For the first time in quite a while, I am honestly pleased at something Barack Obama has done.
Recently, as part of the new healthcare legislation that has been passed, it has been mandated by his administration that all employers must provide insurance options that cover contraception for women, making it so every woman in America can have access to "co-pay or deductible-free well-woman visits, screening for gestational diabetes, breast-feeding support, domestic violence screening and all FDA approved birth control methods -- including emergency contraception such as the morning-after pill." Again, that is free and available women's health support to every woman who has insurance; admittedly, there are still far too many people without insurance, even with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, but it is quite frankly an unprecedented step for American politics, namely, that they would care about women being healthy, or having control over their own bodies. It's the kind of awesome thing that the more optimistic types expected from Obama at the start, but never happened. Better late than never, I suppose.
Of course, in the face of this, the hordes of women-haters from the American right wing and their buddies in the religious establishment just will not stand for freedom for anyone but themselves. They have tried to frame this issue, hilariously, as one of religious freedom; they say that not being able to deny women potentially life-saving care is a "direct challenge to the fundamental beliefs of Catholics and are directly contrary to the Catholic faith"; the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, called it an "unprecedented incursion into freedom of conscience,"and Rick Santorum, our favorite frothy-mouthed presidential candidate, said at CPAC that "It's not about contraception, it's about economic liberty, it's about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of religion, it's about government control of your lives." Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League and quite possibly my least favorite human being on the planet, rounded these protests off in typically batshit fashion, announcing that “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.”
... There is so much to analyze in just those four quotes. Admittance that Catholic doctrine advocates against equality and autonomy for women, "freedom of conscience" equaling oppression, capitalism, and a call for outright revolution to protect their inane and backwards beliefs. And frankly, it's all horseshit. As Amanda Marcotte points out, this is not about religious freedom in the slightest, but about maintaining gender divisions and hierarchy. Catholics as a whole are in favor of the mandate by a sizable majority, and in fact Catholic women use birth control just as much as do other women, but the kicker is the fact that far more men are against this new law than are women. Huh. Imagine that. A majority of men want women to be unhealthy and unsafe, and to be controlled by men. No sir, officer, no patriarchy here. Uh uh.
So, after all of this madness exploded, President Obama announced that he was working on a compromise that would make everybody happy. And my heart sank. Oh shit, I thought: here we go again. Another backdown from the administration that will further eradicate my nonexistent faith in the man.
Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that Obama has well and truly done a number on the haters. Now, religiously affiliated universities, hospitals, etc now don't have to provide contraception through their own policies, but insurance companies can now provide such care directly if the employers object. So, religious institutions still get to officially hate women, but no matter what, women will be able to get contraceptive care. It's quite frankly a brilliant move, and my hat is well and truly off to the President. Start pulling this kind of stuff more often, and you might make me a fan yet. Y'know, if you stop torturing people and prosecuting whistleblowers. That's still the kicker.
In news closer to home, it turns out that the school I attend, DePaul University, the nation's largest Catholic university, already provides contraception in its health insurance plan for its employees, which is awesome, and keeps up with the institution's habit of pissing off the Church for things like not hating queer people and the like. However, there is still a rather large elephant in the room when it comes to their health policies, namely that it is not permitted to distribute contraception of any form on campus, that our Office of Sexual Violence Support Services has only one employee to deal with all of the issues that may arise on campus, and furthermore that the code relating to sexual violence is difficult to find and woefully written and organized. There is not even a centralized student health office; those duties have been farmed out to an outside practice, Sage Medical Group, which any patient of will know is not necessarily the best place to go even for small procedures, much less assault counseling. For a university of 25,000 students in one of the biggest cities in the country, this is quite frankly a pitiful state of affairs.
