Humanists at Barefoot Bay

Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty (arlinc.org) and former president of the American Humanist Association, is the author of over 3,500 published books, sections of books, articles, columns, book and film reviews, translations, letters, short stories, and poems. He has made over 2,000 speeches and radio and television appearances.

Christian Europe?

The European Union’s proposed Charter of Fundamental Rights makes reference to Europe’s spiritual and moral heritage but makes no mention of Christianity. While most Europeans apparently approve of the wording, theocrats, mainly in Poland, are decidedly unhappy and want Christianity singled out for special mention. Well, if the charter were to mention Christianity it would also have to mention Judaism (Jews lived in Europe before there were Christians) and Islam (Muslims lived in Spain for centuries and brought with the much of the learning, literature, and science of several ancient civilizations). It would also have to bring up the pre-Christian religions of the Romans, Greeks, Celts, Norse, Slavs, Goths, and countless others. It would also have to refer to the fact that European Christianity as often as not was imposed by the fiat of the kings and conquerors, not to mention the horrors wrought by centuries of faith-based government.

Bad Year for Women’s Rights?

2008 could well be a bad year for women’s rights. A campaign is under way in Colorado to place a state constitutional amendment, Initiative 36, on the ballot that would define human personhood as beginning at conception. Should such an amendment be approved, freedom of choice and conscience for women regarding abortion would be brought to a screeching halt. Similar efforts are being made in Georgia and several other states. The notion that personhood begins at conception is not supported by history, by the Judeo-Christian scriptures, or by science, but only by Vatican and fundamentalist theocons. The scientific consensus is that human personhood is not biologically possible until a certain level of cerebral development is reached to permit consciousness, sometime after 28 to 32 weeks, as a brief to the Supreme Court produced by Americans for Religious Liberty nearly 20 years ago and signed by 12 Nobel laureates and other scientists showed. Interestingly, the Judeo-Christian scriptures put the beginning of personhood at birth.

Rudy’s Way

Presidential aspirant Rudy Giuliani has now made it clear that he favors tax-paid vouchers for faith-based and other private schools. His newly formed educational advisory panel prominently features voucher fanatics Terry Moe, whom I once clobbered in an NPR debate, and attorney Clint Bolick. Could Rudy really be unaware that between November 1967 and November 2007 millions of voters from coast to coast rejected vouchers or their variants by an average of two to one? In 1967 voters in his own state of New York voted 3,487, 513 to 1,327,999 (72% to 28%) to defeat a proposed new state constitution whose most prominent feature was the absence of the old, and current, constitution’s Article XI, Section 3 prohibition that reads: “Neither the state nor any subdivision thereof shall use its property or credit or any public money, or authorize or permit either to be used, directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance, of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination, or in which any denominational tenet or doctrine is taught. . . .” (The New York referendum battle was the subject of my 1968 book, The Conspiracy That Failed.) So much for Rudy’s respect for his state’s voters or constitution.

Politics? No!!!!!

On November 14 the US Catholic bishops voted 221-4 to approve “moral guidelines” for Catholic voters that – no surprise – emphasize ending abortion rights and warn that political choices could affect a person’s salvation. While the 40-page document covers a range of issues, such as economic justice and immigration, it makes clear that the bishops’ priority concern is imposing on the country their (unscientific, unbiblical, male-dominance) ideology of the personhood of fertilized eggs, blastocists, embryos, fetuses, and those in a permanent vegetative state. Bishop Nicholas DiMazio of Brooklyn insisted that the document is not a “voter guide,” and Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo, ND, declared that “as bishops we know that we are truly called to warn our people . . . that choosing ‘intrinsic evils’ will have an impact on their salvation.” Fortunately, polls show that most Catholics think for themselves and pay scant attention to Episcopal advisories.

The bishops are also reportedly concerned that the sex abuse scandal that has cost the church over $2 billion since 1950 “may reduce its role in public life.” What, no word of remorse for the victims of the scandal?

Abstinence Only Baloney

Teenage birth rates increased by 3% between 2005 and 2006, according to a study released in December by the Reproductive Statistics Branch at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Births to US teenagers rose sharply during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, fell even more sharply during the Clinton years, started to level off after Bush II took office in 2001 and then turned up in 2005.

