: It doesn’t say that, but a cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins, and I believe that’s why the Jewish war veterans –

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. It’s the — the cross is the — is the most common symbol of — of — of the resting place of the dead, and it doesn’t seem to me — what would you have them erect? A cross — some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Moslem half moon and star?

MR. ELIASBERG: Well, Justice Scalia, if I may go to your first point. The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew. (Laughter.)

MR. ELIASBERG: So it is the most common symbol to honor Christians.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.

MR. ELIASBERG: Well, my — the point of my — point here is to say that there is a reason the Jewish war veterans came in and said we don’t feel honored by this cross. This cross can’t honor us because it is a religious symbol of another religion.

Consider the implications of a Supreme Court Justice actually arguing that the Christian cross represents all Americans! As if it were identical to our national flag or otherwise served as some sort of universal symbol!

This isn’t to say, of course, that a justice on the Supreme Court must be a nonbeliever in order to respect and promote the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. As Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has documented, Justice Stevens, a protestant, has been one of the nation’s greatest friends to religious freedom and the separation of religion from government.

But with this new vacancy coming up on the court, isn’t it time, as Marc Cooper argues, to ensure that the large number of American nonbelievers are represented? Isn’t it time to install a voice for reason and secular judgment on one of the most powerful institutions in the United States? Isn’t it time for President Obama to nominate a nonbeliever?

I know, I know…I’m not going to hold my breath. But times are changing and the power of atheists, humanists, and other nonbelievers is growing. We’ll get there. In the meantime, happy National Day of Reason!

On May 4, 1970, several thousand students gathered at midday at Kent State University in Ohio to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the presence of National Guard troops on campus. The demonstration followed several days of tension and violence on campus and in downtown Kent following President Nixon’s April 30th announcement of a major incursion into Cambodia by American and South Vietnamese troops. In the days leading up to May 4, riot police used tear gas to disperse demonstrating students, the ROTC building was burned down, and the governor of Ohio ordered Kent State to be occupied by Ohio National Guard troops.

By noon the National Guard commander had issued an order for the demonstration to disperse, and guardsmen began to use tear gas to break up the demonstrators (some of whom had been throwing stones or throwing the tear gas canisters back). Oddly, by the time the actual killings took place, many of the students thought that the main action of the afternoon was over and had started to walk to class. But about a dozen members of Troop G of the National Guard suddenly turned and fired into the crowd of student demonstrators. Many bullets met their mark; four students lost their lives, and nine more were wounded. The guardsmen later asserted that they felt threatened by a mass of protesters, and no one was ever punished or held accountable for the killing of the four unarmed students, all of whom were several hundred feet away from the guardsmen who fired.

The killings at Kent State galvanized a national student protest movement, with demonstrations and student strikes on hundreds of college campuses across the nation in the following days. And over time the public support for the war in Vietnam and Cambodia crumbled.

Today Kent State University is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the attacks. A New York Times reporter spoke to freshmen on campus, and found that many of them don’t feel a strong historical connection with what happened at their university forty years ago.

Fourteen of 15 freshmen interviewed on the campus said they did not feel any connection with the lives of the students who were protesting the United States’ invasion of Cambodia at the time.

The university requires first-year students to watch a historical video of what happened that day and the events leading to it: the violent confrontation between protesters and local police and the burning of the R.O.T.C. building near the Commons.

Freshmen attribute their lack of interest to the time span.

“Our generation doesn’t necessarily really care because it happened so long ago none of us were alive,” said Ethan Moore, a freshman majoring in nursing. “Though it definitely shouldn’t be forgotten because they were people, too.”

Of course, the opinion he expressed was not universal; another student that the reporter spoke to said that had she been there forty years ago, she would have been out there with the Kent State demonstrators. Nevertheless, I wonder if freshmen at Kent State (or at any university) can truly conceive of what it must have felt like to students and antiwar demonstrators all over the United States to know that soldiers had used live ammunition on their fellow Americans, leaving four unarmed people dead. The division between state and civil society must have felt complete and irreconcilable—at least, that’s what I always thought Neil Young meant when he sang “We’re finally on our own” in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song “Ohio.”

Forty years have passed since the day the National Guard gunned down the students at Kent State. And yet, eerie parallels exist between 2010 and 1970. Today the United States is engaged in two intractable and long-asting wars on the Asian continent. But where is the anti-war movement? While there was a mass uprising in 2003 against the war, it climaxed during the February 15, 2003, pre-war demonstrations. Ever since then, the anti-war movement has gradually but surely diminished.

Why has this happened? Journalist Chris Hedges, who recently participated in an anti-war teach-in in Washington, DC, at the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill (an event that was co-sponsored by the Humanist magazine), believes that not enough anti-war liberals in the United States are actually affected by the wars. He writes:

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military.

In contrast to 1970, when young men were being drafted to serve in the front lines of Southeast Asia, today a very small number of Americans are being called upon to actually bear the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as Hedges points out, many of those who do serve in the military come from the economic class that has less access to power, less visibility in the media, and less access to the institutions that can be used as a springboard into wider action against the war, such as universities. The result is a diminished anti-war movement.

I would suggest, too, that fatigue and confusion have both taken their toll. By fatigue, I mean that the war in Afghanistan has lasted nearly a decade, and the war in Iraq has lasted more than twice as long as American involvement in World War II. It is difficult to keep up the energy and momentum that the anti-war movement built up in its initial days for all of those years. And by confusion, I mean that the election of President Barack Obama has engendered a lot of bewilderment on the part of those who took strong stands against the wars over the last decade. After all, President Obama spoke out forcefully against the war in Iraq when he was a state senator in Illinois and the war was just on the horizon. He received the vast majority of the anti-war vote, and he promised to bring a more peaceful presidency. Yet even as we’re told that the war in Iraq is winding down, President Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan (an action that was also, contradictorily, part of his platform as a candidate). So the anti-war movement is left with a president who does not galvanize them like President Bush did, even as he takes actions that many still consider to be belligerent.

The anti-war movement today may be smaller, but that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. For just one example of what we could be doing, right now, to make a difference, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), an outspoken anti-war member of Congress, made the call at the Capitol Hill event for a new series of teach-ins across the country to educate people about the wars and the need for peace.

Will we heed Rep. Kucinich’s call to challenge “the deficient orthodoxy that war is inevitable”? Let us rededicate ourselves to the idea that those four students gave their lives forty years ago today for a worthy cause, the cause of peace in this world, and honor their legacy by living our lives for peace.

Today the Los Angeles Times contained an opinion piece by Neal Gabler, a biographer of Ted Kennedy, titled “Politics as religion in America.” In the piece Gabler argues that segments of the right have become dogmatic and zealous in their political beliefs.

According to Gabler,

For centuries, American democracy as a process of conflict resolution has been based on give-and-take; negotiation; compromise; the acceptance of the fact that the majority rules, with respect for minority rights; and, above all, on an agreement to abide by the results of a majority vote. It takes compromise, even defeat, in stride because it is a fluid system. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once put it, the beauty of a democracy is that the minority always has the possibility of becoming the majority.

