Americans United Remains Committed To Protecting The Rights Of Non-Believers ( a response to Mathew Goldstein's Post)

By Rob Boston

I wish to respond to Mathew Goldstein’s recent criticisms of Americans United for Separation of Church and State on this blog.

I have worked at Americans United for 26 years. In that time, I have observed the organization work repeatedly to protect the rights of all Americans – religious and non-religious – to be free from government-sponsored theology. I resent my organization and the good people who work there being called "hypocrites." Such a characterization is not only untrue, it is offensive.

There are many non-believers among AU’s membership, and over the years we have, time and again, stood up for the civil rights and equality of humanists, atheists, agnostics and non-believers. Non-believers have been plaintiffs in just about all of our major cases, among them the challenge to “Ten Commandments” Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, the fight against “intelligent design” in Dover, Pa., and most, recently, our lawsuit against official prayers before municipal meetings in Greece, N.Y.

Americans United is a coalition. Some of our members are religious and some are not. All are dedicated to the principle that government must never impose religion onto the unwilling nor treat anyone as second-class citizen based on what they believe, or don’t believe, about god. We frequently work with religious and secular groups to achieve this goal.

Mr. Goldstein is disappointed in the way that AU dealt with a matter he brought to our attention. Rather than assume that Americans United had abandoned its commitment to protecting the rights of non-believers, perhaps he should have asked if the situation he raised was a strong church-state violation. As it turns out, it may not be.

According to his complaint, Mr. Goldstein is upset because he believes the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is sponsoring a Boy Scout troop. AU’s intake attorney did investigate the matter and was unable to find strong evidence that the department does in fact sponsor the troop. However, after Mr. Goldstein provided some additional information, the attorney referred the matter to AU’s full Legal Department for further review.

That process is ongoing. While things may not be proceeding at the pace Mr. Goldstein would like, it’s important to remember that Americans United receives complaints concerning church-state violations every day. We examine each one, and this can occasionally create a backlog. The file on this matter remains open.

I share the frustration many humanists feel over issues related to the Boy Scouts. Last year, the BSA changed its policies and now allows gay Scouts, but it hasn’t budged on atheists. The BSA’s policy of excluding non-believers is reprehensible, but it has proven a difficult issue to challenge in court. In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Boy Scouts of America vs. Dale that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is a private organization that may legally deny membership to gays and atheists.

After that ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue public schools and other units of government that sponsored Boy Scout troops. In 2005, the BSA recommended that government entities stop sponsoring Boy Scout troops. The BSA was worried that public schools and other arms of government might get sued. Many schools and government offices, worried about the time and expense of a lawsuit, did indeed end sponsorship of Boy Scout troops.

No court ordered them to do this. Thus, there is no case law explicitly stating that units of government may not sponsor BSA troops. From a legal perspective, this is a murky situation.

I am sorry Mr. Goldstein is disappointed, but I want to assure him and others that Americans United has not deviated from its willingness to assist freethinkers. In reality, we’re more than willing to help non-believers and do it all of the time.

For more information about Americans United and the work that we do, please visit www.au.org or email me directly at boston@au.org.

Dan Fincke on objectivity of morality

By Mathew Goldstein 

Advocates of religion often argue that religion is necessary to provide an objective grounding for morality. The obvious problem with this argument is that only something non-fictional can provide objective grounding for something else. Therefore religion fails to provide objective grounding for anything because religion is fiction. In other words, the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse. So even if religion would provide an objective basis for morality if religion were true, the religion horse is fiction so it is incapable of pulling any cart of objectivity. People can pretend that religion is true and from there they can pretend that morality has objective grounding in their religion, but pretending objectivity is self-contradictory, it is disengenuity.

Having dismissed religion, the question of objectivity remains.  Contrary to what some advocates of religion claim, objectivity is clearly not dependent on religion.  We are objectively better off seeking the assistance of medical doctors who are trained and licensed according to the principle of following the empirical evidence than we are going to religious faith healers with magic potions and dances and traditional rituals.  What about morality?  Is there an objective basis for morality?

