I get asked a lot about how I approached the question of religion when my son was young. Did I insist that he follow my lack of belief?
No, I did not. That he has a vivid imagination but a rational and humanistic lifestance is attributable, I think, to making sure he knew how to think for himself.
One of the things we most urgently need to instill in our children is the to think critically about the world around us. Not just when it comes to religion, but when politics, ethics, and personal conflicts are in issue, having the skill to think rationally about things is crucial to a better life.
I taught my child to question everything. Lots of times, I taught him to do it by asking him questions. Yes, my son was raised by Socratic Method. We had rules, but we felt it was important for him to understand the reasoning behind the rules.
I never said no to him without giving him a reason. “Because I said so” is not a reason. “Because I don’t feel like it” is.
If he calmly and rationally rebutted me, I listened. If his argument was better than mine, I changed my position. That being said, if he was argumentative or rude, he automatically lost the argument and often got sent to his room to calm down. If only this process were observed in the political arena, we’d be in great shape!
We explored his questions and his interests together. We did science experiments in the kitchen and back yard. And because Dinosaurs Are Awesome, we kept a notebook full of dinosaur information, and added newspaper and magazine clippings to it regularly. I still have that notebook.
Bedtime stories were just as likely to be stories from history and science as they were from Narnia or Hogwarts. We told each other stories we made up, and we made up stories together.
When he was preschool and elementary school age, we bought age-appropriate books of Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Native American, and other mythology, which we read right along with the children’s Bible our son’s grandmother gave him.
He played the video game “Age of Mythology,” which taught him about the capriciousness of deities. Later he graduated to “Age of Empires,” and when he told me William Wallace was his hero, I knew for sure that these games were okay.
We played the “what if” game, to imagine how things might be different if one thing about the world was different, and we explored the best possible uses of a time machine.
Magazines full of popular science were in every bathroom and on every tabletop. Discover. Archaeology. National Geographic. Smithsonian. We read those articles together, too. When he got older, he would pick up the magazines himself and read them.
We watched science, nature and history shows together. Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was at his pinnacle when Jack was growing up, and there was a lot of really good stuff on that show. We grieved his death. The Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series (not the new movie) was on the Discovery Channel – back when the Discovery Channel still was about science. Connections – that James Burke documentary series that combined science, history and technology in wonderful ways – was a favorite, too.
I spent time in his elementary school classrooms, and talked not just to him but to his classmates about how to tell stories, all about fossils, dinosaurs, how the legal system works, how amber is formed, and more. I even organized a field trip to the local juvenile court where his classmates and my lawyer friends put some naughty dinosaurs on trial. After the trial, we visited a real juvenile detention facility.
I took him to Sunday school. I felt like I needed to, because I wanted him to understand where his religious friends were coming from. He went to Bible School one summer, too. He was in about second grade. We only did this for about a year, because I’m atheist and it was on Sunday mornings, when civilized people lounge around the house in pajamas reading the New York Times and doing crossword puzzles. I wanted him to learn, but not be indoctrinated.
This is when I knew I had succeeded:
When he was about 11, I asked him whether I had to do the Easter Bunny schtick again that year. “What do you mean, ‘schtick’?” he asked.
“Your father never helps me and I have to stay up late and I really don’t want to,” I told him. (Yeah, I was kind of whiny about it, I admit.)
“You! What about the Easter Bunny?”
“Son, do you really think a bunny hops around the house after we go to bed hiding eggs and pooping jellybeans?”
“Well, no … but can I still have the basket? And all the candy?”
“Sure, sweetheart.”
Fast forward to summer. He had lost a tooth and I forgot to put money under his pillow.
“Mom, the tooth fairy forgot last night.”
“I’m sure she was just busy and lagged behind. She’ll get to you tonight if you put it under there again.”
The next morning he reported that the tooth fairy had once again forgotten. “Just go get my purse. Get a dollar out of my wallet.”
“What? You’re the tooth fairy, too? First the Easter Bunny, now the tooth fairy – what’s next? Santa Claus?” I could tell he was annoyed, but I needed to get to work.
“Yes, son. And right after that comes God,” I said.
He looked at me in pure shock and horror for about three solid seconds, and I wondered what I would say next. Then he burst out laughing.
“I knew all along, Mom.”
Eventually, I sent my son to an Episcopal school. I did this because, after working in the juvenile justice system for a decade, I was terrified of gangs in our local public middle schools. There weren’t a lot of private school options, so I chose the least religious of the bunch, where I thought he would get a good education (that included evolution as real science, not as part of some non-existent controversy). He was inoculated against religion before he went, because critical thinking was automatic and habitual with him by the time he was enrolled there in 5th grade.
He had to take religion classes for one semester both in middle school and in high school. That was fine with me, because I doubted he’d read the Bible otherwise. Let’s face it: it’s a lousy, poorly-written book with plot holes big enough to fly 747s through, but knowing enough to be able to talk intelligently about it is pretty important in our culture.
In middle school, he pretty much kept his head down and just did his work. In high school, though, Father John wanted more out of him. The very first day of class, the priest threw out a question:
“Jack, What do you think prayer does?”
There were pockets of laughter around the classroom as Jack hesitated.
“Yeah, Jack! What do you think?” asked one of the students.
“What’s so funny?” asked Father John.
“You asked an atheist what he believes prayer does!” one of Jack’s classmates blurted. Jack was probably grinning, too. I hope he was.
He said, “I don’t think prayer does anything, but I can understand how it might be helpful for some people.”
I’m happy with his response. My son the critical thinker is also much more diplomatic than I am when it comes to this subject.
We need to give kids credit for being able to think for themselves – but we need to teach them to do it, too. It’s part of our jobs as parents, to give them the tools to understand and deal with the world, and to be able to determine for themselves what is credible.
During a recent visit with cousins from out of state, I learned that my mother’s family’s Mayflower connection is through Mercy Leonard, the wife of Samuel Robinson. I started doing a little digging to confirm this. I haven’t found the Mayflower connection yet, because, hey, I just started looking, but I found something else that grabbed my attention.
Because I get absurdly excited by all of these family history discoveries, I have to share. Grab a Bloody Mary (yeah, we’re related to her, too, but it’s way distant) or pour another glass of grape juice, and settle in for a little history lesson.
In the mid-eighteenth century, both France and Britain claimed parts of what is now Vermont. To further complicate matters, three British colonies – New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts – laid claim to at least a portion of Vermont’s territory. They argued nastily among themselves as to which colony had the right to issue land grants in the area. In 1741, to the relief of New Hampshire and New York, a royal decree finally prevented Massachusetts from claiming lands north of its current border. But the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War, broke out in 1756 over territorial lines between the American colonies claimed by France and those claimed by England. Vermont lies less than 50 miles south of Montreal. Its territory was very hotly disputed.
The British finally took control of Ticonderoga (New York) and Montreal (Quebec), and in 1760 signed a peace agreement with France to end the North American portion of the conflict. The North American battles between France and England that started in 1756 had spilled over to Europe, where it the Seven Years War finally ended for good in 1763, making it last – you guessed it – seven years.
Even though the European superpowers had resolved their territorial differences, the British colonies had not. Before the ink was dry on the North American peace agreement, New Hampshire colonial governor Benning Wentworth began making land grants in disputed territory. His motivation was partly a colonial power struggle and partly avaricious land speculation. Many of the settlements that sprang up as a result of Wentworth’s land grants were named for Wentworth and his rich and powerful pals who he hoped would support him when New York predictably got testy over the whole matter. The very first of these land grants went to our ancestor, Samuel Robinson, for Bennington. Samuel knew the area because he had camped there with his troops during the French and Indian War.
Samuel Robinson died in London, England on October 29, 1767. He had been elected by a convention of Vermont towns to go to the king to petition for validation of the New Hampshire land grants. He succeeded but was stricken by smallpox before he could return home. In a twist of fate, his grandson Dr. Benjamin Robinson (1776-1857), would pioneer smallpox vaccination in America.
The territorial dispute among the colonies was not resolved before the Revolution. Vermont was never a separate English colony. Depending on who was asked, it was part of either New Hampshire or New York. In 1777, during the Revolution, Vermont declared itself to be a separate Republic because of the land disputes between New Hampshire and New York. After the Revolution, in 1791, Vermont became the 14th state. The New Hampshire land grants pretty much prevailed once everything shook out.
My 7th great-grandfather Captain Samuel Robinson was a product of the First Great Awakening, an evangelical religious movement that started in New England in the 1730s. This evangelical movement championed a version of separation of church and state that was first proposed by Roger Williams when he founded Providence, Rhode Island, along with Richard and Catherine Marbury Scott. (FYI: Catherine Marbury Scott is my favorite of our direct ancestors. Her older sister, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, was utterly amazing, and I’m going to be just like her when I grow up. That means I’ll be run out of Boston and killed by restless natives on Long Island, but that’s another story.)
Roger Williams promoted the notion that freedom of thought, of opinion, and of the press would inspire individual religious belief, not dogma dictated by a ruling hegemony of religious leaders. Naturally, these religiously “free” places – like Providence – permitted their leaders to impose their version of religion on local residents. The movement was born in Puritan New England, after all. (Non sequitur: Massachusetts was the last state – yes, state – to abolish established religion in the United States in 1833.)
Our illustrious forebear did all he could to ensure only the right sort of Christians were his neighbors. Mercy Leonard Robinson and her children are buried in Old Bennington Cemetery, next to the church Samuel Robinson founded there. The original church building no longer exists, but its replacement celebrated its 200th birthday in 2006.
After the Revolution, Mercy and Samuel’s son Moses (named for Mercy’s father – it’s her I’m researching, remember) was a member of the delegation sent by the Republic of Vermont in 1782 to the Continental Congress to work out the territorial dispute with New York. He later served as governor of the Vermont Republic and oversaw its transition to statehood. He served as one of the first pair of senators from Vermont. Several of Samuel and Mercy Leonard Robinson’s sons were prominent leaders in politics and medicine. Religion, not so much. That was their father’s bailiwick.
Thomas Jefferson is credited in legal doctrine with the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” because of a letter he wrote to the Baptist Church leaders in Danbury, Connecticut in 1803. Before the famous Danbury letter, though, he wrote a letter to Moses Robinson in 1801 on the subject. The original is at the University of Virginia among Jefferson’s papers. Jefferson, who had been President for less than a month at the time the letter was written, expressed dismay that so many of the clergy seemed to want to establish a state religion, and ended his letter with a complaint that still rings in my ears today – mostly because I listen to my own words, and I pontificate about this a lot:
The eastern States will be the last to come over [to Jefferson’s notion of a secular and scientific nation], on account of the dominion of the clergy, who had got a smell of union between Church and State, and began to indulge reveries which can never be realised in the present state of science. If, indeed, they could have prevailed on us to view all advances in science as dangerous innovations, and to look back to the opinions and practices of our forefathers, instead of looking forward, for improvement, a promising groundwork would have been laid. But I am in hopes their good sense will dictate to them, that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find their interest in acquiescing in the liberty and science of their country, and that the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.
(Today, I’d insert “Southern and Midwestern” for “eastern” in that first line. In fairness to Jefferson, not only was the letter written before the Civil War and Dust Bowl devastated the economies of those regions, thereby providing fertile ground for more religious fervor, it predated the Louisiana Purchase.)
According to a recent Gallup poll, Vermont is now the least religiously inclined state in the nation. I assume 7th great-grandfather Robinson would not be near as amused as I am by this, especially since his own sons began selling land to the wrong sorts as soon as old Sam was room temperature.
Recently, I posted some hate mail on Facebook that the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers received from someone named Carey Dove. This email said that atheists have no heritage in the United States, that we aren’t real patriots, and that we don’t have the courage to step up and play with those who are.
Dear Carey Dove:
I’ve studied constitutional law, history, and my own genealogy. I know what my heritage is. Apparently, you don’t know me at all.
So, let me give you a little introduction to me, my knowledge about the Constitution, and whether or not I have any American heritage.
We’ll start with the constitutional lesson.
Portrait of George Mason (1725-1792), Dominic W. Boudet, after John Hesselius, c. 1750. This is a copy of the original, which was destroyed.