Religious fundamentalism, on the other hand, rests on immutable truths that cannot be negotiated, compromised or changed. In this, it is diametrically opposed to liberal democracy as we have practiced it in America. Democrats of every political stripe may defend democracy to the death, but very few would defend individual policies to the death. You don’t wage bloody crusades for banking regulation or the minimum wage or even healthcare reform. When politics becomes religion, however, policy too becomes a matter of life and death.

Gabler concludes by opining that “for the political fundamentalists, this isn’t political jousting, this is Armageddon. With stakes like that, they will not lose, and there is nothing democrats — small ‘d’ and capital “D” — can do about it.”

Drivel. Gabler’s argument rests on two assumptions that are simply without merit. First, he assumes that the right is unique in this “political fundamentalism”; he is wrong. Second, he believes that “political fundamentalism” is something new; it’s not.

“Political Fundamentalism” is a vague term. For Gabler it seems to refer to political beliefs that are held with religious fervor. Insofar as one truly holds a religious belief—so let’s exclude many people of faith who are, for lack of a better description, hypocritical—it inherently taints one’s political beliefs. Take Christianity as an example. The Gospels (in the broad sense of the term, the Good News) are political in nature. Jesus walked with lepers, prostitutes, and other outcasts. But most importantly, to me at least, he taught that “the poor would be poor no more” (this is a line I heard Sister Helen Prejean say at a book talk and have never forgotten). These are political messages, challenging the castes of the age and promising a better world for the downtrodden. While this isn’t directly related to health care (although he did heal), taxation (although tithes are still compulsory in countries with state-supported churches), or the place of the state (although the Romans did adopt Christianity and states made war in the name of it), Jesus was reshaping the polity; and it is undeniable that he was successful in that endeavor, even if the results were arguably malign.

While I interpret Christianity, as do many, as requiring certain benevolent political viewpoints, I realize Gabler’s issue is not with the religious, but with those for whom politics becomes like faith. But Gabler never defines how large this group is, names a single member, or anything else; we just know that they are the fringe right. But is there not a fringe left as well? Good luck convincing a Wobblie that capitalism is anything but an evil that must be opposed even at the cost of life. Has the Animal Liberation Front not violently destroyed property and life in the name of animal rights? No matter how reasonable one argues, you will never convince half of Hollywood that the Republican Party is anything but a blight to be fought with all one’s resources.

Furthermore, such virulent political stances are as old as the United States itself. America is born out of the Sons of Liberty, and the Declaration of Independence was signed despite the fact that Britain had shown a willingness to compromise and backed down on many of the taxes. Lincoln was shot over politics, as was Alexander Hamilton. You couldn’t compromise with McCarthy, Malcolm X, or Ross Perot. Martin Luther King held his political beliefs so zealously he even had the gumption to attribute them to God.

No, Mr. Gabler, you have provided no insight into the current political discourse. What we have seen in the last decade was the over-reach stage of conservatism. Liberalism had its stage too, think of the 1968 protests in Chicago. Many of the hardcore and uncompromising members of Congress have lost their seats, Gingrich is gone, and 2006 was a “thumpin’” for republicans.  Relax Neal, it’s just politics.

Monday’s LATimes contained an interesting piece on the Bald Eagle. In essence, many Indian tribes have religious practices, such as the Sun Dance, that require Bald Eagle… ahem…parts. The Bald Eagle is a protected species—even more so than other listed species due to a special act of Congress—and so an obvious tension emerges; how can the federal government protect the animal while simultaneously protecting the religious rights of native Americans?

Currently, the federal government runs a depository of dead birds and has a licensing program. The licensing program has been plagued with problems—many people are apparently unaware of it—and the depository has a long waiting list for many Eagle parts. To avoid long waits, some Indians occasionally shoot birds without a license and find themselves fugitives as result of their religious beliefs.

Larger than the Indian issue, this does raise some moral and political questions for those of us who avow a separation and church and state. I think many people would agree the Indians have a right to these birds; Indians have been hunting and shooting the birds since before the Europeans arrived. Simultaneously, government has an interest in protecting all endangered species. How do we rectify these conflicting priorities?

We could make like the soviets and just outlaw religion. Problem solved. But, of course, that’s absurd. On the opposite end of the spectrum we could say any religious belief is a right, but that’s a slippery slope. The government would then be in the business of defining what is and isn’t a religion (granted they already do this for tax purposes but look at the fight it causes over things like Scientology). Also, someone could have some insane beliefs that direct them, for example, to extinguish a species that is the devil incarnate or to practice human sacrifice. Do we really want to play an even worse version of the snake-handler game?

Obviously, then, the answer lies somewhere between these two extremes. At some degree between zero and 180 is where we have been situated throughout history. The attempt to move the needle slightly one way is why groups like that AHA exist. Even though we claim to be proponents of religious liberty we cannot sit here and seriously say all peoples with a religious need have a right to shoot Bald Eagles at will. Defining that need is the purpose of the licensing program. To eliminate that is to open a can of worms so messy as to all but sign an extinction warrant for the Bald Eagle.

The current Bald Eagle services provided to the Indians by the federal government are pretty reasonable; they are by no means perfect, but the only other option I can see is to farm raise the birds. We do it with fish, why not birds? Is it even feasible, or will it devolve into the shame that is poultry production? Does a farm-raised bird even have the same essence as a wild one? Is that better, is that worse?

The current Utne Reader (their 25th Anniversary issue) features an article by Tom Jacobs called “Liberals Aren’t Un-American. Conservatives Aren’t Ignorant” (excerpted from the magazine Miller-McCune), which highlights the theories of Jonathan Haidt. Haidt, a University of Virginia Psychology Professor, believes both conservatives and liberals skew the moral argument and demonize each other even though they are interdependent. Haidt believes, perhaps correctly, that conservatives strive to uphold authority while liberals challenge it. He believes that if conservatives ran the world we would resemble North Korea and if liberals ran the world it would be chaos.

Haidt believes that morality is built on “five foundational moral impulses.” These impulses are

• Harm/Care: It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/ Reciprocity: Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-Group Loyalty: People should be true to their group and wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/ Respect: People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
• Purity/ Sanctity:The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination, and associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

In the broadest sense, a moral entity would be one that contains all the above categories to some extent. According to Haidt, liberals are focused on the first two while conservatives are focused on the last three. He may be onto something; his website, YourMorals.org, allows you to take a quiz and see the results for not just yourself but also other self-identified liberals and conservatives. According to his results, in the aggregate liberals do emphasize the first two and conservatives the last three.

I’ve heard conservative/liberal morality arguments before; George Lakoff’s Moral Politics comes to mind. I’ll say exactly what I said in my review of that book in college, it’s all bunk. Haidt’s questions are so devoid of context and so complex as to be stupid. Here are a few examples:

• Respect for authority is something all children need to learn
• People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed
• People should be loyal to their family members, even when family members have done something wrong
• If I were a soldier and disagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because it was my duty

After each of these questions, and more, you are given the choice to strongly, moderately, or slightly agree or disagree. These are complicated questions, how on earth are you supposed to answer with a bubble sheet?