Some atheists, such as Jerry Coyne, assert there is no objective morality.  Other atheists, such as philosopher Dan Fincke (and neuroscientist Sam Harris), argue that morality is empirically rooted in human flourishing and therefore, in the main, objective. I have read both sides of this argument and there is a winner: Dan Fincke is correct.  Take a look at Dan Fincke disputing Jerry Coyne on his blog Empowerment Ethics: “Can There Be Objective Morality When So Many People Disagree About Morality?” Human flourishing would arguably be enhanced if everyone who has more than the bare minimum that they need gave away everything non-essential that they owned to those who otherwise lack what they need to survive. Jerry Coyne has a fair point that almost no one does that or advocates that everyone do that.  But this lack of perfection in practice, as with the lack of perfect and complete empirical knowledge or the lack of universal agreement, does not defeat the successful argument that there is an objective basis for evaluating morality.

Some people may object to the self-indulgence of the human flourishing criteria. This concept does generalize so that, for example, we can evaluate morality of other animals by their behaviors to each other and also of cross-species behaviors. But any practical morality must prioritize, and humans are the proper priority of us humans.

Americans United not acknowledging the evidence

By Mathew Goldstein

About one month after I wrote to Americans United for Seperation of Church and State regarding the apparent sponsorship by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources of a Scouting program unit, I received a reply from a staff attorney. It began with a thank you followed by an apology for the delay. The AU staff attorney then wrote: ".... Despite the use of the word "sponsor" on the Venturing Crew's website, I can find no evidence that there is any formal sponsorship relationship between the two organizations. Instead, it appears that the Venturing Crew participates in certain volunteering initiatives offered by DNR. It is not unconstitutional for a religious organization to volunteer time and effort with a government agency. If there is evidence that DNR provides funding to the Venturing Crew, please send it to me and I will review it. Otherwise, this does not look like a violation." 

This reaction to my complaint from AU contrasts sharply with the FFRF reaction. FFRF reacted by writing a letter to the DNR requesting "any department records related to sponsorship of Venturing Crew 202." FFRF did not assume that there is no formal sponsorship absent proof one way or the other. Why is AU making the assumption there is no formal relationship given that the evidence suggests that there is such a formal relationship? The Crew 202 web site says that they have been sponsored by the DNR since 2000, when the unit first started, and the advisor of the unit has a DNR email address. And why is AU emphasizing funding? Even if the DNR gave no money to the unit, they are still operating a unit of a membership youth group that excludes atheists which by itself is illegal, as the FFRF staff attorney stated in his correspondence with me.

After calling more than a dozen times and getting an answering machine, I spoke to the registrar of the Baltimore Area Council of BSA.  She confirmed that the chartered organization (a.k.a. the sponsoring organization) of Crew 202 is the DNR and the advisor with the DNR email address is also the Chartered Organization Representative.  However, she refused to give me a copy of the charter agreement. I separately wrote to the AU and FFRF staff attorneys to alert them of this additional evidence.  FFRF immediately responded.  From AU I have so far received no response.

Although disappointed so far with AU, I cannot say I am surprised.  AU and the ACLU are very good organizations whose membership probably consists largely of liberal theists.  Many liberal theists have a strong commitment to civic equality and non-establishment of religion that becomes weak, or antagonistic, when it comes to atheists.  A country where more than 4/5 of the population are religious believers is a very different country when many such believers are liberal from a country where few such believers are liberal.  Liberal religious believers may object to my characterization of religion as inherently having a conservative orientation, but the fact is that the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions are often (very) conservative. And taking those ancient texts seriously in the 21st century is also conservative.  So let's celebrate the liberal religious believers, with their creative hermeneutics, for their central role in making our country as tolerant and free as it is.

