Category: The Dish

Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is terrorizing Iran’s campuses, one of the key centers of resistance to his theocratic messianism.

It’s Topic A, and I’m conflicted. So what’s new? These things I am not conflicted about: I do not believe we should ever criminalize religious or other groups who seek merely to help people in need. I do not believe most illegal immigrants are parasitic on the United States: I think they help make it what it is. There has to be a way to accommodate legally the millions of people who work hard in America and merely want an opportunity to better their lives, which is why the president’s guest-worker program seems reasonable to me, as do the proposals from McCain and Kennedy. Nevertheless, it’s unhealthy for any country to have laws it does not enforce, and we obviously need more attention to the borders to the South and North. One of the core functions of any government is the securing of borders, and a conservative government that does not accomplish that is betraying basic conservative principles. In other words, there’s an obvious compromise waiting to be had here. It’s just that an election year may not be the most opportune time to get one.

A reader writes:

I write this with a certain weariness, but nevertheless it is important.  I can’t help but read your blog because as an articulate gay, catholic conservative you are inevitably conflicted and therefore rarely have uninteresting things to say!

In more hubristic moments I sometimes think of myself as something of a mirror image of you: I am an entirely monogamous heterosexual man (I have only ever had sex with one person in my life – my wife of 14 years).  We have two thriving children. Put simply, my family is the almost perfectly nauseating embodiment of what the Dobsons of this world dream about, but with one caveat: none of us have the slightest interest in the idea of God in any of his incarnations.

I don’t like the word "athiest" because it implies the absence of a God and this is not the way we live our lives. We live joyful, peaceful, happy, fullfilling lives – we take nothing for granted, but we have never experienced spiritual hunger or thirst, or whatever metaphor you want to use and yes, we have been through very difficult times, but the idea of a God has always been either meaningless or counter productive in our struggles through life.

I have the greatest respect for your sexuality, your religion, and your conservatism and would never presume for a second that somehow my sexual disposition and the choices I have made in my life represent anything more my sexual disposition or the choices I have made.  This is America, and I am happy to be evangelized by any one who makes the effort, but the sooner the haters – from Neuhaus (thanks for the link to the Damon Linker piece in the New Republic) to Dobbs – who want to legislate my sexual disposition, my morality, my family values, my absence of religion, and my ethical choices – get lives for themselves and leave the good people of this country alone, the happier we will all be."

Jon Rowe has a beaut from John Adams:

"Government has no Right to hurt a hair on the head of an Atheist for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices."

People have this strange idea that Americans are much more secular today than they once were. In fact, the kind of religious fundamentalism we see today, while always part of the American fabric, has rarely been as dominant. The faith of the founders’ was a drier, more Enlightened type; and it’s fair to wonder whether some of them were believers at all in the modern sense of the term. That’s why a defense of secularism is by no means un-American. It is the essence of what made the United States such a radical experiment in its time: the separation of government from God. Just don’t tell that to the theocons.

The newly-released Canadian activist, James Loney, was captured in Iraq by a nasty terror group who killed one of his colleagues. It now turns out he’s gay – but kept it secret while in captivity. His partner was forced to stay silent – so as not to provoke the Islamists from having a very good reason to murder him. It’s great news he is now free; and his statement on his escape was an appropriate one:

"I’m going to disappear for a little while into a different kind of abyss ‚Äì an abyss of love. I need some time to get reacquainted with my partner Dan."

It’s good to see a Christian openly embrace the man he loves.

Here’s a site where you can view the advertisements for the United Church of Christ. The funniest is the ejector seat one, in my view. And this one is oddly moving. I’m just glad to see that the non-fundamentalist part of Christianity, the part that used to dominate, is not going to give up its traditions of inclusion and acceptance easily. They seem more compatible with the Gospels than the prerogatives of exclusion and judgment.

"Some impose upon the world a belief they do not really hold; others, more in number, make themselves believe what they believe, not being able to penetrate into what it is to believe," – Michel de Montaigne, "The Apology of Raymond Sebond."

Card, as I’ve written, was obviously worn out. But Bolten is hardly fresh as a daisy either. He has been there from the beginning; he represents continuity more than change; and it appears that Card volunteered his resignation. Of course this could be a convenient fib; but for public consumption, Bush has not fired Card. Bottom line: this is better than nothing, but also merely the minimum necessary. Maybe there’s more to come. And maybe next time, it will be someone outside the cocoon.

A reader writes:

On the issue of atheist parents losing custody of their children, Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave. The practice of taking children from atheist parents and "Free Thinkers" was attacked by Jefferson in his 1781 essay "Religion in Virginia." In this essay, he decried the fact that relative to "a father’s right to custody of his own children … they may be severed from him, and put by the authority of a court into more orthodox hands."  He denounced this practice as evidence of "that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain." He concluded:

"…our rulers can have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God. [emphasis added] It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg….Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man…Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Given a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.  They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only."

It seems to me that this principle – which seemed self-evident to most of our Founding Fathers and upon which, among others, our Republic was founded – is the one principle that if it were grasped by the majority of Americans would render obsolete most of the present social and political discord."

I couldn’t agree more. Our core political and philosophical predicament in this country is religious fundamentalism. Until we have tackled it, as Jefferson and the founders did, our polarization will deepen.

Eugene Volokh has just written a law article (PDF file here) on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country – and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases. Volokh recalls how Percy Byshe Shelley was the first father to be denied custody because of his atheism – but his dilemma doesn’t belong to a different time and place:

"That time and place, it turns out, is 2005 Michigan, where a modern Shelley might be denied custody based partly on his ‘not regularly attend[ing] church and present[ing] no evidence demonstrating any willingness or capacity to attend to religion with [his children],’ or having a ‘lack of religious observation.’  It’s 1992 South Dakota, where Shelley might have been given custody but only on condition that he ‘will agree to present a plan to the Court of how [he] is going to commence providing some sort of spiritual opportunity for the [children] to learn about God while in [his] custody.’ It’s 2005 Arkansas, 2002 Georgia, 2005 Louisiana, 2004 Minnesota, 2005 Mississippi, 1992 New York, 2005 North Carolina, 1996 Pennsylvania, 2004 South Carolina, 1997 Tennessee, 2000 Texas, and, going back to the 1970s and 1980s, Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska.  In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a mother to take her child to church each week, reasoning that ‘it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training’; in 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the same, partly on the grounds that weekly church attendance, rather than just the once-every-two-weeks attendance that the child would have had if he went only with the other parent, provides superior ‘moral instruction.’"

Of course, this is an outrageous attack on religious liberty. Imagine if Christian parents were denied custody because of their faith. O’Reilly would have weeks of programming. But atheists? Naah. When Christianists declare that they are fighting for religious freedom, bring this issue up. It will determine whether they are in good faith, so to speak, or not.