The Loneliest Liberal:We need to rebrand

By James Knudsen

The United States of America’s system of government allows for periodic modifications. The process of amending the Constitution is well known and has been used 27 times, including for one amendment, the 21st, that repealed a previous amendment, the 18th. However, getting an amendment passed, first through Congress and then through the required three-quarters of the state legislatures, is a lengthy process and, unless it’s something really important – like the right to get blind drunk without running afoul of the local constabulary – you’re probably not going to be very successful. Did you know that over 11,000 amendments to the Constitution have been introduced in the U.S. Congress since 1789? I didn’t.

Senate Republicans meet in secrecy to address their President’s mental instability

Satire in the style of Andy Borowitz

By Moristotle

A handful of Republican Senators met behind barred doors this week to detail their plan to contain President Trump, remove his access to weapons, and have him evaluated.

As the World Turns: Control the throne

A new strategy for Democratic government

By Ed Rogers

From my most recent novel, Unwanted President:

Adam Weishaupt realized that the real power was with those who controlled the seat of power, not with the one who happened to be sitting on the throne. [p. 71]
    [President] Benton forgot the rule of rules: the power is always in the dark behind the throne. [p. 277]

Five Years Ago Today

Getting to know the devil

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 14, 2012, not one word different.]

I completed one of those political questionnaires yesterday that, besides seeking numbers to rank election issues, seeks to gauge how likely it is that you might donate money to the party. To a direct question whether I’ll donate, I checked the “no” box and found myself explaining, “I don’t have money to waste on stupid political money wars.”

Movie Review: The Most Hated Woman in America

Who is Madalyn Murray O’Hair

By Moristotle

Netflix’s latest streaming release, The Most Hated Woman in America, doesn’t flatter Madalyn Murray O’Hair, nor does it flatter the religious people who hated her for “standing up” (as she put it) for the First Amendment of the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom, including freedom not only to believe, but also not to believe. Her lawsuit, Murray v. Curlett, led to the landmark 1963 Supreme Court ruling that ended official Bible-reading in American public schools.

Tuesday Voice: The gun debate

Not that there’s a real conversation

By Tom Lowe

I’ve pretty much stayed out of the debate on guns that has taken place over the last year or so, suspecting that little impact on people’s reasoning was likely. Basically, I disagreed with the reasoning of all the positions articulated, that their frames of reference assumed a rationality I doubted existed; but I wasn’t clear why. The language of the Second Amendment seems clear [A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed], yet somehow the current dispute ignores the first half.

Getting to know the devil

I completed one of those political questionnaires yesterday that, besides seeking numbers to rank election issues, seeks to gauge how likely it is that you might donate money to the party. To a direct question whether I'll donate, I checked the "no" box and found myself explaining, "I don't have money to waste on stupid political money wars."
    And I was thinking, The one percent who are in a position to outspend me (and everyone else I know combined) already own most of the country anyway. Political campaigns anymore seem designed to make the poor poorer and the rich richer. I just don't care to participate in it.

Apropos that thought, a friend told me recently that he and his wife are moving to Costa Rica:

Costa Rica is like it was here in the 50s, only we still have all the goodies. The temp is 72 to 83 during the day and in the lower 60s at night. Spring year round. We can live there, for $1.500 a month. That includes everything.
    If the Dems lose big this year, you can kiss Medicare as we know it good-bye. Unlike the US, Costa Rica has in their Constitution that healthcare is a human right. Can you see the wonderful people of the good old USA agreeing with that?
    We may get down there and after a year hate it; but what the hell, we're not going to live forever and everybody needs one last great adventure.

    I told him that I would never do anything like that myself. But the only reason I could give him was, Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
    And I'm not even sure what that means.

Interestingly, when my wife and I were in Bulgaria last year, I found myself remarking, What if we retired here? (As you know, I often just find myself doing things, and more and more often, after reading Sam Harris's book Free Will, wonder why. In this case, I think I was just being whimsical.)
    However, out of curiosity, my wife checked into whether we could even collect our United States social security checks if we lived in Bulgaria. She found out we couldn't.
    I'm pretty sure my friend will be able to receive his social security checks in Costa Rica. I tried to confirm this by googling "in what countries can americans collect social security." The second link listed took me to a Social Security website that provided the following general information:

If you are a United States citizen, you may receive your Social Security benefits outside the United States as long as you are eligible for them. Regardless of your citizenship, there are certain countries that we are not allowed to send payments. For more information, please see the section titled Countries To Which We Cannot Send Payments in Your Payments While You Are Outside The United States (Publication No. 05-10137).
    If you are planning to be outside the United States for six consecutive calendar months or more, you can find out if you can receive your Social Security payment by using the Payments Abroad Screening Tool.

