The fight for population control: Cairo, Rome and beyond.

Edd Doerr, (arlinc.org), notes that Churchandstate.org.uk has just republished (on line)  his article:

 “The fight for population control: Cairo, Rome and beyond.”

Though originally published in The Humanist in 1994, it is at least as important now as it was then. 

Since it discusses climate change, human overpopulation, the Nixon/Ford National Security Study Memorandum 200 report, and other increasingly timely issues, I urge you to check it out.

Also currently on the  Churchandstate.org.uk web site is my new article:

 “Burundi, Overpopulation and Pope Francis,” also of current interest. Check that out too.

Churchandstate.org.uk, operating out of London, is one of the most important  sources of social media information. 

Don’t miss it.

An Hypothesis on the Secular Vote in 2016

by Gary Berg-Cross


Bill Scher, the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America's Future, (and the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com), often blogs about the problems that the Republican Party & Conservative Pols face. Recent ones include "Why Republicans Can’t Stop The Iran Deal (And Shouldn’t Want To) and "Republicans On Track To Lose The Latino Vote, And The Election, Again." But the most recent one (JULY 20, 2015) to catch my eye was, "Republicans Can’t Win Without Solving Their ‘Secular Problem. ’

The idea is simple, the highly religious and fundamentalist vote is maxed out.  The less religious and nones are growing and up, like the Latino vote, for being grabbed.

Scher points out some trends starting with an 2006 exit poll data that showed that:

'Democrats crushed Republican among voters who went to church “a few times a year” (60-38 percent) and “never” (67-30 percent), while the Republican margin among those who attended church “weekly” was slashed from 16 points in the previous midterm to seven."

The trend contnued in 2008, and Sher argues that the Republican secular problem was magnified:

'…In 2008, Sen. John McCain received 39 percent support of voters who seldom attend religious services, and 30 percent from those who never go. Both numbers represent a 6-point drop from what Bush received in 2004…

…Obama received 43 percent of the vote from voters who attend religious services weekly or more than weekly. For Kerry, those numbers were 41 percent and 35 percent…'

The idea here, which jives with the type of things we see among the current crop of GOP candidates  is that conservatives are aiming at keeping their Evangelical base.  The battle is for the more casual religious.

Scher reports that in 2012 an openly religious Obama did no better than Kerry among the  42 percent of voters who said they were regular worshipers. (The secular vote is also about 42%) Although a very religious Mitt did worse than Bush's 2004 results among the 57 percent who "never went to services or who went irregularly."

President Obama carried Religiously Unaffiliated voters 70% to Mitt Romney’s 26% according to a report from The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life exit poll data of the 2012 election. Although the President’s percentage was lower than in 2008, it still continued a trend of the nones supporting the Democratic candidates. The exit poll numbers were larger than a similar election poll in September when the President held a 65 to 27 lead on Romney. (from  President Obama Wins A Landslide From The Religiously Unaffiliated)

So 2016 shapes up in this view to having a new swing vote group he call the Secular. Candidates need to speak to them on secular topics. Renouncing “religious freedom” laws

that would permit discrimination is one he sites along with women's freedom to choose. Supporting equal rights for the LGBT community is obviously one that appeals to young seculars in particular based on their experience.  Even if they are not persuaded by a liberal candidate they find offense in how a socially conservative candidate  panders to the Conservative base on these and other Judeo-Christian inspired topics that do not respect the separation of Church and State. 

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What’s More Reactionary than Defense of Marriage? A State Bill for Defense of Religion.

By Gary Berg-Cross

The idea that States are Laboratories of democracy is a phrase popularized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to describe how a "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."   It’s a popular conservative thought with their dislike of Federal experiments such as run (successfully?) by FDR.

And there is something good to a federated approach to governmental experimentation at ALL levels.  Which means that “experiments” can go wrong at any of the levels. The Defense of Marriage Act, enacted in 1996 with reactive insecurity, still allows the federal Government to recognize only opposite-sex marriages. But here there have been correctives at the state level & the 8 federal courts have argued that Section 3 of DOMA marriage is only between a man and a woman) is unconstitutional. According to a poll by the Washington Post/ABC News, the % of Americans opposeing marriage equality is down to 36%. Still many Religion's official position is to oppose gay marriage (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life).

