There They Go Again: Specialty License Plates

by Gary Berg-Cross

There’s a license-plate and First Amendment violation dispute underway in North Carolina. In the past states required drunk driving offenders to use special “whiskey plates” to visually signal their offense. This NC dispute has more of a right to life/religio-ethics slant. It follows on the 2nd Circuit ruling in favor of a Vermont resident who wanted to put a Biblical reference on a license plate. In the Tar Heel State the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of 4 "pro-choice automobile owners" to void a new law, easily passed both Republican-controlled state legislative chambers, establishing a "Choose Life" license plate. The NC General Assembly approved the "Choose Life" plate this year, along with 79 other specialty plates. The Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship, an association of nonprofit pregnancy counseling centers, will get $15 from each plate sold.

Note in Virginia, you can buy "Trust Women/Respect Choice" license plates but the funds are denied to pro-choice, women-trusting groups. You don't even have the plate option in NC.

The ACLU contends that the license plate constitutes state-sponsored discrimination in part because the North Carolina legislators have denied requests for plates that would carry such messages (not one of the 79 plates) as “Respect Choice.” Katherine Lewis Parker, the state's ACLU legal director notes:

"The state is opening up a forum to one side of the argument. When they do that, they are constitutionally obligated to open to the other side."

In this case the other side would be the state offering a tag for abortion rights supporters, such as a "Respect Choice" or 'Trust Women'. So says Sue Holliday, a certified nurse midwife who is one of the plaintiffs in the case. Holliday put her case this way, in a statement posted by the ACLU:

“If anti-choice drivers are permitted to express their views on their license plates, people like me should be able to express our view that women deserve full reproductive freedom,”

If history is a guide there is a good chance that the decision will be reversed. The AP noted in covering this story that in:

“2004, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a South Carolina judge's ruling that the "Choose Life" plates approved by lawmakers in that state were unconstitutional because they provided one group a forum to express its beliefs without giving the opposing view a similar forum. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and the state was forced to pay Planned Parenthood's $157,810 legal bill.”

Some of the new tide of conservative legislators thinks otherwise. NC Republican state legislator Mitch Gillespie, who sponsored the bill establishing the “Choose Life” plate, told the local NC News & Observer paper that the suit was an attempt by “an evil liberal organization to try to appease its liberal base.” That’s the ACLU in right-wing speak. Gillespie added that he didn’t think the suit will succeed since he knew that conservative legal groups were lining up to help defend the law. Just another data point on the uncompromising political-religious times we live in.

Enlighten the Vote PAC

By Mathew Goldstein

Secularists have several civil rights groups with lawyers such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists. Secularists have a lobbying group, the Secular Coalition for America. Yet there is still only one elected official in the Congress who self-identifies as a non-theist. We need something more, but this something more that we need is not an atheist political party. We need a well funded PAC similar to EMILY's List.

There is such a PAC, it is called Enlighten the Vote, but unfortunately it appears that is not well funded. If the Enlighten the Vote PAC were better funded, secularists could pursue a three-pronged strategy to elect atheists: recruiting and funding viable atheist candidates; helping them build and run effective campaign organizations; and mobilizing secular voters to help elect progressive candidates across the nation. We could work within the context of existing progressive political parties, including the Democratic party, for the targeted and limited goal of secularist government, much like the Secular Coalition for America already does, but without the 501(c)4 restrictions on partisan political activities.

As a group, atheists don't have a common, broad, governing agenda needed for a political party. For example, I disagree with the National Atheist Party's support for import tariffs. My understanding is that most economists disfavor import tariffs because the available empirical evidence (and also economic theory) is that by restricting trade such tariffs result in a net loss in most contexts. I don't think atheists should be taking a position on import tariffs under the banner of atheism because economic policy is too far removed from the issues related to the existence of gods.

More generally, I think everyone should, insofar as it is currently possible, strive to anchor their policy positions in the available empirical evidence. One of the biggest problems I have with the Republican party is that their supporters tend to favor policies that directly contradict lots of available, strong evidence on issues such as global warming, evolution and sex and history education, and the like. Republicans like to say that the Obama Administration's stimulus program "failed" despite the fact that the empirical evidence, when evaluated by the experts, appears to better fit the conclusion that the stimulus program reduced the strength of the recession. It is difficult to trust any political party or movement that proudly exhibits a selective unwillingness to follow or respect or understand the overall weight of the evidence. Ideology overtaking reason isn't a recipe for good governing or national achievement and success.