Children do need to learn to respect authority but they should also learn to challenge authority and call a teacher out when they say something wrong. Where on the agree/ disagree scale is that choice?

Should people do disgusting things? Who is going to answer that people should? And individuals might disagree, for example, on just how disgusting it would be to defecate in the woods out of necessity.

Should people be loyal to their family? What exactly does this mean, do I not turn my sister into the cops for a triple homicide, or do I act civilly the day after we have a fight? These are very different things with different answers and you cannot express it on the agree/disagree scale.

Would you follow orders if you were a soldier? Yes and no. If my commanding officer told me to hook electrodes to a guy’s testicles for fun I would have him court marshaled. If he decided to enter a town from the south as opposed to the north I would shut my mouth and do it. It depends on the context, it depends on the order, and it depends on your relationship with that officer.

All of these questions have a lot of context and complicated answers that this test does not allow for. All Haidt is really measuring is responses to key words that appear throughout the questions: authority, harm, loyal, duty, and more. So self-identified conservatives react more favorably to the word loyal, I fail to see what that has to do with morality or politics.

Politics is a complicated area. It does derive from people’s morality, I don’t deny that. But it is so much more complicated than Heidt’s test allows; there is the cult of personality, self interest, and parental party affiliation all playing into how people vote. Politics is much more about who gets what, when then it is about legislating morality. Haidt’s research is interesting, I give him that, he has shown that self-identified conservatives and liberals react differently to loaded words, but it is a mistake to believe that anyone’s politics, much less their morality, can be measured.

Columnist Bob Herbert has a must-read piece in today’s edition of the New York Times about what happened when justice failed and an innocent man was put on death row in Texas.

Referencing an article appearing in this week’s New Yorker (which can be read here), Herbert reports that on December 21, 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham was at his home in Corsicana, Texas, asleep. His two-year-old daughter and twin one-year-old daughters were in another room. He awoke when he heard the cries of his oldest child, and he quickly found that their room was being engulfed by fire. Herbert tells us what happened next:

Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.

There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern) that they interpreted as evidence of arson.

Even though investigators couldn’t determine any motive for Willingham to kill his own children, nevertheless he was arrested and charged with capital murder. Willingham declined a plea deal that would have spared his life and maintained his innocence for the twelve years that he sat on death row. He was executed on February 17th, 2004.

Herbert points out that in the weeks leading up to Willingham’s execution, a leading chemist and fire expert named Gerald Hurst reviewed the arson investigator’s case against Willingham and knocked down key pieces of evidence. This didn’t persuade the state to spare Willingham’s life. Nevertheless, as part of an official review of the state of Texas’s mishandling of forensic evidence, another fire expert named Craig Beylor reviewed the Willingham case and recently released a report on the evidence that sent Willingham to his death. Herbert writes:

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

It looks like Willingham was completely innocent of murder and the house fire that claimed the lives of his daughters was a tragic accident. His execution by the state of Texas is irreversible. And it was the scientifically unsound testimony of an incompetent fire investigator (along with a jailhouse informant who was later shown to be unreliable) that put Willingham in the death chamber.

Now, there are some obvious lessons to be learned here. First, the justice system absolutely must be adapted to keep up with the latest advances in forensic science, even after a prisoner is convicted. Like any science, forensic criminal investigations are subject to rapid advances, and older techniques may no longer be reliable or represent the best interpretation of the evidence available. With a prisoner sitting on death row for twelve years, it is likely that advances made in forensic science during that period of time may affect his case. And while opponents to this idea will point out that the courts may be tied up reviewing evidence in settled cases, nevertheless, in a case like this, where a man’s life is at stake, the state can do no less. The protection of innocent life is always paramount. If previously heard scientific evidence is called into doubt by new discoveries or advances, then it must be heard again.

Furthermore, proceedings involving forensic evidence must be infused with a healthy sense of skepticism. As Beylor’s report makes clear, there is no guarantee that investigators will use the latest or most credible scientific methods in their investigations. Beylor stated in his report that the lead fire investigator in the Willingham case based many of his conclusions on personal beliefs and that he had no real understanding of fire science. Investigators must testify based on sound science and not just sway the jury by dint of their position of authority.

Finally, Willingham is gone, and although being exonerated post mortem may give some measure of comfort to his family, it will not, of course, bring him back. This is another argument in favor of abolishing the death penalty once and for all. Does anyone believe that the legal system in the U.S. is infallible? If it isn’t, then it was inevitable that at least one innocent person would be put to death. And Willingham was by no means the only person wrongfully convicted of serious crimes in this country. While others may eventually be released from prison, Willingham’s case is emblematic of the inherent danger of implementing death as a punishment. Nothing can be done for him now.

To learn more about taking a stand against the death penalty, I recommend visiting the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, DC-based organization dedicated to collecting and disseminating accurate information about how the death penalty is applied in the United States. Once you’ve learned more about the death penalty, including how 135 people have been set free from death rows around the USA since 1973 after being proven innocent, I’ll bet that you’ll turn against this horrific punishment too.

There’s an article in the New York Times this morning that serves as an appropriate followup to my post yesterday. Because this level of deception and fraud is so vast that it makes fortunetelling seem inconsequential (hat tip to Friendly Atheist):

FORT WORTH — Onstage before thousands of believers weighed down by debt and economic insecurity, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their all-star lineup of “prosperity gospel” preachers delighted the crowd with anecdotes about the luxurious lives they had attained by following the Word of God.

Private airplanes and boats. A motorcycle sent by an anonymous supporter. Vacations in Hawaii and cruises in Alaska. Designer handbags. A ring of emeralds and diamonds.

Because isn’t that what the Bible is all about?

But seriously, there really is no charitable interpretation of what the Copelands are doing: they are running an enormous scam that is preying on people that simply can’t afford it. They’re parading their own wealth in front of the very people that provided that wealth for them — in order to inspire them to make further donations. This is naked exploitation:

Many in this flock do not trust banks, the news media or Washington, where the Senate Finance Committee is investigating whether the Copelands and other prosperity evangelists used donations to enrich themselves and abused their tax-exempt status. But they trust the Copelands, the movement’s current patriarch and matriarch, who seem to embody prosperity with their robust health and abundance of children and grandchildren who have followed them into the ministry.

“If God did it for them, he will do it for us,” said Edwige Ndoudi, who traveled with her husband and three children from Canada for the Southwest Believers’ Convention this month, where the Copelands and three of their friends took turns preaching for five days, 10 hours a day at the Fort Worth Convention Center.

The Copelands certainly do embody personal prosperity: the New York Times reports that their Newark, TX based ministry has 481 employees and an annual budget around $100 million. They passed the collection buckets at least five times a day at the Fort Worth convention. Despite being under Senate investigation, they seem to be doing quite well!

But what about their followers? They’re not quite in as good a shape. The NYT reporter spoke to a few:

Stephen Biellier, a long-distance trucker from Mount Vernon, Mo., said he and his wife, Millie, came to the convention praying that this would be “the overcoming year.” They are $102,000 in debt, and the bank has cut off their credit line, Mrs. Biellier said.

