Humanists at Barefoot Bay

That’s a book title? Yes, because 34 million is the amount of dollars Congress authorized in 2002 for the UN Population Fund but which President Bush blocked every year to please his theocon base. Whereupon two women, Jane Roberts and Lois Abraham, launched a campaign to get private donations to make up the US’ disgraceful shortfall to the extent possible. Roberts’ book is the story of that campaign and of the vitally important work of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in protecting the health, reproductive health and choice, and lives of countless women in developing countries. The UNFPA’s medical and educational work is saving women’s lives, preventing unwanted pregnancies and abortions, unnecessary childbirth deaths, HIV-AIDS, and assorted medical problems. According to the Population Fund, the $34 million that Bush blocked could have prevented two million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths, 60,000 serious maternal illnesses, and over 77,000 infant and child deaths. So much for Bush’s self-proclaimed compassion! Roberts’ important book is available free for a donation (tax-deductible) of $10 or more to 34 Millions Friends Americans for UNFPA, PO Box 681, Toms River, NJ 08754-9922.

Historian Garry Wills’ brilliant book is an excellent antidote for the noxious propaganda brew the theocons are peddling calling for faith-based government and pushing the myth that this country’s Founders intended this to be a “Christian” republic. In a sweeping yet astonishingly comprehensive survey of religion in the US from colonial days to what he calls the “Rove Era,” Wills explores the tides and tensions of Enlightenment and Evangelical religion in our history, Enlightenment religion encompassing everything from Deism and Unitarianism to liberal trending mainstream religion.

Wills shows that “the chief founders of the nation [Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Paine] were all Deists”; that “Whatever their faults, the Deists delivered us from the horrors of pre-Enlightenment religion, title enough to honor. They also founded this country”; and that “The Federal Constitution was, in short, the 18th century equivalent of a secular humanist text. The delegates were not a wry orthodox group of men in any doctrinal sense. The only born-again Christian among them was probably Richard Bassett of Delaware . . . who said nothing at the Convention.”

The book climaxes with a long section on “The Karl Rove Era” and the faith-based government of George W. Bush. He writes that Rove’s “real skill lay in finding how to use religion as a political tool,” making the “executive branch of the United States more openly religious than it ever had been.” Ironically, Wills notes that Rove had/has “no discernible religious beliefs himself.” Bill Moyers recently stated that Rove is an agnostic, all of which bears out my point that it is wrong to confuse humanism with mere non-theism.

Wills tackles the abortion rights issue head on, declaring that there is no scriptural or scientific basis for the notion that fetuses are persons until a functioning brain is present, around the end of the second trimester. He also hits the Bush administration’s pouring tens of millions of dollars into the failed “abstinence only” programs.

Wills concludes that church-state separation is good for both religion and religious freedom.

Head and Heart is a must read book that belongs at the top of the bestseller list. It rates at least six or seven stars.

12/14/07

James Madison would flip over in his grave if he could see some of the sorry stuff coming from the university press of his alma mater, Princeton.

MacMullen’s opus is an ivory tower utopian fantasy by an overeducated political scientist innocent of any knowledge of the real world, of educational economies, or of US constitutional law. While the book contains some interesting abstract philosophizing, it’s main thrust, reiterated ad nauseam, is that the goal of education in a “liberal” (?) state should be good citizenship and individual autonomy (OK so far) and that (not OK) taxes should support faith-based schools that promote individual autonomy while the state should not only not support faith-based schools that do not promote autonomy and free inquiry but should also prohibit their very existence. In other words, the “state,” however defined, should closely regulate all schools and deny the right to exist to unapproved faith-based schools. In the courts and in the court of public opinion MacMullen’s grand scheme would have less chance than the proverbial snowball in Hades.

Viteritti’s opus magnus is little more than a bizarre, sloppy, somewhat paranoid tract clearly aimed at undermining church-state separation. He propagates the theocon myth that a vast “secularist conspiracy” is out to do harm to a besieged religious community. Sprinkled with dumb errors (he gets the year wrong for 9/11, misspells Paul Blanshard’s name, etc.), Viteritti’s main aim is to promote school vouchers, using misinterpreted poll results and totally ignoring the 25 (now 26: Utah in November 2007) statewide referenda showing that many millions of US voters have registered opposition to school vouchers or their variants by an average of two to one. All in all, Viteritti’s book is a shameless hack job that should embarrass its publisher.