Costa Rica seems to be okay.
    Hmm, healthcare in its Constitution, eh? And what season was that year round?
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[Follow-up]

Nailed it (and no damn fooling)

The Letters editor of the Durham Herald-Sun telephoned me last night. She was going to run my letter in the morning.
    "You printed it this morning," I said.
    "No, tomorrow's will be your 'abominable things' letter."
    "I submitted that on Friday, right after reading Gordon Hansen's letter."
    "Oh?" she said. "I just received it this morning. Hmm, I'm going to have to check what else might not be being sent on to me....
    "You're right about religious rants," she said. "They do generate some interest. When letters have been kind of boring and one like that comes in, I'm glad to run it. And letters like yours, they're welcome anytime. Thank you for submitting them."

So, the game wasn't cancelled after all, although whatever happened that she didn't receive my letter immediately was a sort of rain delay.
    And it appears that I hadn't needed to soften my "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe any damn fool thing they want" in Friday's letter to "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want" in the one she printed yesterday.
    Good on you, Ms. Betsy O'Donovan!

Did you see my letter?" I asked my wife from the kitchen.
    "You nailed it," she said.
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Today's letter on the web

A former Baptist, that is

A fitting objet trouvé to accompany my letter in today's Durham Herald-Sun¹ sort of reached up this morning from p. 376 of Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, and tapped me on the shoulder. I found the objet in the chapter, "The Jewish Question," in which Hitchens explains how he discovered that he was a Jew and reports on his extensive investigations into his Semitic roots:

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions [I think these are the writings from which Mr. Gordon Hansen likes to select those that support his prejudices against gays and women], we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam....²

As ever and always, Christopher Hitchens, thank you, thank you for your mind and your heart.
_______________

1. The rest of the paragraph:

   Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for "mind" or "intellect," and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over "exile" or "return." It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the "messianic" Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

2. Today's letter on the web

A Baptist weighs in

Well, they haven't printed my letter in reply to Gordon Hansen, but they printed Larry Bumgardner's this morning, and that gives me an opportunity to try again:

Judging by Mr. Bumgardner's letter this morning ("Southern Baptists will apologize again"), my having been a Baptist^* confers on me, too, some authority to enter this conversation.
    Mr. Bumgardner writes: "Hanson [sic; “Hansen” according to the Sept. 30 edition] used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery…polygamy…stoning adulterous women…on and on."
    Quite right; the Bible is used to justify many incompatible things. What is one to conclude from this? God did NOT write the Bible; it is NOT His inspired word. Or, the Bible is no more inspired of God than, say, the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I can pick a word at random from the dictionary (or from any book whose language I can read) and "get an idea" that might (or might not) be helpful to me in solving a problem, being cheered up, making the right decision, or whatever I'm looking for. That's the nature of inspiration, the only inspiration we know.
    The First Amendment of our Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want, including that God wrote the Bible. That doesn't make it so—not when it flies in the face of facts and logic.
    If having been a Baptist qualifies me to say that, I suspect that Mr. Hansen would say that my use of logic disqualifies me.
    I’m not sure about Mr. Bumgardner. He too seems to be lapsed.

* Yes, I was a "First Baptist" for two or three years in high school, roughly fifty to fifty-five years ago. As well as I can remember, the church in the photo above—from somewhere on the Internet—could be the very one I attended (in Tulare, California).
_______________
In case the Herald's letters page should not be available for long), I include Mr. Bumgardner's letter here:

Southern Baptists will apologize again
I’m happy that Gordon Hanson wrote his letter (Sept. 30) objecting to my comments about Southern Baptist behavior. His letter speaks perfectly to the mindset that his children or grandchildren will one day be ashamed of.
    I am particularly qualified to speak of Southern Baptists since I was raised in that tradition and, up until about 15 years ago, was affiliated with them. Their decision to break from a longtime theological position referred to as the “priesthood of the believer” and switch to a top-down authoritarian rule demanding a belief in biblical inerrancy has decimated Southern Baptist ranks. Membership and baptisms continue to fall. I suspect their apology for slavery was motivated by their desire to pick up membership from similarly disposed black churches.
    Hanson used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery as his church years ago certainly did. He could justify polygamy, if he were so disposed. He could justify stoning adulterous women. The list goes on and on.
    The Bible Belt states have the highest incidence of divorce of any states in the union. The most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, has the lowest divorce rate. What is it those folks are trying to tell us about living a moral life? It sure isn’t by setting an example. Sooner or later, an apology or serious regret will be forthcoming. It’s just a matter of time.
                                    –Larry Bumgardner, Durham