And even though they are so deep in debt, it turns out that they have given thousands of dollars to the Copelands over the years:

The Bielliers were at the convention a few years ago when a supporter made a pitch for people to join an “Elite CX Team” to raise money to buy the ministry a Citation X airplane. (Mr. Copeland is an airplane aficionado who got his start in ministry as a pilot for Oral Roberts.) At that moment, Mrs. Biellier said she heard the voice of the Holy Spirit telling her, “You were born to support this man.”

She gave $2,000 for the plane, and recently sent $1,800 for the team’s latest project: buying high-definition television equipment to upgrade the ministry’s international broadcasts.

Let’s get this straight: They are now into six figure debt but still have given thousands to the ministry in recent years to buy a private plane and high definition broadcasting equipment!

That offends me to my very core as a human being. These people may be gullible, but that still doesn’t justify their exploitation by the Copelands. After all, faith is still very strongly built into American society. Even though the United States is now trending more secular than in the recent past, most people are still raised in households where they are taught that religious belief must ultimately hinge on faith rather than critical thinking. Indeed, I think that many believers and nonbelievers alike would agree that faith and critical thinking have many incompatibilities. The nature of God is supposed to be ineffable, right?

When you couple that with the fact that religions are interpreted here on earth by other human beings (emissaries direct from Heaven don’t actually show up at the Fort Worth Convention Center to preach, at least, as far as I know), then that is a recipe for exploitation by charismatic people acting with guile. Excessive credulity plus a pleasing message that simultaneously taps both people’s self interest and their desire to give and be charitable is toxic for the financial health of people like the Bielliers.

What’s the answer? As the NYT article mentions, the Copelands may be abusing their tax exempt status as a ministry, and if that is found to be true, then they need to be stopped. That is a short-term solution that may save some of their followers some money. But in the long term, we need to work hard to make critical thinking a centerpiece of education at all grade levels. A little healthy skepticism is the antidote to the prosperity gospel.

From today’s Washington Post comes the story of a “self described Gypsy” who is challenging a ban on fortunetelling businesses in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Nick Nefedro didn’t need to have his palm read or look to Tarot cards to know that his plan to work as a fortuneteller in Bethesda would fail. His fate was already written: Montgomery County says it is illegal to make money from forecasting the future.

But Nefedro, who says he is a Gypsy, is determined to change that. He has enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union in his year-long fight to overturn the law that calls his livelihood fraudulent. He argues that fortunetelling is part of his heritage and that prohibiting him from working as a fortuneteller amounts to discrimination.

Mr. Nefedro characterizes the Montgomery County ban as “persecution against Gypsies,” which he ties into the historic persecution that the people commonly called Gypsies (also known as the Romani) have suffered across Eastern and Central Europe. He points out that Romani were often regarded to be thieves and con artists wherever they traveled. And he argues that this ban inhibits his rights under the First Amendment.

Does the ban against fortunetelling businesses in Montgomery County inhibit Mr. Nefedro’s freedom of speech and religion? Or is this a different issue because he wants to make this practice into a business and charge people money for it? After all, it is not the fortunetelling itself but rather the practice of charging for it that is banned. Mr. Nefedro is fighting for his right to run a business rather than the basic right to practice his religious beliefs at all.

Indeed, it seems that, to a certain extent, his status as a religious practitioner is entirely wrapped up with his status as a business proprietor:

Like his father, who had been a fortuneteller in the District [of Columbia] in the 1980s, Nefedro turned the practice into a business. With family members, he has owned and operated a half-dozen fortunetelling businesses in the Los Angeles area and in Key West, Fla.

But he wanted to move closer to home. Born in the District, he spent much of his youth with friends and family in Bethesda.

It’s understandable that he wanted to return home and open a business. But, leaving aside the obviously cynical answer to this question for the moment, can a for-profit business be a protected religious practice as well? And should Montgomery County have the right to ban businesses of this nature if the goal is to protect consumers from fraud?

The ACLU of Maryland argues that prohibitions against fraud are enough, without the additional blanket prohibition against fortunetelling businesses, and that even if Mr. Nefedro’s speech is mainly commercial in nature, it should still be protected. From the ACLU of Maryland’s press release on the case, discussing their role in helping him appeal the original ruling against him by the circuit court:

Contrary to the ruling of the Circuit Court in this case, courts across the country have consistently held that fortunetelling is protected speech, and restrictions on it, like the Montgomery County law, are equivalent to absolute bans and therefore unconstitutional. In addition, the Supreme Court has held repeatedly that merely because speech is for profit does not reduce the level of protection it is due.

In defending the law in the Circuit Court, the County argued that it is a legitimate exercise of police power, aimed at preventing fraud. While the interest in preventing fraud is legitimate, the County already has a law accomplishing that goal. A separate provision of the County Code prohibits persons from intending to or engaging in fraud in any consumer transaction. Accordingly, the ban’s only effect is to prevent individuals from engaging in constitutionally protected activity.

In other words, since the county already bans fraud, then why ban fortunetelling? Any fraud that he may commit during the course of operating his business would already be illegal. But, the ACLU argues, a broad ban on fortunetelling only serves to prohibit government protected speech.

I’ve never gone to a fortuneteller, and I don’t think that I’m alone in my suspicion that many of them are trying to scam people. However, Mr. Nefedro insists that he can see the future, and he may very well believe that he truly can. There is no way to judge the sincerity of this belief; we’ll have to take it at face value. Rather, to me the appropriate questions to ask are: does he have a First Amendment right to operate a for-profit business based on his religious beliefs? And is for-profit fortunetelling a form of protected speech? Or should local governments be empowered to protect consumers against the fraud perceived to be inherent in such businesses?

What do you think?

The State of Oregon’s longtime prohibition against the wearing of religious clothing or adornment by public school teachers while on duty has returned to the spotlight. Why? Because recently passed legislation, the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act (PDF), now guarantees the right of every Oregon state employee to wear religious garb or accessories while on the job, with the notable exception of public school teachers, who will continue to be prohibited from doing so.

There has already been an outcry from a variety of religious organizations against the continuation of the ban for teachers. Organizations including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund have objected strongly and are asking that the ban be rescinded.

Why would such a ban be necessary? The Oregonian newspaper quotes a spokesperson for the state Department of Education explaining it like this:

“The underlying policy reflects the unique position that teachers occupy,” said Jake Weigler, spokesman for the state Department of Education. “In this case, the concern that a public school teacher would be imparting religious values to their students outweighs that teacher’s right to free expression.”

Is this true? Would students be influenced by a teacher who is wearing a turban, hijab, yarmulke, or a Christian cross while teaching? Is it reasonable for the state to protect students from such influence by prohibiting personal religious expression by teachers?