George Mason wrote the first bill of rights to be adopted in the Americas. His Virginia Declaration of Rights, written in the spring of 1776, influenced revolutions on two continents. The Declaration of Independence drew heavily from it. The Bill of Rights plagiarized it. The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen tracked it. Its final provision was to grant religious freedom to Virginians.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, 1940, Howard Chandler Christy 1872-1952, American)
George Mason was a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia when fifty-five men from twelve of the newly formed states argued about how to replace the unworkable Articles of Confederation. Mason dominated the discussions. Ultimately, he was one of three delegates who voted against it, primarily because it did not contain a bill of rights – there were no constitutional guarantees of personal liberty.
He would be vindicated four years later when the Bill of Rights was adopted. The first two of those enumerated rights listed in the very first of the amendments address religious freedom.
So, now we have established that our constitution, and the history that preceded it, includes religious freedom. That means the freedom to dissent and to reject religion, because without the freedom to dissent and reject what we find to be wrong with religion, there can be no freedom in our practice of religion. And if we ultimately reject it all? That is the ultimate freedom.
So now I’ll embark on explaining the pedigree I have in this country.
A few years ago I was chosen to be on the Board of Regents that oversees the maintenance and operation of George Mason’s historic home in Virginia.
Gunston Hall and its garden, Wikimedia Commons
I was invited to sit on that board because of who my ancestors were. My European ancestors not only lived in colonial America, but they gave their time, talents, efforts, and money in public service to their colonies. They were politicians, military officers, doctors, judges, ministers, founders of schools, and founders of towns. They spoke out. They acted. They were patriots.
Who they were and what they did has shaped our country and its government. They shaped our states and our institutions. Their words and actions are this country’s heritage, and this country is their legacy.
On a very personal level, who they were and what they did has shaped who I am personally, and what I do. Their behavior, values, strengths, words, intelligence, and deeds are my heritage, and I am the culmination of their legacy.
Anne Marbury Hutchinson statue at the Massachusetts State House. The child is her daughter Susannah, who survived the Pelham Bay massacre.
One of my favorite ancestors is my 11th great aunt, Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson was a well-liked and respected mother of 15 children. She was brilliant, charismatic, and a passionate intellectual. She was also the polestar of a controversy that nearly shattered the religious experiment that was the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Anne and her husband Will came to America in 1634 with a Puritan minister named John Cotton, who would eventually become the most preeminent theologian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unlike the Puritan ministers already in Boston when he and the Hutchinsons arrived, John Cotton believed that a person had no control over his salvation, which depended solely on God’s grace. This was Calvinist predestination in its purest sense, but it was contrary to what other Puritan ministers were teaching. They taught that the good works done by a person were the only ticket to salvation.
Boston was a small town in 1634. Click to embiggen, and note that every single household is listed. Will & Anne Hutchinson and their large extended family stayed with friends and relatives while their own home was being built. The population of the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Plantations was about 5,000 people. (Map from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection at the Boston Public Library)
The Hutchinsons were wealthy in England but even wealthier in the colony. They built one of the largest homes in Boston. After church services, Anne Hutchinson would invite other women to gather in her home to discuss the sermons and the Bible. Anne’s meetings were very popular with the women of Boston, and soon men joined in.
Anne Hutchinson Preaching at Her House, 1901 (Howard Pyle, 1853-1911, American)
Like her mentor, John Cotton, Anne emphasized the importance of a state of grace over good works. People liked what she had to say. They were focused on feeding their families and running their businesses; they didn’t have time for unlimited acts of charity. As the number of people at her meetings escalated, Anne’s philosophy quickly leaked back to the Puritan clergy. Boston was a very small town in 1634.
The ministers claimed that Anne’s “unauthorized” religious gatherings “might confuse the faithful.” They argued the theological point of predestination – good works versus inherent grace – among themselves, and ultimately, Anne was charged with heresy – not because the leaders of Boston disagreed with her philosophy, but because they claimed she accused them of being more concerned with good works than the grace of God, to which she basically replied, “If the shoe fits…”
John Cotton, however, was not charged.
Anne Hutchinson on Trial, 1901 (Edward Austin Abbey, 1852-1911, American)
Anne was a woman, so she was not authorized to preach.
Left to her own devices, Anne Hutchinson, the first female defendant in any trial in America, defended herself at her heresy trial, which was prosecuted by John Winthrop, her neighbor and the governor of the colony. Governor Winthrop was most displeased with Anne’s religious dissent because his wife, Margaret, was very fond of attending the meetings in the Hutchinson home and brought home with her ideas he found unbecoming in a woman.
And like the Reverend Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who was modeled after him, John Cotton essentially betrayed Anne to the powerful citizens who brought the charges against her. When he was called to testify, Cotton denied that he had incited any dissent in Anne, and smiled and shrugged, claiming he did not remember the substance of any of his conversations with her.
It is no accident that this red A, the icon of the secular movement, evokes the scarlet letter Hester Prynne was required to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel.
Upon hearing his repudiation, Anne Hutchinson did something she had been forbidden to do: she began to teach the men. While her teaching had been in private before, here, now, at her trial for heresy, she took off the gloves and came out punching. “If you please to give me leave, I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true.” Without waiting for permission, Anne continued speaking, explaining her own history, her dissatisfaction with the Church of England, and her search for the truth she knew had to exist.
Governor Winthrop attempted to interrupt her. She ignored him and continued.
“God did discover unto me the unfaithfulness of the churches and the danger of them, and that none of those ministers could preach the Lord aright.” Scripture fell from her lips as she brazened on, daring to teach, despite an exchange with Governor Winthrop earlier in her trial during which they had exchanged barbs about the ability of women to teach. (“What, now you would have me teach you what the Bible says?” she mockingly exclaimed to him.)
One of my favorite quotes from Anne’s lecture during the trial is:
“How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?” Never mind that, chronologically speaking, Abraham knew nothing about any commandments.
Governor John Winthrop was also, conveniently, one of the judges, so naturally Anne Hutchinson was convicted, and in November 1637, she was banished from Massachusetts.
Anne was 43 years old at the time of her trial. She was also pregnant, and during the trial she suffered a miscarriage. The superstitious Puritans allied against her saw the severely malformed fetus as proof that Anne had fallen from God’s grace. Chromosomal anomalies are not uncommon in older mothers. This would be Anne’s last pregnancy.
Anne’s youngest sister was my 10th great-grandmother, Catherine Marbury Scott. Catherine and her husband, a shoemaker named Richard Scott, came to America on the Griffin with the Hutchinsons and John Cotton in 1634. They left Boston with Anne, first joining Roger Williams at a place he called Providence, in the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations secured by Williams as a separate colony. Williams had himself been banished from Boston in 1635, the year after the Hutchinsons and Scotts had arrived, for preaching that one did not need a a church in which to worship.
The Providence Agreement or Civil Compact, with Richard Scott’s signature. Rumor is that it’s all in his handwriting. (Providence City Archives). It reads:
August 20, 1637
We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them only in civil things.
[Signed by Richard Scott and twelve others.]
In Providence, the Scotts, along with many other of Anne’s followers from Boston, created a new community. Richard Scott wrote the Providence Compact, which was then signed by each of the 39 heads of household to come to that place. They became Baptists for a while, then Quakers. Then, in 1660, Catherine returned to Boston to protest the punishment of two young Quaker men. For her efforts, she was stripped to the waist and flogged in public. Even though Boston had been unspeakably cruel to her sister 23 years before, Catherine did not hesitate to speak out when she saw the government do something wrong. She was a worthy bearer of her sister Anne’s torch.
Anne herself was afraid to stay in Providence, especially after her husband’s death. Massachusetts had rattled its saber at the Rhode Island settlers, claiming it had the right to govern them, so she fled with her children to Long Island. There, in 1643, she and all but one of her children were murdered by natives. How long might she have lived had she not been run out of Boston? How much more might she have contributed to the ideas of women’s rights and freedom of conscience had she remained in Boston?
Far from being dour, rigid Puritans, Anne and Catherine were firebrands.
Anne Hutchinson is a key figure in the development of religious freedom in the U.S., and in the history of women in ministry. She challenged authority, and she didn’t back down. A monument to her at the Massachusetts State House calls her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She is easily the most famous – and infamous – Englishwoman in colonial American history.
Anne Hutchinson was a freethinker in the truest sense of the word: Dogmatic as she was in her own way, she seriously contemplated her religion, a deity, and the teachings of those who claimed to know, and then she drew conclusions for herself. The conclusion she reached was not the one that was favored in Boston in 1637. Nevertheless, she did not back down. She had the courage of her convictions, and today she is admired and even revered for her steadfastness.
I admire her enormously. Her courage in the face of adversity, her sustained intelligent wit, her sublime sarcasm – right to the face of the most powerful man in Massachusetts! This – this is a woman I can only hope to live up to as I exercise the courage of my own convictions.
Firebrand atheism: an in-home “revival,” with Sam Singleton, Atheist Evangelist, at my house in December 2012.
When I speak up and speak out, when I hold meetings in my home, when I dissent from religion, when I give my time, money, and talents to my community and to issues I care about, I am following the legacy of my heritage. I am doing exactly what my ancestors have done ever since they first came to this continent – and before.
For the 392 years that we’ve been in America, it’s been my family’s tradition to speak up and speak out and to act on our convictions.
And that, Carey Dove, is a very proud heritage, with full knowledge of where our religious freedoms came from, with full knowledge of when they did not exist here, and with full knowledge of what happens when dissent is not allowed – and why it most definitely and wholeheartedly is.
On July 10, two senators introduced Senate Bill 1274, which would add religious buildings to the list of nonprofit facilities eligible to receive federal disaster relief aid after catastrophic events like hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. The Senate bill and its House counterpart, H. R. 592, address aid to nonprofit facilities damaged in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 and afterward.
The Secular Coalition of America opposes the bill because tax dollars would directly fund the repair or replacement of damaged and destroyed churches, synagogues, and mosques, not to mention other nonprofit organizations.
SCA is encouraging a campaign to remind our Senators that one of the longest-standing principles of our nation is that no citizen should be required to fund any religions with which they disagree, and not to permit taxpayer money to be used to repair or rebuild churches destroyed in natural disasters.
I’m usually right on board with the Secular Coalition of America in anything it does, but this brought me up short.
No, I don’t want my tax dollars to build new churches, fund their missionary programs, or finance a church-supported school’s science-denying science curriculum. It makes me sick that religious institutions get a pass when April 15 rolls around. Frankly, I think all nonprofits ought to pay taxes. If their profits are reinvested for public benefit, or set aside in specific funds intended for that purpose, then that should be credited to them. But should churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues be treated differently than any other nonprofit when they are hit by a natural calamity?
I looked into the status quo, without the passage of this Senate bill.
FEMA’s current policy addressed aid to individuals and their households as well as to government facilities. It does not permit disaster assistance to nonprofits unless they provide “essential services to the general public customarily provided by the government.” Whether nonprofit or for-profit, facilities used primarily for religious, political, athletic, recreational, or vocational purposes don’t qualify for FEMA funds. Churches, the DNC headquarters, the Superdome, Disney World, and Joe’s Body Shop don’t get government money. They are expected to be adequately insured.
The new law would allow virtually any nonprofit organization to benefit, though, which may indeed be desirable when we consider that the gift shop at Hurricane River Cave in the Ozarks (one of the coolest caves I’ve ever had the pleasure to visit) might be taken out when the next big New Madrid quake hits, as might the collection of historical buildings at the Scott Plantation Settlement.
On the other hand, it would also, in this time of high budget deficits and sequestration, open the FEMA coffers to more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations. It does this by removing the requirement that, in order to receive FEMA funds, the organization must provide a service that would otherwise be an essential government service. Cool gift shop or not, amazing caverns, even if operated by nonprofit organizations, do not supply an essential governmental service. Nor do historic preserves of bygone eras.
Having a church building is definitely not an essential governmental service.