Princeton should honor its most distinguished alumnus by putting someone more responsible in charge of its university press.

11/30/07

When Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement in June of 1991 the ACLU was holding its biennial conference in Burlington, Vermont. As a delegate I introduced motions, which were (as I recall) passed unanimously, praising Marshall and urging Bush the Elder to appoint a successor with comparable devotion to civil rights and civil liberties. What we got was Clarence Thomas, whose nomination led to a display not unlike excrement striking a fan.

Now we have Thomas’s self-censored memoir. One can certainly empathize with his rise from direst poverty in Georgia, but the empathy evaporates when he finishes his university education and attains professional success. It’s downhill from there on. Nearly every page of this superficial, mediocre opus oozes self-pity, seasoned occasionally with what comes off as a phony religiosity. Much of the book deals with his controversial Supreme Court nomination and the circus-like lead up to the 52-48 Senate confirmation vote.

Here Thomas rehashes his self-serving version of his one-time employee Anita Hill’s charges of sexual improprieties. Hill responded to Thomas’s defense in a New York Times op-ed on October 2, while Ruth Marcus, who covered the confirmation hearings for the Washington Post, supported Hill’s side of the story in a Post column on October 3.

Thomas’s curiously truncated memoir provides few cues about his judicial philosophy or thinking and, oddly, ends with his confirmation. Not a peep about his 16 years on the Supreme Court. Far more information about him may be found in Ken Foskett’s sympathetic 2004 biography, Judging Thomas, which notes that Thomas requires his new clerks to view the film version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and sometimes fantasizes about being Gary Cooper, star of the film.

Thomas makes repeated weepy references to his having left his first wife, but provides no clue as to why he walked out on her and their son, though he does make much of his getting custody of his son after the divorce.

Justice Thomas has rarely if ever spoken from the bench, so he must be judged by his rulings and dissents, and what we find there is hostility toward civil liberties, women’s rights, and church-state separation. We can also note that it was his fifth vote that upset Al Gore’s election to the presidency in 2000 and delivered the White House to the son of the man who put him on the Court. Had he recused himself in Gore v. Bush this world would be a different – and better -- place.

Do I exaggerate? Let’s see what John Greenya, author of Silent Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story, wrote in a review of Thomas’s book in the October 16 issue of the ultraconservative Washington Times: “Given what he went through, some readers will feel for Mr. Thomas, but he goes way over the top. And he does so with such religiosity that it sounds as if he thinks America is a theocracy. Earlier in the book he attributes the opposition to his appointment to the Supreme Court to disagreement with his political and philosophical beliefs, noting the liberals’ across-the-board assumption that he’d vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But by the end it’s all racism and the ‘high-tech lynching of an uppity black man’. A more lawyerly argument might have changed more minds.”

My Grandfather’s Son is a cask of sour whine guaranteed to give the reader a queasy headache.

10/16/07

Michael Shermer (Ph.D. in history of science) is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American. In this important book, Shermer not only completely wipes out the arguments for “intelligent design” creationism but also does a fine job of explaining evolution. This is a book that merits wide circulation.

In discussing the court challenges to attempts to intrude creationism into public school biology classes, Shermer makes this point: "The 1987 Louisiana case amplified the description of science even more because this case was appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, thereby fulfilling the ACLU’s original intent for the 1925 Scopes Tennessee trial. For the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, seventy-two Nobel laureates, seventeen state academies of science, and seven other scientific organizations submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Court’s justices in support of the appellees’ challenge of the constitutionality of Louisiana’s 'Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act,' an equal-time law passed by the state in 1982. The brief is one of the most important documents in the history of the evolution-creation debate and presents the best short statement on the central tenets of science endorsed by the world’s leading scientists and science organizations." [Disclosure: Getting the Nobel laureates to sign the brief was the idea of this reviewer. I used the same strategy the following year when the Supreme Court heard Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, getting twelve Nobel laureate biologists and 155 other scientists to sign an amicus brief defending abortion rights on the ground that embryos and fetuses cannot scientifically qualify as “persons” under the law.]

Useful features of the book are the chapters on why science and religion need not conflict and why conservatives and conservative Christians should accept evolution. “Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives. . . . The conflict between science and religion is senseless, . . . based on fears and misunderstandings rather than facts and moral wisdom.”

