Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1987

More than two years ago, the United Coalition of Reason offered to pay $5,700 to the Port Authority of Allegheny County (in Pennsylvania) to put up 12 king-sized bus ads over the course of a month to advertise the newly-formed Pittsburgh Coalition of Reason.

The Port Authority said yes… at first. But just as the ads were about to run, they changed their minds, telling United CoR that the text of the ads — “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” — didn’t comply with the company’s ad policy.

In November, United CoR, aided by the Appignani Humanist Legal Center of the American Humanist Association, filed a complaint in a U.S. District Court:

The Complaint seeks injunctive relief but at this point no motions have been filed. In the Complaint, UnitedCoR alleges that the Port Authority violated UnitedCoR’s free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. UnitedCoR asserts that the First Amendment prohibits the Port Authority, as a governmental entity, from using its disfavor of the nontheistic message of UnitedCoR’s ads as a reason for refusing to run them on its buses. Such acts, the Complaint states, amount to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination against UnitedCoR’s speech.

I was amazed at how a message reaching out to the godless — that didn’t even refer to, much less denigrate, the religious — could be so offensive as to warrant this lawsuit.

“We tried to support the Port Authority by buying ads,” said Nicole Currivan, coordinator of Pittsburgh CoR. “I take the bus to work every day in my personal effort to support them. But we also want to be treated with the same fairness, dignity and respect as other groups. We just want the Port Authority to run our ads. We want non-believers to know they’re not alone.”

What made the atheists’ case especially compelling was that the Port Authority rejected the message saying that “noncommercial ads” were not allowed… even though they ran such ads from plenty of other noncommercial groups, including churches, advocacy groups, and “hospitals soliciting volunteers for medical studies.”

…

There’s finally some justice in the matter. Earlier today, United CoR celebrated what amounts to a court victory, even though the Port Authority denies doing anything wrong:

The Port Authority of Allegheny County has agreed to pay $20,000 plus legal fees to settle an advertising lawsuit by a Washington, D.C., group, according to federal court documents filed Wednesday.

Lawyers for the authority and the United Coalition of Reason Inc. filed notice of the agreement, which doesn’t specify an amount for the legal fees.

The atheists’ ads still won’t go up, but at least the policy will become more uniform so that different groups aren’t treated in different ways.

All of this could have been avoided if only the government officials had said yes to the harmless ads to begin with. But this is excellent news following a very straightforward case of anti-atheist discrimination.

I’ve reached out to United CoR for comment but haven’t heard back yet.

***Update***: I just got a message from Fred Edwords at United CoR with a little more information:

The total cost to the Port Authority is $60,000, with $40,000 covering the AHLC’s legal fees. It was the Port Authority that actually suggested the settlement (possibly knowing it was on shaky legal grounds), not a judge.

Why take the settlement and not fight this out in court? Edwords explained it this way:

Although we still maintain that we were improperly denied the opportunity to run our ad, as originally conceived, under the Port Authority’s old rules, the old rules are now gone. So even if the courts allowed our original ad to run, it would merely be grandfathered in as an exception. It wouldn’t improve the situation for others.

It also means United CoR doesn’t have to waste any more time fighting a legal battle.

Some of the $20,000 given to United CoR in the settlement will be used for a new ad campaign for the Pittsburgh Coalition of Reason. Will it be on the buses? Probably not. The new rules set by the Port Authority in the wake of this settlement prohibit ideological advertising. So a billboard may be in the works instead.

We’ll find out very soon…

(Large portions of this article were posted earlier.)

Former South Carolina GOP chairman Chad Connelly (below) is the Director of Faith Engagement for GOP Faith, a new outreach campaign to reach out to conservative Christians… because that’s a demographic the Republican Party just hasn’t been able to crack yet.

During an appearance on Sandy Rios‘ American Family Radio show on Monday, Connelly made it very clear that GOP Faith is a very narrow campaign indeed, since he finds it inconceivable that anyone who believes in God could even vote for a Democrat:

Rios: There are some very good elements, certainly, in the Republican Party. I wish I could say the same for the Democratic Party. I can only find, again, one pro-life Democrat in the House right now.

Connelly: How does a believer vote that way now, Sandy? We just gotta get our people involved…

Maybe because there are religious people out there who understand that conception doesn’t begin at ejaculation.