Yet these same liberal theists are also hypocrites when it comes to atheists.  As with the ACLU, I will continue to wait for the AU to show me that I am wrong about liberal theists being civil rights hypocrites.  I want to be wrong. I want the AU and the ACLU to tell the world that they favor civic equality for atheists and non-establishment of theism.  They both have this opportunity here and if they take it then I will be happy to let you know on this blog.

Humanist William James on Certain Blindness in Human Beings

By Gary Berg-Cross

These are angry times on so many level including the war front.  It seems at times like “The Guns of August II” or to paraphrase a recent WAPO article, “Is this 1939 again?”  Will the dogs of war and the romance of simple military solutions sweep away another generation?

Events don’t make it easy to talk about alternatives to war or the value of the culture of peace, but perhaps such times are exactly when we need this conversation the most.  As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

          “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate

          cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” 

With this hypothesis in mind it seems like a good time share, if not love, then a peaceful space in which to discuss such the topics.  WASH MDC has organized a panel and community discussion on Sept. 6th from 2-4 (Wheaton Public Library, 11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD ) on the topic of Peace and Issues including a Humanist perspective. Edd Doerr, past AHA president, who blogs here often, will be on the panel along with an anthropologist with experience in peace negotiations. 

I thought that I’d get a little jump on the meeting with a few humanist-oriented thoughts on the challenge of peace going back to a time before the WWI Guns of August swept away the Great Powers' peace.  Why not a mini-Renaissance on the prospects of avoiding the damages of war and the building of a culture of peace?

Around the turn of the 20^th Century American

Philosopher/Psychologist William James looking back to the Civil War, a squalid US war with Spain and the recent Boer war.  It was the late colonial period. Looking back to our late 20th and now recent 21st century events in history's rear view mirror they start to uncomfortably resemble the earllier aggressions that James lamented.  Similar too is the specter of war clouds abroad that motivated James to gave talks and write a series of anti-war pamphlets around the turn of the century,  He started with one called “Certain Blindness in Human Beings” in 1899.  In raising anti-war consciousness James was leveraging facts & new understanding from the social sciences.  It seemed to him that the emerging sciences offered some enlightened basis to understand human nature and the tendency toward violence.  Certainly he saw the corruption of language as the word Peace and peaceful activity had come to mean essentially the preparation for war.  And with that start of new factual understanding strengthened with a Progressive philosophy of truth,  knowledge & morality James argued we could begin to take on age old problem & escape the ruptures to civilizations caused by war. But it would, as he later said, take a moral and culture commitment as strong as the commitment to war and militarism. To bring the war-party and the peace-party together an extended discipline was needed and the avoidance ot, as he said:

  “The strength of one’s opposition to war depends on the correctness of one’s position, certainly, but it also requires a better understanding of the permanent enemy among us, namely, “the bellicosity of human nature.”

New understanding in turn calls on moral action. Beyond the mere intellectual conviction that war is morally unacceptable, James argued that we have a

 “bounden duty to resist settling reasonable disputes in a violent manner,”

Instead suggests James one is also obliged to translate one’s beliefs into an active, yet non-violent resistance to the human proclivity to settle disputes  “quickly, thrillingly, tragically, and by force.”

    From http://williamjamesstudies.org/8.1/kipton.pdf

That’s still good advice and a hard task. Sure, we have an even better fact and theory basis to understand human tendencies.  It’s just that empirical science and our best wisdom, tempered by moral sense, seem now to be again out of power and favor.  What passes for statecraft is running somewhat amok.

James followed him 1899 work with 2 later ones. The Essence of Humanism & The Moral Equivalent of War.  In the first James pointed to the hopes of Humanism mixed with a Pragmatic philosophy which he saw as levers  to advance society’s enlightenment:

Humanism is a ferment that has "come to stay." It is not a single hypothesis of theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new center of interest or point of sight.

A humanist perspective might be marshalled to avoid war, but in Moral Equivalence he starts with the observation that:

“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”

It certainly hasn't been easy and The Great War proved to be a steam roller that ended peace and progress for a generation.  James saw militarism well entrenched asd as Chris Hedges later wrote, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. As James put it:

"The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. .."