What many secularists as a group have in common is an ethical civil rights agenda for secular government that opposes government favoring religious ideologies over more generally applicable principles and opposes government privileging religious institutions over non-religious institutions. Accordingly, the Enlighten the Vote PAC that seeks to elect self-identified atheists who favor ethical secular governing with equality before the law for all, and that could supplement the work of the non-partisan Congressional lobbying group Secular Coalition for America, appears to me to be worthy of our support (despite their odd practice of capitalizing the word atheist as if it were a proper noun).

The specifics of the agenda varies over time. Examples of current policy issues which the Secular Coalition for America lobbies Congress include discrimination against atheists in the military, laws allowing pharmacists to deny emergency contraception access, exemptions for so-called faith-healing from medical neglect liability, safety exemptions for religious child care centers, theological restrictions imposed on civil marriage, government support of organizations that deny membership to non-theists such as Boy Scouts, broad exemptions for religious groups from local zoning restrictions (RLUIPA), religious control over sex education, "Under God" in the Pledge, government funding of religious schools, taxpayer subsidized housing for clergy, and state school curricula that mislead children for religious reasons.

There are naysayers who advocate for fear on behalf of silence. They say that the religious right is big, and strong, and mean. The religious right wants us to challenge them so that they can target us for defeat. Therefore, anyone who publicly takes any unpopular position in opposition to the religious right is playing into the religious right's hands by provoking them. The best strategy is to be intimidated into silence.

It is logical, and therefore probably true, that some people want their political opponents to be afraid of them with the goal of intimidating their opponents into silence. Insofar as we appease a strategy of promoting intolerance and bigotry against atheists by agreeing to be intimidated into silence by our political opponents we are arguably guilty of encouraging such a strategy on their part. But this is not primarily about what our opponents want or about their tactics, this is not primarily about what is currently popular and unpopular, this is first and foremost about the merit of alternative government policies and trying to realize the better policies on the basis of merit. We identify and speak out on behalf of some policies and against other policies because those policies are better or worse than the alternatives, not because those policies are currently more popular or unpopular. We are all better off if our conversations on policies are open and held on the basis of the policy merit, not on the basis of insisting on a-priori self-censorship that is rationalized by someone's measure of relative size of, and reasons to fear, the opposition. Silence because of fear of the opposition isn't a policy argument with any substance, its a recipe for rewarding the promotion of intolerance as a political tactic. My advice to everyone is to avoid being self-deceived by anyone claiming it is a sophisticated and wise strategy to refuse to advocate for good policies merely because those policies currently face a misdirected, strong opposition.

I anticipate that some people may object to the focus on electing atheists. Why not focus on electing secularists more generally? Why not use the more inclusive term "non-theist"? We, all of us secularists, not just atheists, need to challenge the anti-atheist prejudice directly and head on because it is in the self-interest of secularism to defeat the fear of atheism. The fear of atheism and prejudice against atheists is one of the major obstacles to the popularity of secularism more generally. We can't defeat that association by trying to divorce secularism from atheism even though they are not the same because secularism necessarily tolerates atheism and therefore, for that reason alone, anti-atheist bigots will not accept secularism. EMILY's list is more effective, not less effective, by focusing on electing women rather than focusing on electing people of any gender who support abortion, because they recognize that opposition to legal abortions and under-representation of women as policymakers in government are mutually re-enforcing problems.

The Tax Scam from Heaven

By Luis Granados

Do you pay too much in taxes? Sure you do. Here’s a terrific way you can save a bundle, that’s perfectly legal.

First, figure out how much you pay in total expenses for housing – rent, mortgage, etc. Say it’s $20,000 a year, to pick a round number. Then, go to your employer and say “Instead of giving me $20,000 in something you call ‘salary,’ give me the same $20,000 in something you call a ‘housing allowance.’ That way, I won’t have to pay any taxes on that $20,000, which will save me many thousands of dollars a year!”

I know what you’re thinking: that’s too easy. The government would never let you get away with a scam like that, because it would say that being paid $20,000 of “housing allowance” is exactly the same as being paid $20,000 of “salary” – which it is. But the law is right there, in Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code. There’s only one catch: you have to be a “minister of the gospel”:

Internal Revenue Code Section 107. Rental value of parsonages In the case of a minister of the gospel, gross income does not include – (1) the rental value of a home furnished to him as part of his compensation; or (2) the rental allowance paid to him as part of his compensation, to the extent used by him to rent or provide a home.