Unfortunately at the state level we are seeing what seems like bone headed, defiant experiments less a lab than a bazaar of oddities. Gun security is one of them that offers special silliness. Consider this from Ralph Shortey (R-Oklahoma City) who argued that everyone should carry a gun everywhere at all times. In response the state legislature moved to address the danger posed to unarmed civilians from... poultry. Here is Ralph Shortey (R-Oklahoma City) arguing in support of the measure during committee discussions. Shortey started by arguing that he shouldn't be required to pay fees and get a license to carry a weapon. How he justified that knocks me out: 

 

 "I was in oil and gas," Shortey said. "I was out on a lease at one time and I got attacked by a turkey. Wait until you get attacked by a turkey. You will know the fear that a turkey can invoke in a person. And so I beat it with a club. That was all I could do...I wish that I had a gun with me. And I started carrying a gun in my truck after that without a license because I didn't want to get attacked by a mountain lion. Turkeys are bad enough."     This Week in the Laboratories of Democracy By Charles P. Pierce

Actually this has nothing on small town Nelson Georgia whose City Council, perhaps frightened by the mere possibility of falling under proposed gun safety rules, defiantly & reactively passed a new law that says residents must own a gun. If you want to hear some of the mind numbing reasoning on this you can hare Nelson, Georgia Residents Debate their New Law Mandating Forced Ownership of Firearms.

Fundamentalist religion usually finds a way to come up with some dandy local experiments, often minus the democratic lab mentality and with reactionary fervor. As the Huffington Post reported Republican North Carolina state legislators recently proposed allowing an official state religion in a measure that would declare the state exempt from the Constitution and court rulings. It’s all the ACLU’s fault. These NC pols have a habit of praying to Jesus Christ before meetings so the ACLU sued them.   You know it’s that bleeding-heart liberal (Federal) law about separation of church and state. So 2  North Carolina Republican legislators, Carl Ford and Harry Warren  aided by nine others, introduced what they called a Defense of Religion resolution.

 

They arguing the state is sovereign & can make its own laws regarding the establishment of religion, and the federal government and courts have no authority to decide what is constitutional.   Yes birth control in legal, one may regulate guns and there is a separation of church and state….But to some you can nullify any of these.  So much for a federated government when your are exempted from the establishment clause under the First Amendment.

Happily the Republican NC House speaker, Thom Tillis, killed the bill and ended this chapter of Frankenstein monster experiments in another purple state. States are more laboratories for emotional, reactionary assaults on intellect than exercises in critical thinking. It's part of the defiance of people with some ignorant degree of surety and energized by parading their bazaar of the weird in front of their fans.

 

Image

 

Neslon gun law: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/02/17567999-georgia-town-passes-law-requiring-citizens-to-own-guns-and-ammo?lite

 

NC Religion:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/03/establishing-a-state-religion-a-proposed-bill-in-north-carolina-would-do-just-that/

 

 

Politics, Prayer, and Prejudice

By Mathew Goldstein

In a August 2, 2011 editorial titled Politics and Prayer, the New York Times editorial staff applauds a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decision outlawing the Forsyth County prayer policy because the prayers often featured sectarian references. The NY Times argues that the constitution forbids government from favoring "one religion", citing the court's observation that the invocations must not "repeatedly suggest that government has put its weight behind a particular faith." The NY Times then quoted the court criticizing the county's policy because it favored "the majoritarian faith in the community at the expense of religious minorities." This argument is seriously flawed because it ignores that "the majoritarian faith" encompasses more than "one religion" or "a particular faith" and that the Establishment Clause forbids "an establishment of religion", not "establishment of a religion" or "establishment of one religion" arbitrarily selected.

Forsyth County is majority Protestant, it is majority trinitarian, it is majority Christian, it is majority monotheist. There is no one majority religion or faith. Different religious belief based divisions of the same set of people results in multiple different religious belief majorities. The gratuitous addition of the qualifiers "a", "the", and "one" by the NY Times and the court to mis-characterize as singular the pluralism inherent in majoritarian religion is disingenuous and mischievous. Counting religions is capricious. Delineating a single religion for large groups of citizens is inherently subjective and arbitrary because there can be as many religions as there are people. One judge could count a single religion where another judge could count hundreds of religions.