These ideas are  protected by irrationality, paradox and old human tendencies claimed as the highest of virtues not balanced by enlightened passion .

“ The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals   from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade…

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. 

James could see the factors that militaristic times leverage to trample peaceful stances.  There is seemingly paradox there too as some things so horrible should propel us into action, but they are rationalized away with ego defenses and spin:


"Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him (people). The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”   From   http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

 Yes, and we still are willing to pay for war over pre-school and the like.

James worries and paradoxes & double personalities of civilized man still hold sway even as the Humanist perspective and a better understanding of human nature sheds light on factors like irrationality, the politics of fear, scapegoating, personalizing evil, religious & self-justification, the seduction of glory, the fear of shame, tribal solidarity, pugnacity.  James saw it all and rang the bell of warning that is hard to hear with the thump of bombs.

Still sadly still  too true. In our time the Dept of War has become the Dept of Defense. We have perpetual preparation of war and plans for attack masked in the right of self defense. As James said:

"Peace" in military mouths today is a synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the 'peace'-interval."....and

"...no legitimate interest of any one of them (Great Powers) would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests."

Cartoon from http://cybertrails.org/mil/

Hamas v. Israel

By Mathew Goldstein

Bill Creasy, in the most recent edition of WASHLine, expressed concern that Hamas is sometimes being unfairly vilified with what he characterizes as hyperbolic language more typically found in comic books.  Hamas leaders are capable for speaking for themselves. So if we want to accurately understand Hamas without exaggerated oversimplifications or denialisms then we should attend to what they say about about their methods and goals when they speak to Islamic audiences.

On On December 8, 2006, several months after becoming Hamas’ leader, Ismail Haniyeh spoke to thousands of worshipers at Tehran University in Iran, calling for the next intifada against Israel. “We will never recognize the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem.”

On December 14th, 2010, Haniyeh spoke at a rally to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Hamas terror group’s founding. ”Palestine is from the sea to the river, from Rosh HaNikra to Rafah. The siege will not change our belief, wars don’t cause people give up resistance and resistance leaders. We will not recognize!  We will not recognize!  We will not recognize Israel!”

On September 18th, 2011, in the wake of the Palestinian bid to gain recognition in the United  Nations, Haniyeh reiterated his refusal to recognize Israel. “We repeat today that we are with the establishment of a Palestinian state on any liberated part of Palestinian land that is agreed upon by the Palestinian people, without recognizing Israel or conceding any inch of historical Palestine.”

On December 14th, 2011, Haniyeh addressed more than 100,000 Hamas supporters gathered in Gaza City’s al-Katiba to celebrate the 24th anniversary of Hamas’ creation. This was his message of violence to the audience: “The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine – all of Palestine, Allah willing.”

On January 10, 2012 Haniyeh gave a sermon during which he declared "The land of Palestine, oh brothers and sisters, is an Islamic waqf, as decreed by the second caliph, Omar ibn Al-Khattab. We shall not relinquish the Islamic waqf on the land of Palestine, and Jerusalem shall not be divided into Western and Eastern Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a single united [city], and Palestine stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and from Naqoura [Rosh Ha-Niqra] to Umm Al-Rashrash [Eilat] in the south."

On February 12, 2012, Iranian Preisdent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited Haniyeh to his country just in time for the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. During a speech to his Iranian supporters, Haniyeh called again for a violent confrontation against Israel. “The resistance will continue until all Palestinian land, including al-Quds (Jerusalem), has been liberated and all the refugees have returned.” Also, he said “The gun is our only response to [the] Zionist regime. In time we have come to understand that we can obtain our goals only through fighting and armed resistance and no compromise should be made with the enemy.”

On October 19, 2013, Haniyeh called for an end to peace negotiations with Israel, warning that Hamas fighters are preparing for a liberation campaign against Israel.  “Thousands of fighters above ground and thousands of fighters underground have been preparing in silence for the campaign to liberate Palestine.”