A useful appendix lists eight different positions on the creation-evolution spectrum, from “young earth” creationism to “theistic evolution,” plus six out of a myriad creation stories found in different cultures. With reference to the latter, I came across an interesting pre-Columbian Kogui Indian creation story inscribed on the wall of the Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia (my translation from the Spanish):

“In the beginning was the sea. All was dark. There was no sun or moon or people or animals on anything. The sea was everywhere. The sea was the mother. The mother was not people or anything else. She was the spirit of that which was to come. And she was thought and memory.”

This exciting book by ACLU executive director Anthony Romero and journalist Dina Temple-Raston provides a narrative guided tour through the thicket of some of the serious civil liberties problems facing our country today. Among them: the battle over “intelligent design” creationism in Dover, Pennsylvania; the nightmarish treatment of prisoners in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; the grossly disproportionate treatment of a gay teenager in Kansas: the South Dakota attempt to outlaw all abortions; the problems caused by the federal government’s warrantless spying program; the Bush administration’s post-9/11 activities that have imperiled our system of checks and balances; the new dangers of mixing religion and government.

If you think your – our – civil liberties are safe and sound, you need to read this book.

10/7/07

Journalism prof Ronald Bishop offers us two inextricably intertwined stories, that of Michael Newdow’s ultimately thwarted challenge to Congress’ 1954 inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and that of the near-hysterical responses to that challenge by the media, the punditocracy, politicians, and the Religious Right. After Newdow won his case in the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the case on the ground that Newdow lacked standing to sue.

Bishop records the near hysterical and generally banal responses to the challenge by all and sundry as they huffed and puffed about Newdow’s threat to the nation, motherhood, and apple pie, responses that reflected a certain timid herd mentality.

US-history-impaired people, including media types, need to be reminded that the Constitution does not mention a deity; that Congress was officially in session on Christmas until the 1850s; that our Washington-Adams Senate-approved 1797 treaty with Tripoli stipulated that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”; that the “In God We Trust” motto did not appear on any US coin until the middle of the Civil War, not on all coins until the eve of World War I, not on our currency until 1955; and that the US managed to win two world wars against an adversary whose troops wore uniforms with the motto “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”) well before Congress added “under God” to the Pledge in 1954.

At the end of the day we should be glad that the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the substance of Newdow’s challenge because, as ACLU president Nadine Strossen (who wrote the forward to the book) put it, a Newdow win would have led to a constitutional amendment to restore the phrase in the motto that would have “sailed through.” I agree and would add that such an amendment could well have done even more serious damage to the First Amendment. Strossen opined that energy would be better spent on other church-state issues. I would also add that had Newdow lost on substance in the Supreme Court, the ruling would have been written by either Chief Justice Rehnquist or Justice Thomas and its effects could have been as devastating as a constitutional amendment.

9/26/07

In July 2007 the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest, agreed to a payment of $660 million to hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse of minors. In September the San Diego diocese agreed to a payout of nearly $200 million to 144 victims. Added to the huge settlements paid out to victims in the Boston and other church judicatories in recent years, the total bill to the church and its insurers has topped $2 billion.

This sordid mess has been well documented and analyzed by Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe and Patrick J. Wall in their book Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2,000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse (Volt, 2006), in Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Vanderbilt U. Press, 2007), in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s 2003 report, The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, in the Irish government's Ferns Report, in two books by Spanish psychologist Pepe Rodriguez, and elsewhere.

Now we have Mexican journalist Sanjuana Martínez’ thorough exposé of the same problem in Mexico and its links to the mess in California. Unfortunately for most US readers, the book is only available in Spanish.

Among Martínez’ findings and conclusions: An estimated 30% of Mexico’s 14,000 active priests have been involved in sexual abuse (a figure higher than that found in the US or Spain); Mexican Cardinal Norberto Rivera and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony both transferred abusing priests from one parish to another, and even shuffled them between the US and Mexico to cover up the abuse, apparently without any squawk from the Vatican; Although church and state are supposedly separate in Mexico, church officials seem immune from civil law; Cardinal Rivera is a poor excuse for a religious leader.

Martínez touches briefly on the case of Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who was protected by the Vatican until the abuse scandal got so bad that 70% of Austrians polled considered him guilty of sexual abuse. Since Austria has a church tax, more than 50,000 Catholics have left the church, costing it three million Euros per year in lost tax subsidies.

It should be noted that these abuse scandals are made public not by secularists but by Catholics themselves.