There is no basis in law for judges to pick and choose for which religions the Establishment Clause applies and for which religions it does not apply. The concocted misconception that the constitution requires judges to identity "the" majority faith or "a" majority religion when evaluating the applicability of the Establishment Clause is in conflict with the underlying principles of impartiality and equity which gives the first amendment and, more generally, all laws, their warrant to claim to be just. It should be obvious that the Establishment Clause principle equally prohibits establishments of minority religion, regardless of how unlikely that result is in a democracy, multiple establishments of religion, however many such distinct establishments there are, and a single simultaneous establishment of multiple religions, regardless of how many different religions or faiths, however delineated, are simultaneously established in a given instance. The Establishment Clause applies equally to minority and majority religions, to any and all religions, to one and many religions.

Accordingly, if, as asserted by the court here, Forsyth County violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by starting its meetings with prayers “endorsing Christianity to the exclusion of other faiths” then it also violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by starting its meetings with prayers endorsing monotheism to the exclusion of polytheism and atheism. There is no non-prejudiced basis for declaring government favoritism for Christianity to be unconstitutional while declaring government favoritism for monotheism to be constitutional. That is a completely arbitrary distinction. Jesus as deity is Christian religion, singular God as deity is Abrahamic religion, one majority is larger than the other majority, but otherwise its the same violation of the same principle against government establishment of religion. Yet it is exactly this irrelevant distinction that many judges, courts, and the NY Times, repeatedly and inconsistently endorse as a foundation of Establishment Clause jurisprudence.

There is no such thing as inclusive or nonsectarian theistic prayer. Theism is exclusive to, and sectarian for, those who believe one or more gods should be worshiped, or be appealed to, with a prayer prior to starting work. If, as the NY Times asserts, "a government that favors one faith flouts the inclusive nature of American government, harming church and state" then a government that favors monotheism, or even theism more generally, is identically harming church and state by flouting the inclusive nature of American government. Excluding non-Christians and excluding non-theists is an identical harm to the identical principle. The NY Times, and the judges, by refusing to acknowledge this, are hypocritically declaring themselves to endorse a principle of inclusiveness while they simultaneously advocate against the identical inclusiveness principle. The only real difference is that one exclusion targets a different minority than the other exclusion. Prejudice or bigotry are the nouns that apply when one minority is not deemed equal before the law merely because that minority disagrees more completely or directly with the majority on a matter of opinion than the other dissenting minorities.

National Duh! of Prayer

by Edd Doerr

May 5, designated by Congress as this year's National Day of Prayer, has come and gone. Scarcely anyone paid attention. Humanists and freethinkers griped a bit, but that is hardly news. But there is something to be said on the subject again.

If most Americans claim a religious affiliation of some sort and believe in prayer, whatever diverse meanings that might have across the spectrum, why is it necesary for government to designate a special day for it? Aren't praying people capable of deciding for themselves when or if or how to pray? And since there are many activities that may have "religious" significance -- such in addition to prayer as alms giving, visiting the sick, helping widows and orphans, etc -- where does government come off designating a specific activity, prayer? Or does helping poor people fall under the heading of some sort of socialism?

Just as relevant as what "unbelievers" may say on the subject is what devout believers in prayer have to add to the discussion. My friend J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, representing a wide range of Baptist bodies (minus the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination, whose governing apparatus was taken over by ultraconservatives a generation ago), had this to say. "The problem with the National Day of Prayer is that it is an official act of government urging citizens to engage in a religious exercise." And, "The government should not be in the business of telling the Anerican people what, where and when to pray or even if they should pray."

BJC general counsel K. Hollyn Hollman, referring to the April 14 federal appeals court ruling that private citizens lack "standing" to challenge the practice, added that "most Americans are unaware of the occasion", but "it is certainly unwise".

The National Day was started in 1952 by Congress, and like a fishhook stuck in one's finger, it is easier to get in than get out.

The big problem, the real problem, is that far too many Americans have forgotten that the men (women being still shut out of the political process then) who designed our Constitution knew very well the evils associated with mixing religion and government, and so they incorporated the principle of separation of church and state into our founding charter. Politicians like John F. Kennedy understood this well, but far too many political hacks today are eager to force all taxpayers to contribute involuntarily to religious private schools (through vouchers or tuition tax credits), to impose theological notions about "personhood at conception" on all women (who sadly make up only 17% of Congress), to smuggle fundamantalist "creationism" into public schools.

What Ben Franklin wrote over two centuries ago is still applicable today: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when God does not care to support it, so that its professors [adherents] are obliged to call for the help of the civil power [government], it it a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."