And, as the SCA points out in its letter to Senators, two-thirds of the American population doesn’t use churches. Nonbelievers and the nonreligious constitute 20% of the American population, and that number is growing. And by expanding FEMA’s coverage in this era of sequestration, 2.3 million nonprofit organizations would immediately become eligible for FEMA funds in the event of a natural disaster. (Only 1.6 million are registered with the IRS. The others haven’t filed their forms to obtain official approval of their nonprofit status.)
“While the services of these nonprofits may provide great benefit to the general public, federal funds should not be diverted away from essential governmental programs toward nonprofits with access to a charitable and generous base of donors nationwide and around the globe,” says the SCA. Being on the boards of a few nonprofits that are always struggling for money, I kind of take issue with the “generous base” description, but I can’t help but acknowledge the definite difference between “great benefit” and “essential service.”
private nonprofit educational, utility, irrigation, emergency, medical, rehabilitational, and temporary or permanent custodial care facilities (including those for the aged and disabled) and facilities on Indian reservations…
[as well as any] [p]rivate nonprofit facility that provides essential services of a governmental nature to the general public, (including museums, zoos, performing arts facilities, community arts centers, libraries, homeless shelters, senior citizen centers, rehabilitation facilities, shelter workshops, and facilities that provide health and safety services of a governmental nature)…
Language proposed by the Senate bill and the House resolution would add community centers and houses of worship to the list.
To be fair, the bill contains a restriction for religious facilities that does not apply to the other nonprofits. Taxpayer-funded disaster relief would be allowed to religious institutions only for the actual buildings damaged. Its language is pretty specific:
In spaces used primarily for religious worship services, contributions…shall only be used to cover the costs of purchasing or replacing, without limitation, the building structure, building enclosure components, building envelope, vertical and horizontal circulation, physical plant support spaces, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems (including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and fire and life safety systems), and related site improvements.
A three-prong test has to be passed in order for government funds to be used by religious institutions, including religious educational institutions:
The funds must be used for a secular purpose that does not promote religion;
The effect of using the funds must not promote religion; and
Enforcement of the secular purpose should not unnecessarily entangle church and state.
In the Tilton case, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that grants for non-religious school facilities did not violate the Establishment Clause because the purpose and effect of the Act that authorized the grants was not to aid religious institutions but to aid education generally. The students affected by the act were secondary students, who the Court determined to be less susceptible to religious indoctrination than elementary school students. Significantly, though, the decision in the Tilton case did not address whether granting schools affiliated with a particular religious sect would enable those schools to further their religious instruction. It did, however, determine that taxpayers were not themselves harmed if their ability to practice their own religion remained untouched.
The Hunt case came out of South Carolina and addressed whether revenue bonds intended for capital improvements at institutions of higher education could be used by sectarian colleges. Because higher education is a secular purpose, and constructing buildings to house educational facilities does not promote religion, and because at the college level, religious indoctrination is not as significant as it is in elementary schools.
It would seem that an actual church is not a school, though, and its primary purpose is to promote religion. While Tilton and Hunt both seem to say that FEMA funds can be used to rebuild the local Catholic High School, there does not seem to be any justification, based on the Supreme Court’s three-prong test, to use taxpayer funds to rebuild a church, even if the rebuilding is limited to the facility alone and not to provide the pews within it.
An ordinary nonprofit organization exists for the public benefit, and the public does indeed benefit from its existence. These facilities all provide valuable community services. But it can be argued that churches do, too. They are community centers, even though they serve a much smaller slice of the population. Then again, rehabilitation centers and senior citizen centers only serve a portion of the community, too.
While we as secularists may disagree vehemently with the mission of religions in general, are we really any differently situated than, say, someone who believes zoos to be cruel? The argument feels somewhat like saying that if our trashy neighbors’ home gets washed away during the flood or flattened by a tornado, they be denied emergency relief to rebuild just because we don’t like them.
I hate feeling mean-spirited. It puts me in a bad mood.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has filed suit to do away with the favored tax status of churches and to have them treated like all other nonprofits. If churches want to be nonprofit organizations, they should have to file the expensive tax form that goes along with being awarded that status. If they want to endorse specific candidates or political parties, they should lose their 501(c)(3) and have to satisfy themselves with 501(c)(4), which has stricter reporting requirements. I firmly stand with FFRF on this, as, I suspect, do many readers of this post.
But should a church be treated differently when it comes to disaster relief just because it is a church?
As long as the damaged church isn’t violating its tax-free status by politicking, do you see a problem with treating it like any other nonprofit, and allowing the use of taxpayer funds for it to rebuild after a disaster?
And what about extending FEMA coverage to all nonprofits? It is a noble intent, for sure. But is it practical, given our current economic issues? Why should nonprofits be treated differently than Joe’s Body Shop when it comes to disaster relief? I would think that helping businesses recover from disaster would be a pretty noble investment, too.
I’m very interested in hearing what you have to say and whether you feel strongly enough about this issue to contact your Senator.
For the second year running, I’m organizing a conference on science and secularism. My friend Sky came up with the idea after a group of us from central Arkansas attended Skepticon in the fall of 2011, and we’ve run with the project. Last year was the first ever Reason in the Rock. We expected maybe 75 people for a day of speakers. Instead, over 250 signed up!
We’ve learned from organizers of similar conferences, especially from Skepticon’s, that we can expect to double our attendance for the first few years as word spreads. And like Skepticon, we really want to keep Reason in the Rock free for anyone who can’t afford to attend otherwise.
*Image is considerably smaller than actual creature
This presents a bit of a problem, because renting a venue, hosting speakers from all over the country (not to mention just getting them to Little Rock), and promoting the conference takes money. We depend on donations to make Reason in the Rock a reality.
See the video, which was made mostly in my basement hallway, in front of the collection of books in the Star Wars Expanded Universe – proving my X-treme geekery – and with a diplodocus from the Carnegie Collection of dinosaur figurines serving as the horns of the devil in many segments.
This event is very important. It’s the only one of its kind this year in Arkansas. Conferences like this can change minds, open eyes, and expand horizons. Reason in the Rock did all that last year, and will do it again this year, if it can make its funding goals.
Not only did Reason in the Rock expand the number of people who knew about the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers – because we organized the conference – it got us important positive news coverage. So often when the Freethinkers get in the news, it’s because we’re objecting to violations of separation of church and state, which, in the minds of those who would have us live in a theocracy or think that injecting religion into politics isn’t harmful, makes us seem like Grinches. We aren’t – we’re a group of fun-loving, politically diverse, intellectually active, friendly, community-minded humanists, agnostics, atheists, ethicists, and other secularists.
In the deeply religious Bible Belt, someone who doesn’t ascribe to religion can feel very alone. The Arkansas Society of Freethinkers is working to build a community dedicated to good science education, rational inquiry, critical thinking, secularism, and fun. This conference is one of many ways we can get the word out that the isolated nonbelievers in Arkansas are definitely not alone.
We have a great lineup this year, and one that will appeal to anyone who loves science, reason, and independent thinking.
David Silverman, president of American Atheists, will be here. Dave’s fun to hang out with and fun to hear speak. And yes – those who come to Reason in the Rock will get to hang out with the speakers and talk with them one-on-one. Those who donate $500 to sponsor a speaker will even get to share a meal with one of the stars of the line-up!
Jerry DeWitt, who just published his memoir Hope After Faith about his transition from charismatic Pentecostal preacher to nonbeliever, will be returning. Fun fact: The first time Jerry ever spoke publicly about his atheism was in Little Rock, at a meeting of the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers. He’s a special guy, and we’re glad to be special to him, too! Jerry’s book will be available for sale, and he’ll happily autograph it for you.
Ben Bell and Kyle Sanders, who started Little Rock’s Skeptics in the Pub, will put on a special Skeptics presentation for us. Kyle put together the Indiegogo campaign for us, and he just generally rocks.
Ever seen Matt Dillahunty on the Atheist Experience? No one pwns theocrats and unthinking believers like he does. Oh, they try to argue with him. They lose. Decisively. Matt’s amazing, and if you’ve never seen him in action you should definitely check out the Atheist Experience’s YouTube Channel.
Bil Cash, the director of Arkansas’ EEOC office, will speak about religious discrimination in the workplace. Since he was one of my very best friends in law school a million years ago, I’m really excited about his participation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is sending Lecia Brooks, the Director of Outreach, to talk about the state of intolerance in America. There’s some controversy here, because some have said that SPLC is promoting intolerance just by keeping and making public its dossiers on hate groups. Is it wrong to keep tabs on the haters and to describe them that way?
We’ll show an awesome documentary, No Dinosaurs in Heaven, and the filmmaker, Greta Schiller will take questions after it. Me, I’m hoping she can explain how none of the dinos managed to make it onto the ark, and how even the prehistoric swimming creatures drowned in the flood. (I’m kidding, guys. Relax.)
Darrel Ray will be here to talk about Sex and God. Rachel Johnson says she’ll be talking about sex, too, but from a biological perspective. She’s one of the co-hosts of the Pink Atheist Podcast along with LeeWood Thomas, who is one of our members, and Phil Ferguson, who also plans to be here.
No conference on secularism would be complete without the participation of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Dan Barker, co-president of FFRF, will be here. As much as FFRF gets slammed in the press by theocratic fundamentalists, you’d think he sports a tail and horns, but in actuality he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.
These aren’t the only great speakers in our lineup. There are more, and we want to make sure they all come and they all make a bog impression. Please help the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers make this year’s Reason in the Rock a reality.
We’re actually hoping to be over-funded, so we have a head start on next year’s conference. We have big dreams about who we want to invite next year. BIG dreams!
And Arkansas has uphill battles. We have hateful bigots in our state who advocate the murder of gay people, a former governor with Faux News show who thinks his version of Christianity would make a great theocracy, and a largely uneducated state legislature who not only doesn’t have the first clue about how to pass laws that also pass constitutional muster but also want to impose their dubious morality on everyone in the state…. We need all the help we can get.
So sayeth the sign with a picture of a pepperoni on the pizza. (Leviticus 11:7)
When it comes to picking cherries, Heavenly Pizza in Searcy, Arkansas, fills a whole pie.
Heavenly Pizza posted a reference to Leviticus after the Supreme Court decisions last week. Looking it up was an exercise in excess caution. Leviticus 20:13 says exactly what we predicted it would say:
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.
In other words, those LGBTQ abominations just ought to be killed, that’s all. End of story. God has spoken.
One would think that the authorities would frown upon a business prominently displaying a sign that advocates murder, but this is Searcy, Arkansas. Searcy is dominated by the Churches of Christ. It is home to Harding University, but instead of the tolerance and openness that one tends to expect from a college town, Harding’s worldview mimics that of the town: Harding is a Christian institution, and by Christian, it means Churches of Christ, not those sinful not-really-Christian Presbyterians and Catholics and such. The congregants of the Churches of Christ believe that the bible is the inspired and completely inerrant word of God, which means
They haven’t read the book to see all the contradictions this “inerrant” work contains;
They accept what their preachers tell them is dogma when they need to clear up perceived inconsistencies;
They have read the book, but they have seriously deficient reading comprehension;
They cherry-pick their bible, even though they say they don’t; or
All of the above.
Aside from encouraging hate crimes, Heavenly Pizza has a few problems. Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21 all prohibit cooking cheese and meat together. Therefore, clearly, nothing says “I hate Jesus” like a steaming slice of pepperoni (a sausage made from a blend of pork and beef) served up with extra cheese (beef and cheese together? Not kosher, guys!) and helping of bigotry. If we’re going to abide by Old Testament law, we need to abide by all of it, because after all, this is the inerrant word of God.
Let’s worry about Heavenly Pizza’s sinfulness. Please assure me that their employees aren’t required to wear uniforms made of a cotton-polyester blend, nor that the restaurant’s owners allow anyone wearing such a sinful fabric to enter the place. Can anyone confirm whether Heavenly Pizza pays its employees’ wages daily, not weekly or bi-weekly as sinful employers might? I wonder how many times the cashiers at Heavenly Pizza have accidentally given incorrect change, only to find the person they shortchanged to give them the right amount plus an extra 1/5 to make up for the error – and how many times, when an honest customer has told them they received too much change, the Heavenly Pizza employee extracted another 1/5 from him? God requires that, you know.