Here’s my first question: Why can’t rabbis get this? Or imams? Or Buddhist monks? Last time I checked, none of these guys had anything to do with the “gospel,” which is universally defined as the first four books of the New Testament. I guess this is what the fundamentalists are talking about when say America is a “Christian nation.”

. Here’s my next question: Once I get ordained, can I get this boondoggle for more than one home? That’s an important issue, because these days with government promoting religion at every turn lots of God experts are making lots of money, and have homes all over the place. Recently the Tax Court came down with a definitive ruling: the sky’s the limit, and “ministers of the gospel” can get tax-free housing allowances for as many mansions as they can con their flocks into paying for. After all, reasoned the learned judges, when the tax code talks about exemptions for a “child” it allows the same exemption for multiple children; so when it allows an exemption for a “home,” it must mean multiple “homes.” The millions of Americans whose one and only home was lost through foreclosure in the past few years are free to go to church and be comforted by a God expert who has lots of homes, all provided tax-free.

The case is fascinating because of the taxpayer who was its subject. Phil Driscoll is a gifted trumpeter, who played with artists like Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, and Blood, Sweat & Tears in the 1970s and won a Grammy in 1984. Government taxes the hell out of entertainers, though, as the Beatles so eloquently described. [Do yourself a favor and clink on the link.] So Driscoll gravitated toward God, using his “Mighty Horn Ministries” not only to rake in bucks from believers but to do it in a way that supported a lavish lifestyle, all tax free. When he wasn’t flying his church airplane, he was driving his church Porsche, to and from his church homes at lake resorts. Unfortunately, he got a little carried away with the idea of following God’s law rather than man’s, and wound up getting convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion in 2006, and sentenced to a year in federal prison. (I’m not certain whether he tried to exclude the fair rental value of his cell from his income tax for that year.) When he got out, he still had all those homes, and our divinely inspired Tax Court now says he doesn’t have to pay tax on the “allowance” he receives for any of them.

Here’s my next question: Isn’t there a lot more than rental value involved in maintaining a home? “Minister of the gospel” Rick Warren, President Obama’s favorite pastor, knows there are lots of other costs, too. So a few years back he started excluding from his tax return items like insurance, repairs, utilities, new furniture, even his gardeners – gotta have gardeners, right? Not because he needed the money, mind you, but on behalf of all those other poorer pastors out there who couldn’t keep their heads above water if they had to pay taxes on the value of their own church-provided gardeners.

Rev. Warren won his case in Tax Court, like trumpeter Driscoll just did. Then the IRS appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where a funny thing happened. IRS had no intention of questioning the constitutionality of Section 107, because that would step on way too many toes, and bring down the wrath of organized religion on the administration (at that time, headed by Bill Clinton). But the bad sports at the Ninth Circuit raised the constitutionality question on their own, as they have the power to do, and ordered both parties to write briefs on the issue. What’s more, since they (correctly) expected both parties to write briefs saying there was nothing at all wrong with Section 107, they appointed their own independent expert, a Southern Cal law professor, to prepare his own report on the issue. His conclusion: of course it’s unconstitutional! Slam dunk.

“Aaaack!” This was the official response of the IRS, by this point under control of the Bush administration. It was too late to withdraw the appeal, and they couldn’t stand by and let all those God experts start paying taxes the same way you and I do. So they went to Congress, where there is always tremendous bipartisan support for every penny doled out to politically influential clergy. With lightning speed, a law was enacted in 2002 letting Rev. Warren keep every penny of his prior tax-exempt income while clarifying that in the future only the “fair rental value” of the home (now “homes”) is tax-free. This took the case out of the hands of the court, and everyone (other than the rest of America’s taxpayers) breathed a sigh of relief.

The general counsel of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention tells us that for his 46,000 churches, “the housing allowance is critically important for making ends meet – it is not a luxury.” Besides, God experts provide an important service to their communities, so they deserve preferential treatment. That is a terrific argument. Let’s see: who else provides important services to their communities? Doctors? Yep. Nurses? Check. Teachers? Firefighters? Farmers? My personal vote would be for preferential tax treatment for plumbers, who solve more critical real-world problems every day than any black-robed charlatans ever have.

Rev. Warren still isn’t satisfied, though. Just a month ago he was in high dudgeon again, whining that “HALF of America pays NO taxes. Zero. So they’re happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay taxes.” I’m guessing he counts himself among the half that does pay taxes. I’m also guessing that his accuracy on the facts of what is happening in America today is about the same as his accuracy on the facts of what happened in Palestine 2000 years ago. Half of Americans don’t pay Social Security tax, Medicare tax, telephone tax, or tax on their beer? How can I get into that half?

