Washington DC Secular Voters' Forum

by Don Wharton

Date: Thurday April 11, 2012
Secular Voters' Forum
Time: 6:00 PM
Where: Cleveland Park Library, 3310 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC

Our thanks to the American Humanist Association for posting the following text on their Facebook Page and including in a issue of their Humanist Network News. 

The Christian Right holds political forums for candidates to see which one can best put into effect the neo-fascist ideology that the leaders imagine they have received from God. The humanist community has seldom if ever decided that we are big enough and important enough to ask political candidates to come to a forum for secular voters. Perhaps we are now big enough as a community for that to change.

There is a Special Election in Washington DC on April 23, 2013, to fill an At-Large seat to the City Council. We have scheduled a forum for Thursday April 11, in the local Cleveland Park Library. Most of the candidates have agreed to attend.

What are the secular values that would best serve the secular voters in DC? There is the small problem that the law does not allow an atheist to officiate at a wedding. There are two forms that may be used to have the certification to officiate at a wedding and both of them demand membership in a religious organization. This is grossly unconstitutional and many local humanists would like this to change.

The states of Oregon and Washington have death with dignity laws. After hundreds of cases, there has not been one single case where anyone has reported that a doctor assisted in a suicide done for financial reasons. Many who pass the stringent criterion under these laws never fill their fatal prescription. Many never make use of the prescription after they are filled. There is ample evidence that this law actually reduces the incidence of suicide because people are comfortable that they can chose a time to leave and need not commit suicide before a final decline. I mentioned to one candidate that the most horrible thing that I could imagine would be to be legally forced to endure a long painful death because some people imagine that this would be pleasing to God.

Washington DC is the only American city with a school voucher program mandated by Congress. Will these candidates see this as a program that should end?

Humanists are nearly universal in their understanding that global warming is a menace to our planet. Washington DC can become a tremendous example of how an east coast city can make strides in dealing with this problem.

Virtually every person in any humanist discussion group I have participated in thinks our war on drugs is irrational. There is a profoundly racist aspect of this war. People of European and African descent use drugs in nearly equal proportions. African-Americans are prosecuted to a vastly greater extent. The criminal records become a continuing punishment that never ends. A rational response might be to ameliorate criminal records for non-violent, victimless crimes after some period of time. Will these candidates support this change to the structural racism of our society? Questions such as these are never raised in other forums. They will be raised at this one.

For those who are in the DC area on April 11, please come and join us at 6pm in the Cleveland Park Library, 3310 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC. We will love to see you there.

Worth noticing

Scientists prove man made religious books preach non sense in the name of god
see:http://www.dailysquib.co.uk/index.php?news=3102

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/

 

 

Faces in a Museum

By Gary Berg-Cross

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is one of DC’s gems- architecturally and by content.  Every few years they feature the results of the 7 panel judged Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. This year they feature 48 “faces” that stare back at you as you voyeur through. If you come in from the NPG side you are eyed by Jill Wissmiller’s 2011 ‘video portrait’ “The Gilding of Lily."  It's a long way from the small portraits of the Dutch school but continues the Renaissance spirit of moving from religious portraits that narrate the world through faith to very human ones.  This continues shift towards a broader intellectual & scientific understanding of humanity and uses modern technology like video to express its ideas. The section from The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Ed. Tom Flynn) uses Passmore's 3 categories for art - entertainment, telic and 'serious' art (Guernica as an example). all types are hear and perhaps mixes of all 3 with many bringing the excitement & perhaps whimsey of the first type along with the iconic impact of a cause for the 2nd.

 I’m not sure I agreed with the judges on the best, but then that’s part of the charm.  You can walk through the rooms and be your own judge.  You may stroll by an iconic women’s figure made from  100 pounds of rice. I wonder what artists of the early Renaissance would say as they strove to portray lifelike human forms with correct proportions.  Much of that is here, but in forms that astound and challenge new thinking  for idea of humanism.

Life raft was another favorite of mine with a human, telic back story. It was painted  by Katie O’Hagan in 2011, and she explains it's theme and purpose:

during a time of great personal upheaval. During this period, I came to truly understand, for the first time, the vital role that art plays in my life. As most of the solid ground I had depended on seemed to erode away, my art emerged as the only thing keeping my head above water. I woke up one morning with this image in my head. I built the raft myself and spent the next couple of months completing the painting. It’s a very literal image, and I felt quite exposed and not entirely comfortable making it at first. Now I see it as something positive to come out of a bad situation. It also marked a turning point in my work, as it has led to a move toward more personal paintings, beyond the straightforward portraiture I was doing before.