Abominable subjects

Leviticus, of the Hebrew Bible

I've had enough of tsk-tsking at our local newspapers' printing religious diatribes in their Letters column. I've decided to just enjoy them for their humor. Upon reading the letter printed by Durham, North Carolina's Herald-Sun this morning under the title, "Regarding several abominable subjects," I wrote to thank the editor:

Dear Editor, thanks for continuing to print religious rants like that this morning of Gordon Hansen ("Regarding several abominable subjects"), for they are hugely entertaining, what with their statements like "God was very specific when he wrote Leviticus 18:22" and "If we read further, verses 24-26, we read that God will hold America responsible for the abominations committed here"—as though the ancient Israelite who wrote the verses (or the scribes who came along later and either intentionally or by mistake altered the original wording) had foreknowledge of nations formed millennia later! As I said, very amusing and for that reason much appreciated by adult readers on the lookout for irony.
    I can understand your desire to entertain your readers, but it seems to me that from an ethical point of view you maybe ought to let Mr. Hansen & Co. know that you're using them. While the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe any damn fool thing they want, it seems only fair to Mr. Hansen & Co. to let them know that that's not the main reason you publish their diverting opinions.

_______________

In case the Herald's letters page should not be available for long (for as long as I hope Moristotle will be available, anyway), I include Mr. Hansen's epistle here for posterity:

Regarding several abominable subjects
In the Sept. 28 Letters to the Editor, I read the letter by Larry Bumgardner of Durham. His statement was, “sooner or later Southern Baptists will apologize for their view on homosexuals, and their refusal to accept female ministers, just as they apologized for slavery over 100 years too late.”
    The question I would like answered according to God’s Word, the Bible, and not by liberal judges that for the most part deny the very existence of God, is this: Since God was very specific when he wrote Leviticus 18:22—“Thou shalt not lie with a male, as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” (NASB), which seems pretty clear to me—do we disregard what God has written or do we take the politically correct position to keep the liberals and that ilk happy?
    If we read further, verses 24-26, we read that God will hold America responsible for the abominations committed here.
    Also, one should read about Sodom and Gomorrah, when those cities became so immoral. God did not apologize and did not excuse their lifestyle, and neither should Southern Baptists who are born again.
    The second part of Bumgardner’s article concerns Southern Baptists who refuse to accept female ministers. I assume he would like someone to rewrite 1 Corthinians14:34-35. That to me is clear and concise. It reads: “Let your women keep silent in the church: for it is not permitted unto them to speak: but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.”
    If a woman wants to learn she should ask her husband or a Godly man. “Women speaking” refers to preaching and not conversations.
                                    –Gordon Hansen, Durham

We sort of have to make Mr. Hansen out to be a Vaudeville comedian, don't we? If we took him seriously, we'd be forced to weep rather than laugh.

You don't need God alive & well in Durham, NC

Madalyn Murray O'Hair
(1919-1995)

The Center for Inquiry, whose mission is "to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values," has posted "a big sign [in Durham, North Carolina that] proclaims: 'You don't need God to hope, to care, to love, to live,'" according to today's Durham Herald-Sun.
    The Center's spokesperson, Michelle A. Blackley, is quoted as saying, "The intention is to show you can live a positive life without religion." [At least, to proclaim it.]
    However, says the article (under the byline of Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, whose report seems objective),

David Silverman, president of American Atheists, thinks the Center for Inquiry billboard is too soft.
    "American Atheists believes billboards should call out atheists," he said. "So many are closeted because of the stigma."

What stigma? The American Atheists website identifies the organization to be nonprofit, nonpolitical, and educational, "dedicated to the complete and absolute separation of state and church, accepting the explanation of Thomas Jefferson that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was meant to create a 'wall of separation' between state and church." The Jeffersonian stigma, I suppose?
    American Atheists arose out of a court case begun in 1959 by the family of Madalyn Murray O'Hair that challenged prayer recitation in the public schools.

Another word game from Hitch-22

Indeed, that index entry on  p. 435 of Christopher Hitchens's memoir ("word games, ... 264-266") was good for another web log. It's from the chapter titled "Salman."