I hope Heavenly Pies doesn’t have a pizza with shrimp on their menu, because that would be a sin. I hope that when they say the blessing over their pizza, they aren’t sporting zits or bruises or rashes or cuts, they don’t wear glasses, and they aren’t limping, because if so, the blessing just won’t work. And I am shocked – shocked, I tell you! – that they have what they call a “Hog Zone” in their restaurant. While some might think that is a special place for fans of the Arkansas Razorbacks, you and I recognize it as a place to keep unclean animals from polluting the rest of the restaurant.
It is an abomination that Heavenly Pizza is open on Saturday; it’s against God’s law to be open for business that day. According to their Facebook page, they are open on Sunday for lunch, too. I fear for their immortal souls, what with all the work they do on the various and sundry sabbaths.
My guess is that the only verse in the whole chapter in all of Leviticus the good Christians at Heavenly Pizza bother to remember is the one about gay-bashing. I’m so glad that they are all about promoting (in the words of Harding University) “an all-encompassing love for God and a corresponding love for people.”
Except for those homos. Because homos aren’t really people. And treating them like real people entitled to equal rights is one of Satan’s many schemes to lead us down the path of sorrow.
Come have a slice of pizza…..the extra toppings of bigotry and hatred are free!
Surely the good Christians at Heavenly Pizza aren’t hypocrites. Let’s examine Leviticus for possible problems, just to be sure. Now, a lot of Leviticus focuses on the exact rites and beasts and plants that are used to purify offerings and sinners, but there is a lot of good stuff in those 27 chapters that tells us how to live and all. I’m going to assume that all the good Christians at Heavenly Pizza obey each and every stricture of that particular book of the Bible, just like they do all the rest of the chapters. Because inerrant word of God.
I’m sure no one around there has ever told one of their friends, family members or colleagues that they don’t want to testify in court, despite knowing what happened in the case being litigated. That happens a lot, especially in divorce cases – people just don’t want to get involved. They don’t realize that refusing to go to court is a sin, and that to purge themselves of that sin they need to sacrifice a female sheep or goat according to Leviticus 5:6.
They have to do the same if they break any kind of promise, according to Leviticus 5:4. I wonder if there is anyone there at Heavenly Pizza who has not broken a promise, and I wonder how many sheep and goats have died for their sins.
All of the people there surely have a priest check their acne and boils for leprosy as directed by Leviticus 13, too. Don’t they?
What will you bet that some of those folks at Heavenly Pizza are hunters, or know hunters, and have eaten a rabbit or two? Leviticus 11:6 says that’s a sin. I bet they’ve chowed down on tasty crawfish, yummy oysters, and succulent lobster, not to mention some good southern fried catfish. They’re in deep trouble, according to Leviticus 11:9-12. And if those folks have ever tried alligator or rattlesnake meat – delicacies in the rural south – they’re likewise doomed.
Have the women at Heavenly Pizza who have borne children purified themselves after giving birth by sacrificing a lamb in accordance with Leviticus 12:6, and sacrificed two pigeons or turtledoves after every irregular menstruation pursuant to Leviticus 15:29? I hope so. They don’t want to be seen as cherry-picking what parts of the inerrant word of God they want to follow, after all.
I’m sure none of those godly people have ever read their horoscopes, because if they have they are being shunned by the other godly folks thereabouts, and whoever wrote those horoscopes has to be put to death immediately. Likewise, I hope none of them have ever had sex with a menstruating female, because that results in shunning, too. I hope they check the community carefully to see who’s having sex and who isn’t, who’s on her period and who isn’t, and that they keep the sexes strictly separate during that terribly unclean time.
No one at Heavenly Pies has ever had an extramarital affair, because their colleagues already would have put them to death pursuant to Leviticus 20:10, just like the gay people they want to kill. That verse is right before the one they cite to promote the massacre of gays, so you know they totally abide by it. Likewise, if any of the boys around those parts have had sexual relations with an animal, they are murdered immediately, too. I’m not saying any have, naturally, because I’m not aware of the community rising up to stone any cow-, chicken- or pig-fuckers.
Death comes to us all, and when the good, holy people at Heavenly Pies lose someone, I’m sure they immediately stop shaving, and no matter how the death of their loved one distresses them, I’m sure they don’t pull out their hair or scratch or cut themselves in their grief. Because that would be wrong. Likewise, I’m sure they don’t call a coroner or undertaker because Leviticus 21:1-4 tells them they have to deal with the dead bodies themselves. They don’t tattoo anything on themselves, because Leviticus 19:28 strictly and expressly forbids it, and they treat immigrants just like anyone born and raised in Searcy, because the bible tells them to – why, I would imagine they completely ignore laws against hiring illegal immigrants because they know biblical law supersedes anything Congress tries to say.
I’m sure all the wives of the religious leaders who lead the flock at Heavenly Pizza were virgins when they got married, and that none of them were divorced or widowed, and that all of them are related to their husbands. God doesn’t like second marriages, because cooties or something, and priests have to keep it in the family. And if any of the daughters of these pastors ever slept around, surely her father burned her to death stat, just like Leviticus 21:9 tells him to do. There’s just no killin’ like an honor killin’. These pastors never go near a dead body, either. Funeral rites for the blessed Heavenly Pizza crew are conducted by their close families, not by their church or by a funeral home.
Heavenly Pizza Pies has its ardent supporters in Searcy, of course. Looky what one of Jesus’s peaceful, loving followers said:
So…much…fail.
First, “sodomites are waging a war of death and misery”. Sure, they are. For years the news has been full of hetero-bashing hate crimes and lynchings like the one committed by that awful Matthew Shepherd, discrimination against heteros in the workplace, denial of adoptions and foster parent qualifications to heterosexual parents, denial of spousal benefits to heterosexual couples, … what? No? I got that backwards? Oh. Then on to the next…
“This Holy Christian Nation.” Exactly! The First Amendment clearly established Christianity as the official religion of all the United States and its territories, and that was confirmed by Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli (ratified by both houses of Congress unanimously and signed by Founding Father and 2nd President John Adams) and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists…. what? No again? Backward again? Damn. Okay, on to the next point.
“Self-hating baby killers will not stop…” Damn right they won’t. Not until every baby is dead, by golly! We hate babies! They are almost as icky as lesboqueers! Except… no. Those without the guilt imposed by religion don’t hate themselves, and no one kills babies except criminals. Furthermore, “self-hating baby killers” is so off-topic as to be ludicrous in this situation. So, another fail.
“Will not stop until their Atheist religion has ruined everything for everyone.” I can’t even pretend on this one. If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color, an empty bowl makes a meal, and not collecting stamps is a hobby. By definition, atheism is the absence of religion. And it doesn’t ruin anything, because there is nothing to ruin. If the commenter wants to hang on to her delusional fairy tales, she can. She can believe in Santa all she wants to, and she can assume that when he doesn’t come down her chimney on Christmas morning it was because she was such an awful person. Because she is.
“They don’t want equality, they want everyone under their control.” Ouchies for the missed semicolon opportunity there. And if she wasn’t sure about the semi-colon, she should have used a period, because that misplaced comma hurts my feelings. And that’s not me wanting to control her; that’s just proper punctuation. The whole idea of “control” is making other people conform to what you want, not what they want. If you don’t want to get gay-married, honey, don’t get gay-married. But you shouldn’t have the right to control gay people’s happiness and basic human rights any more than they should have the right to control yours.
“It’s time we as a country impose God’s will on them…” See the paragraph above. She really doesn’t get it, does she?
“If the sodomites don’t like the punishment imposed in Leviticus 20:13, they certainly won’t like the heat from the flames of hell.” Sweetie, there is no hell. And even if there were, I’m betting you’d get to visit it, too, because of all the rules in Leviticus you’ve broken in your lifetime. Here – wipe your tears with this cotton-poly blend hanky. There’s a good girl. What? You weren’t a virgin when you got married? And you’ve been divorced? Burn, baby, burn!
I’m not even going to bother with the rest, except to say that I think law enforcement takes a rather dim view of making threats of death, mayhem, and torture to other people.
There’s just one thing that Heavenly Pizza Pies and its supporters are forgetting in their argument. The Supreme Court decision that Heavenly Pizza finds so objectionable was a decision about what the government should do in a country that prides itself on equality. Churches and their members are free to do something more strict, more stringent, as they please. They can be bigoted, discriminatory and hateful if they want to be. They are private organizations and they have a right to free speech, too. The government does not enjoy that privilege, however, because while a church can choose who to serve and who not to serve, a government has to be even-handed in its treatment of all of its citizens.
Today my friend Kevin, whose wit and wisdom I admire to the point of not even wanting to give him credit when I plagiarize him, summed it up beautifully. Kevin happens to be from Searcy. He also happens to be one of those loathsome homoqueers that Heavenly Pizza Pies wants to kill. He said:
There is church and there is state, two separate things.
The state is required to have equality. The church is not.
A church member’s opinion may reflect his church’s teachings.
As an American, you either stand for equality or you don’t.
Go ahead, say the words, “I do not believe all people are created equal.
I do not believe all have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Sounds pretty crappy, huh?
–Kevin 7/3/13
Heavenly Pizza Pies, you and your kind make the baby Jesus cry like you are burning him with your nasty cigarettes.
Graduation seems to be one of those times during the school year when religion rears its head and wants to elbow its way into the public square, disseminating itself messily all over unwilling captive audiences. This year is no exception.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) got involved in an Arkansas case recently, writing a letter to tell the Riverside School District in Lake City, Arkansas, that plans to pray and sing hymns at its sixth grade graduation were unconstitutional. Variations of two different versions of what happened next have made their rounds. In the first story, the school board, possibly at the behest of the superintendent, decided simply to cancel graduation rather than bow to the law. In the second story, the school board voted to abide by the law, but the parents organizing the graduation said that if they couldn’t pray, then graduation at the school would be cancelled. The upshot was that the sixth grade graduation was indeed cancelled, and the organizing parents decided to hold graduation exercises at a local church instead. More uproar has ensued.
Because apparently we’re the only advocates of separation of church and state to be found in Arkansas, the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers was invited to participate in a radio talk show about the kerfuffle. When Alice Stewart, Mike Huckabee’s former spokesperson and the host of the program, told me that her other guest would be the evangelical preacher who enjoyed the spotlight at our fair state’s National Day of Prayer event at the state capitol, I asked her if she had considered asking a representative of a more progressive variety of Christian – one that supports separation of church and state. She said she didn’t know any. Right then and there I probably should have directed her to the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or Jews, but I didn’t. I agreed to go on the show.
They’ve done it this way forever, so there’s no harm in allowing them to continue praying at public school events.
The Constitution says we are entitled to the free exercise of religion.
God is the foundation of our founding documents.
Many of our founding fathers went to seminary with certainly the intent that God would be incorporated on our money and in our system and society.
We’ve tried, and we just can’t ever take God, guns, sex, violence, drugs out of school.
God is everywhere in school forever.
Our country is built on the principles of God.
The pledge is a prayer.
By insisting on leaving religion out of school functions, atheists impose their views on everyone else.
It’s more important to keep faith in schools than anywhere.
It’s impossible to take God out of schools because too many religious people are in the schools, and god is in the songs that the school choir sings, plays that the school theater performs, civics and history books, and because there is a federal holiday honoring Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who taught the nation about the Bible.
We shouldn’t have to wait for another bombing or mass shooting before a school assembly prays again.
We should not have to care about the rights of minorities in public schools.
FFRF wanted graduation stopped.
Public prayer in school isn’t illegal.
God calls the light day and the darkness night and no one can change that because it’s an order from god. (If you listen closely you can detect that I nearly busted out laughing here. Sorry.)
If the Constitution allows the pledge, which contains a prayer, then it is resolved that all prayer should be allowed in schools.
Religion never changes.
Jesus said always to pray and not to think.
The word that God gives Christians is in Psalms 1.
God’s law is higher than Constitutional law.
If we say “under God” in the pledge at school, we are obligated to continue praying in schools so as not to be hypocritical.
I know, I know. Our first response is “What? They actually believe this tripe?” followed immediately by a facepalm and “Oh, boy. They really believe this tripe.”