Listed by Time in 2005 as one of the “25 most influential evangelicals in America,” Richard Land heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Committee and has appeared frequently in the media. His book, largely a vacuous parade of pious platitudes, pretends to put forth an evenhanded middle-of-the-road approach to church-state relations between the extremes of “intense secularists” and the wackiness of the fundamentalist “dominionists.” Instead, what he offers is a Religious Right trending tract that gives a whole new set of meanings to the words shallow, superficial, pompous, simplistic, confused, and cynical.

For a guy with an Oxford Ph.D. (sic!) Land makes some really outlandish statements. While he writes that “the vast majority of people in this country . . . have always celebrated Christmas,” the fact is, as Al Menendez shows in his book The December Wars, evangelicals like Land opposed celebrating Christmas until at least the end of the 19th century. He claims that Evangelical Christians are “discriminated against” and shows off his knowledge of French by misspelling the French word for “equality.”

In a short (half-page) appendix, Land writes that “ . . . Church and state should be separate. . . . The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. . . . The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion. . . .” That’s fine, but elsewhere in the book he works hard to make a case for the right of majorities to push their religious views in public schools, a sort of Falwellian “let the moral majority” have the run of schools. He avoids any discussion of the intensifying school voucher controversy, takes a strong stand against freedom of conscience on abortion without intelligently discussing the issue, and goes out of his way to slam former President and fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter and Episcopal priest and former senator John Danforth as being too “secularist.”

Land makes much of the Declaration of Independence’s reference to human rights coming from the “Creator” but avoids discussing why no one thought of this until 1776, why rights were bestowed only on white males, and why the “Creator” has not endowed the majority of the human race with unalienable rights. It should be obvious to reasonable people that rights exist because humans define them, struggle to establish them, create machinery to protect them and continue to refine them and defend them.

Land’s opus is a weak, amateurish, poor thing that deserves to be forgotten.

9/23/07

Increasing Muslim populations in the US and Western Europe, along with rising tensions between the Muslim world and the West, make this study of Islamic education particularly important. The author provides us with an encyclopedic wealth of information about Islamic education in the US, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the last two of which, for historic reasons, provide generous public support for Islamic and other faith-based schools. Especially useful is Merry’s demonstration of the insufficiently known or appreciated diversity within the Islamic world—Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Indo-Pakistanis, Indonesians, Sunnis, Shiites, Wahhabis, Sufis, fundamentalists, liberals, secularists, etc.

So far so good. But then the author takes a wild leap through the Twilight Zone to Cloudcuckooland, where with utterly astonishing naiveté he strongly advocates full tax support for Islamic and all other faith-based schools coupled, more astonishingly still, with a level of state supervision and involvement that 99% of US faith-based schools would find unacceptable. It is hard to understand why the author, a specialist in educational philosophy, could know so much about faith-based education in the US and Europe and still support school vouchers or their equivalent.

Merry may know a lot about Islamic schools but he seems woefully ignorant of the nature of faith-based education in the US or our 40 years of referenda, opinion polls, and political fights over vouchers. He might care to note the 2007 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, released in late August, showing opposition to full tax support for faith-based and other private schools at 67% to 33%, almost exactly the average level of opposition to vouchers or their analogues registered in 25 state referenda from coast to coast over the last 40 years.

9/23/07

Why review these two books together? Because the editor of the second, Maureen Fiedler, was the host of the half-hour July 12 “conversation” between Hitchens and myself on the nationally syndicated “Interfaith Voices” radio program on the subject, “Atheism and Humanism in a Pluralist Democracy: Differing Approaches to Belief and Non-Belief in Today’s World.” This review, then, will in part reflect the views expressed on that program.

First off, Hitchens’ book contains an exhaustive compilation of the myriad objections to much of traditional religion, far too much even to summarize in a review of reasonable length. In any event, readers of this review are already doubtless familiar with most of them.

None of this is especially new, though Hitchens is to be commended for producing this useful summary. However, he goes too far – by equating all religion with fundamentalist extremism, by failing to distinguish between humanistic-tending religious progressives and Falwell/Robertson/Taliban sorts of fanatics. On the radio program Hitchens decried the widespread “cafeteria approach” to religion, which I regard, however, as a rational, healthy adaptation by ordinary people to increasing knowledge, to the irresistible spread of facts.