At all events there came a time when someone arrived late at a dinner party, complaining of having been stuck at an airport with nothing to read but a Robert Ludlum-style novel. This didn't seem worth pursuing until the complaint was refined somewhat: "I mean it's not just that the prose is so bloody awful but that the titles are so sodding pretentious...The Bourne Inheritance, The Eiger Sanctioni; all this portentous piffle." Again, not a subject to set the table afire, until someone idly said they wondered what a Shakespeare play would be called it if were Ludlum who had the naming of it. At once Salman was engaged and began to smile. "All right, Salman: Hamlet by Ludlum!" At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—"The Elsinore Vacillation." Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for Macbeth, he produced "The Dunsinane Reforestation" with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through "The Kerchief Implication," "The Rialto Sanction," and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember. [pp. 265-266]

    This chapter follows the one in which 9/11 figures prominently. And, in his chapter on Salman, there's much more to talk about in the way of theocratic religion. Hitchens, who I trust I've already demonstrated seems to have been on hand for everything politically major during his seniority, was dining with Edward Said one evening "in late 1987 or early 1988" when

a courier came bustling up from the Andrew Wylie Agency in Midtown. He bore a large box, which contained the manuscript of a forthcoming novel by Salmon Rushdie.... [p. 267]

    The note that came along with the manuscript asked Said for his view on what would be published as The Satanic Verses, for Rushdie thought that it might upset some of the faithful. My readers don't need to be reminded that the book's publication provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah sentencing Rushdie to death for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad and his wives.
    My readers should be able to predict what Hitchens said to the Washington Post when they telephoned for his opinion about the fatwah.

I felt at once that there was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian member of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... [ellipsis Hitchens's; p. 268]

I've been trying to think of a good example of the title word game. What The Satanic Verses would be called it if were Ann Coulter¹ who had the naming of it: "Blasphemy: Liberal Lies about the Religious Right"?
    Well, it's an example anyway.
_______________

1. Titles of her books:
   • High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
   • Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right
   • Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
   • How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
   • Godless: The Church of Liberalism
   • If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
   • Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America
   • Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

The more unbelievable, the greater the...

Thanks to Greg Houston
and indyweek.com

"The Republican Party's slapstick search for a leader," to quote Hal Crowther's August 17 article at indyweek.com ("Why does the right wing worship Ayn Rand?"), has provoked a fair amount of adult commentary this week.
    David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam reported in the August 16 New York Times ("Crashing the Tea Party") that

the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic....
    Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.
    Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about—lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like "atheists" [emphasis mine] and "Muslims." Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

    Less popular than atheists? The Christian Right unpopular? If true, this is very good news.
    We're all familiar with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. As I pointed out in "Political magical thinking" about a year ago, it "guarantees the right of the People to believe any damn fool thing they please."
    And they will.
    And the effect of their right to believe damn fool things is magnified by their tendency to make up for the foolishness of much of what they believe by believing it all the more fervently. The more incredible their beliefs, the stronger their belief in them. The greater the foolishness, the greater their faith in it.

Crowther suggests some examples of this foolishness:

Could we start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama's birth certificate or raised the specter of Shariah law in America, followed by briskly ushering offstage lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?....
    ...When tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole, when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns—there's a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when "conservatives" fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo's holster? I've reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I've never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner....

In John M. Broder's August 17 article in the Times ("Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race"), Michelle Bachmann is quoted from Iowa:

"I guarantee you the E.P.A. will have doors locked and lights turned off, and they will only be about conservation. It will be a new day and a new sheriff in Washington, D.C."
    In an earlier debate she said the agency should be renamed the "job-killing organization of America." She has called global-warming science a hoax.
    ...[She] wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.
    ...In his book, Fed Up, Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Mr. Perry described global-warming science as "one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight" and a "secular carbon cult" led by false prophets like Al Gore.
    But...the American people, by substantial majorities, are concerned about air and water pollution, and largely trust the E.P.A., national surveys say.

Another foolishness is the role sought for religion (Christianity, strikingly in parallel with the role Islamists seek for Islam). Say Campbell and Putnam:

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek "deeply religious" elected officials, approve of religious leaders' engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates....
    This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Governor Rick Perry of Texas....