Maybe because there are religious people who know that giving women a safe choice over what they do with their bodies is more important than forcing their will onto everyone else.

Maybe because there are religious people who want nothing to do with a political party that essentially doubles as a church — when elected officials are supposed to represent all Americans and not just the Christian ones.

Connelly’s argument can best be summed up like this: religious people should be selfish. Vote for the party that’ll give you everything you want! Forget about Jews and atheists and gays and lesbians and immigrants and the poor!

Later in that same clip, Connelly urges pastors to run for office just to hammer home the point that only Christians matter. Hell, the rest of us have no integrity at all:

… It used to be exalted, if you were a person of integrity, if you were Christian, people said, “Hey I can count on him.” And now we scratch our heads and wonder why we can’t count on more of these people. It’s because they don’t have a core line, a base line.

I’m not sure who GOP Faith’s target audience is supposed to be. Because they won’t gain any ground by talking to the same crowd as usual. It’ll barely have any effect on younger voters, I suspect, since they’re tired of the strong alliance between religion and the GOP. Even Glenn Beck‘s website makes that point.

Asking how people of faith can vote for a Democrat is the type of rhetoric you expect from people who still think President Obama is a secret Muslim. It’s willfully ignorant.

I wish I could say the Democrats were a party of no faith… but that’s not the case at all. They love religion, too, which means we have two major political parties in our country that rely on a God-fearing base. The Republicans just go after the extremists. Then they have the audacity to throw their hands in the air and ask why other Christians aren’t also on their side.

It’s because those Christians, like the rest of us, can see past faith, especially faith that’s only used for political marketing.

(via Right Wing Watch)

The Freedom From Religion Foundation will run a full-page ad in the front news section of tomorrow’s New York Times to protest the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision:

DOGMA SHOULD NOT TRUMP OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES

ALL-MALE, ALL-ROMAN CATHOLIC MAJORITY ON SUPREME COURT PUTS RELIGIOUS WRONGS OVER WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Are you dismayed and alarmed by the Supreme Court’s June 30 Hobby Lobby ruling? The Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative, Roman Catholic majority — Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Kennedy and Thomas — has sided with zealous fundamentalists who equate contraception with abortion. The court has granted employers with “sincere” religious objections the right to deny women employees insurance coverage for birth control.

This ruling marks a turning point in the struggle to uphold civil liberties in the face of relentless attacks by the Religious Right. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people. Now, the Supreme Court asserts that corporations have “religious rights” that surpass those of women. In the words of Justice John Paul Stevens, “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires” — but real women do.

Allowing employers to decide what kind of birth control an employee can use is not, as the Supreme Court ruled, an “exercise of religion.” It is an exercise of tyranny.

CONGRESS MUST REPEAL RFRA

EMPLOYERS SHOULD HAVE NO RIGHT TO IMPOSE THEIR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS UPON WORKERS

The Hobby Lobby ruling is based not on the Constitution, but on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, misguidedly enacted by Congress in 1993. RFRA radically redefines “religious freedom,” according believers extreme religious liberty, exempting them from laws they claim create substantial burdens on their free exercise of religion…

The ad also features an image of birth control activist Margaret Sanger.

No word yet on how much the ad costs. Though it’s probably at least in the mid-five-figures. (And it was probably paid for by an anonymous donor, though I haven’t confirmed that yet.)

It’s not the first time FFRF has run a full-page ad like this. They last did it in 2012 when they encouraged readers to quit the Catholic Church. In 2011, an ad wished readers “Reason’s Greetings,” prompting the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue to call them “parasites of Christmas.” In 2010, a full-page ad called the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional. And in 2008, FFRF urged readers to imagine a world without religion.

Last year, the Bossier Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana lost $15,000 in federal funding for its Young Marine Program. On the surface, the program sounded great, promoting the “mental, moral and physical development of its young recruits.”

Sheriff Julian Whittington

The problem was that it was a religious program, emphasizing “the love of God and fidelity to our country,” subjecting members to a Young Marine Obligation to not disgrace or dishonor God, and having students sign on to a Young Marine Creed that included: “Keep myself clean in mind by attending the church of my faith.”