Differences of Opinion Among the Freethinking Community

by Gary Berg-Cross

We all get into disagreements and differences of opinion. Its safe to say that no one is right about everything. We don’t have the same experiences or exactly the same tastes and values. People’s knowledge and opinions are like composite structures whose ingredients have been mixed over time from purer substances. Understanding in many areas, including the social world, is limited by the complex nature of subject matters, the boundaries of human rationality, limited time for analysis etc. As a result, to paraphrase Thoreau, it’s important to know what really know and tread more lightly in areas we are less experience with and expert in. Even in the freethinking, secular humanist-atheists may stumble or be on the wrong side of issue. And this can produce some interesting discussions, but also disagreements of opinion that develop into real arguments.

I was thinking about this in the last few weeks perhaps sparked by Penn upcoming talk in the area. He’s one of the atheists stars with his “God, No!,” book, but also of libertarian fame. You can see him talking about is libertarian views on the Glenn Beck show and equating them to the Founder’s philosophy. He’s clearly intelligent and freethinking on a variety of subjects a great deal which he speaks about opening in a humorous way often ending with "I could be wrong.” But he expresses some ideas that I take issue with such as:

“..the fact that the government can't rally everybody to work together. That's to be celebrated. The government being is hamstring and as closed off and as clumsy as possible is exactly what we want. The last thing we want is a government that can get things done. A government that can get things done all they will get done is taking away freedoms. Its been shown over and over again. We want a clunky, sloppy, slow-moving, small, insignificant, weak government there all the time. And that's a government we can love and protect.”

I might have honest disagrees with other notables in the freethinking community. I might agree with Bill Maher most of the time, such as “"The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them," but be uncomfortable with other serious points wrapped up in a mix of provocative humor and scathing criticism that leave little room for nuance.

With freethinkers like Dennett, Jacoby, Doerr and Grayling, it might take a micro analysis to find serious disagreements on important topics. Then there are the core of New Atheists, whose prominent figures include scientist Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and author Christopher Hitchens. There is some disagrement in the secular humantist-atheist community on the New Atheists who claim that believers in 'the god hypothesis' should not be tolerated, but should be actively countered and the 'shoddy' arguments supporting their beliefs should be exposed. While we might disagree on strategic and tactical stances many of us are happy to have some vigorous countering, criticism, and exposure of religious to Belief to rational argument and evidence. As Hos notes in a prior posting religions often escape any criticisms. It's not a policy we should apply to ourselves, but be thoughtful about it.

Whatever you think of the strategy the 3 central stars, the new atheist giants have fallen afoul of non-religious issues where they may be less certain of the facts and complexities. Christopher Hitchens, a literary powerhouse with a clear prose and scathing style, applied the same rather famously as an aggressive critic of God and his followers. This comes after bringing Mother Teresa to earth in an earlier scree that exposed Mother Teresa's ties to various despots and thieves, and questioned the wisdom of handing out the Nobel Peace Prize to a woman whose famous clinic for the poor had repeatedly been found unsanitary and badly run, refusing, for example, to give painkillers to the dying—maybe because she really did believe, as she once said, that "[t]he suffering of the poor is something very beautiful."

Clearly a freethinker, but he seemingly embraced (believed in?) neoconservative ideology after Sept. 11. In effect he provided a freethinking champion for George W. Bush Iraq war. Always one to paint a vivid image he said that the mere thought of preemptive action gave him an erection. As usual Hitchens comes across as supremely confident of his position. In his new book he says he knows more about the Middle East than simple liberal bumpkins who "weren't there", meaning:

• he has traveled in and reported extensively on the Middle East,
• he has access to knowledge denied most of the rest of the world;
  
• he knows for sure that those Islamofascists are Evil (shades or religious categories) and need to be pummeled and taught a lesson.

The fact that there were significant others with equally immediate and/or specialized knowledge, Brent Scowcroft comes to mind plus an assortment of generals and diplomats who were also "there," who had adequate security clearances and still opposed the war, goes unvoiced by Hitch. Taken as a whole liberals like Chris Hedges are uncomfortable with a slippery slope for secularists, who ally themselves with unethical people seeking pretexts to bombing "religious" countries. I'm uncomfortable with Hitchen's admiration of Paul Wolfowitz who in one interview he described as a bleeding heart and described neo-conservatism as a:

“distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy.”