Fideism is the philosophy, generally applied to theology, that beliefs may be held without evidence or reason, or even in conflict with evidence and reason. And, as I've pointed out, people tend to believe something all the more strongly if the evidence for it is weak or nonexistent (or if it conflicts with the evidence).
    The case of the Tea Party argues that all of this applies to political ideology as well as to theology.
    The Tea Party candidates' rampant ideological and religious foolishness has ascended to dizzying heights. Maybe—just maybe—Americans are starting to demand that they climb down before we all throw up. (I think that some of us already have.)

Protecting and defending the rights of women

From the back matter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 2010 memoir, Nomad: From Islam to America:

The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation was set up in 2008¹ as a charitable organization to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West, especially in the United States, against militant² Islam and harmful tribal customs. Its aim is to investigate, inform, and influence against several types of crimes against women, including the denial of education for girls, genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor violence, and restrictions on girls' freedom of movement.
    The AHA Foundation seeks to raise awareness in America that some of these violent practices against women are increasingly carried out in the United States. The foundation also exists to provide girls and women in distress with information and assistance, by creating a database of people and institutions qualified to deal with cases of maltreatment and abuse. [p. 275]

_______________

1. The AHA Foundation website gives 2007 as the year of foundation.
2. The use of "militant" here might be an attempt by the AHA Foundation to avoid the appearance of indicting Islam generally, but the tenor of Ms. Hirsi Ali's writings is that Islam generally promulgates values detrimental to women and personal freedom, due primarily to Islam's teaching that the Quran rules in all matters and that "Allah's laws" (including laws based on the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, who she said, "measured by our western standards, [was] a pervert") override all man-made laws. In other words, Islam, her writings seem to assert, is essentially totalitarian and therefore inimical to democracy, which would seem to raise some provocative questions about "freedom of religion" in America when it comes to Islam.

On the "exercise" of religion

As exemplified in last month's article in Harper's Magazine ("Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military"), some exercise of religion leads to evil consequences, and our Constitution's quashing of any law "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" [as it's phrased in the First Amendment] was ill-advised. The Constitution should have limited the "exercise of religion" to the confines of each person's own mind and private practice among consenting adults, the way various sexual activities are protected so long as they don't scare the horses.¹
_______________

1. "My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.” –attributed to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, British actress (1865-1940)
2. Or was it Lady Astor? At another website I found this quotation: "But it was Lady Astor, very much a Victorian, who said, 'You can do anything you like in public providing you don't frighten the horses.'"

Truce to the preposition war

That the First Amendment calls for a truce is obvious. When it comes to religion (and non-religion), there are many potentially warring factions, for even though there is essentially only one non-religion, there's a big raft of religions. And the first clause (the one that guarantees freedom from religion) doesn't protect just the non-religious (from religion generally); it also protects the followers of the various religions from each other's religion (from religions particularly).

Episcopaleans, for example, are fully as happy as I am not to have to indulge Evangelicals or Jehovah's Witnesses (or anyone else who "reads the Bible literally"). And the really true-believing religionists, of course, are generally happy not to have any truck with those agnostic or (horrors!) even atheistic Unitarians and Episcopaleans. And many Americans, including religious Christians and Jews as well as the non-religious, are a little jumpy right now about Muslims, not least because many of even the most religious-sounding Christians don't really take their religion quite as seriously as really believing Muslims do (probably not even Mitt Romney). (Islam after all means "submission [to God]," and Muslim "one who surrenders [to God].") And, of course, American Muslims are reciprocally a little uneasy living in a country whose current "president" (born-again, no less) talks about crusading in the Middle East. (Muslims who aren't Americans are a little uneasy about that too. Bush of course would remind us—since he no longer has Gonzales to do it—that those Muslims aren't protected by our Constitution....)

So, the first clause protects everybody (who is covered by the Constitution).

Whom does the second clause protect? It says, "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]." Since the non-religious don't "exercise religion," they have nothing for the second clause to protect. (Their interest in the First Amendment comes back into play in the third and following clauses.) So, the second clause is there to protect the religious, that they may go about "exercising" their religion "freely."

But what does "free exercise" mean? It must, of course, at least exclude actions that nullify the first clause....

The preposition war

The First Amendment might have been worded more clearly. While it emphatically guarantees freedom from religion (its first clause is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), it unfortunately fails to use that preposition, and its second clause does use the preposition of (albeit in the lawyerly relative "thereof"): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." [emphasis mine].

This unfortunate fact has given fuel not only to religionists, but also to politicians, to claim that the First Amendment is all about freedom of religion (that is, not in the least about freedom from).

The religionists, of course, don't need much fuel to start a fire, given that hellfire, they love to point out, is already right there in scripture.