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice made it very clear that the money would be returned to the Sheriff’s office once the God references were removed. That never happened. Sheriff Julian Whittington complained to Governor Bobby Jindal, prompting Jindal to join him at an “In God We Trust Rally” last July 4:

Sheriff Julian Whittington (left), Governor Bobby Jindal (center), and information officer Lt. Bill Davis (right) at the ‘In God We Trust Rally’ (Henrietta Wildsmith – The Shreveport Times)

That’s when Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) stepped in. She sponsored a bill that would “prohibit the revocation or withholding of Federal funds to programs whose participants carry out voluntary religious activities.”

The problem is that these religious activities weren’t exactly voluntary. The references to God were built right into the program. You may have been able to get away with not saying them, but there’s no doubt this was religious proselytization at some level.

Landrieu’s bill stalled in committee, but she found a way to get it passed, anyway. She tacked it onto page 975 of the Omnibus Spending Bill passed by Congress:

No funds appropriated in this Act may be used to prevent the implementation of programs of voluntary prayer and meditation in the public schools.

With that insertion, Landrieu gave religious groups a loophole with which they could push religion into public schools. All they had to do is insist that students weren’t required to say all the godly oaths and creeds in their programs and they could Jesu-fy up everything they do.

The spending bill passed in the House on a 359-67 vote and passed in the Senate 72-26. President Obama signed it once it reached his desk.

The senator was thrilled about her “freedom to pray” provision, of course:

Sen. Landrieu said, “Programs like the Young Marines in Bossier City will now have peace of mind knowing that they will not have their funding revoked because they offer voluntary prayer or other religious activities.”

Sen. Landrieu also said, “The Department of Justice’s overreach threatened not only the positive contributions of Young Marines to Bossier, but community enhancement programs like this across the country. I’m proud to have secured this provision that will help avoid the unnecessary conflict that the Young Marines experienced the last couple years with the Department of Justice.”

There was no “overreach” here. There was just reach. The Department of Justice was doing its job by not funding a blatantly religious program, voluntary or not.

There was no reason a local church couldn’t sponsor the Young Marine Program, even with the Sheriff’s support (when he’s off-duty). There was also no reason the references to God couldn’t be removed from the program.

But neither of those options were even considered. Whittington got his taxpayer money for a religious event — and he had to support of some of the highest-ranking politicians in the state.

Now, it’s happening all over again.

This Friday, on July 4, Sheriff Whittington will once again hold a prayer rally on government property:

“Not only am I elected to serve the people of Bossier Parish, but I live here and my family lives here. I think Bossier Parish is a better place with Christianity and Christian values involved in it. I am an elected official. I’m also a citizen here. I think this is what’s best for us. I don’t work for anybody in Washington. What they do, what they say, I couldn’t really care less,” Whittington said. “We’re No. 1 in a lot of areas. The fastest growing parish north of I-10, a safe community, great schools, good government. Frankly, we know how to operate and what to do.”

…

“Last year, we didn’t really know what we were doing and we had so many people, so much reaction from people, so we held the event and over 1,000 people showed up and said, ‘We agree with you. For a nation that was founded on Christian values, our government was formed around it, it’s on our money, it’s in our oath, we pledge as elected officials, to somehow now say it’s somehow taboo or you have to run with it is ridiculous. We agree with you. Stick with it,’” Whittington said.

The problem is that the Sheriff doesn’t understand or care for the law. No one’s stopping him from praying on his own as a citizen. But for him to use his office and title in promotion of religion is illegal. If anyone but a Christian was doing what he’s doing, there would be a national outcry. That “over 1,000″ other uninformed people confirmed his faulty thinking means nothing.

(Speaking of uninformed people, Governor Jindal won’t be there in person but he has already prepared a videotaped message.)

When asking about the recent 5-4 Town of Greece v Galloway decision, Whittington doubled-down on his Christian Persecution Complex:

“That shows just how close, one vote, how that could very well be out the window sooner than we think. It’s a good barometer for where we are,” Whittington said. “It goes back to one reason people are so involved and feel so strongly about it. People are realizing that as well. For the most part, people have sat back and left it up to someone else and not worried about it. It’s time to be worried.”

He doesn’t get it. If the decision went the other way, it still wouldn’t have prevented Christians from praying — on their own, before the meetings.

What Whittington wants is for the government to endorse and honor his magical friend. He wants special treatment for being Christian. He wants members of the community to understand they’re second class citizens if they don’t belong to the same faith he does.