I don’t believe that it is. While any given student will most likely take note of a teacher’s religious adornment or clothing, this presents an opportunity to learn about religious diversity and pluralism in the United States and around the world. There are right ways and wrong ways to deal with religion in the classroom, and while teachers should always be prohibited from proselytizing to their captive audience of students, nevertheless they do not have an obligation to check their personal identity at the door of the classroom. Indeed, the religious and cultural identity of a teacher can present a learning opportunity for students if it is handled the right way.

I believe that an important part of professional behavior for teachers is ensuring that his or her own personal life does not become too big a part of the discussion in the classroom. But nevertheless, classes are not taught by robots who must present a neutral identity. Religious identity, including personal adornment, is an important part of a person’s identity, and it’s not helpful to make teachers pretend as though their personal religious beliefs don’t exist while they are on duty. This is a far cry from the more reasonable requirement that teachers must always respect the rights of their students by refraining from inappropriate religious content in lessons and activities.

In addition, this prohibition overall doesn’t pass First Amendment muster. State institutions are prohibited from adopting a religious identity or favoring one certain religion over another. However, this prohibition should not extend to the passive religious expression of state employees. This is reflected in the fact that the new legislation reinforces the protection of religious expression for Oregon state employees in every sector other than the public school classroom. But I fail to see how public schools should be a special case.

The Oregon state legislature should rescind this ban and create much less stringent regulations that respect the First Amendment rights of teachers. Having teachers from different religious backgrounds could provide valuable lessons in diversity and pluralism for Oregon students. Otherwise the state is attempting to smooth over religious differences by pretending that they don’t exist.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Randall Terry, who for years was the face of the anti-choice movement in the United States. Even though he hasn’t been the head of Operation Rescue, an organization that he founded, since 1989, he has managed to keep his name out there as a prominent anti-abortion and anti-reproductive choice activist. Although his star has faded in recent years, he is trying harder than ever to make a comeback to national prominence.

The Washington Post has an article today about some of Terry’s recent efforts to stay relevant and keep his face on the national anti-abortion brand. It begins with the startlingly creepy image of Terry and his acolytes smearing fake blood all over their hands and copies of the Roe v. Wade ruling while standing outside the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. And it’s all downhill from there, as Terry tells the journalist that using fake blood for his protests came to him in a “vision” (is that what he vaingloriously calls having a thought?) while he was planning ways to disrupt the hearings.

It turns out, though, that this was not his first vision; as the Washington Post article states, in reference to the founding of Operation Rescue:

Terry, 50, was in his 20s when he founded Operation Rescue — the result, he said, of a vision from God that appeared before his eyes at a prayer meeting. The vision was, he said, a scroll with instructions to stop abortion. Along with the scroll, he saw thousands of people gathered in front of abortion clinics to save babies, and he saw himself being interviewed on “Donahue,” the popular TV talk show hosted by Phil Donahue.

After serving as a primary spokesperson in favor of federal interference in the Terri Schiavo case in 2005, the Post states that Terry had more or less faded from view for several years. But he is on the upswing once more, getting his name back in the press for the demonstrations against President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame University and his unbelievably hateful comments after the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. (Amongst other things, he said, “George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God…Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God.)

And now he is attempting to lead the charge against President Obama’s middle-of-the-road Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Adele M. Stan of AlterNet attended Terry’s demonstration this past Sunday on the steps of the US Supreme Court, and reported on Terry’s demand that the anti-abortion senators filibuster Sotomayor’s nomination:

Terry made the camera operators move forward and adjust their mikes. “Pro-life senators have a moral obligation to filibuster Sotomayor,” he began. “Pro-life Republicans, pro-life Democrats seduce us with their words. They use our money, they take our man-hours, they take our votes, and then throw us away like a used-up mistress after an election. It’s disgusting! If Sen. [Sam] Brownback and Sen. [John] McCain and Sen. [Knute] Nelson and Sen. [Bob] Casey believe that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, then they must filibuster Sotomayor. You can’t say you want to overturn Roe on the one hand, and then vote for somebody who will uphold Roe on the other. It is treachery, hypocrisy, laziness and betrayal.”

He certainly sounds frustrated! Perhaps this ties into Amanda Marcotte’s assertion in the Guardian that Republicans overall have not made abortion front and center in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, opting to focus on race and gender-based attacks against her instead. Says Marcotte:

Anti-choice activists used to own the issue of Supreme Court nominations so thoroughly, they were able to bully George Bush out of nominating Harriet Miers, despite her anti-choice views, in no small part because they simply don’t trust women not to stick by their own. Obviously, with Republicans out of power, anti-choice activists can’t block the nomination, but now they can’t even get Republicans to consider their demands a top priority.

The most obvious reason is that gender has been demoted to a second-tier issue so that Republicans can work more efficiently with arguments over race against Sotomayor, playing off anti-Hispanic sentiment and rightwing folk beliefs about a Latino “takeover” to inculcate resentment in their base. Anti-choicers are feeling the sting of falling out of fashion in the circles of rightwing nastiness and resentment.

Marcotte goes on to say that she also believes Republicans may be a little more toned down on anti-choice rhetoric this time around because of the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller. Perhaps they don’t want to be associated with a movement that is so violent in the eyes of many Americans. She’s not optimistic, though, that this distance will last.

I would be shocked if the Republicans filibuster Sotomayor, and I’m sure she’ll sail through confirmation. So the real question here is, what does the future hold for Randall Terry after his stunts at the Capitol are over? The Post notes that some anti-choice activists are less than enthusiastic about his desire to be a more public figure once again:

Leaders of the antiabortion movement are cringing at Terry’s sudden return. They say his incendiary rhetoric and showy tactics turn off ordinary Americans and reflect Terry’s struggle to regain his glory years.

“It’s sad in a way,” said Fredericksburg antiabortion activist Patrick Mahoney, who was close to Terry at one time but, like others in the movement, is now estranged from him. “It’s almost like a heavyweight boxer who’s past his prime. The movement has gone by him.”

While I fear the harmful consequences of his horrific rhetoric and stunts, particularly because they could inspire further violent acts, nevertheless I do feel that Randall Terry serves a useful function for those of us that favor reproductive rights. With his stunts, his jugs of fake blood, his followers disrupting Senate Judiciary Committee meetings, and his references to having “visions” that guide how he organizes his protests, he does represent one idea very well: that his anti-choice position is on the outer fringe. He makes it clear that his strong belief that women should not have control over their own bodies is in fact an extremist position to be defended by fringe and even dangerous characters such as him, operating on the margins of society. His extremist tactics lay bare the extremist nature of the entire anti-choice stance. Even so, we cannot discount the constant threat that Terry’s ugly and explosive language poses. He represents the worst of the intertwining of religion and social activism, when a fanatic believes that he speaks on behalf of his god and that his actions bear a holy endorsement. And we certainly know what kind of trouble that can lead to.

I recently attended a panel discussion at the Capitol on the Sotomayor confirmation. The event was chaired by Sammie Moshenberg of the National Council of Jewish Women.