So…
1. The War on Religion
Evidently I burned my draft card on this one. Personally, I couldn’t care less what religion someone else practices, as long as they do no harm with it. (Yeah, I know. That’s impossible, unless they keep it totally to themselves, which they never do.) They can have all the fantasies they like about what happens after death, and no one else is affected. We are, however, affected by their dogmatic attempts to indoctrinate our children, deny freedom of conscience to our children and to us, and to curtail the rights of other people based on their fantasies and what someone said their invisible friend wanted more than two millennia ago. So, practice religion all you want – just keep it strictly to yourself.
2. They’ve done it this way forever, so why make them change?
Ah, yes, the appeal to tradition. As logical fallacies go, this one is pretty easy to dismantle. It is also symptomatic of the traditional conservative state of mind, which holds that progress is bad.
Let’s say you’ve got an employee who regularly steals from the till. You’ve warned him time and time again that if he doesn’t stop, you’re going to take legal action. He doesn’t stop. You call the cops. Do we seriously expect the police to say that since you never called them before, you can’t call them now?
Or, let’s say your neighbor is a wife-beater (the POS, not the shirt). He’s beaten his wife at least weekly for all 40 years of their marriage, and your long-suffering family has witnessed it. One day, you’ve finally had enough. The wife has two black eyes and a bloody nose after one of their little tiffs, and you call the cops. Do you want to live in a society where the police say, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but she let him beat her up for 40 years, so she has to keep letting him beat her up. Just use ear plugs and avert your eyes if you don’t want to be aware of it”?
I didn’t think so.
Illegal is illegal. Period.
3. The Constitution says we are entitled to the free exercise of religion.
It sure does. And then it says that the state can’t tell us how to practice our religions. This is the part the religious right loves to forget as they strive to use government-sponsored events to impose their version of God on the rest of us. And impose it they do – at public invocations, in schools, in the laws they pass, and on billboards across the country. Only one of those instances is actually legal. (Hint: it’s the one that has nothing to do with government.)
4. God is the foundation of our founding documents.
The only foundational document that mentions anything about a God is the Declaration of Independence, which wouldn’t have been a founding document if the rebellion had not been successful. In its introduction, it mentions “Nature’s God” and which in the famous second sentence of its preamble says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” One of those unalienable rights, which was added to the Constitution 15 years after the Declaration (it wasn’t there to begin with), says that Americans are free to practice whatever religion they choose, and that the state cannot tell them what religion to practice.
It’s the second part that people like Rev. Hunt and Ms. Stewart and their fundamentalist friends have so much trouble with. In fact, they prefer to ignore it, under the short-sighted and arrogant assumption that their version of religion would naturally be the one established by the government.
5. Many of our founding fathers went to seminary with certainly the intent that God would be incorporated on our money and in our system and society.
Sometimes when religious people say idiotic things, we have to graciously understand that they are grasping at straws. I certainly hope that Ms. Stewart knows the facts don’t support this assertion of hers. I hope she has a better grasp of history than what this particular assertion indicated.
First, let’s look at the education opportunities in the late colonial period. Actual colleges were not easy to find – or, maybe they were, since there were so few of them. New College (now Harvard), the College of William and Mary, the Collegiate School (now Yale), the College of New Jersey (Princeton), the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania), King’s College (now Columbia), Rhode Island College (now Brown), Queen’s College (now Rutgers), and Dartmouth College were the only choices for formal higher education, and the last three in that list were founded after 1760, so it’s unlikely the founders attended them. Without exception, all were associated with religious institutions. However, like the colleges and universities sponsored by religious institutions in the 21st century, none of them was strictly a seminary. Since the founding fathers all obtained what formal education they got prior to the Revolution, these nine schools – and probably actually only six schools – were their only choices unless they opted to go abroad. A number of them whose families had money did indeed send their sons abroad for education at places like Cambridge, London’s Middle Temple (one of the famous Inns of Court where British barristers were – and are – formally trained, not a religious institution), and various schools on the European continent.
So, let’s take a closer look at the oldest six. By 1750, the era when the founding fathers who went there would have been enrolled, only 15% of Harvard graduates were seminarians. William and Mary, the second oldest institution, was founded with only one-third of its resources dedicated to a college of divinity, and separation of church and state was already a thing in Virginia prior to the end of the Revolution thanks to the work of George Mason and James Madison on the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Yale was not founded as a seminary, but as a college of the arts and sciences. Princeton was founded primarily to train Presbyterian ministers, but by the 1760’s was focused on the disciplines valued by the Enlightenment: philosophy, science, and the arts, and by the 1780’s no longer housed a seminary at all. Penn was never a seminary, but was founded, mostly on the advocacy of atheist Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin, as a liberal arts institution. Columbia, also, was founded as a liberal arts school. According to its website, “various groups compet[ed] to determine its location and religious affiliation. Advocates of New York City met with success on the first point, while the Anglicans prevailed on the latter. However, all constituencies agreed to commit themselves to principles of religious liberty in establishing the policies of the College.” Brown University was founded as a Baptist college – not Southern Baptist, but traditional, original, New England Baptist – although Congregationalists, Quakers, and Anglicans all had significant representation on its original board of trustees. Its Charter, granted by George III in 1764, declared its purpose was to prepare students “for discharging the Offices of Life with usefulness & reputation” by providing instruction “in the Vernacular and Learned Languages, and in the liberal Arts and Sciences.” It was not a seminary. Rather, the charter specified specifically that “into this liberal and catholic institution shall never be admitted any religious tests, but on the contrary, all the members hereof shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninterrupted liberty of conscience.”
But easily half or more of the founding fathers of the United States of America had no formal education at what we would now consider a secondary level. The state of education in colonial America was such that most people were taught to read and write at home, and additional education was often sought with private tutors. For the most part, our founding fathers were autodidacts – self-taught, widely read, and definitely products of the Enlightenment. They never stopped questioning their world, reading, debating topics as diverse as philosophy, agriculture, and astronomy, and most importantly, they never stopped learning.
I think it is extremely safe to assume that not a single founding father decided to go to a seminary so he could foment a revolution and put his god on the money of a new nation, much less so he could violently rebel against his sovereign specifically to get more religion.
6. We’ve tried, and we just can’t ever take God, guns, sex, violence, drugs out of school.
Maybe it’s just me, but when the good Reverend Hunt said this, I couldn’t help but notice that his deity was lumped in with all the other bad things we don’t want in schools. The clear implication of his statement was that we can try, but we ought to just give up. Sorry, Rev. Hunt, but no can do – not as to any of these things.
7. God is everywhere in school forever.
Indeed, our imaginary friends can be wherever we choose for them to be. Inflicting them on other people is unacceptable, though.
8. Our country is built on the principles of God.
The principles of God that I see when I read the Bible are intolerance, caprice, narcissism, homophobia, misogyny, and violence. Are these the principles upon which our country is built? If so, it’s beyond time for reform.
Rev. Hunt probably meant the Ten Commandments, though, because before they were written down about 500 BCE, people just went around killing, coveting, disrespecting their elders, stealing, and bearing false witness all harum-scarum and willy-nilly. Never mind that Egypt’s laws (3000 BCE), Mesopotamia’s Lagash Code (2400 BCE), Sumeria’s laws (2200 BCE), and Hammurabi’s Code (1795 BCE) predate Leviticus by much more than a millennium, and Sparta’s laws (800 BCE) predate it by 400-500 years. Other codes of law from roughly the same time period as Leviticus are well documented, including the Dharmasutras of the Hindu tradition and the evolved versions of all those laws that went before, as well as Roman law (550 BCE), the Zoroastrian Avesta (600 BCE), China’s Zheng laws (500 BCE), and Draco’s Greek law (620 BCE). It is worth mentioning that our trade and maritime laws originated with ancient Phoenicia (~1200 BCE).
Don’t pretend to know legal or social history if you look at it only through the opaque lenses of your Mosaic blinders.
9. The pledge is a prayer.
In the 1962 case of Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court held that prayer led by government officials was not permitted in schools, but did not address whether the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance rendered it a prayer. Justice Douglas, in his concurring opinion, said that he believed the religion “honeycombed” throughout our federal laws was not permissible and that the words “under God” should not stand – and that, yes, the pledge was indeed a prayer.
A 2004 case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, challenged the pledge directly but was dismissed because the plaintiff, a noncustodial parent of the school child in question, lacked standing.
Therefore, I sincerely hope the good Reverend will be willing to repeat this assertion that it is resolved that the Pledge is a prayer the next time some godless heathen decides to file suit to challenge the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance because it gets us one step closer to getting the words stricken.
10. By insisting on leaving religion out of school functions, atheists impose their views on everyone else.
There’s a difference between religious neutrality and forced atheism. If we were forcing our atheism on the impressionable little school children, we’d be hosting “There is No God” as the cool after-school activity to go to instead of tolerating the insidious presence of “Good News Clubs” that indoctrinate children. We’d be demanding that the school choirs sing TimMinchinsongs instead of classical choruses. We’d start every event with an announcement that there is no god and repeatedly remind any believers out there that they are stupid to still have an imaginary friend. As it is, we may think those things, but we don’t say them in government settings and we certainly don’t try to scare the shit out of their children to ensure the little darlings will come around to our way of thinking.
Religious neutrality means no one says anything one way or another about deities, religions, or the way those imaginary beings think we should conduct ourselves, much less what they plan to do with us when we die.
11. It’s more important to keep faith in schools than anywhere.
On the contrary, school is exactly the place where things should be questioned and not taken on faith. School is the place where facts should be tested, experiments performed, empirical evidence gathered and assessed, and ideas debated. Critical thinking skills need to be emphasized much, much more. Our children should be taught never to take anything on faith but to investigate and find the truth for themselves. Otherwise, all we are doing is drilling information into their heads without giving them the skills to apply it to reality and to the betterment of the world. I don’t know about you, but I want more for my child than for him to be an automaton that dully repeats whatever he’s been told. Faith is the last thing we need to teach our children in school.
12. It’s impossible to take God out of schools because too many religious people are in the schools, and god is in the songs that the school choir sings, plays that the school theater performs, civics and history books, and because there is a federal holiday honoring Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who taught the nation about the Bible.
Where do I even begin?
Okay, so, there are religious people in schools. Sure. There are religious people everywhere. It does not necessarily follow that everything that comes out of the mouths of those religious people is religious. In a school setting, they need to keep their religion to themselves and teach kids how to think critically, how to solve problems, and what a logical fallacy is. (Maybe by teaching logical fallacies, they will recognize the ones they use on themselves to keep religion alive.)
God is in the songs that the choir sings. Because ecclesiastical patronage is responsible for a considerable chunk of the greatest art and music in history, we neither can nor should avoid some religious songs or art. There is plenty of secular art and music out there, though, and it also should be taught. And if the public school is performing a religious play, someone needs to let the ACLU, Americans United, and FFRF know so a lawsuit can be filed – because it’s illegal. Period.
Religious history is part of human history. The history of the Catholic Church’s political maneuverings is a valid study – it has had great effect on the politics of medieval Europe, and despite its lack of stature as an official religion for governments now, it still wields a mighty sword. Its complicity in the Holocaust, for example, should not be downplayed, nor should its interference in human rights issues in places like Africa, where it has helped to spread the HIV/AIDS pandemic by preaching against condom use, and Ireland, where women die because their lives are considered less valuable than the fetuses they carry, sometimes against their will. Religion has a great deal to do with the denial of women’srights in the MiddleEast and CentralAsia. So, yes, study religion’s effect on world history and current events.
Do not ever make the mistake of teaching public school children which religion is “better” or “correct.” That is the establishment of religion, and in this country it is illegal.
And now for Martin Luther King, Jr., who apparently taught us all about the Bible so now we honor him with his very own holiday. I hardly know how to begin to address this idiotic statement, so I’ll just heave a huge sigh and delve in.