What an awful role model and irresponsible elected official.

(Thanks to Randall for the link. Large parts of this article were posted earlier.)

Brandon Fibbs grew up in a religious family and attended a Christian college, but he eventually stopped believing in nonsense. His story isn’t all that unfamiliar to readers of this site, but I was captivated by his video autobiography:

Brandon describes the Christian bubble he used to live in

Money quotation: “Once Genesis fell, the rest of the Bible fell with it.”

Turns out you’ll always be closer to the truth if you place your trust in scientists instead of pastors.

Take note that Brandon speaks very highly of his Christian friends. But “the things they are required to believe” have no basis in evidence.

We are hard-wired to recognize faces in a sea of visual noise. It’s a smart survival tactic for a baby, but adults can be anywhere from amused to embarrassed by their own tendency to detect faces in random data.

The ones who are neither amused nor embarrassed — because they think that there’s divine meaning in the faces they see — are the hardcore people of faith who believe that God is sometimes moved to burn a picture of the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, or that the Almighty, from time to time, sees fit to depict Jesus on a drop cloth, in bird shit, and so on.

The overall phenomenon is known as pareidolia or apophenia, and I just learned there’s a very entertaining Facebook page devoted to it, called Faces in Stuff.

This one made me laugh out loud:

And speaking of God spelled backwards, here’s a classic of the genre (hello, Jesus):

Do you see faces in inanimate objects? If you have striking examples, please share them in the comments.

Thank you all for tuning in to our new podcast!

Our latest guest is Dave Silverman, President of American Atheists.

Silverman became AA’s president in 2010 after serving in the organization as both National Spokesperson and Vice President. He was the Executive Producer of 2012′s Reason Rally, which brought approximately 20,000 atheists to the Mall in Washington, D.C. He has made numerous appearances on Fox News Channel and CNN; one of those appearances resulted in a popular Internet meme.

We spoke with him about the effectiveness of his approach, whether a hardcore atheist can have a successful relationship with a religious partner, and why he no longer calls himself a secular Jew.

There were so many fascinating sound bites in this conversation…

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, get the MP3 directly, or just listen to the whole thing below.

And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

Last month, former Entertainment Weekly staffer Grady Smith wrote on his blog about the secret he hid from his colleagues for so long:

When I worked at Entertainment Weekly, I hid almost every aspect of my faith from my co-workers. I was okay letting it slip that I attended a church, but I didn’t like to go any deeper than that. I preferred to be thought of as a dorky square rather than an explicitly religious person because I was terrified I’d be rejected if I actually expressed my beliefs. Obviously, it’s no secret that most people in the media — especially entertainment media — are very liberal, and as a brand new college grad getting my first taste of the New York working world, I didn’t want to rock the boat by fully owning my identity as a Christian man. I assumed people would equate that with being an arrogant Southern conservative, so I kept my mouth shut.

Just so we’re clear, that’s not Christian persecution. That’s fictional persecution taking place only in Smith’s mind. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Smith would’ve been treated differently if people found out how devout he was.

A few days ago, he posted a follow-up in which he admitted another secret: He’s a gay Christian:

Now, I choose to not act on my gay desires because I think scripture makes it pretty clear that that’s not God’s ideal plan for people. I’m not angry or jaded about that fact, nor do I look at sacrificing my own sexuality to God as a tragedy. To me, it’s simple obedience — and it is not shame-based. I know that I was fearfully and wonderfully made by God. Heck, I was created in His very image! (And so were you!) But, like every other Christian that’s ever lived, I’m simply in the ongoing process of learning how to not give in to every natural desire that I feel — whether that has to do with sex or not.

Okay, so Smith has a lot of purely-self-inflicted wounds here. He worried (for no good reason) how people would react at work if he opened up about his faith, and now he’s depriving himself of happiness because he (wrongly) thinks (a) God (that doesn’t exist) is deeply concerned about his sexuality.

Obviously, it’s his decision to make. I don’t particularly care whether he chooses to be celibate or not. And I don’t feel bad for him since he brought these problems on himself. (His pastor, on the other hand, should feel awful. But probably doesn’t.)