Undoubtedly there are a number of factors involved in these ups and downs, but the Bush administration’s antipathy toward comprehensive sexuality education and its pouring $176 million annually into contraceptive-bashing “abstinence only” (mis)education programs seems to be a major cause of the uptick in teen pregnancies. Recent reports have shown that abstinence only education simply does not work.

Child Trends scholar Kristin Moore told the New York Times that even the pre-2005 US teen birth rate was far higher than in other industrialized countries, where comprehensive sexuality education is far more common.

All this reminds me of Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling’s remark at a press conference several years ago. She said, “If abstinence education doesn’t work well in Catholic seminaries, why would anyone expect it to work anywhere else?”

12/14/07

Americans vs. School Vouchers

Taxpayers can get stuck with paying for faith-based and other private schools only when lawmakers can enact voucher or similar schemes without getting voter approval. That’s what happened in Wisconsin, where the state supreme court thumbed its nose at the state constitution, Ohio, Florida, and Arizona. Ohio’s plan was upheld by the US Supreme Court only because the Court’s 5-4 majority chose to ignore the reality of facts on the ground.

But whenever voters have had a chance to vote on vouchers or their variants, as has occurred in 25 statewide referenda from coast to coast over the last 40 years, they reject them by an average margin of two to one. Interestingly, the 39th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of public attitudes toward education, released in August, showed opposition to vouchers nationwide at 67% to 33%, exactly the same as the average referendum. And the PDK/Gallup poll did not even call attention to the pervasively sectarian and discriminatory nature of the vast majority of nonpublic schools.

Other findings of this year’s PDK/Gallup poll: By 69% to 28% respondents believe that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act forces teachers to “teach to the test,” and 79% of those who held that view of the NCLB program said that it is a “bad thing”; by 66% to 31% respondents opposed allowing school boards to contract with private profit-making outfits “to run the entire operations of public schools”; 67% of respondents gave an A or B rating to the school their oldest child attends, while only 16% gave A or B grades to schools nationally [In other words, the school my kid attends is good, but the rest of the schools in the country are not, which is obviously a response to the unfavorable publicity given to public education by media and theocon/neocon voucher advocates.]; 85% think that all students should learn a second language; lack of adequate funding is regarded as the biggest problem facing public education in the U S.

A Chip Off the Old Block

Jerry Falwell, probably the most prominent of the founders of the Religious Right theocon movement, is no longer with us, but his son Jonathan has inherited his mantle as senior sheepherder (“pastor” in Latin) of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Like his daddy, Junior opposes freedom of conscience on abortion and urges ministers “to use their pulpits to mobilize voters.” O tempora, o mores!

I’ll miss Jerry. He and I tangled several times on the Hannity & Colmes Show. And several years ago when I gave a speech on church-state issues at a Unitarian church in Lynchburg, I was surprised that the religion editor of the local paper covered my presentation. When I asked him why he was not covering a major event at Falwell’s Liberty “University,” he replied, “I’m the religion editor; the business editor covers Falwell.”

From Hither and Yon

● Michael Cromartie, of the ultraconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, has been appointed by President Bush to head the US Commission for International Religious Freedom. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has been named a vice-president of the US Commission. Cromartie and Land, with both of whom I have clashed, are fundamentalists who are not friendly to church-state separation.

● Televangelist Pat Robertson is the recipient of a federal contract to distribute hurricane relief. Well, at least that’s different from playing footsie with African dictators with diamond mines.

● Frau Karin Wolff, culture minister for the German state of Hesse, has stirred up fears that fundamentalist creationism will creep into European science classes. “I see no contradiction between biological evolution and the biblical explanation for the world’s origin,” she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

● Federal judge Sarah Vance said on September 14 that grants totaling $120,000 to two churches in Louisiana are probably unconstitutional. She said that giving money to churches without making them explain first what they plan to do with it is “what the Founders clearly did not want” when they wrote the First Amendment. The ACLU is challenging the grants.

● The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly is set to vote in October on a resolution opposing the teaching of creationism or “intelligent design” creationism in school science classes, as attacks on evolution are rooted “in forms of religious extremism” and are threats to science and human rights.