I don't know whether the man who (to paraphrase Al Gore) used to be the next Vice President of the United States¹ got his fuel from scripture (the Torah in his case) or from preposition-parsing, but in an article in the February 19, 2001 issue of The Nation, on how politicians pander to the religious in campaigning, Ellen Willis wrote:

Lieberman was even bolder [than Gore, who had divulged that he was "born-again"]: He responded to what he called the "miracle" of his nomination with repeated public professions of faith in God, along with declarations that religion is the basis of morality and that the Constitution provides "freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." [my emphasis]

Irresponsible, inflammatory political rhetoric doesn't help our enlightenment when it misinterprets the Constitution and proclaims falsehoods about the basis of morality, which is evolutionary, not religious.
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1. Gore's running mate, you may remember, was Joseph I. Lieberman, U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He was, by the way, a member of my baccalaureate class at Yale.

Celebrating my blog's new tag line

Until a few moments ago, the tag line on my blog masthead was "A Journal of Dissent." As I told my friend Keith this morning:

"A Journal of Dissent" doesn't satisfy me, but I haven't figured out a better tag yet. You seemed to take "dissent" as political, but that's not what I had in mind. Not exclusively, anyway. My posts on Mitt Romney, for example, were of course political in that he's running for political office. But I intended my comments to be more on religion than on politics, on how in America people seem to assume that you have to be religious. Romney's rhetoric, for example, simply doesn't recognize non-religion (or nontheism, as the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts it) as being acceptable here; he even implies that people without faith in god aren't legitimate U.S. citizens. I'm particularly disgusted at the way he and others distort the views of the freethinkers among our founding fathers and co-opt them for partisan purposes.

I'm also unhappy with "dissent" because it is negative rather than affirmative....

Well, as usual, merely setting myself a problem (in words) quickly led to a solution (while I was outside clearing some drains). Hence the new tag line:

Celebrating our constitutional freedom from religion (while we still have it¹)

My text, of course, is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let's celebrate!
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1. Several hours later: Rather than "while we still have it," my original parenthetical was for a few hours "and other popular delusions." While I savored its ambiguity (is religion the delusion, or the assumption that we are constitutionally free from it?), two things bothered me. First, I don't think the First Amendment can be interpreted to guarantee freedom from delusions generally, however extraordinary they are or how mad they make crowds². Second, and more important, a lot of my friends and relatives are religious. I offend some of them enough already without implying in my masthead that religion is a delusion.
2. In 1841, Charles Mackay published a book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

At the suggestion of a friend, I have also changed my profile photo.

Mitt Romney would not enlighten us

When it comes to the question I concluded by asking on Friday, How could belief in believing [that is, in faith as opposed to knowing based on evidence] have come to have such sway over Americans, we citizens of a nation born of Enlightenment political philosophy?, Mitt Romney pretty decisively identified himself as such a believer by this sentence from his religion speech:

Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals [of Europe] now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer.

Don't miss the significance of those quotation marks.

As Roger Cohen put it Thursday in his op-ed piece in The New York Times:

Europe’s cathedrals are indeed “so inspired, so grand, so empty,” as Mitt Romney, a Mormon, put it last week in charting his vision of a faith-based presidency. Some do not survive at all. The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor....

Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, was dismissive of European societies “too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer.” He thereby pointed to what has become the principal transatlantic cultural divide.

Europeans still take the Enlightenment seriously enough not to put it inside quote marks [emphasis mine]. They have long found an inspiring reflection of it in the first 16 words of the American Bill of Rights of 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

...Bush is no transient phenomenon; he is the expression of a new American religiosity. Romney’s speech and the rapid emergence of the anti-Darwin Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as a rival suggest how estranged the American zeitgeist is from the European.

At a time when growing numbers of Americans identify themselves as born-again evangelicals, and creationism is no joke, Romney essentially pitted the faithful against the faithless while attempting to merge Mormonism in mainstream Christianity. Where Kennedy said he believed in a “president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Romney pledged not to “separate us from our religious heritage.”

...Religion informed America’s birth. But its distancing from politics was decisive to the republic’s success. Indeed, the devastating European experience of religious war influenced the founders’ thinking. That is why I find Romney’s speech and the society it reflects far more troubling than Europe’s vacant cathedrals.

Romney allows no place in the United States for atheists. He opines that, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Yet secular Sweden is free while religious Iran is not....

Oh yeah, we sure do want some more unreality-based political leadership, don't we?