Why am I talking about DePaul in this? I mention these issues to illustrate that, despite the new government regulations on contraception described above, there is a very, very long way to go in this country before proper health care for not just women, but all Americans, is not just offered, but easily accessible. Just because this fight seems to be going in the right direction does not mean that we can stop and pat the President and ourselves on the back: there is so much more to do, on DePaul's campus and across the country. So by all means, we should congratulate Obama and DePaul on their steps forward, but we can''t let them off the hook until full coverage is achieved.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Not Atheism, but Secularism
The opinions of this post do not necessarily reflect the positions of the membership of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought.
There has been much talk recently, on In Our Words and elsewhere, about the circumstance of being religious and yet also devoted to progressive activist causes that contravene the tenets of one's faith. Relatedly, I have also engaged in many conversations about "New Atheism" and how it should approach such people and activism in general; unfortunately, in my view, many of those who I have encountered in such conversations believe that we should be essentially preaching atheism, looking to convert the religious as we without faith have so often been targeted for conversion to faith. I believe this to be a position that is untenable if we as a secular movement are to truly do without the trappings of organized religion, and so in this post I will examine these two phenomena in light of some recent developments in secular activism, and provide an alternative to such preaching that allows us as a movement to continue with a proactive, rather than domineering, message.
It is easy to forget in places like Chicago and New York and other more cosmopolitan areas of this nation that atheists stand as the most disliked and distrusted group of people in the United States of America: as Julian Baggini discovered on a recent journey around the country, it is one of the last big taboos existing in America. His piece documents numerous people who have been isolated by their friends and families for simply admitting their nonbelief. Our country's longest standing institution, bigotry, truly does extend to every group that is not white, male, rich, straight, and Christian.
One story that Baggini did not cover is, I think, one of the most important. Two years ago, a Rhode Island high school student named Jessica Ahlquist noticed that her public school, Cranston West, had an official school prayer emblazoned on a banner in their gymnasium. Such an exhibition is, of course, in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and Ahlquist, an atheist, found herself feeling marginalized by it. She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the former sent a letter to the school district asking the prayer to be removed, and offers a fine explanation of the issue at hand:
Being such an open and shut case, one might think that the district would understand how in the wrong they were and take down the banner and have that be that, with no legal battle having to ensue. Ahlquist went and sat in at the school board meetings deliberating on the issue, and found that not just the board, but most of the town and her classmates were fighting for the banner to remain. In fact, when she spoke out against the banner, Ahlquist had to be escorted by police from the school due to the volume and seriousness of the abuse against her.
The abuse did not stop. She was threatened regularly at school, as well as in the community, especially so when the ACLU filed suit against the town. In the end, the ruling was granted in her favor, as expected, but since then she has continued to receive a sickening volume of threats, many violent in nature, and she has been given police escorts during and after school, and the police has deemed several serious enough that they are worth criminally investigating. Through it all, she has stood tall and spoken incredibly eloquently on behalf of herself and her cause, and is a credit to all activists dedicated to equality everywhere.
Jessica's story is sadly not unique. Damon Fowler had his entire town, including his parents, turn against him for speaking out against prayer in his school, to the point where his parents kicked him out of their house. Eric James Borges, a gay teen, recently committed suicide after his fundamentalist Christian family tried to perform an exorcism on him and made his life toxic and unbearable. There are far too many stories that follow this pattern.
Why am I writing about these events? They are to illuminate my belief that religion of this sort, so discriminatory, so bigoted, so unthinkingly horrible, is near-fully enmeshed with American life, and that it needs to be stopped. There is no good to come, I believe, for establishments of religion to have any role beyond the private lives of their adherents and in charitable causes. There is no reason for a religious organization to have any influence or involvement with matters of politics or public life, because it has never, to my knowledge, resulted in any good. It only results in the kind of awful sexist and patriarchal abuse of the sort suffered by Jessica Ahlquist, and other varieties of bigotry aside.