On January 13th, 2014, the Hamas’ government celebrated 13,000 graduates from the Hamas youth paramilitary camps, designed to encourage Gazan teens “to follow in the footsteps of the suicide martyrs.” Haniyeh congratulated the participants at the graduation ceremony. “This is a generation which knows no fear. It is the generation of the missile, the tunnel and suicide operations.”

Khaled Mash’al, another Hamas leader, in a speech on December 7, 2012 said "First of all, Palestine – from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, from its north to its south – is our land, our right, and our homeland. There will be no relinquishing or forsaking even an inch or small part of it. Second, Palestine was, continues to be, and will remain Arab and Islamic. It belongs to the Arab and the Islamic world. Palestine belongs to us and to nobody else. This is the Palestine which we know and in which we believe. Third, since Palestine belongs to us, and is the land of Arabism and Islam, we must never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. The occupation is illegitimate, and therefore, Israel is illegitimate, and will remain so throughout the passage of time. Palestine belongs to us, not to the Zionists."

A similar attitude can be seen in the streets of towns cities around the world during some of the rallies against Israel.  Here are some of the July rallies in the United States where one of the slogans repeated by the attendees, appearing on signs, or declared by speakers, was "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free": July 7 San Francisco, July 9 2014 New York City, July 11 in Milwaukee, July 12 Chicago and San Francisco, July 17 South Bend, IN, and Boston, July 18 San Diego, July 19 Fort Lauderdale, FL, July 23 Miami.

Could Hamas one day reach a peace agreement with Israel?  Hamas would need to replace, or abandon, it's abhorrent covenant titled "The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement" first.  Hamas is currently insisting on an airport and a seaport in Gaza.  Without solid assurances that they will not use such facilities to prepare for another attack on Israel, it is in no ones self-interest to see such facilities functioning in Gaza while Hamas governs there.  Well, no ones other than wealthy Hamas leaders such as Khaled Masha'l who has become a billionaire.  Hamas is currently not popular among Palestinians.  Mahmoud Abbas is more popular and also more reasonable and pragmatic.  The focus should be on the Palestinian Authority and the people living in Gaza, not on defending the reputation of Hamas.

Rheeformers & the Vergara ruling against teacher tenure

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org) notes that the Washington Post, 15 Aug 2014, ran a long op ed piece, “The promise of teacher tenure reform”, by Joshua Lewis, a long time “Rheeformer”  supporting the recent LA lower court ruling in the Vergara case that slashed teacher tenure.

 Below is the comment Edd posted in the Post on line. A similarly strong response was posted by “LaborLawyer”. 

Of course Lewis would like the Vergara ruling against teacher tenure. He is on the board of Pearson, the testing and publishing supergiant that makes uncounted millions from its contracts with public schools and which owns some charter schools, which are not friendly to teacher unions. Lewis talks big about "reform" but says nothing about the overtesting of kids that is actually hurting public education and kids. And he says nothing about the real reforms that serious professional educators have been advocating, such as more adequate and more equitably distributed funding for public schools, universal pre-K, smaller classes, wraparound social and medical services for the neediest kids, an end to the diversion of public funds to special interest private schools through vouchers and tax credits (which have invariably been voted down in state referenda), and a pull-back in the expansion of charter schools, which the 2013 Stanford CREDO study found were generally no better than regular public schools despite their selectivity and other advantages.

Doing away with teacher tenure can only harm the teaching profession and the kids. The idea that the quality of in-school teaching is all important ignores the fact that kids are not widgets in a factory, that teachers are not robots on an assembly line, and that at least 1/4 of our students live in poverty.

The Post should run opinion pieces by real educators -- like Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider or David Berliner.
 