The first speaker was J. Brent Walker, director of the Baptist Joint Committee, who noted that the First Amendment contains two clauses: establishment and free exercise. Historically, he argues, both clauses have been read quite broadly. This has begun to change; whereas historically government has been forbidden from touching religion in anyway, today government must simply treat religion as it would any other group. So, government can use money to provide services through religious groups and can issue education vouchers. Walker argues that Sonia Sotomayor has, in the past, espoused a rather broad view of these clauses. That said, it would be tough for her or basically any candidate to fill David Souter’s shoes in terms of taking a broad view.

The second speaker, Melissa Rogers of Wake Forest University, picked up where Walker left off and argued what is important in a judge is that he or she understands it is the individual who counts, not the established church. To draw the point out, a person who takes some tiny facet of their religion such as a feast or some beads very seriously is as entitled to those markings of their faith as a Christian is to the cross. Their belief need not be reasonable or mainstream, simply deeply held. In the past Sotomayor has adequately upheld this doctrine.

The third and final speaker was Richard Katskee, assistant legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Katskee argues that church/state separation issues come down to essentially three facets: where a display is allowed, who has standing to sue, and whether the government can fund. Sotomayor has ruled in two cases affecting standing and display. In both the Flamer and Mehdi case she has upheld precedent set by the higher courts and many argue ruled correctly even if the outcome was less than desirable. As for funding, no case that has come before her has given the opportunity for her views to come out.

The Baptist Joint Committee recently released an analysis of Sotomayor’s decisions. They come to the same conclusion the speakers did: “Sotomayor’s written record raises no red flags.” She has ruled on very few free exercise cases and no establishment clause cases. Her “writings include few, if any, statements articulating how the First Amendment protects religious liberty, promotes the voluntary nature of religion, prevents governmental interference in religion, and tends to reduce conflict among religions.”

Confirmation hearings begin July 13^th.

Faith Complex, a production of Georgetown University, recently released an interview covering the history and role of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

When Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in 1996, there was a small provision known as charitable choice embedded in the law. In essence, charitable choice makes federal grant money available to religious groups so long as the money is used purely for secular purposes. Despite safeguards eliminating the most flagrant violations of the separation of church and state, charitable choice proves to be one big can of worms.

Let’s make up a hypothetical group, Buddhists for a Greater Jacksonville (BGJ), to help illuminate the problems with charitable choice. BGJ raises one million dollars a year, and spends $750,000 sheltering homeless and $250,000 spreading Buddhism. They then apply for a grant through Health and Human Services and receive a $500,000 annual grant to expand and continue the shelter. They do so and spend a million on their shelter. But, because BGJ now has an income of 1.5 million, they can spend $500,000 spreading Buddhism. So what does this mean? That the government has indirectly supported proselytizing.

Charitable choice does have benefits. In rural places, such as small-town Texas, the only organization in town may very well be the local church. In such a case, it makes a lot of sense for the church to send a person to check on that elderly man at the end of the dirt road. Charitable choice makes that possible.

To aid groups such as the local church in small-town Texas, then-Governor Bush set up an office to direct these groups to the correct grant making authorities. When he came to the White House he did the same; and soon after, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was born.

During Barack Obama’s campaign for President, Obama pledged to expand and strengthen the office. After his inauguration he did just that and renamed it The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. While Bush’s faith-based office was rather weak, Obama’s is to serve as a policy advisory council.

The role of the faith-based office is somewhat ambiguous, insipid, and inane. The office is charged with supporting responsible parenting and fostering interfaith dialogue, whatever. Oh, and decreasing demand for abortions… what?!? The office, with its attached advisory council, is one of several offices within the White House charged with creating a consensus policy decreasing the need for abortion across America.

Having a faith-based advisor in the abortion debate is a little troubling, but I understand the practical efficacy of it; to reach a consensus you must have those who object at the table. More troubling, however, is something our hypothetical group BGJ can, and has been able to, do since the dawn of charitable choice. When hiring employees to manage their federally subsidized shelter, BGJ can discriminate on the basis of religion, an unheard of precedent. Obama will neither endorse nor change the policy of discrimination, instead he claims issues will be considered on a case-by-case basis. In real terms, case-by-case basis means unless someone objects discrimination is kosher. I object. Thoughts?

In January 2008 Jose Padilla sued John Yoo for $1. Padilla is a U.S. citizen who was incarcerated and tortured while the government challenged his right to Habeas corpus and he wants one freakin’ dollar. The notion that Padilla thinks one dollar will compensate for a round in the star chamber of U.S. counterterroism is a dead giveaway; he has something bigger in mind.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White issued a ruling refusing to dismiss Padilla’s $1 civil suit, thereby clearing the way for it to move to discovery. Yoo and the Department of Justice must turn over a host of internal information to Padilla and his lawyers. Not only will all sorts of new evidence come out but if the ruling stands, the door is open to other Bush administration officials facing personal liability for their actions in office. It won’t be long before there is a million dollar suit against Jay Bybee.

White took a historic step, but not an unprecedented one. Since the 1940’s people have been able to sue the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act. There is no legislation authorizing suits of federal employees; however in Bivens vs. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971) the Supreme Court held one can sue public officials as a means of protecting one’s rights.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your daily dose of stupid, I give you Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) explaining why he doesn’t want to do anything about greenhouse gasses (via Thinkprogress):

“I would also point out that CO2, carbon dioxide, is not a pollutant in any normal definition of the term. It’s not hazardous to health, it’s naturally occurring. I am creating it as I talk to you. It’s in your Coca-Cola, your Dr. Pepper, your Perrier water. It is necessary for human life. It is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, does not cause asthma.”

“And something that the Democrat sponsors do not point out, a lot of the CO2 that is created in the United States is naturally created. You can’t regulate God. Not even the Democratic majority in the US Congress can regulate God.”

Let’s say that a neighbor were spraying lots of water on his lawn, day and night. It’s ruining your garden, flooding your basement, and causing mold and mosquitoes to spawn in the standing water.

Would you be comforted to hear him say, “Did you know that H2O is naturally occurring? It’s in our Coca-Cola, is necessary for human life, is odorless, colorless, tasteless, does not cause cancer, and does not cause asthma! Besides, rain is water, and we can’t regulate the rain!”

No, you would want him to turn off the damn sprinklers.

We know the harmful effects of greenhouse gasses. No longer suppressed by the Bush administration, the E.P.A. recently declared that there was “compelling and overwhelming” evidence that greenhouse gasses “endanger public health and welfare.”

Barton also had this familiar gem:

“If you think greenhouse gases are bad, life couldn’t exist without greenhouse gases. … So, there is a, there is a climate theory — and it’s a theory, it’s not a fact, it’s never been proven — that increasing concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere somehow interact to trap more heat than the atmosphere would otherwise.”

Keep in mind: this man is the highest-ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Wonderful.

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam recently spoke at the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life about his latest research on religion in America. He discussed the increasing lack of affiliation with any religion amongst younger generations in the United States, saying that the percentage of Americans in their 20s that declare no affiliation is now between 30 and 40 percent.

This comes on the heels of the recent news from the Pew Forum’s US Religious Landscape Survey that over 15 percent of Americans now report themselves to be unaffiliated with any religion. But looking at Putnam’s recent work, it is clear that there is a generational divide: young people are more secular than ever.