I say this with a very large caveat; I am not the sort of Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens atheist who believes religion needs to be destroyed, or cast away entirely. I am more than well aware of the good that can and has been done by more liberal sects, and I stand behind them as much as I am able, so long as they would remain committed to such good works. As Patton Oswalt rather wonderfully details, I don't give a damn why or who with you are working for social justice and to make the world a more equal and fairer place, just so long as you are. Whether it's because you believe Jesus or Mohammed or Mahavira or Athena tell you to, or you just have rationally deduced that it is the right thing to do, it does not matter. Solidarity and collective effort are everything in the fight against the kind of intolerance that has dogged Jessica Ahlquist and the others mentioned previously.
In the end, however, thought we can and must work with our friends of faith for equality, we cannot, as James Croft recently explored, end up maintaining religion's place of privilege in our society. At the end of the day, Christianity and Hinduism and all the rest are superstitious belief systems with no grounding in fact or rationality, and as such do not deserve any sort of privilege. But to the point I made before regarding converting people to atheism, we must not as secular people turn around and place rationality or empiricism or any of the various methods we use to examine the world on a pedestal. It already happens; I encounter atheists who never question authors like Harris and Dawkins because they are the Most Rational, The Best Atheists, and so on. But they have to be, because the fact of the matter is that most of the mainstream atheist writers do not so much as mention activism or social justice issues as worthy pursuits, instead sticking to high-minded academic arenas such as historical instances of organized religion's awfulness, or scientific proofs against the Bible, and so on. These are extremely important areas to know and understand, but they do not relate us to the wider world at large. Sikivu Hutchinson, in her brilliant book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, puts it best:
Thus, I come to my ultimate point: making an argument for atheism as a preaching movement, as one that actively seeks to convert, is wrapped up in the same hierarchical, holier-than-thou rhetoric that allows religions to go out and try to do the same thing. However, by working to remove religion from the institutions of the state, to eliminate their influence over politicians and those who hold power in our country, we can actually make progress in making the United States a more free and equal place. We must work to secularize our government, not turn them all into atheists. The latter is simply not tenable, and ignores the good that religious motivation can do. Our worldview is no more privileged or better because we have the evidence and common sense on our side: what matters is how we act as citizens in the world. If we do not work for change, then we are no better than the religious fundamentalists we love to criticize.
There has been much talk recently, on In Our Words and elsewhere, about the circumstance of being religious and yet also devoted to progressive activist causes that contravene the tenets of one's faith. Relatedly, I have also engaged in many conversations about "New Atheism" and how it should approach such people and activism in general; unfortunately, in my view, many of those who I have encountered in such conversations believe that we should be essentially preaching atheism, looking to convert the religious as we without faith have so often been targeted for conversion to faith. I believe this to be a position that is untenable if we as a secular movement are to truly do without the trappings of organized religion, and so in this post I will examine these two phenomena in light of some recent developments in secular activism, and provide an alternative to such preaching that allows us as a movement to continue with a proactive, rather than domineering, message.
It is easy to forget in places like Chicago and New York and other more cosmopolitan areas of this nation that atheists stand as the most disliked and distrusted group of people in the United States of America: as Julian Baggini discovered on a recent journey around the country, it is one of the last big taboos existing in America. His piece documents numerous people who have been isolated by their friends and families for simply admitting their nonbelief. Our country's longest standing institution, bigotry, truly does extend to every group that is not white, male, rich, straight, and Christian.
One story that Baggini did not cover is, I think, one of the most important. Two years ago, a Rhode Island high school student named Jessica Ahlquist noticed that her public school, Cranston West, had an official school prayer emblazoned on a banner in their gymnasium. Such an exhibition is, of course, in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and Ahlquist, an atheist, found herself feeling marginalized by it. She contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the former sent a letter to the school district asking the prayer to be removed, and offers a fine explanation of the issue at hand:
Rhode Island, as a pluralistic state founded on religious freedom, should be particularly sensitive to the divisiveness of government-sponsored displays promoting religion. While students remain free to privately pray at appropriate times, prayer does not need, nor should it have, the guiding hand of government for its effectuation. No student should be forced to attend his or her public school only at the cost of being subject to a religious message that may run directly counter to his or her deeply-held beliefs.