Hedges also crosses some lines with amateur evolutionary psychology and proactive hypotheses about men and women. In a Vanity Fair bit called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he argued that men are funnier than women for Darwinian reasons: hapless males need the gift of humor to persuade women to mate with them. Reproduced in his new book (Arguable Essays) we hear that women are not tough enough to master comedy. Because such engineered wit requires a strong stomach and a stoic acceptance of the futility of life. “Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.”

One of my favorite thinkers Richard Dawkins recently got on an uneasy side of the discussion about sexual harassment. During the informal after-hours socializing time at an atheist conference Feminist Rebecca Watson was talking with colleagues about her presentation and other issues. At 4 AM, she said she was tired & left the bar heading back to her room to sleep. But in the elevator ride to her floor, she was with a male only identified now as the “Elevator Guy.”

Rebeca was aghast at being asked by the “Elevator Guy to continue discussion in his room. She expressed her later ideas to the atheist community this way:

"Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that. You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and—don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner."

Richard Dawkins got himself into hot water by commenting that she was overreacting by comparing her situation with more serious ones. Using the dangerous form of a sarcastic letter to a Muslim woman, he suggested that Watson's experience in the elevator was trivial compared to the abuses that Muslim women deal with daily:

"Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and...yawn...don't tell
me again,.."

The exchange escalated with postings on PZ Myers Pharyngula website where he noted that, "Richard did make the valid point that there are much more serious abuses of women's rights around the world, and the Islam is a particularly horrendous offender."

But he went on to argue that:

"the existence of greater crimes does not excuse lesser crimes, and no one has even tried to equate this incident to any of the horrors above. What these situations demand is an appropriate level of response: a man who beats a woman to death has clearly committed an immensely greater crime than a man who harasses a woman in an elevator; let us fit the punishment to the crime."

A final, arguable mis-step is Sam Harris who I agree with on a vast swath of topics. I'm more than a little uncomfortable with his critical words on Islam appearing in his “The End of Faith,” (pages 128-129). Normally a cool, clear thinker Harris seems here to be considering if seriously not advocated a future pre-emptive nuclear strike against a nation based on its religious views. Part of what Harris said to give this impression is:


"It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."
from sam_harris_responds_to_chris_hedges_fundamentalism_kills_column_20110726/

Liberal thinker Chris Hedges was astonished by Sam Harris hubris to advocate taking millions of innocent lives - since nuclear weapons don’t only kill the bad people). Hedges is very familiar with terrorist and totalitarian regimes, having spent two decades covering Central America, the Balkans, the Middle East, & Africa and is concerned with our reaction to it and vulnerability to intolerance on all sides. There has been a great running debate by Hedges and Harris on this which your can read on Truthdig. It's too rich a discussion to do justice here but the core point is that Harris' position seems to some a dangerous idea related to beliefs on the part of Harris. One must consider carefully claims of whether or not whole populations are dangerous. Who has the right to determine which people get to live and which to die? Like Hitchens and the idea of pre-emptive attack, it is not something that can mitigate by using apologetic language and saying you were just weighing the options.



It's always a humbling experience to realize that 3 pioneering thinkers and personal heroes may get into tricky situations. In some cases the disagreement might be modest on topics of limited importance. But in other cases it may be important. Fallibility remains a core part of the human experience. Something that freethinkers know and appreciate more than most and we can be proud of being able to discuss the phenomena is constructive ways.

Elephant in the room called out, for once

By Hos

Hector Avalos is one of my heros. He is a professor at the University of Iowa and an atheist. Concerning biblical matters, he is the absolute go-to authority.

In a recent column marking the 9/11 anniversary he thoroughly deals with the controversy regarding involvement of religion in violence.

I would like to add a point of my own. The way religious violence is covered in the media betrays a deep deference, which religion did not earn and does not deserve. You have heard of "religious charities, hospitals, benevolence". But "religious division/strife/bloodshed etc."? No way. The adjective used is always "sectarian". Nothing negative can ever be conceivably associated with religion.

Mississippi Misogyny

by Edd Doerr

On 9/8/11 the Mississippi Supreme Court declined by a 7-2 vote to halt a November referendum on a proposed amendment to the state constitution (Measure 26) that would grant "personhood" status to fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses. If passed, and not shot down by the federal or state courts, Measure 26 would outlaw all abortions in the state and probably some forms of contraception.

This story was reported in the ultraright Washington Times, but ignored by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

This measure is intended to deny all women reproductive freedom of conscience and to impose a particular theological doctrine on everyone in the state.