● Suit was filed in federal district court in Kansas City on September 18 by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation on behalf of Jeremy Hall, a soldier on active duty in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force Hall to accept evangelical Christianity and retaliating against him for refusing. MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, a former Reagan White House attorney, said that this is the first of a series of lawsuits to be filed to protect the rights of armed forces members.

● Montreal: The Quebec Council on the Status of Women says that the provincial government should bar civil servants from wearing visible religious symbols in order to protect the province’s status as a secular society. Council president Christiane Pelchat said that “a secular state promotes freedom of religion” for people of all religious traditions.

● John Tory (sic!), head of Ontario’s Tory (Conservative) Party, is proposing to have the province fund all faith-based schools. Under the British North America Act of 1867 Ontario is committed to funding only public and Catholic schools. A UN judicial body has held that Ontario must either fund only public schools or all faith-based schools. Polls showed several years ago that a plurality of Ontario voters prefer the first option. Neighboring Quebec ended funding of faith-based schools years ago and now has only tax supported French and English public schools. Newfoundland in the 1990s ended its policy of funding only faith-based schools (there being no public schools) and switched to US-style religiously neutral public schools. Newfoundland’s public schools-only policy was approved by three to one in a popular referendum. The Tories’ Tory should wake up and smell the coffee.

9/28/07

Sherwin Wine

Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, one of the most important humanist leaders of the past half century, died in a tragic automobile accident on July 21 while on holiday in Morocco. He was 79. Sherwin founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism, with congregations and members in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere, thus establishing Humanistic Judaism as an acknowledged fifth branch of Judaism, in addition to Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox. Of particular importance, Sherwin developed humanist communities, something lacking in other humanist organizations.

As Ethical Humanist leader and Unitarian Universalist minister Ed Ericson wrote recently, “The strength and energy of Sherwin Wine’s life and thought rested firmly on his commitment to Enlightenment principles. When reason was out of fashion, he stood by it. When science was scorned, he upheld it. When secular democracy was attacked, he defended it.”

When the Religious Right, or “theocons,” began to become an important political force in the late 1970s, Sherwin founded the Voice of Reason organization to defend secular democracy and church-state separation. This occurred at the same time that Ed Ericson and others in New York were founding the Center for Moral Democracy. Almost immediately the two groups were merged into what became Americans for Religious Liberty in early 1982 and I was asked to become executive director.

Having known Sherwin for over 30 years I can say without fear of contradiction that no one who ever knew or met Sherwin could fail to be impressed by his vast learning (he could speak authoritatively on nearly any subject for hours without notes), his unfailing energy, his optimism, his sense of humor, his balance, his empathy.

We who remain must now work all the harder to protect and promote the values to which Sherwin devoted his life and energies and spirit.

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish humanist filmmaker, died on July 30 at 89. In a half century career Bergman joined the ranks of Fellini and Kurosawa as one of the world’s great cinematic artists. I fell under his spell ages ago when seeing such film gems as “Summer Interlude” (also called “One Summer of Happiness”), “Wild Strawberries,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Monika,” “The Magic Flute”. All his films should be made readily available. A 1960 book, Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, contains the scripts and some stills from “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries,” and “The Magician.”

His Retroness

In mid-July Pope Benedict XVI provided a magnificent demonstration of negative PR that managed to irritate as many people as George W. Bush and his gang. The Pontifex Maximus (“bridge between heaven and earth,” a title borrowed from the old Roman emperors) approved with much fanfare a statement by the outfit he headed before he got his hands on the keys of St. Peters, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition), that “the church established by Christ exists in its complete form only in the Catholic Church.” Thus other branches of Christianity are not churches “in the proper sense” but only “Christian communities.” He even described the Eastern Orthodox Churches as “defective” because they do not accept his authority.

This put-down of all Christians outside his fold seems to have stuck a pin in just about everyone, including a great many Catholics. Two nuns let him have it in the August 3 National Catholic Reporter.

Sr. Bridget Mary Meehan wrote that this “offensive statement” is “a giant step backward for ecumenism and smacks of the triumphalism of pre-Vatican II days,” a slap in the face to other faith traditions, and “out of step with Jesus in the Gospels.” She added that “Catholics should apologize for the arrogant attitude expressed by the Vatican.”

Sr. Wendy Cotter wrote that the Vatican is “out of touch with the world” to “release a document so triumphal, condescending and – dare we say – arrogant.”