Being such an open and shut case, one might think that the district would understand how in the wrong they were and take down the banner and have that be that, with no legal battle having to ensue. Ahlquist went and sat in at the school board meetings deliberating on the issue, and found that not just the board, but most of the town and her classmates were fighting for the banner to remain. In fact, when she spoke out against the banner, Ahlquist had to be escorted by police from the school due to the volume and seriousness of the abuse against her.
The abuse did not stop. She was threatened regularly at school, as well as in the community, especially so when the ACLU filed suit against the town. In the end, the ruling was granted in her favor, as expected, but since then she has continued to receive a sickening volume of threats, many violent in nature, and she has been given police escorts during and after school, and the police has deemed several serious enough that they are worth criminally investigating. Through it all, she has stood tall and spoken incredibly eloquently on behalf of herself and her cause, and is a credit to all activists dedicated to equality everywhere.
Jessica's story is sadly not unique. Damon Fowler had his entire town, including his parents, turn against him for speaking out against prayer in his school, to the point where his parents kicked him out of their house. Eric James Borges, a gay teen, recently committed suicide after his fundamentalist Christian family tried to perform an exorcism on him and made his life toxic and unbearable. There are far too many stories that follow this pattern.
Why am I writing about these events? They are to illuminate my belief that religion of this sort, so discriminatory, so bigoted, so unthinkingly horrible, is near-fully enmeshed with American life, and that it needs to be stopped. There is no good to come, I believe, for establishments of religion to have any role beyond the private lives of their adherents and in charitable causes. There is no reason for a religious organization to have any influence or involvement with matters of politics or public life, because it has never, to my knowledge, resulted in any good. It only results in the kind of awful sexist and patriarchal abuse of the sort suffered by Jessica Ahlquist, and other varieties of bigotry aside.
I say this with a very large caveat; I am not the sort of Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens atheist who believes religion needs to be destroyed, or cast away entirely. I am more than well aware of the good that can and has been done by more liberal sects, and I stand behind them as much as I am able, so long as they would remain committed to such good works. As Patton Oswalt rather wonderfully details, I don't give a damn why or who with you are working for social justice and to make the world a more equal and fairer place, just so long as you are. Whether it's because you believe Jesus or Mohammed or Mahavira or Athena tell you to, or you just have rationally deduced that it is the right thing to do, it does not matter. Solidarity and collective effort are everything in the fight against the kind of intolerance that has dogged Jessica Ahlquist and the others mentioned previously.
In the end, however, thought we can and must work with our friends of faith for equality, we cannot, as James Croft recently explored, end up maintaining religion's place of privilege in our society. At the end of the day, Christianity and Hinduism and all the rest are superstitious belief systems with no grounding in fact or rationality, and as such do not deserve any sort of privilege. But to the point I made before regarding converting people to atheism, we must not as secular people turn around and place rationality or empiricism or any of the various methods we use to examine the world on a pedestal. It already happens; I encounter atheists who never question authors like Harris and Dawkins because they are the Most Rational, The Best Atheists, and so on. But they have to be, because the fact of the matter is that most of the mainstream atheist writers do not so much as mention activism or social justice issues as worthy pursuits, instead sticking to high-minded academic arenas such as historical instances of organized religion's awfulness, or scientific proofs against the Bible, and so on. These are extremely important areas to know and understand, but they do not relate us to the wider world at large. Sikivu Hutchinson, in her brilliant book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, puts it best:
New Atheist discourse purports to be “beyond” all that meddlesome stuff. After all, science has been cleaned up to redress the atrocities of the past. The “bad” racist eugenicist science and scientists of back in the day have been purged. Religionists of all stripes are merely obstacles to achieving greater enlightenment in the generic name of science and reason. Race and gender hierarchies within the scientific establishment are immaterial when it comes to determining the overall thrust and urgency of the New Atheism. Non-believers who argue for a more nuanced approach to or progressive understanding of the political, social, and cultural appeal of religion are toady apologists. Religious bigotry and discrimination are deemed the greatest threat to “civilized” Western societies. As delineated by many white non-believers the New Atheism preserves and reproduces the status quo of white supremacy in its arrogant insularity. In this universe, oppressed minorities are more imperiled by their own investment in organized religion than white supremacy. Liberation is not a matter of fighting against white racism, sexism and classism but of throwing off the shackles of superstition.