When Roe v Wade acknowledged (not created) the constitutional right of women to choose to terminate problem pregnancies, the opposition came almost entirely from the Catholic hierarchy. Only later, when Protestant fundamentalists saw that Roe liberated women from patriarchalism, did they jump on the anti-choice bandwagon.

All this is rather curious, as the Bible does not actually condemn abortion or even hold that personhood might begin before actual birth. Indeed, the Hebrew ("Old Testament") word for person is "nefesh", meaning something that breathes. Christians generally subscribe to the view that humans are "created in the image of God". Whatever this means, it has nothing to do with flesh and blood and DNA, but, rather, with the consciousness and will, both of which are not possible in a fetus until a level of brain development reached some time after 28-32 weeks of gestation.

This view was put before the US Supreme Court in an amicus curiae brief that I engineered in the case of Webster v Reproductive Health Services. The brief was signed by 12 Nobel laureate biologists and 155 other distinguished scientists. (There would have been a very great many more, but the Supreme Court calendar required a measure of haste. Francis Crick was one of the laureates. In the rush to get the scientists on board I rang up Crick's office in California. He was on holiday but had returned to his office for something and was passing his secretary's desk when my call went through. He answered -- we had met earlier while I was AHA VP -- and the rest is history.)

The Webster brief may be found in John Swomley's book Compulsory Pregnancy: The War Against American Women, published by Americans for Religious Liberty and available from ARL, Box 6656, Silver Spring, MD 20916 for $10.

With the all out attack by Republicans, Tea Partyers and the religious right in full swing this year, the Mississippi referendum is important. If Mississippians have any sense, they will send this monstrous attack on freedom down the drain.

By the way, it is important to note that the fight over reproductive choice is not between the religious and the nonreligious. Among the strong defenders of reproductive choice are the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (on whose governing body I served for 30 years) and Catholics for Choice, publishers of the superb quarterly journal Conscience.

Ushahidi & Small Progress on Humanitarian Efforts

By Gary Berg-Cross

It’s peak hurricane season again and we’ve already experienced a range of natural disasters from earthquake to tropical floods. Around the anniversary of Katrina and 9/11 it is natural to think of recent mega-disasters including the Asian tsunami, the Haitian and the Japanese earthquakes along with various mega droughts in African compounded by social unrest. But sometimes it brings out the best humanitarian instincts in people and leads to real improvement in how we deal with problems.

I ran across one of these humanitarian projects recently. It grew from simple blogging to a crowd sourcing system to help disaster victims. The effort was started in 2007 by Ory Okolloh, a prominent native Kenyan lawyer who blogged about post 2005 election violence in Kenya. Early in January 2007, UN agencies and other humanitarian bodies were getting general reports that tens of thousands of people had been displaced and dozens killed across the country (sort of like the reports coming out of Syria now). But in this part of the world details on the extent, location, and chronology of the violence are hard to establish. As a result humanitarian agencies had difficulties planning effective response. But Kenya turns out to have a tech savvy cadre of people and Ory’s blogs triggered responses to her reports and the possibility of war in Kenya. This was a virtual crowd of friends but also strangers, of technology experts and neophytes. They all volunteered their services to create and support developing a mashup – a Web 2.0 applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated experience. The mashup/system was called Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili. A Ushahidi mashup site was created in 2 days. It could gather incident reports from people who observed violence (e.g. Riots, Deaths, Property Damage, Government Forces, Civilians, Looting, Rape and displaced people) and create maps that documented cases of violence & political repression.

Back in 2008 Ushahidi allowed Kenyans and relief organizations to keep current on information needed for informed decisions. Ushahidi illustrates the use of crowd sourcing, which is the idea of using open calls to an undefined group of people to complete a (usually large-scale) task that is difficult for a person or small group to handle. Wikipedia content, for example, is crowd sourced. Crowd sourcing has now been widely and successfully applied based on the assumption that an open call can draw a crowd that is fitted for the task. The internet and mobile phones facilitates communication and creates a virtual source of information. In the Ushahidi application citizens volunteered geographic-based information on violent incidents in order to aid workers in emergency response situations. It’s success relies upon:

1. a self-established user community in which the citizens are not only willing to volunteer information, which may be as simple as looking out of the window to report what you see and also
2. to actively search and respond to calls for updates within their ability.

Some of the recent disaster scene video we see on Youtube reflects this type of effort.

Since 2008 Ushahidi has grown into a large project impacting a number of communities around the world. The open-source program now provides a way for volunteers to collect information from a range of sources including text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, & pictures. These can then be placed on an integrated in near real time.