In addition, the Vatican has insisted that no essential Catholic belief has been changed. What chutzpah ("impudentia" in Latin)! As various Catholic experts have shown in Rome Has Spoken, edited by Maureen Fiedler and Linda Rabben (Crossroad Publishing, 1998), official Catholic Church teaching has meandered all over during the past two millennia.

So what does this mean to humanists? First, that the liberalization started by Pope John XXIII and Vatican Council II in the early 1960s stalled under Paul VI and John Paul II and is in full retreat under Retro Benny, who seems to want to revert back to the bad old days of the 19th century’s Pius IX, the reactionary who lost the Papal States to the new constitutional monarchy of Italy and managed to honk off practically the whole world.

Humanists should appreciate, with James Madison, that keeping religion as pluralistic as possible is good for religious liberty. Meanwhile, as the Vatican turns its face backward, fewer and fewer Catholics pay attention to its thunderings about contraception, abortion, divorce, faith-based schools, ordaining women, and allowing priests to marry.

The Vatican’s retrogressing should also spur progressive humanists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and others to work together to further the humanistic values that they share.

It is unfortunate that more non-Catholics than Catholics sem to believe that when Rome speaks, that settles it. In the long run, the antics of Benny the Retro could have positive results.

Sexual Abuse Settlement

Thanks to official church indifference and deliberate cover-ups, the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to a $660 million settlement in litigation by 508 plaintiffs involving sexual abuse by 150 clerics. This is in addition to a $114 million settlement in 86 other cases last year. It’s estimated that over the last 20 years the abuse scandals have cost the church at least $2 billion in the US alone.

Although the clergy abuse scandals only became well publicized in the US since early 2002, the problem has existed throughout history, as has been documented in two recent books, Perversion of Power, by Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea (Vanderbilt University Press, 2007), and Sex, Priests and Secret Codes, by Thomas Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe, and Patrick Wall (Volt Press, 2006), not to mention the Massachusetts attorney general report, the Irish government’s Ferns Report, and two books by Spanish psychologist Pepe Rodriguez. It is the kind of arrogance displayed by Benedict XVI (see above) that allows this sort of thing to happen and go undetected or unpunished.

Power mixed with delusions of divine connections can produce all sorts of evil. Just think about Bush and Cheney.

8/7/07

Belay DeLay

Indicted former republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay recently told an audience of College Republicans that there is a link between legal abortion and illegal immigration. According to the erstwhile bug exterminator (see Bill Potts’ Bushopedia for bio info on “The Hammer”), “I contend [that abortion] affects you in immigration. If we had those 40 million children that were killed over the last 30 years, we wouldn’t need the illegal immigrants to fill the jobs that they are doing today. Think about it.”

One comic noted that if the US had an additional 40 million people, few of whom would care to mow lawns or flip burgers, there would be even more illegal immigration.

But, seriously, there is a connection between abortion and illegal immigration. People in Mexico and Central America have inadequate access to contraception, comprehensive sexuality education, and abortion (Mexico City only this year legalized abortion and Nicaragua just outlawed it), and this is a contributing factor in the desperate flood of poor people to El Norte.

Too bad Mr. Bug is unable to understand this.

Vagaries of Orthodoxy

Noah Feldman, writer and Harvard law prof, attended a “modern Orthodox” yeshiva for twelve years. In an article in the July 22 New York Times Magazine, he described how all mention of him had been deleted from the yeshiva’s alumni bulletin, a “nonrecognition” not unlike the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza.

It is interesting to contrast Feldman’s situation with my own. Like Feldman I attended an “orthodox” religious school, Roman Catholic in my case. But while Feldman maintained his close connection with Judaism, I had become a humanist and a Unitarian before I was old enough to vote. Yet in the Winter 2007 issue of my Catholic high school alumni bulletin may be found the following entry: “1948. Edd Doerr, ’48 [I actually finished high school in three years and had started college a year before I received my diploma] has recently had his 25th book published, 'Here I Stand.' He is the author of over 3,500 published books, sections of books and encyclopedias, articles, editorials, columns, book and film reviews, short stories, poems, translations, and letters. He has headed Americans for Religious Liberty since 1982.”

Go figure.

8/1/07