Why? Writing about Putnam’s speech, former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post op-ed columnist Michael Gerson characterizes the trend this way:

The politicization of religion by the religious right, argues Putnam, caused many young people in the 1990s to turn against religion itself, adopting the attitude: “If this is religion, I’m not interested.”

And as ABC news reported on Putnam’s speech:

This movement away from organized religion, says Putnam, may have enormous consequences for American culture and politics for years to come.

“That is the future of America,” he says. “Their views and their habits religiously are going to persist and have a huge effect on the future.”

For just one example of this, look at the generational divide on support for marriage equality (found via Daily Kos)

Fifty-four percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Monday say marriages between gay or lesbian couples should not be recognized as valid, with 44 percent suggesting they should be considered legal.

But among those 18 to 34 years old, 58 percent said same-sex marriages should be legal. That number drops to 42 percent among respondents aged 35 to 49, and to 41 percent for those aged 50 to 64. Only 24 percent of Americans 65 and older support recognizing same-sex marriages, according to the poll. (emphasis added)

With full marriage equality in five states now and New Hampshire poised to soon be the sixth, it is clear that the political landscape for marriage equality is shifting. The current generation of young voters are less likely to support future efforts to limit or repeal marriage equality. Hopefully Proposition 8 in California will be one of the last of its kind – while two-thirds of voters over the age of 65 supported it, the measure failed to gain a majority in any other age group.

While some of the political implications of this increase in lack of religious affiliation among young Americans are clear, another major question is, will it stick? Are young Americans going to be secular for good? As reported by Gerson::

Putnam regards the growth of the “nones” as a spike, not a permanent trend. The young, in general, are not committed secularists. “They are not in church, but they might be if a church weren’t like the religious right. . . . There are almost certain to be religious entrepreneurs to fill that niche with a moderate evangelical religion, without political overtones.”

Putnam’s book on this research is yet to be published, but I’ll be interested to read it when it comes out, because his discussion with the Pew Forum seemed to mainly focus on politics and the negative impact of the Religious Right on religious affiliation amongst younger Americans. But political and social views are only part of the picture. What else influences younger people’s lack of religious affiliation? In their report Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S., the Pew Forum provided additional research on this very subject, examining the reasons why Americans in general change affiliations or leave their former religious affiliations without adopting a new one. From the executive summary of the report:

Two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated and half of former Protestants who have become unaffiliated say they left their childhood faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, and roughly four-in-ten say they became unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions. Additionally, many people who left a religion to become unaffiliated say they did so in part because they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules or because religious leaders are too focused on power and money. Far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition. (emphasis added)

I initially thought that the increase in the number of people that are unaffiliated with organized religions would be driven in large part by increased scientific literacy. But even if this is happening, it’s not a very conscious process; as the Pew Forum reports, not many people credit science for their changes in religious outlook. Rather, the changes take place in light of what the report calls “disenchantment with religious people or institutions.” This is similar to Putnam’s characterization of the younger unaffiliated being driven away by intolerant religious conservatives.

Also significant is the age range at which the Pew Forum found people make their most monumental religious changes:

The survey finds that religious change begins early in life. Most of those who decided to leave their childhood faith say they did so before reaching age 24, and a large majority say they joined their current religion before reaching age 36. Very few report changing religions after reaching age 50.

So the religious decisions that people make in their younger years often end up staying with them. Nevertheless, the report points out that the unaffiliated population is one of the most dynamic religious populations in the United States, with over half of people who are raised without any affiliation later joining one.

I will be very curious to see how Putnam’s research fits with the picture painted by the Faith in Flux report. I certainly feel that humanists should not take for granted that the younger, less affiliated generation is going to automatically join our ranks. The Pew Forum reveals a dynamic religious population that may get disgusted with the politicization of religion or the frailty of human institutions but isn’t necessarily going to march in step with organized non-religion. The key, of course, will be humanist outreach to this population: we have to offer something of value, something beyond a critique of the institution of religion, something that offers the sense of community and togetherness that people are seeking, even as they decide that religious institutions are not serving their needs.

The Washington Post, on its On Faith website, recently asked panelists representing different religious points of view to address the question, “Is torture ever justified?” The responses are by no means representative of all religious viewpoints on torture (the humanist viewpoint of which I have addressed previously), but nevertheless it was enlightening for me to read some of the different viewpoints and how these commentators feel torture and religion relate to each other.

Christian theologian and philosopher John Mark Reynolds is initially direct on the question, writing, “Torture of any human being is incompatible with the Christian faith.” I hope he’s telling that far and wide, because it appears that not everyone has received the message. However, he goes on to spend most of his short essay wondering whether or not what the United States did actually was, in fact, torture:

A general condemnation of torture does not mean that we already know that what the Bush administration did was torture. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly what torture is and some believe that what the Bush administration ordered in prosecuting the War on Terror was not torture. They should be heard and not ignored, but so far the arguments advanced have not been persuasive.

He does believe, though, that John McCain’s condemnation of the techniques that were employed by the United States during the Bush years indicates that they were probably unacceptable. I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding how anyone can equivocate at all on whether or not pouring water into someone’s lungs, slamming a person into a wall, or any of the other methods that were approved constitute torture or not.

Another Christian theologian, Gabriel Salguero of the Princeton Theological Seminary, also condemns torture and says it is incompatible with Christianity. He points out that great people in history have chosen not to meet the violence of their adversaries with equal violence:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr never used violence although violence was constantly used against him, his home, and the many people in the Civil Rights movement. Did the millions of people who partook in the non-violent marches not understand terror? Nonsense. They chose a different way…Did Jesus not understand the way of terror when he was being crucified on an imperial cross? Nonsense. He chose a different way.

I find it very compelling that, in history, great figures and brave groups of people have stood up to injustice and tyranny without resorting to the techniques of their oppressors. They have held the moral high ground without conceding the battle. I wish that the USA had taken this approach in the face of terrorism rather than quickly employing torture and secret prisons, disregarding the rule of law as if it were an impediment to safeguarding our nation in the face of danger, rather than central to the task.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield wants everyone, on all sides of the issue, to examine it a little more closely:

It’s easy to say that torture is wrong and that whatever tradition we hold dear forbids it. I wish it were that simple. Imagine for a moment that you knew the life of someone you loved; your child for example, would be saved by information extracted by torture. Are you really certain that you might not suddenly find some justification which allowed it “just this once”? Anyone answering “no” too quickly is either kidding themselves or doesn’t know the meaning of loving someone close to themselves.

Although this sounds like he is defending torture, he quickly states that he isn’t; rather, he says:

I am more concerned about the endless moralizing around tough issues which makes them seem too easy too fast. In fact, that’s the style of argument which typifies those who defend the use of torture.

Their arguments pose the question about saving a life as if we could know with certainty beforehand that the torture for which they advocate would save a life in immediate danger. I wish it were that simple, but it rarely, if ever, is.