You’ll find all 48 finalists on the NPG site with descriptions from the creators. It’s a feast for humanist sentiments. Check out a slideshow with all the winners here.

Iceberg Democracy

By Gary Berg-Cross

A recent article in The Washington Post (Tuesday, April 2, 2013) was called “Meat Inspectors Beat Sequestration.”  It described how behind the scenes to get Congress to give back money for people who “inspect animal carcasses” to

replace what the sequester took. This was contrasted to the frustration of seemingly powerful groups such as defense and transportation.  The trick was pulled off, somehow, with a smart, logistical campaign begun in early February, before sequester started. Cabinet secretary Vilsack began describing in detail how badly his department would be hit.

“In our food safety area ... we will have to furlough workers for a period of a couple of weeks,” Vilsack said, speaking to an agriculture industry conference in Las Vegas. “The problem is, as soon as you take an inspector off the floor, that plant shuts down.”

The firm and unyielding threat of entire plan shut down, backed by the right forces (inspectors &  the powerful meat lobby), seems to have won the day. The final winning part was described this way:

The effort was joined by the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation and the American Meat Institute, heavyweights of one of Washington’s powerful agriculture lobbies. In the Senate, their cause was picked up by two influential senators from strongly agricultural states: Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

Those two found a solution: $55 million in new money that had been meant for other Agriculture Department programs. Blunt and Pryor wrote an amendment that would give it, instead, to the meat inspection program. This was sequester-proofing. After the sequester took its cut, the meat-inspection program would be left with almost as much money as it had before.

It’s a bit of a peak into the hidden world of how things get done in what Alexis de Tocqueville called  “Democracy in America.”  When aristocrat de Tocqueville arrived in the US he was hoping to see how the US managed to pull off a functioning democracy when France had not. What he saw at first seemed like a dysfunctional mess.  Things just didn’t seem to work smoothly or as he expected, He saw problems including:

• Institutional problems - too much power in the legislative branch (with “mediocre” representatives) blocking executive action,
•  abuses of freedom,
• Individual problems - an excessive drive for individualism, and materialism
• ‘Materialism results from a passion for equality because people think that they ought to be able to have as much wealth as everyone else.
• Indirectly, materialism also comes from the philosophical tendency fostered by democracies to disdain lofty ideas or thoughts of eternity.
• The effect of materialism is that people may be so absorbed in their personal pursuit of wealth that they neglect to use their political freedom.’
• From Democracy in America Summary

But as he traveled around he saw that somehow, behind the scenes, problems got solved.  American Democracy was a bit like an iceberg in that a huge part of how it worked was under the water and invisible to the eye. And part of the reason de Tocqueville thought it worked was a form of faith people had in the idea of Democracy itself. This was a fused religious and progressive belief that things were destined to head in a better direction.  Things may look bad, but there are hidden solutions, we are good people in a Democracy and we will find a way.

Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t find this type of faith in other places since there was less of an under the water iceberg to how societies run.  How dictatorships are run is painfully obvious.  The same might be said of long standing aristocratic oligarchies.  But America was mysterious and worked solutions in wondrous ways. 

It’s a feeling that there is probably a bit less of now abroad in the country as problems are not being solved at an adequate rate – elected politicians can’t decide on how to handle gun safety, solve unemployment or avoid climate change. 

For every wondrous solution like that pulled off by Cabinet secretary Vilsack there seems to be a multitude that are not. And for every good thing going on below the water level there seem more troubling things. This perhaps better fits the feeling of danger by under the water icebergs heading for our solution ships. For example, President Obama recently signed into law H.R. 933, a sweeping and seemingly OK piece of legislative that ostensibly keeps the government from shutting down by explaining where funds will be allocated for the rest of the fiscal year.. But iceberg-like hidden in the bill's  100,000+  words was a very small, viral piece that changes how our country's legal system polices biotech giants like Monsanto: 

Slipped into the Agricultural Appropriations Bill, which passed through Congress last week, was a small provision that's a big deal for Monsanto and its opponents. Anger is growing over this “industry ploy to continue to sell genetically engineered seeds even when a court of law has found they were approved by USDA illegally,”

It’s another blow in faith in a system that remains opaque but less subterraneanly, wondrously so.