An uplifting story is how Ushahidi was used during the Haitian earthquake. Two years after it started in Kenya, Haiti was devastated on January 12 by a colossal earthquake. 1.5 million people were left homeless. In response special Haiti Ushahidi application was set up just two hours after the earthquake by Tufts University volunteers. Following that a short mission code (4636) was created for incoming text messages reports. Word on this code was passed on via local & national radio stations. The code allowed Haiti based observers to text information about what they were seeing or experiencing. For messages that were immediately actionable, e.g.: "there are 5 people trapped in a building located near the intersection of Rouge & Deltier," then a Haiti Ushahidi volunteer would map the GPS coordinates and provide the information to rescue teams on the ground.

The work in Haiti was amazing but Ushahidi has also been deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo to monitor unrest, by Al Jazeera to track and provide transparency into Israeli-Palestian violence in Gaza, and to help monitor the 2009 Indian Elections. It has even been used to help gather reports globally about recent Swine Flu outbreaks.

And such grassroots, shoestring efforts have inspired others. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) Crisis Mapping and Early Warning program has built on such efforts and has set out to develop an evidence base to evaluate information technologies role to enable humanitarian efforts. They have:

“ convened the humanitarian and technical communities, to facilitate dialogue among humanitarian actors, and to provide new sources of data to improve understanding of conflict dynamics.”

Ushahidi is one of those global, grass-root humanitarian advances that modern technology and an innovative spirit afford. It’s a small piece of evidence that humanitarian instincts and the search for a more peaceful world are not Utopian. It’s a small, concrete example of people helping people in trouble spots across the world. But it also contributes to the idea of a viable global citizenship through the best kind of globalization that transcends the barriers of place, race, religion, gender, sexuality, politics, and language.

“Ushahidi is testimony to a universal generosity of spirit that will ultimately triumph over preconceived structures and static ideologies.”

Enlightenment Deferred

By Luis Granados

When is the last time you used the word octocentenary in a sentence? You can go a long time without using a word like that, because there really wasn’t much happening 800 years ago that was all that interesting. September, 1211 is an exception though, because that month saw the election of a new King of the Germans, later to become Holy Roman Emperor, who nearly succeeded in launching the Enlightenment 500 years ahead of time.

Frederick II was only 17 when he was elected King of the Germans, but he had already shown an independent streak by dismissing Papal officers from his court, causing an angry Pope to write that “We are amazed at the conduct of your advisers. Do not usurp our office in things spiritual: be content with the temporal power you hold from us.” More serious, though, was his decade-long procrastination in launching a new Crusade to reconquer Palestine from the Muslims. Under threat of excommunication, he finally set sail in 1227, only to return three days later claiming illness. A furious Pope promptly excommunicated him.

Frederick finally sailed the following year, after audaciously imposing a tax on Church property to pay for his expedition. When he arrived in Jerusalem, instead of fighting, he tried talking. In a short time, he worked out a peace treaty naming himself King of Jerusalem but giving Muslims the full citizenship rights they had been denied during the century of European rule. What a concept!

The lack of bloodshed, coupled with the unspeakable crime of taxing Church property, made the Pope even angrier than before, so he dispatched an army to remove Frederick from his throne. But by now Frederick’s reputation had soared. Beating the Muslims and the Pope at the same time was seen as quite a feat; many commoners came to believe he was somehow super-human, especially since the Church had been spreading rumors that he was dead. In 1230 the Pope backed down and accepted Frederick’s rule, in exchange for a promise to repeal those awful taxes.

This allowed Frederick to get back to what he was doing before being rudely interrupted by the Crusade: launching a humanist revolution in Europe. His grandfather had established Frederick’s birthplace of Sicily as a tolerant, multicultural, wealthy island kingdom where Christians, Jews, and Muslims could enjoy security and protection in the practice of their religious customs. After Frederick returned from Palestine, his court enjoyed a golden age such as Europe had not witnessed in a thousand years. While the Church at this time was bent on restraining scientific investigation and the arts, Frederick was eagerly embracing new teaching wherever he could find it:

We have always loved knowledge from our youth; whatever time we can steal from state affairs we cheerfully dedicate to reading the many volumes stored in our library. We have stripped the works written by the Greek and Arabic philosophers of their garb; we have had them translated by chosen men, maintaining faithfully the virginity of the words. We do not wish to keep them all to ourselves … Do you make them public for the use of your students, to the glory of your Caesar. We do not wish to keep them all for ourselves.