Dr. King was indeed a minister. He did indeed connect his faith to his fervent advocacy for civil rights, and frequently invoked his deity and the teachings of the Bible. He wasn’t assassinated for being a minister, though. He died because he was an extremely effective advocate for civil rights and for peace. Dr. King was much more than a minister, and his civil rights and anti-war activism is the reason for that holiday, not his messages from any pulpit. He pioneered peaceful civil disobedience to a degree this country had never before seen. He worked for racial parity and desegregation, something the Bible definitely does not advocate. He worked tirelessly to end an unjust war. The war he wanted to fight was against poverty and the disparate treatment of human beings in American society. That war, at least, was a noble one.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, if not one of the greatest orators in all of American history. His work was rewarded with international acclaim and he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize because of it. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Four people have federal holidays in their honor: two of them were presidents, one is popularly credited with “discovering” the continent, and the fourth is Dr. King. Could he have done this work without being a minister? Absolutely. Unequivocally. Does he deserve the acclaim he has received? Without a doubt, yes. But not for being a minister. He deserves every accolade he has ever received because of what he did for race relations in the United States 100 years after the Civil War, and for using his popularity and influence to end a horrifically unjust war and to advocate for human rights.
Dr. King didn’t teach Americans the Bible. He taught us something much more important: that all men must be treated equally and fairly. We would certainly appreciate it if the religious right would demonstrate that they understand that lesson.
13. We shouldn’t have to wait for another bombing or mass shooting before a school assembly prays again.
When that next bombing or mass school shooting happens, we still shouldn’t pray – at least, not in school and not as part of a government-sponsored event. Prayer won’t undo it, prayer won’t prevent it, and prayer won’t stop it mid-horror.
Do we really lack so much creativity as a society that we cannot devise another way to honor the dead or mark a tragedy without thanking God for it? Do we really think prayer will stop malicious and crazy people from socially aberrant behavior? If so, church shootings wouldn’t happen, and legislatures wouldn’t have to make church-goers feel safer by allowing them to carry weapons to Sunday services. And isn’t it ironic that we thank a god for such monstrous atrocities and celebrate the deaths of those killed by saying they’ve been “called home” to that deity? How screwed up is that, anyway?
And this leads us back to good old Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE), another philosopher roughly contemporaneous with the scribes of Leviticus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then why is there evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
14. We should not have to care about the rights of minorities in public schools.
There is so much insensitivity in this statement that my mind nearly boggled. The majority rules when votes are counted for candidates. When the candidate elected by the majority takes his oath of office, though, he represents everyone, not just those who elected him, and he owes a duty to everyone, not just those who elected him.
We do not operate our society by doing what the majority of people want to do just because the majority want it done. We also look at the public policy behind doing things, the ramifications of doing them, and the overall effect on society.
We also don’t squash the little guy under our heels just because he is poor, speaks a different language, is mentally handicapped, physically challenged, from another country, homosexual, short, illiterate, fat, old, sick, red-haired, of a different racial derivation than we are, of a different religious persuasion, or for any other reason. It’s just plain wrong. When will the Christian right get this through their thick skulls? Seriously, what jackasses!
15. FFRF wanted graduation stopped.
One of the reasons the uber-conservative media is so good at persuading its watchers and listeners that the boogeyman is at the door is because when the truth doesn’t suit them, they change the facts to fit their narrative.
They make us refute their fake facts, and thereby deprive us of the time to make our points. To borrow a phrase from Christopher Moore, this is heinous fuckery most foul. If you have to lie to make your point, you obviously have a crappy argument to begin with. Go home. You’ve forfeited the game.
17. God calls the light day and the darkness night and no one can change that because it’s an order from god.
If you listen closely at this point in the segment, you can detect that I nearly laughed out loud here. I apologize for the audible derisive snort. I couldn’t help it. I did, however, have considerable empathy at that moment with David Silverman’s conversation with Bill O’Reilly about the reason for tidal forces. Evidently, the good Reverend Hunt is a flat-earther who does not understand the earth’s rotation or heliocentrism. He thinks it gets light and dark because God says so. We’ll just ignore the fact that we have night and day for the same basic reason as we have high and low tides: gravity.
After all, gravity is just a theory.
18. It is resolved, that if the Constitution allows the pledge, which contains a prayer, then it is resolved that all prayer should be allowed in schools.
Well, he was almost right. It is definitely resolved that prayer is not permitted in schools. Engel v. Vitale, remember? But what isn’t resolved is whether or not the words “under God” make the pledge tantamount to a prayer. The atheist that is me thinks it does, and the religious guy that is Reverend Hunt thinks it does. Therefore, the pledge is a prayer and pursuant to the precedent set by Engel v. Vitaleand pursuant to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the pledge shouldn’t be recited any more than the Lord’s Prayer should be.
Resolved.
19. Religion never changes.
The delegates to Vatican II would be interested to learn of this.
So would Martin Luther, who kicked off a pretty serious change in Christianity by tacking those 95 theses to the door of that Wittenberg Church back in 1517. (Okay, fine, so the church door thing may be a bit of a myth. But the invention of the printing press did a heck of a lot to change Christianity because that’s how word of the 95 theses got liberally sprinkled throughout Germany and the rest of Europe.)
In fact, I think the attendees of the Council of Nicea – you know, the meeting at which the books of scripture were either included or jettisoned from what we now call “the Bible” and the meeting at which the Jesus character was determined to be a god – would find the Rev. Hunt’s assertion patently ludicrous, as would those who attended the other thirteen major ecumenical councils of the last two millennia.
I wonder if Rev. Hunt has a Christmas tree? My money says he is clueless about its pagan roots or somehow thinks no religion changed to accommodate that tradition.
20. Jesus said always to pray and not to think.
Herein lies the biggest problem with religion. “Don’t think,” religious leaders tell us. “Just believe what you’re told.” A gullible, uneducated, ignorant populace is all too willing to accept any popular authority that purports to explain their world.
“You’ve got to have faith,” they say.
I have plenty of faith. I have faith that the sun will rise, because every morning it does, and because scientists have provided a reasonable, testable, consistently provable reason for it happening. I have faith that gravity won’t stop working, for the same reason. I even have faith that my computer will post this little rant when I hit a certain combination of keys – because it’s happened before, because it happens consistently and reliably when I hit those keys, and because there is some computer scientist person who knows how and why it happens. I don’t know how or why, and I don’t pretend to understand it, but because it works reliably and consistently with predictable results, I am satisfied that there is a reasonable explanation for it. It might feel like magic to me because I just say (type) my incantation and poke my fingers at the right buttons and watch it happen – again and again. But I know people who not only understand why it works, but can tell me why it has stopped working, fix it, and make it work again. Reliably and consistently.
That’s the kind of thing I can have faith in.
21. The word that God gives Christians is in Psalms 1.
Wait wait wait wait wait. Wasn’t the Book of Psalms compiled a long time before the guy who started the whole Christianity thing? Hasn’t the god of the Christians failed to utter one single word to them since that dude’s alleged death in the early first century CE? (Well, except for like, the Book of Mormon, but those people are in a cult and not really Christians, right?) I mean, I thought most of the Psalms were attributed to King David, who lived a full millennium before the Jesus character.
Of course, Christians use the Old Testament, too. But since Christianity hadn’t been invented at the time of the composition of the first Psalm (there’s that old religion changing thing again), it would seem that the Christian god might – just might – not have been talking to Christians back then.
Just sayin’.
22. God’s law is higher than Constitutional law.
Not in the United States of America, it isn’t.
In fact, the original language of the Constitution never once mentions or even refers to any deity or creator. The only time religion is mentioned at all is in the First Amendment, which says the government is to keep its hands off religion. The government can’t tell us how to practice religion and can’t tell us not to practice religion. It also can’t tell us that we must practice religion.
This is not Indonesia, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. We do not have to believe in any gods at all, and no one can tell us what version of which of the 3500+ gods man has ever worshipped that we should worship.
And just to make sure that foreign governments were aware of this, John Adams, this country’s second president, included in the Treaty of Tripoli an affirmation of the secular nature of the American government with the following language in the Treaty of Tripoli, which was duly ratified – unanimously – by Congress in 1797:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
23. If we say “under God” in the pledge at school, we are obligated to continue praying in schools so as not to be hypocritical.
Fine. I won’t say the Pledge, either. Not that I have since I was in elementary school and thought I had to. Actually, I stopped saying the pledge before I was out of elementary school because by about 5th grade I had had it with religion and with the “because I said so” reasons that I was given for really just about anything. Plus, I thought it was stupid and meaningless to pledge my undying devotion to a piece of cloth. If any piece of cloth could be that important, it would have been the old pink blanket I used to drag around the house when I was a little kid. At least that ratty old thing gave me some comfort and kept me warm.
Rev. Hunt should keep in mind that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t have to say the pledge, either, because doing so violates the rules of their religion. Neither does anyone else who doesn’t want to, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1943 ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.
We’re back to that “free exercise” thing that necessarily goes hand-in-hand with the “disestablishment” thing, and the “freedom of speech” thing that necessarily implies freedom of conscience.
We are free to reject religion, to follow our own consciences, and we are free not to have to submit to someone else’s religion.
Over the last almost 30 years since graduation, we’ve remained in touch. At first, it was a phone call or two every year, but with the invention of email (thank you Al Gore!) we’ve managed to become quasi-regular correspondents. I’m a terrible correspondent, usually. I’m guilty of holding an email intending to respond, forgetting about it, then shooting off one or two sentences to cure my egregious default. I don’t tend to do this with Dave. Oh, there’s the one or two-sentence responses, but they tend to be sent pretty promptly – well, promptly for me, anyhow.
No, Dave’s emails provoke long-winded responses from me. Dave and I have never claimed to be politically compatible, but our discussions usually turn up much more areas of agreement than disagreement. See, Dave’s a self-described conservative. Not a Tea Party conservative, absolutely not. Dave’s got two post-graduate degrees – an engineering degree from Dartmouth and an MBA from UVA, so no one has ever accused him of not being a thoughtful, extremely intelligent guy. Well, maybe someone did when we were undergrads together at Colgate, but that only happened because they were drunk.
Dave’s emails have inspired more than one of my blog posts. Today’s is yet another.
Dave wrote me earlier this week, saying,
Thought provoking:
1. Are the people opposed to same-gender marriage equally opposed to opposite-gender marriages where there is no sex and hence no chance of procreation?
2. What will same-gender marriage advocates protest for if full marriage rights are granted? My guess is clean air and water, safer roads, better schools … Or maybe they won’t protest at all and instead will just get on with their lives like most “normal” people.
‘Tis a silly question, I thought in my best Monty Python accent. Opposition to same-sex marriage tends to be based on religion, not on procreation. And don’t “normal” people get concerned about inequities of our government and culture? So I responded,
Depending on their reason for objecting to same-sex marriage, maybe.
The world won’t be fixed when this one unfairness is resolved. We have lots more to protest. Equal rights for women (the ERA in Arkansas can’t seem to make it out of committee). Equal rights for minorities. Freedom from religion-based laws that restrict freedom of conscience. Access to safe, effective sex education and birth control, including safe abortions. Life and health for kids whose parents would restrict their access to proven and effective medical treatment in the name of religion or pseudoscience. Eradication of preventable disease. Vaccination. Food for the hungry. Replacing dictatorships like North Korea’s and North Dakota’s. A stop to corporate abuses of campaign finance laws. A stop to the corporate abuses of the people who buy their products. Clean air. Clean water. Safer roads. Better schools. Alternative fuels. Safer communities. Rehabilitation of criminals. Job training for criminals. Job training for young people who choose not to continue their traditional educations. Preservation of rain forests. Preservation of threatened and engendered species of plants and animals. Funding of scientific research. Funding of medical research. Space exploration. More charitable giving. Rehabilitation of drug abusers. A stop to unnecessary regulation of anything. Complete nuclear disarmament. An unbiased news media. Free healthcare. Free Tibet.
Need I continue?
Dave wasn’t about to let me off so easily.
1. Some people just object.
2. I think that was the point. Move on to other issues. And the people opposed to same-gender marriage won’t have to hear about it anymore. Maybe the people opposed to same-gender marriage will find themselves side-by-side with same-gender marriage advocates on issues where they share common ground. It’s up to them to build on it.
Optimistic?
Insert eye roll here.
