Jim, a friend from California who recently passed through DC, had never been to the South. Being from Georgia myself, I thought I would give him a nice sample. We drove 2.5 hours to the Pamplin Historical Park in Petersburg, VA for the “Civil War Weekend,” a reenactment festival staffed by folks who travel the country recreating “great moments” from our bloody past. While we were overwhelmed by the final meeting of Grant and Lee, the mock-up amputation tent (lacking any disinfectants), and the laser tag (yes, there WAS laser tag in 1860), the highlight of the experience may have been a conversation we had with two conservative reenactors.

The reenactors pointed out that preservation of the Union was not important enough to the people of the North to warrant all those lost lives, and so Lincoln created a moral imperative around equality and freeing of slaves to rally the North to continue the war (like the WMDs?). The reenactors were disgusted with what they called the lies that fill U.S. public school history books, and highlighted that these books portray a “winner’s truth,” devoid of factual basis.

I proceeded to mention how the U.S. government has done such things in most wars since the Civil War. I used World War II as an example, where we knew the brutal tactics of the Germans and Japanese and even of the Holocaust, but didn’t get involved until it seemed as though America would be the Nazi’s next target. They were silent. I mentioned the Gulf of Tonkin, and they wanted to have nothing to do with that either. It seems for these two conservative reenactors, the U.S. government stopped lying about war in about 1865. I beg to differ. Just look at Iraq–is it about freedom and democracy, or oil?

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As reported today in the Independent, officials of a group called The Organization to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Muslim World said a £80,000 reward should be paid to anyone “able to execute the apostate Salman Rushdie.”

Well, as we can see, rationality has returned to the Middle East!!!

In today’s news, novelist Salman Rushdie has a price on his head, and it is a pretty penny. Inflamed by the British crown’s knighting of Rushdie, Iranian jihadists are offering nearly $160,000 for his murder.

In other disturbing Mid-East developments concerning Rushdie, Pakistani youth (yes, YOUTH) are burning effigies of Rushdie and the Queen, in protest that one of the greatest writers of our time, an avowed humanist, spoke ill of Islam in his 1998 book The Satanic Verses.

“If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ’sir’ title,” said Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq.

Those, my friends, are the words of the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister. That’s right, members of the Pakistani cabinet (allies of Bush Co.) are calling for suicide bombings against a fellow humanist!!!

And when asked at the New Humanism conference at Harvard in April what ever had become of that fatwa against him for writing The Satanic Verses, Rushdie commented that it was all thankfully behind him. How wrong he was.

Rushdie, an active humanist, is featured in the July/August edition of The Humanist magazine, on newsstands now.

Today is Aung San Suu Kyi’s 62nd Birthday, her 11th spent under house arrest by the most brutal regime in Asia today, the Burmese Junta.

Aung San Suu Kyi was the head of the National League for Democracy, the party that won an astounding percentage of the vote in the 1990 Burmese elections. The junta ignored the results and put her under house arrest. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after the elections, and is today the world’s only Nobel laureate under arrest.

So why should you care? Because she embodies so many of the principles of democracy, justice, accountability, and perseverance that we all hold dear.

My favorite Aung San Suu Kyi quote, and one that I think rings especially true in today’s turbulent world: “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

Some time today, look to the West and give her your thoughts, if only for a moment. Please keep her in your thoughts until she is free!!

The June 18 issue of Newsweek features a short article on the controversy between the so-called “atheist fundamentalists”–authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who recently published books presenting a more aggressive stance against religion–versus the “feel-good” humanists, namely Greg Epstein of the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy, criticizing those who focus on the negative rather than the positive side of our movement.

I’m not going to jump on either side in this debate, since I believe that both the Dawkins Atheists and the Epstein Humanists, in their own ways, do a great job in getting the general public to pay attention to us. Don’t forget: just a few years ago, the media wouldn’t give us the time of day. But now, articles on atheism make it into the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, humanist rallies are featured on national television, books on atheism reach the top of the bestseller lists, and countless blogs are spreading the word to thousands of online readers. And look: the Humanist magazine was featured in the Newsweek article mentioned above!

The Creation Museum’s “Adam” is an actor who’s played a number of roles, including that of owner of a porn website called “Bedroom Acrobat.” The Museum, which opened in May and tells the Bible’s version of how Earth was created, recently pulled a video featuring Eric Linden as Adam after learning from the Associated Press of his online appearances. The 27-year-old actor appears as Adam in 1 of 55 videos featured on visitor tours at the Petersburg, Kentucky museum and told the AP that he is no longer affiliated with the site.

For Sven Bocklandt of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA the immediate work may be on the gay gene but the real work is bigger than that:

Quote:

“Who cares about gay men or lesbian women? Sexual selection defines evolution and creation—such a major ­player in determining society—and we have no idea how it works. This is much larger than the gay gene; it’s about all sexual ­reproduction.”

His work started when he met Dean Hamer. Hamer had just published a study that claimed not only to have finally proved that male homosexuality was at least partially genetic but also to have pinpointed the stretch of chromosome where one of the genes involved resided. There he discovered a shared genetic marker, a patch of DNA called Xq28.

Hamer’s study is still controversial in part because for a long period NIH grant proposals that included words like “gay,” “condom,” or even “sexuality” were turned down, making it difficult to further explore and test in this area.

Whether or not a gay gene, a set of gay genes, or some other biological mechanism is ever found, one thing is clear: The environment a child grows up in has nothing to do with what makes most gay men gay. Two of the most convincing studies have proved conclusively that sexual orientation in men has a genetic cause.

Other tests are ongoing and maybe we might see some answers in the next few years. This may cause ethical concerns, and activists are on the alert for embryo testing and cures for homsexuality or abortions for homosexual babies. Still, if Geffen is right this could help us better understand how sexual reproduction and homosexuality fits into evolutionary biology.

See “The Real Story on Gay Genes: Homing in on the science of homosexuality—and sexuality itself” by Michael Abrams.