It should be abundantly clear that there will never be enough humanists and nontheists to deal with all the world’s problems, such as global warming, resource depletion, deforestation, desertification, pollution, overpopulation, the growing gap between the superrich and everyone else, the gradual loss of civil liberties, sexism, racism, xenophobia, genocide, etc. The rational way for people of good will is for progressive humanists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and others to work together despite their increasingly less significant differences.

Further, merely identifying as an atheist tells almost nothing whatever about one. Too often those whose preferred primary identification is “atheist” are unhumanistic jerks who contribute little to the advance of humanist values.

Finally, Hitchens' book lacks stress on humanist values. And especially disturbing is his opposition to abortion rights, his apparent abandonment of science and reason to agree with fundamentalists on the personhood of fetuses (p. 220).

Turning to the Fiedler/Rabben book, there is a widespread belief, more common among non-Catholics than Catholics, that when “Rome has spoken, that settles it” and that the Catholic Church’s position on essential issues never changes, as Pope Benedict XVI reiterated only this summer. Well, ‘tain’t so. The experts pulled together by Fiedler and Rabben document how church positions have meandered and evolved over the past two millennia on such subjects as infallibility, primacy of conscience, interpreting scripture, religious freedom, slavery, theological dissent, women’s rights, clerical celibacy, sex, contraception, and science. Fiedler/Rabben reinforces my long held position that viewing religion as vertical pillars – Protestants, Catholics, Jews, humanists, etc. – is far less useful than a lateral division between progressives of all traditions and fundamentalists of all sorts toward the opposite pole.

Today’s world is far more complex than either vocal atheists or fundamentalists seem to think. Fiedler and Rabben have made a most useful contribution to the interfaith, or inter-lifestance, polylogue now so urgently needed.

8/9/07

While Darryl Hart, an evangelical and a conservative, provides the reader with some useful insights and information, his book is often confusing and he fails to tackle some of the main issues in the church-state field. Nonetheless, he does drop a few nuggets of wisdom. Here are some:

“[T]he effort by political conservatives to harness faith-based initiatives to Republican policy prompted religious conservatives to give up something crucial to their Christian faith as well as to the political order in the United States. . . . If religious organizations maintain that transmitting faith is crucial to their charitable work, and if they seek public funds for that work, the state will be funding proselytizing. This not only violates the clear intentions of the First Amendment but also the convictions of most conservative Protestants who believe that God’s people, not state agencies, should support the Lord’s work.”

“[U]sing Christianity for political ends fundamentally misconstrues the Christian religion.”

“Christians may fruitfully participate in political life not as a site of redemption but as an essential part of their humanity. . . . [S]ecular politics is thoroughly compatible with orthodox Christianity.”

Law profs Eisgruber and Sager live in an ivory tower in a galaxy far, far away and have confected a naïve plan called “Equal Liberty” to deal with religious liberty and church-state problems in our messy little world. Like a clock that is broken they are right some of the time, but, having never actually visited our planet, they see nothing wrong with having tax dollars flow to sectarian schools and charities. Unacquainted with the field of economics, they seem to think that a tsunami of pennies from heaven will be available to pay for religious and secular schools and charities to suit everyone’s preferences.

In one short dip into terrestrial reality they cite sociologists Mark Chaves’ and Robert Wuthnow’s questioning “whether religious congregations have the desire or the capacity to provide social services on the scale presupposed by the Bush administration’s proposals.”

Author Mansfield apparently descended to earth on a fiery chariot to do battle with church-state separation and restore righteousness to the world. His Darth Vader is the late Justice Hugo Black, who wrote the 1947 Everson ruling holding that the First Amendment, made applicable to state and local government by the Fourteenth, was intended to erect a high and impregnable wall of separation between church and state. He does not explain, however, how Darth Vader Black mesmerized the other eight justices into agreeing with him or how Black was able to travel back in time and influence the Supreme Court in 1879 to declare that Jefferson’s wall metaphor was what the Founders intended.

To hear Mansfield tell it, Black (a “reactionary liberal,” whatever that is), and Everson, aided by the ACLU (“the Taliban of American liberal secularism,” as he quaintly puts it), are the font of all evil. George Orwell would have been shocked and Josef Goebbels gleeful at Mansfield’s selective manipulation of history.

Finally, these three authors were so busy drilling holes in the First Amendment that they overlooked the religious liberty implications of the controversies over reproductive rights.

Alas, I weep for all the trees that were sacrificed to produce these two adventures in silliness.

8/1/07

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