Christian Walters at Towleroad summarizes the problem well:

The post in itself is a shame. Smith accurately points out a great many flaws in the church, such as the special level of judgment leveled at homosexuals and the philosophical bankruptcy of “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Unfortunately, rather than strongly stand by a statement saying the church and Bible are just flat-out wrong on homosexuality — just as they were with slavery — Smith accepts that his teenage addiction to pornography (colloquially known as “being a teenager”) and his attraction to men and the wrongness of same-sex desire are in fact sinful flaws within his imperfect human self, but the church should just be nicer about pointing it out.

Smith posted a video on YouTube in which he talks about his faith and sexuality; he says more videos will come.

I hope he eventually figures out that he doesn’t need to suppress his sexuality to please his god — and that even other Christians have said as much. I also want him to realize that people are less concerned about his faith and more concerned with how his beliefs take root in the real world. If he’s a gay man leading a fight against marriage equality, then we’ll have a loooooong conversation. We’ll care at that point. Until then, he just needs to work through these obstacles he’s created for himself.

It’s all just more evidence of the pernicious mental abuse religious dogma can have on certain people.

(Thanks to Alan for the link)

Writing for The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch tries to warn the Religious Right that they’re only hurting themselves by becoming even more intolerant:

The default stance for evangelical Christian leaders receiving advice they don’t want to hear

… The idea that serving as a vendor for, say, a gay commitment ceremony is tantamount to “endorsing” homosexuality, as the new religious-liberty advocates now assert, is a far-reaching proposition, one with few apparent outer boundaries in a densely interwoven mercantile society. It suggests a hair-trigger defensiveness about religious identity that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. As far as I know, during the divorce revolution it never occurred to, say, Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, “Your so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.” That would have seemed not so much principled as bizarre.

Religious people? Hypocrites? Never…

And that’s really their biggest problem. They pick and choose which tenets of their faith they’re going to go to battle over. Gluttony, greed, and divorce are all-but-ignored, while homosexuality and birth control are somehow harbingers of evil.

We all see the hypocrisy. Many Christian leaders just ignore it or rationalize it (poorly).

Rauch also plays devil’s advocate in his piece, saying those of us who support church/state separation should let some things slide:

As a matter of both political wisdom and constitutional doctrine, the faithful have every right to seek reasonable accommodations for religious conscience.

But he then provides the obvious rebuttal: The accommodations sought by the Religious Right are far from reasonable. Their goal is to legislate bigotry and have the government defend discrimination when it’s done in the name of Jesus.

Associating Christianity with a desire — no, a determination — to discriminate puts the faithful in open conflict with the value that young Americans hold most sacred. They might as well write off the next two or three or 10 generations, among whom nondiscrimination is the 11th commandment.

That’s why they might continue to win battles here and there, but they won’t win the war. Eventually, more people will come to their senses and see evangelical Christian leaders of today as the racists of yesterday: Holding irrational views justified by nothing but their own bigotry (or selective Bible verses).

Here’s the good news: The Religious Right, as usual, isn’t listening to anything Rauch says. They’re too busy swimming in their own sanctimony. They’re too busy making Christianity even more exclusive and intolerant to see the wisdom in Rauch’s warning.

If evangelical Christian leaders want to remain in power, they would be wise to listen to some of the younger members of their churches, many of whom feel the same way about the pick-and-choose battles as we do. But they won’t. And those younger Christians will have no choice but to leave their churches if they want to avoid the negative association.

We know there’s still a nasty stigma to being a young atheist, but it’s downright embarrassing to be an evangelical Christian these days. (Good job, everyone!) Many young Christians have eschewed that label in favor of having a “relationship with Jesus” — or just saying they believe in God but don’t call themselves Christians, hence the rise of the “Nones.”

Why the rest of us see that trend while conservative Christian leaders ignore it is something they’ll have to answer themselves after it’s too late.

In the meantime, we need to continue pointing out the hypocrisy, bigotry, and general asshole-ness of Christians who think discriminating against certain groups of people is the best way to advance their faith. They’ll have some short-term victories, but even those will start fading away eventually.

(via The Dish. Image via Shutterstock)

On last night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver spent the bulk of the episode talking about Uganda’s anti-gay laws, Scott Lively, and the Christian influence on anti-gay attitudes:

Obviously, not all Christians want to deny equal rights to gay people. But unless more of them speak out against their “brothers and sisters in Christ,” does it really matter?