One of Frederick’s favorite pastimes was mathematics. When the great mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci dedicated his treatise to Frederick, Frederick responded by giving Fibonacci some problems to solve, which Fibonacci ultimately did. While negotiating with the Sultan in Palestine, Frederick did him the honor of sending a gift of mathematical problems to ponder, while requesting in return the honor of hosting Arab astronomers at his court.

The intellectual freedom of Frederick’s circle attracted an ever increasing number of travelers and scholars. With the founding of the University of Naples, Frederick’s court became the established center of a great educational movement and his imperial seat became the principal destination of teachers and scholars from Europe and the Middle East – Christians, Muslims, and Jews. He turned the medical school at the University of Salerno into the foremost institution of its kind in the world; a condition of receiving a license to practice medicine was taking an oath to serve the poor, for free.

Frederick did more than encourage science; he pursued it himself, writing an extensive treatise on ornithology that stood as the leading work in the field for centuries. His interest was sparked by the sport of falconry, but his six-volume The Art of Falconry became arguably the most impressive work of empirical science of any kind in the entire Middle Ages. He resolutely rejected conventional lore, recording only observations that he himself or his trusted associates had made. If the facts were not available on a particular issue he drew no conclusions but left the question open. It was Frederick who first discovered the nesting habits of cuckoos; he noticed a strange chick in a nest and brought it home to be reared with great care, and found that it grew up into a cuckoo. One of the Pope’s many denunciations of Frederick was that he would only believe what was proved by force of reason and nature.

The free and open atmosphere that Frederick encouraged led him to another conclusion astonishing for its time: that his people deserved to have a written constitution, spelling out their rights. In 1231 Frederick proclaimed the Constitution of Melfi, one of the great legal codes of history. Among other things, the Constitution:

• abolished serfdom and gave peasants the right to inherit land – Frederick was fond of saying that “nothing is more odious than the oppression of the poor by the rich”;
  
• stripped the clergy of their jurisdiction in criminal cases, which were to be tried in the king’s courts;
  
• increased penalties for crimes against women, and allowed women to inherit estates;
  
• created a representative assembly, with each town sending two delegates to inform the king about local needs;
  
• allowed the government to legitimize the illegitimate children of priests;
  
• banned trial by ordeal, a practice in which guilt or innocence was established by subjecting a defendant to various forms of torture to see whether God would protect him or not; and
  
• ensured freedom of worship for Muslims and Jews.
  

The Pope, as usual, was outraged, and denounced the entire Constitution as soon as he heard about it.

Frederick surrounded himself not only with scholars, sculptors, and scientists, but with troubadours and dancing girls, a menagerie of exotic animals, carnivals and jousting tournaments in which the knights of France were eager to participate. His cosmopolitan court had an air of Eastern splendor and magnificence, graced by poets, musicians, artists, and beautiful women. Dante Alighieri later called Frederick the father of Italian poetry: not for his financial support, but for his own written work. He even took a bath every day, in an age when dirt was considered to be an outward sign of Christian humility.

The Church saw where all this was heading, and was even more disturbed by stories of Frederick calling Christ, Moses and Muhammad “three impostors,” and saying of the Eucharist: “How long will this hocus-pocus continue?” As the war of words escalated, Frederick began calling the clergy “insatiable leeches … disguised in sheep’s clothing, these ravenous wolves send legates hither and thither to excommunicate, to suspend, to punish – not as sowers of seed, that is the word of God, but to extort money, to harvest and reap that which they did not sow.” War broke out when the Pope excommunicated Frederick once again in 1239. Though Frederick brought his army to the gates of Rome, he unwisely backed down when the Pope paraded an object said to be the head of St. Peter through the streets and placed his own tiara on it.

Before the printing press, no one could match the Church’s capacity for spreading information via the pulpit. Europeans were taught that Frederick was evil incarnate:

His sentence is absolutely irrevocable! His probation is the voice of God by the Church: he is condemned and forever! His viper progeny are included under this unmitigable proscription. Whoever then loves justice should rejoice that vengeance is thus declared against the common enemy and wash his hands in the blood of the transgressor.

Though Frederick survived repeated assassination attempts, civil war instigated by the Pope dragged on for years. When Frederick died a broken man in 1250, the Pope exclaimed “Let the heavens rejoice and the earth exult!” All ten of his “viper progeny” children and grandchildren were then either executed by the Pope or died in his dungeons. Europe’s Enlightenment, which Frederick seemed about to launch, was delayed for another 500 years.