I am not in the least optimistic that the vast majority of those opposing same-sex marriage will look for common ground with anyone who does not share their insular opinions. If it happens by accident, sure, but look for it? Don’t make me laugh. They are terrified of anything that shifts their paradigm, of anything that moves their cheese. Those who can ally themselves over issue 1 (we are at war with Eurasia) will be mortal enemies over issue 2 (we have always been at war with Eastasia), and will come back together over Issue 3 (because we have always been at war with Eurasia), only to become enemies again on issue 4. And often they will not realize that they have changed alliances. Because the enemy has always been Eastasia.
We have a crisis in this country right now. It’s a communication crisis, and it can be blamed on the sound-bite and an “Us vs. Them” mentality. People have much more in common than not. Only occasionally do the different sides actually have different goals. It’s all in how the media or their leaders – or both – spin it to them.
Conservative America traditionally stands for smaller government, which theoretically brings with it lower taxes and greater personal autonomy: “freedom.” Liberal, or Progressive, America traditionally stands for social safety, which theoretically brings with it more government involvement and necessarily higher taxes. What is their common goal? They want to be safe, healthy, and financially stable, because only if they have these things will they have “freedom.”
For more graphs with detailed information about political polarization, go to voteview.com
Political party platforms associated with conservative ideals and with progressive ones change over time. The economic disasters of Reconstruction and the Great Depression caused profound changed in the political affiliations of many Americans. So did the political panic of the Cold War. The demise of the Dixiecrats and the fall of Jim Crow has a lot to do with current political alignments. I’ve seen a violation of the basic tenets in both of these diametrically opposed sides just during my lifetime. Political alignments often define issues, and since for all practical purposes we have limited ourselves to only two parties in the United States, our political parties appear to be polarized. And at the moment, as the chart shows, our two political parties are more polarized than they have ever been since the end of Reconstruction.
At the time of the Civil War, the Republican Party was conservative, but not as much as it is today. In 1860, Republicans not only did not want to “conserve” the status quo (which is the very definition of conservatism), they wanted to bring massive change to the economy of half of the country. The war certainly accomplished that. Outlawing slavery all at once undermined the agrarian business model of the nation, which had been overwhelmingly dependent on slave labor to get crops planted and harvested. The more industrialized north did not feel the devastating economic crisis brought on by this change as greatly as did the primarily agricultural South. Emancipation was the most drastic change in property rights in US economic history – possibly in world economic history. The only comparable situation I can think of is the 1861 emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire – serfdom in western Europe, on the other hand, disappeared gradually over several centuries.
The two biggest cash crops in the South before the war were cotton and tobacco, followed closely by hemp, rice, and indigo. The primary producers of these crops were the large Southern plantations – farms larger than 200 acres – that used significant slave labor. In 1860, plantations with more than 50 slaves made up 4% of all farms but grew 32% of all the cotton produced in this country. By 1880, farms of that size constituted less than 1% of all farms, and now paid wages instead of supporting slaves at subsistence levels. Increased costs to produce the South’s primary sources of income dramatically compromised the economic health of the South.
The stereotypical image of the pre-war plantation is of a rich, idle white family surrounded by complacent slaves who did everything for their masters – from the farm labor and cooking to dressing the ladies and caring for the white children. This image is flawed. The white “masters” typically labored in the fields, too, and always had hired hands – both white and free blacks – in addition to slaves. Families owning 50 or more slaves were rare. For that matter, families owning any slaves at all were not in the majority of white southerners. Only about a quarter of southern families held slaves, While wealthier families frequently had a family of slaves in the same house, most southerners were themselves the laborers, the farmhands, and the hired wage earners that they still are today. Most slaves were owned by large planters and worked on larger plantations. Nevertheless, when the legs are cut out from under the highest-earning industry in a geographic region, the entire region suffers. (No area of 21st century America knows this reality more intimately than Detroit.)
But let’s add other economic costs. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Confederate dollar was worthless due to inflation and people in the South had to resort to bartering services for goods. White planters had lost their enormous investment in slaves. They had virtually no capital to pay free workers to bring in crops. Immediately after the war, onerous property taxes were imposed on southern landholders. These taxes were essentially war reparations and had to be paid in scarce Union dollars. Landowners often could not pay these taxes. The way they had raised money in the past – providing subsistence rather than wages to the families that worked their land to conserve cash income for other purposes – was no longer legal. They had to change their business model entirely, and immediately.
Sharecropping was the answer. Landowners broke up large plantations and rented smaller plots to their former slaves and employees. Almost overnight the South was transformed from a prosperous land-owning populace into a tenant farming agriculture system. The few large landowners who were able to hang on to their property no longer worked the land themselves. Those who were fortunate enough to obtain land at fire-sale prices worked harder than the previous owners to make it produce enough to support their families. Tenant farmers could never hope to wring enough profits out of the land to support themselves in their former lifestyles unless they were freed slaves, in which case their condition in life was definitely improved.
Now, add to that massive change the fact that for four years Southerners had burned cotton and tobacco rather than allow Union forces to confiscate it. Invading Union troops had devastated the physical structures that constituted the framework of the Southern economic engine, and nearly half of the livestock of the South had been killed during the war. And here’s the kicker: over a quarter of all Southern white men of military age died during the war, leaving their families destitute. Per capita income for white southerners declined from $125 in 1857 to a low of $80 in 1879. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, but rather than being reconstructed into something viable and prosperous, the South had been further devastated by it. By the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the former Confederacy was locked into a system of poverty. The financial ruin of the South was complete. One hundred and fifty years later, it still has not recovered except in pockets where petroleum production has made the difference.
The resentment of the defeated South at losing the comfort and prosperity it had once enjoyed lit flames of anger among people who had lost nearly everything. That anger was directed externally: toward the former slaves they had once depended on or who they had once ordered around with impunity, but who now were raised to the same socioeconomic level as free white laborers almost overnight; toward the educated, industrialized northern states, which were able to resume their former lives after the war; toward the federal government agents who enforced these changes; and toward the speculators who came to the South with carpetbags full of cash to take advantage of Southern economic desperation.
The only real power or freedom that remained to Southerners was in how they treated each other. Free black people were the poster children of Confederate defeat, and because of their lack of education, unfamiliarity with government processes, lack of representation in government, lack of education, and economic disadvantages, they were easy targets. White supremacy ideology frustrated racial equality and ushered in the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws had an initial side effect of disenfranchising poor whites along with poor blacks, and almost all black people were poor.
Voter turnout dropped considerably, and the United States Supreme Court eventually declared poll taxes unconstitutional. It was more difficult for the federal government to regulate how people behaved toward one another, though. While many white Southerners who had managed to retain more wealth focused on economic issues, the vast majority of impoverished white Southerners were still indignant that they were caught up in the Southern economic crisis. In the late 1800’s “separate but equal” became the law of the land, cast in iron by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. It was perfectly legal to treat the different races differently, and government policies encouraged it.
Environmental disaster compounded economic disaster when the Great Depression struck. While the stock market crash of 1929 had relatively little to do with the suppressed Southern economy other than to deprive it of what little wealth it had managed to regain, the Dust Bowl had a devastating effect on the still predominantly agricultural South.
The Depression is notorious for high unemployment rates. People who can’t find jobs have no purchasing power. The South was already economically depressed before the 1930s, and the “stimulus” of the New Deal sometimes extracted more money than the poor South had to spare. The New Deal is responsible for the progressive socioeconomic reforms of social security, minimum wage controls, and farm subsidies, the latter of which allowed poor Southern farmers a measure of economic security they had never before experienced. It cost the worker more in actual cash, though, and established institutionalized inflation that is unstoppable.
With the end of World War II, the Southern Democrats who had signed on to the New Deal because of their constituents’ dire economic situation suddenly faced a civil rights crisis: those uppity women and blacks who had earned a comfortable living during the war did not want to turn loose of the gains they had made. The Southern white man had gone away to fight and lost enough of his dominance that something had to be done quickly to preserve his way of life. And despite the gains made by women and black people, white men were still in charge of the government.
Enter the Dixiecrat. After the Civil War, Southern politicians wouldn’t be caught dead identifying with Lincoln’s Republican party. The South turned overwhelmingly to the Democratic party in the 1870’s, and until the 1990’s – that’s right, only twenty years ago – Republicans were rarely elected at the local level anywhere in the former Confederacy. There was no point in voting in a Republican primary in the South because there were so few Republican candidates. Local elections were normally determined in the Democratic primaries until the Reagan administration managed to make diplomatic inroads with Southern sensibilities. Rev. Jerry Falwell had a lot to do with that, which I’ll explain in a moment. (The South voted for Republicans at the national level, though.)
Really, it’s all Harry Truman’s fault. The economic demands of the New Deal had started rabid insanity among Southern politicians. Socially conservative politicians, damned if they would let minorities get the best of them, embraced progressive economic ideas that were sold as a way to lift not just the South but the entire country out of poverty. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death, the liberal and progressive Truman (from the border state of Missouri) got a bee in his bonnet about – of all things! – civil rights. The original idea was to end discrimination in the military since black and Indian soldiers had made amazing contributions to the war effort. The Dixiecrats and their supporters saw the writing on the wall, though. If those minorities got an inch, and they’d take a mile. Discrimination was entrenched in the Southern way of life, and that was a status quo the whites could not tolerate changing. Those uppity Negroes were trying to take the rightful place of white folks all over again. This was Reconstruction Redux.
The Civil Rights movement put an end to the cooperation between Southern Democrats and their northern counterparts. Once again, those damn Yankees were attempting to force massive change on the Southern way of life, and the South was not happy about it.
When I was born at the tail end of the baby boom, Jim Crow was alive and well. The outraged Dixiecrats were being forced to desegregate schools. (My rural eastern Arkansas elementary school desegregated in 1968, the year I started first grade.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the great-grandchildren of slaves a more effective legal tool to fight the racial discrimination that had been institutionalized all over the country. An amendment to it in 1968 further expanded civil rights.
Since the end of the Civil War, Congress had passed numerous civil rights laws. In 1866 Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto of a bill that said anyone born in the U.S., regardless of race, was a U.S. citizen. In 1871, Congress outlawed ethnic violence against black people. (The KKK ignored this law with impunity.) In 1875 Congress attempted to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations, but the Supreme Court struck down the act as an unconstitutional regulation of individual action. Brown v. Board of Education, which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson to do away with the doctrine of “separate but equal,” was decided in 1954. In 1957, the year the National Guard was called out to desegregate Little Rock schools over the objection of segregationists here, the Civil Rights Commission was formed. And in 1964 the broad Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination was passed – a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. Laws passed in 1968 (the Fair Housing Act) and 1987 (extending nondiscrimination requirements to government contractors) further expanded civil rights.
We are now 150 years and seven generations removed from slavery. Those without a sense of the history of it see the struggle for racial parity as black people being “given” what white people have “earned.” Affirmative action, designed to promote minority interests when all other things are equal, is seen as favoring minorities, and to an extent, it does. Quotas that reflect the actual population are also seen as rewarding those “lazy” people who would otherwise not be qualified. Those who complain are called either racist or realist, depending upon their audience.
We see the same thing in other civil rights struggles. Homosexuals make up more than 10% of our population, but discrimination against them is still legal. (A 2002 Gallup poll found the number to be 9%, but keep in mind that Kinsey’s research found that sexual orientation is more of a question of degree along a spectrum rather than a bright line.) Couched in terms of the civil rights struggle, which same-sex marriage certainly is a part of, the conservative population resists change, preferring to maintain a status quo. By definition, a liberal is progressive in ideas, ideals, and outlook. A liberal sees change as improvement in the current situation. This is the exact opposite of conservative ideals, which harken back to the “good old days” when “things were better” and “people knew their places.”
Change is scary to those whose mindset is conservative. Instead of embracing change with all the promise and anticipation of a liberal, the conservative resists with everything in his power.
What’s another thing that poor people tend not to have that wealthier people tend to acquire? Education. The South and Midwest are less educated, more superstitious, and therefore more fearful of the unknown. A lack of desire to educate themselves is an unfortunate characteristic that brands these types so that they are easily recognizable.