Polling Vouchers for private schools

by Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty (arlinc.org)

On August 20 the Washington Post ran this story, “Poll: Common Core support has eroded across the US”, regarding the new Gallup/PDK poll.  Below is the comment I posted in the Post on line – Edd

This story does not give a very complete view of the new Gallup/PDK poll. Here is what was missed:

Vouchers for private schools are opposed 63% to 37%, almost exactly the % by which vouchers or their variants have been rejected in 27 statewide referenda from coast to coast. Republicans favor vouchers 52% to 48%. Democrats oppose vouchers 77% to 23%. Independents oppose vouchers 63% to 37%.

67% of parents give an A or B rating to the public school attended by their oldest child; 50% give an A or B to the public schools in their community; 17% give an A or B to public schools nationally. What this seems to mean is that parents give a good rating to the public school they know most about, but fall for the barrage of anti public school and anti teacher propaganda dished out by conservative media with regard to schools nationally.

The biggest single problem facing public schools is lack of adequate funding. So say 32% of all respondents, 45% of Democrats, 33% of Independents, but only 21% of Republicans.

Most Americans are vaguely familiar with charter schools but are widely misinformed: Only 50% think that charters are really public schools; they believe they are academically selective by 68% to 29%, which is correct; half believe that charters may teach religion, which is wrong because they are publicly funded; by 54% to 33% they believe that charters are better than regular public schools, while the 2013 Stanford CREDO study found that 3/4 of charters are worse or no better than regular public schools despite their obvious and acknowledged selectivity advantage.

I really wish that the Post would do a better job of reporting on educational issues.
 
Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty (arlinc.org)

Remembering Rwanda

by Edd Doerr

Twenty years have elapsed since the horror of the Rwanda massacre, in which half a  million to one million people were killed in just a few months, about 10% of the population of the small central African country. This bears looking at now because a major factor in the tragedy was human overpopulation, a global problem that threatens all of us. But first, a little background.

Rwanda and its virtual twin country Burundi are each about the size of Maryland. Their populations are both predominantly ethnic Hutu (2/3 in Rwanda, over 80% in Burundi) with a strong Tutsi minority ( about 14% in Burundi, slightly higher in Rwanda). The Hutu settled the two countries earlier, but the Tutsi  became dominant in both, rather like the Tutsi being the upper class and the Hutu the peasants. Germany took over both countries toward the end of the 19^th century, but Belgium took over during WW I and ran both until independence in 1962. Catholic missionaries moved in during the German and Belgian occupations, so that today Rwanda is about 2/3 Catholic and Burundi over 80%. The European and Catholic occupations did nothing to alter the unstable balance between Hutu and Tutsi. Birth rates in the two countries have long been very high.

The Hutu and Tutsi have never gotten along very well. The Hutu  generally resented Tutsi domination, while the Tutsi worried what might happen to them if the Hutu ever dominated. In 1962-63 “genocide” by the Hutu in Rwanda killed thousands of Tutsi. In April 1972 an unsuccessful Hutu uprising in Burundi resulted in many thousands of deaths on both sides. The story is well told by Thomas Patrick Melady in his 1974 book Burundi: The Tragic Years (Orbis Books). Melady, a history prof by profession, was US ambassador to Burundi when the violence broke out. Melady mentions the high birth rate and overpopulation, but only very briefly. (Melady, a Catholic, was next the US ambassador to Uganda and from 1989 to 1993 was US ambassador to the Holy See [Vatican], appointed by President George  H.W. Bush. I have commented, most recently in a letter published in the liberal National Catholic Reporter, that every US ambassador to the Vatican since Reagan opened diplomatic relations with that single religious body in 1984, has been a Catholic, which appears to conflict with Article VI of the US Constitutio, which bars religious tests for public office.)

The Rwanda “genocidal violence of the spring of 1994 can be partly attributed to that population density”, wrote French historian and Africa specialist Gerard Prunier in his comprehensive book on the matter, The Rwanda Crisis: History of  a Genocide (Columbia University Press, 424 pp, 1995), after showing how the country’s population grew from 1.6 million in 1934 to 7.1 million in 1989. Prunier also notes that “The church also had a monopoly on education” and “By 1931 …  Catholicism became the quasi-official religion”,  which undoubtedly discouraged family planning in the overpopulated country.