Images

Icebergs:www.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Resources/Toolkits/InterculturalDialogue/ConceptualFramework

Sequestration: http://www.politisite.com/2013/02/27/poking-holes-in-obamas-sequester-report/

Anger grows: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Anger-Grows-Over-Secret-%27Monsanto-Protection-Act-/2013/04/01/id/497254

Food Freedom: http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/hr-2749-totalitarian-control-of-the-food-supply/

Academic torture in India- special story by Humanist M V Ramamurthy

see the academic torture of a Ph.D scholar presented by late Mr M V Ramamurthy in monthly digital magazine edited by Mr Nanavathy Prabhakar at:
https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/?ui=2&ik=0bb21f1470&view=att&th=13dc06dddcc041ac&attid=0.1&disp=inline&realattid=4c0a6fb37062318d_0.1&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P8vUBtJAyuxXYPax51xeJVO&sadet=1364745440303&sads=qBhaWo0O3ZOJQ_pObclGnO-Ws3k&sadssc=1

Excrement de Renard (Fox Poo)

a review by Edd Doerr

The Freedom Answer Book, by Judge (!) Andrew P. Napolitano (Thomas Nelson, 2012, 269 pp., $14.99)

Years ago in Paris I came across a gallery of works by living artists who could each display two items for a small fee. Great stuff.  I spent most of a day there. One watercolor by a painter whose acquaintance I made was a cartoonish map of Paris with little labels on monuments, churches, etc. Something tiny on a sidewalk bore the label "Excrement de chien" (dog poo). There is so much dog poo on the sidewalks there that special sanitation workers on motorcycles mounted with large vacuum cleaners patrol the sidewalks slurping up the stuff.

Well, Napolitano's book suggests the label "Excrement de Renard" (fox poo) because the author, a retired New Jersey judge,  is "Senior Judicial Analyst" for the Faux -- er, Fox News Channel.

The book is one long slam at US courts and lawmakers who ignore Natural Law, whatever the hell that is, and undermine the Constitooshun, at least in Napolitano's fevered imagination. He attacks all federal legislation that attempts to restrict the predations of 1890s Robber Barons; opposes income and sales taxes (but gives no clue as to how government is to be supported); advocates repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendments (income taxes; direct election of senators); excoriates Lincoln; blames FDR for Pearl Harbor; outRomneys Romney; and displays a sad case of political paranoia.

For all his huffing and puffing about freedom, Napolitano writes nary a word about the embattled freedom of conscience of women on reproductive matters or the beleaguered freedom of Americans from taxation to support religious institutions, two major headaches facing the US today.

To top it off, the book was produced by a major conservative publisher of Bibles and religious materials that outsourced the printing of  it to -- Mon Dieu! -- China!

BTW, I did not buy the book; I got a free review copy. And as soon as I finish this review I will consign it to the recycle bin.

War is Hell

a review by Edd Doerr

A Higher Call, by Adam  Makos with Larry Alexander (Berkley Caliber, 2012, 392 pp, $26.98)

Many years ago there was a delightful French comedy called "Fan-Fan le Tulip" with Gerard Phillippe. It opens with scenes of 17th century military mayhem with the narrator gravely intoning, "War, the only sport of kings in which the common man is allowed to participate." Yes, war is hell, and it always involves ordinary people. So let me recommend this new book, a  true story about two rather ordinary young guys caught up in war, an American B-17 pilot from West Virginia and a slightly older  German Bf-109 pilot who meet in the skies over northern Germany on December 20, 1943, and again many years after the war.

I won't leak the details of this fascinating story -- that would spoil it for the reader -- but will say that it is history written not about generals and international politics and grand strategies but about the real experiences of individual guys on the ground, or in the skies, who do the actual shooting. It goes beyond old stereotypes to not often discussed realities.

In a way this story reminds me of the recent British/French/German film about the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front and the recent American film, "A Midnight Clear", about a small-scale American/German encounter (presumably fictional) exactly 40 years later in a forest in Belgium. Both films are eloquently  anti-war. And the Makos book reminds me of a German 1950s era film, "Der Stern von Afrika" ("The Star of Africa") about German Afrika Korps Bf-109 ace Hans Marseille, who appears in this book, which backs the film that at the time I wrongly considered too Hollywoodish.