Religion in America is symptomatic of these attitudes. The United States has experienced several episodes of Christian revivalism, or “Awakening.” These terms refer to a specific period of increased spiritual interest bracketed by declines in religious interest. Revival or awakening happens regularly everywhere in the world where religion is practiced. Eras of economic hardship correlate to an increased religious revival. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was a period of spiritual decline marked by searching outside religion for matters of morality and understanding about human nature. The Great Awakening was its philosophical rival in colonial America and was such a strong movement that its imprimatur is still evident in our national psyche. It was followed by a Second Great Awakening, during which Christian evangelicals really became the institution they now are. Charismatic and emotional speakers rode a circuit to whip the religious audiences into frenzies, and their converts at these tent revivals were so inspired that they carried the word to others, making religious adherence not only fashionable but necessary for morality. A third Awakening spread especially throughout the Midwest and prompted a new flood of missions to Asia.
Despite the persuasive and educated voices of men like Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Robert G. Ingersoll, John Dewey, Felix Adler, and George Santayana, the sheer charisma of the evangelicals of the Great Awakenings carried much more weight with a partially literate, largely uneducated public.
We are now in the midst of another Awakening. This Awakening has cemented itself in the disillusioned South and in the Midwest, where the economy of the mostly rural population is largely agrarian and relatively fewer people have higher education. Television and radio have sped and maintained the momentum of this religious movement. I’ll never forget hearing Jerry Falwell (I told you I’d get back to him) decrying secular humanism in the heyday of the Moral Majority. I never understood how he could make “humanism” into a curse word until it dawned on me that the people flocking to listen to him had no idea what it meant.
In this Fourth Awakening, new Christian sects have sprung up like weeds in a previously neatly-tended garden, and the detritus they spread is poison to reason and science. They look backward instead of forward and are willing to compromise freedoms of conscience to maintain the status quo they treasure. They are the Todd Akins (“Women’s bodies have a way of shutting that whole [pregnancy from rape] thing down”) and Sarah Palins of American politics, and their followers are the Tea Party, and can always be counted on to vote against their own best interest. They are persuaded by sound bites on television and sermons from their ministers. These people are anti-intellectual, uneducated, and irrational. They parrot the words of their religious and political leaders without examining the ideas critically or, apparently, even with any real interest.
Obviously, I do not hold much respect for these people. The sign that summed them up for me read, “Keep Government OUT of My Medicare.” The Awakening and the Tea Party both have less traction on the more populated coasts of our country, where people tend to have more education and tend to be exposed regularly to people who are not like them. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it allays fear.
Now, a person who styles himself as a “fiscal conservative” is a different animal altogether from these screaming mobs of illogical idiots with their misspelled signs and their complete misunderstanding of the purpose of any government system. These fiscal conservatives usually bemoan the loss of the Republican party to the religious right and to the anti-intellectuals of the Tea Party. They are right to be concerned. Where reasonable minds can disagree and compromise, unreasoning minds consider dialog the precursor to capitulating – compromise is to be avoided at all costs.
This is no way to run a government. It is no way to decide public policy. I sincerely wish that rational conservatives would retake control of the Republican party. It’s not that I agree with them, but that I see them as opponents worthy of outreach. I feel like I could work with them, because they will see that we are committed to the same goals, albeit with different ideas as to how to reach them. However, there’s no working with irrational, willfully ignorant, reactionary mobs who see any change at all as a threat to their precious way of life, and who cannot imagine a better future.
DuPage County, Illinois, may not discriminate against Muslims, said a federal court last week. Muslims who sought to build a mosque, complete with a dome and minarets, were denied a building permit because the area where they wanted to locate was already saturated with churches. Obviously, if the Christian community is well-served in a specific
Islam and its attendant issues aside, I think domes and minarets look awesome. (source)
area, there is no need to have other religions present. Christians can take care of everyone’s spiritual needs adequately. The county board pointed out that the Muslims had been using space in a local church to meet, so clearly they did not need their own, separate space. The board also said the domes and minarets were too tall, so the mosque itself had to be redesigned to be smaller and set back further from the street.
Churches other than St. Basil’s in Moscow have minarets. For instance, those towering spires on Sagrada Família in Barcelona look an awful lot like minarets to me. I have personal experience with Sagrada Família and its minaret-like spires, and I have first-hand experience with why it is the exception that proves the Good Minaret Rule.
In 1983, my friend Mishy and I talked our parents into letting us spend the summer backpacking through Europe. Armed with Eurail passes and Fodor’s, we crossed the pond almost as soon as we had finished our spring finals. The ink was not yet dry on Mish’s diploma.
Me, in Mishy’s backyard in Auburn, NY, trying on my gear (June 7, 1983)
We made our way from England to Ireland, where we had our hair permed thinking it wouldn’t show as much if we couldn’t wash it very often. Then we crossed to the Continent, visited Paris and the Louvre, then decided to head south to Spain. I really wanted to see southern Spain, because at the time James Michener’s novel The Drifters was one of my favorite books. (My hippie chick-ness has deep roots.) The protagonists of that book were my age and traveled all over Europe and Africa in an amazing adventure that set my imagination on fire. I wanted to see every place they had been. In their footsteps, I was making my pilgrimage to the beach at Torremolinos. Of course, we stopped along the way at major places of interest. First, as we crossed the Pyrenees mountains, we learned that the train tracks were a different gauge in Spain than elsewhere in Europe. We would have to change trains at the border, high in the mountains. At the Catalan border town of Portbou, we disembarked and climbed the nearby cliffs to take in a multi-country view, socializing with other backpacking college students from all over the world.
Mishy and me on the cliffs above the Mediterranean at Portbou, Catalonia, Spain (June 22, 1983). No, I have never had a tan.
That photo above is one of the last surviving ones taken in Spain with the really awesome 35mm camera my grandfather had given me a few years before. Oh, I tried to take another. That’s where Sagrada Família comes in.
Anyone who has ever been to Europe has experienced the de rigueur cathedral tours. Europe is chock full of cathedrals because the church has always had a metric shit-ton of money to spend on making awesome places to worship the god who said “there’s really no need to worship me in a building.” After buying some awesome leather in the street market at Portbou, including a pair of fringed moccasin boots made of the softest leather I have ever felt, we boarded the train for Barcelona.
We spent only one day in Barcelona. I’m sure there was plenty more to see, but we felt compelled to leave after only a few hours. We experienced an Omen and felt it best to get out of town.
Upon arriving in Barcelona, we made our way to Sagrada Família, which Fodor’s compelled us to visit, claiming that no trip to Barcelona was complete without it. At the time of our visit, the construction of Sagrada Família had been ongoing for a hundred and one years, and even with modern technological advances, it was woefully incomplete. Its primary architect, Antoni Gaudí, had been tragically killed in a traffic accident in 1926 – a mere 43 years into the project. The cathedral was less than 25% complete at the time, by most estimates.
This is what Gaudi wanted the cathedral to look like.
Yes, those are some serious spires. Minarets. Whatever. But despite Gaudí’s golden image of a well-balanced, elaborately detailed work of art, which looked fussy and over-blown to begin with, we have instead a lavishly detailed, clusterfuck of an unfinished building:
The cranes in this image were digitally removed. Despite being under construction for more than 130 years now, this cathedral is still not complete, and no one apparently has any vision as to how it should look when it is done. They just keep building and building and building, and adding more and more overwhelming detail.
Such as the pile of strawberries that tops a spire. Or a Minaret. Whatever.
Such as the column that steps on a turtle.
Such as the engraving on the Passion facade of the building, which looks for all the world like an instructional diagram for invading space aliens.
Such as the Rose Window that looks like someone colored outside the lines.
Such as Christ the Blockhead with, apparently, Poor Yorick’s skull.
Such as the Nativity facade, which has so much friggin’ bumpy detail no one can clearly see the beautifully carved classical figures.
There’s more. Lots more. I haven’t even mentioned the Moorish or serpentine gargoyles, or the magic square next to a homoerotic depiction of Judas’s kiss on the Passion facade, or the weirdly bumpy exterior that clashes with the smooth, Gothic arches. I haven’t talked about the kaleidoscope effect of looking up inside the building because of those crazy cubist-deco stained glass windows, nor have I said a thing about the interior supports that look like neural connections. I haven’t mentioned the flying buttresses, necessary in early medieval times but completely superfluous in 20th-century construction. The main thing I thought when I saw the cathedral was, “What the hell is going on here?” Come to find out, no one really knew. Nor, apparently, do they yet know.
In the grassy area near the cathedral, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man sitting on a park bench. He was Italian. I didn’t speak Italian, and he didn’t speak English, but I did speak a little Spanish. We understood each other just fine. As we chatted in our fractured way, I stood to take a photo of the awe-inspiring mess of a monstrous structure that is Sagrada Família.
I put my eye to the viewfinder. As I was about to snap the picture, my camera fell apart in my hands.
Literally.
Fell.
Apart.
The lens came out, exposing the film within. The case would not open, so I couldn’t extract the film to save what photos I had taken. The flash fell off.
I am not lying. Sagrada Família, with its excessive detail and its bizarre spires that look like minarets, is so ugly it broke my camera.
Nearly 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court decided School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and held that public school courses that use the Bible in a purely secular manner, and which do not cross the line into religious instruction or present the subject from a particular religious viewpoint, are acceptable.
Ever since, religiously fervent school teachers, stubborn school districts, and posturing politicians have done their level best to show their contempt of the high court.
“The Bible as Literature,” “Biblical History,” and similarly-titled electives occasionally popped up. The content of these courses has always been suspect. In recent years the prevalence of these courses has ramped up.
We live in an era of state legislators passing laws directing schools to teach the Bible. Texas is famous for having done it first. Other states followed: Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and, most recently, Arizona. Other states have bills pending that would permit it, including Arkansas. Notably absent from these laws are directives on teaching non-Biblical religious texts. Also notable about these laws is that they purport to make legal something that is already legal. They are pointless posturing for the religious right. They serve as a rallying cry and a way to legitimize proselytizing in the public classroom.
The Texas Freedom Network is an activist coalition of religious and community leaders dedicated to fighting the religious right’s agenda in that state. Its Education Fund sponsored a study of the Bible classes permitted by Texas law in public schools. The study was conducted by Mark A. Chancey, a Religious Studies Professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman College of Arts and Humanities. Professor Chancey has worked with the Texas Freedom Network for years. He has published a lot of material about the prevalence of religious instruction in supposedly secular classrooms.
The study found that at least 60 Texas school districts teach Christian creationism as science, and teach the Bible from a religious viewpoint.
Most of the teachers have no specific training in how to teach the Bible in a secular framework; some of the teachers of these classes are actually ministers. Of the ten school districts that did provide some training for the teachers of these classes, most used a one-day session geared toward the Bible Literacy Project’s textbook whether or not that textbook was actually used. Quite often, texts supplementing the Bible were “written specifically for Christian audiences for purposes of strengthening their faith.” (Curriculums that stayed close to the Bible Literacy Project tended to be of the highest quality.)
The content of the courses was rife with factual errors. Many relied on rote memorization of biblical passages and eschewed critical thinking entirely. Those that supplemented the textbook usually did so with books designed to bolster religious faith. Mitch Albom and C.S. Lewis featured prominently, and even Hal Lindsey’s absurd icon of eschatology, The Late Great Planet Earth, gets time and serious study.
(Whenever I write the word “eschatology,” I want to write “scatology.” Why are these words so similar? Coincidence? I think not.)
Unsurprisingly, given the lack of training and lack of a coherent curriculum for these courses, teachers present conservative Protestant theological claims and interpretations as widely accepted – and true – in Texas classrooms.
I expect conservative evangelical Christians in Texas to howl about a biased report. They may be right.
While the report does have some positive things to say about the Bible Literacy Project’s curriculum, it is definitely not an independent report. The Texas Freedom Network is a group of both secularists and religious leaders who want to maintain the integrity of a secular public classroom. The organization is not solely secularist. That fact lends it more credibility than if an anti-theist group (read: we, us, the atheists) produced it. Nevertheless, the group works hard to fight the religious right. I expect supporters of classroom Bible study to perceive the report as an attack on baby Jesus.
Obviously, I do not hold much respect for these people. The sign that summed them up for me read, 
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