Prunier further notes: “Although … there were admirable acts of courage among ordinary Christians [during the genocide] the church hierarchies were at best useless and at worst accomplices in the genocide.” And: “The only faith which provided a bulwark against barbarity for its adherents was Islam”, a marginal 1.2% of the population. Prunier’s book is probably the best one available on the Rwanda massacre.

Before the dust had even begun to settle on the Rwanda genocide the UN population conference convened in Cairo. There was apparently very little comment about the tsunami of bloodshed hundreds of miles to the south. The only one I could find was this from conference participant Mary (Mrs Al) Gore: “Rwanda  is a tragedy and a warning. It is a warning about the way in which extremists can manipulate the fears of a  population threatened by its own numbers and by its massive poverty.” It was at the Cairo conference that US population scientist Stephen Mumford distributed copies of the National Security Study Memorandum 200 report on overpopulation and related issues that had been ordered by President Nixon, finished under President Ford in late 1975 but then mysteriously “classified” and buried for 17 years, when Mumford got his hands on it and published it. (To my knowledge, I am the only person who published reviews of Mumford’s 1996 book, The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed as US Population Policy (Center for Research on Population and Security, 579 pp), in the Americans for Religious Journal, in USA Today magazine, and in my column in The Humanist.)

Moving on. Scientist Jared Diamond devoted a chapter in his important 2005 book, Countdown: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 575 pp), to the Rwanda genocide (“Malthus In Africa: Rewanda’s Genocide”). The 1994 massacre was triggered in April of that year by the shooting down of a plane in which the presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi were killed, a crime that was never solved.  Diamond writes: “While the killings [the massacre] were organized by the extremist Hutu government and largely carried out by Hutu civilians, institutions and outsiders from whom one might have expected better behavior played an important permissive role. In particular, numerous leaders of Rwanda’s Catholic Church either failed to protect Tutsi or else actively assembled them and  turned them over to killers.”  The UN and the French and US governments did nothing. At the end of the chapter Diamond cited Prunier’s quote of a Tutsi survivor: “The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”

So here we are in 2014. Since 1945 world population has tripled to well over 7 billion and promises to continue expanding to about 9 billion by 2050. Climate change is all too real, and overpopulation is contributing enormously to CO2 increase in the atmosphere, global warming, environmental  degradation, resource depletion, soil erosion, soil nutrient decline, waste accumulation, deforestation, desertification, fresh water shortages, sea level rise,  biodiversity shrinkage, consumption levels rising, and sociopolitical instability and violence, much of which was predicted by the NSSM 200 report. That report recommended universal access to contraception and the legalization of abortion.

Democrats in the US have generally favored moving in that direction, but Republicans, conservatives and the Religious Right have been opposed. We know that equalizing education and rights for women would go  a long way toward lowering birth rates, but religious fundamentalists of all sorts have stood in the way. Religious leaders – the Vatican and the bishops, Protestant fundamentalists, Hasidic and Islamic leaders – have blocked progress. Thoughtful Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Humanists and others favor progress and need to bring pressure to bear on those in power.

Let me also recommend Alan Reisman’s  2013 book, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth (Little, Brown, 528 pp) for its astonishingly comprehensive and wide-ranging coverage of this whole matter of climate change and overpopulation (which I reviewed in Americans for Religious Liberty’s journal No. 126, available on line at arlinc.org). We inhabitants of Planet Earth will either control our numbers humanely and intelligently or Mother Nature will do it for us in a very unpleasant way.

Finally, a report in The Economist (UK) for August 23 notes that Africa’s population is expected to double to 2.4 billion by 2050, 2.2 billion in the sub-Sahara. With the Sahara desert slowly spreading southward, deforestation continuing, and barbarous fanatics like Nigeria’s Boko Haram (education = sin) running loose, we may well see more Rwandas.

Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious liberty and former president of the American Humanist Association, is a regular columnist in Free Inquiry.