It’s true that the circumstances under which the Bush administration committed torture were ambiguous, something which the pro-torture side seems loathe to admit. No matter how many times the torture advocates talk about it, we have yet to encounter a so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario where the deactivation code to the bomb needs to be tortured out of some single suspect in custody before an entire city explodes (or something along those lines). Television shows like 24 aside, under the Bush administration torture was committed with much more dubious and certainly less noble goals than extracting the location of a bomb located under the city.

Rabbi Hirschfield’s point about these over-simplistic arguments being used to justify torture is well taken. Nevertheless, I feel that he is trying a little too hard to be balanced here with his consideration for why someone might support torture. Surely, if the life of my child was at stake, I would probably justify any number of horrible things to be done if it might save my child’s life; this hypothetical situation, however, doesn’t add very much to a discussion on human rights. It may provide some perspective on how we react to the idea of torture, but the actual laws that codify the preservation of human rights must be written under more level-headed circumstances than how you would feel if your child’s life was immediately at risk.

The preponderance of opinion from the different religious commentators on On Faith is that torture is wrong. But beyond that point is less agreement over what actually constitutes torture and how the United States should move forward from this point. This level of disagreement is indicative of why we need to rely on secular documents to guide how we move forward on torture. For all the room for discussion in the arena of religion, US and international law is not at all ambiguous on this subject.

The House of Representatives voted yesterday 249-175 to expand federal hate crimes laws to include crimes that were motivated by the victim’s gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or disability. The bill also lifts the previous restriction that the victim had to be engaged in a federally protected activity when attacked, such as voting or attending school. Additionally, the bill expands federal assistance to state and local authorities for the investigation of suspected hate crimes.

The measure has yet to be taken up by the Senate. It has proven to be quite controversial, with the House vote coming in almost entirely along party lines. Religious Right organizations mobilized their constituents to speak out against the measure. Focus On the Family claims to be responsible for 5,000 messages to Congress against the bill.

Why is it controversial? Let’s look at a few of the objections to this legislation:

Representative of the Religious Right case against hate crimes laws is an editorial from today’s edition of the right wing newspaper the Washington Times, which concluded:

Once homosexuals become a special class protected by hate-crime legislation, the back door is open to prosecuting those who speak out against homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Yesterday’s House vote was really about creating thought crimes to further the liberal agenda.

That unsubstantiated assertion (that the bill creates “thought crimes”) was ominously illustrated with a photograph of George Orwell.

In a piece dripping with contempt towards the LGBT community, Matt Berber puts it in more drastic terms:

In short, this bill places newfangled “gay rights” in direct conflict with our enumerated constitutional rights. It becomes the first step in the official criminalization of Christianity. It’s a zero sum game and someone has to lose. Ultimately, what we lose are our First Amendment guaranteed rights to freedom of speech, religious expression and association.

Um…no. This is the often repeated lie of the Religious Right, but this simply isn’t the case. Let’s get a few things clear about this bill.

First, this is a hate crimes bill, not a hate speech bill. Commentator and attorney Glenn Greenwald explains the distinction:

Hate speech laws and hate crimes laws are entirely different, since the former punishes the pure expression of ideas while the latter involves the commission of actual crimes, usually quite violent and serious crimes. One can easily and coherently oppose the former but support the latter.

While critics have been drawing on cases from Europe where people were prosecuted only for what they said, what they are referring to are laws against hate speech, rather than hate crimes. Many countries in Europe have these kinds of laws; thankfully, the United States does not, because Congress cannot just legislate away the First Amendment. This bill does nothing to criminalize hate speech.

In fact, the language in the actual bill is clear that the defendent’s actions, not thoughts, are what will be on trial:

In a prosecution for an offense under this section, evidence of expression or associations of the defendant may not be introduced as substantive evidence at trial, unless the evidence specifically relates to that offense.

This law isn’t about punishing what the criminal thought; it’s about punishing what the criminal did. It does nothing to prevent a pastor from sermonizing against homosexuality from the pulpit, or for a newspaper to publish anti-gay editorials (don’t worry, Washington Times!), or anything relating to speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion. It does nothing to prevent religious activists from rallying against marriage equality. Anyone that tells you otherwise doesn’t understand the bill or is simply lying.

Another objection to the hate crimes bill is that, as an issue of fairness and equal protection, crime victims should not be treated any differently based on the motivation behind the crime. In other words the punishment should be the same for a criminal whether he committed assault because the victim was gay or because he wanted the victim’s wallet. This is reflected in the comments by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-TN, when he was speaking against the bill:

“All violent crimes must be vigorously prosecuted,” Smith said. “Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system — ‘equal justice for all.’”

“Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim,” Smith said. “It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime.”

What this argument fails to recognize is the particular threat that hate crimes have towards society. For one, when a person is attacked because he or she is identified as being part of a particular group, the attack is, in essence, against the entire group. For example, if racist graffiti was spray painted on the home of an African American family, would it not be clear that the action was taken to intimidate not only that particular family, but any other African American family in the area that may subsequently fear being victimized by a similar crime? The group of victims encompasses those that are given reason to fear after the attack. Hate crimes are a way of sowing terror among the particular group that is the target of hate. This is more detrimental to society than many other types of crimes, and the punishment for the perpetrator should reflect this accordingly.

The new hate crimes bill is, unfortunately, not going to end violence that is motivated by hatred. But it will give law enforcement and prosecutors additional tools to deal with these crimes and ensure that the criminals receive a just punishment.

A Religious Right legal organization has a message for county employees in Iowa: if you don’t like same-sex marriage, then don’t do your job! From the Iowa Independent.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a legal advocacy group founded in 1994 by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and the late Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, sent an e-mail to each of Iowa’s county recorders asking them to tell their staff that they “shall not be required to issue or process a marriage license, or to perform, assist or participate in such procedures, against that individual’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

They’re asking county recorders to defy the recent Iowa State Supreme Court ruling that enforces marriage equality, with ADF Senior Legal Counsel Doug Napier saying, “Government employees who believe in marriage as the union of one man and one woman should not be penalized for abiding by their beliefs.”

See a problem with this reasoning? The First Amendment guarantees your freedom to believe and worship as you wish without government interference. But I’ve said it here before, and it’s worth repeating: religious freedom does not mean the freedom to not do your job. Some beliefs can be accommodated in the workplace, others cannot; if your job is to issue marriage licenses, your desire to issue them only to certain types of people is discriminatory and cannot be accommodated.

The State Attorney General sees it that way:

Attorney General Tom Miller has repeatedly warned county recorders that they do not have the authority to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, and “recorders do not have discretion or power to ignore the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling,” Miller said.

Can you imagine what life in the United States would be like if government employees could ignore court rulings at will? What if a school principal tried to ignore Brown v. the Board of Education because desegregation would supposedly be against his or her conscience? What if county recorders simply refused to issue marriage licenses to nonreligious or interracial couples? What if a Catholic county recorder refused to issue marriage licenses to divorcees?

We can’t go down that road. The government can’t step in and force you to believe or not believe something. But when you’re on the clock, you do your job. Any county recorder or staff member in Iowa that refuses to abide by the Supreme Court ruling should be fired.