Thus, I come to my ultimate point: making an argument for atheism as a preaching movement, as one that actively seeks to convert, is wrapped up in the same hierarchical, holier-than-thou rhetoric that allows religions to go out and try to do the same thing. However, by working to remove religion from the institutions of the state, to eliminate their influence over politicians and those who hold power in our country, we can actually make progress in making the United States a more free and equal place. We must work to secularize our government, not turn them all into atheists. The latter is simply not tenable, and ignores the good that religious motivation can do. Our worldview is no more privileged or better because we have the evidence and common sense on our side: what matters is how we act as citizens in the world. If we do not work for change, then we are no better than the religious fundamentalists we love to criticize.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Croft's Response and Some Clarifications
So, I'm going to be the first to admit that my piece at In Our Words today is, organizationally, not my best. I tend to write shorter pieces there because I spend my life writing 15+ page opuses on Rousseau and conceptual art, and because I know no one who reads that site wants my take on the nature of ethical and political and linguistic quandaries a la Quine, Levinas, Nussbaum, etc. As such, this particular piece is distinctly lacking, when it should have been more robust in this issue. Especially as it deals with a topic that has caused much miscommunication, bickering, and name-calling, I should have done my damnedest to be as clear as possible, and I did not. For that, I'm sorry, and the lesson has been learned.
So, here I go.
So, here I go.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Rick Perry's Ad
Dear readers, another Republican has come out of the closet. That's right: Rick Perry has decided that he's not afraid any more, and has to let a deep secret be known: he's a privileged, homophobic ass.
Not exactly a revelatory statement. The video really is just a desperate ploy by Perry, previous not-Mitt Romney Republican frontrunner to remain relevant in an election campaign that has long since shot him in the knee and left him for dead by the side of the road. This video is absurd, and awful, and seemingly just the sort of thing that should be ignored and pushed to the side in a supposedly civilized society like ours. But, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that is not a viable option.
See, the reason why this video has resonated so much is not simply because of its blatant bigotry, but instead because its warped view of reality is one that is at the forefront of rightwing policy. Sikivu Hutchinson, one of my absolute favorite writers and someone EVERYONE needs to be reading, put it perfectly:
That's right, folks. In the United States, the nation with the highest percentage of Christians in the population in the world, the Jesus-lovers are now a minority and the homo atheist socialists are in control. At least, that's what the Republicans would like you to believe. Personally, I wish with all my might it was true, but that's just me.
Christian nationalism is very much a thing, people. The Ricks Perry and Santorum would like nothing more than our country to become a theocracy, with Pat Robertson at its head. They may not have poll numbers of any relevance, but they have still been elected, in some cases repeatedly, and they have many, many allies in Congress and other branches of government.
I don't think I have to tell you what would happen if they actually managed to be elected to higher offices. They all hate non-straight people openly, hate non-whites a smidge less openly, and if Perry's record as Governor of Texas is any indication, have itchy trigger fingers and plenty of weapons for them. Their platforms are the old fascism of the 30s and 40s wearing new faces. We can deride them, and we should do that, but we must not let that derision stop us from taking these people seriously. They have the capacity to make things awful for all of us, not just make our brains drip out our ears with their inanity.
Not exactly a revelatory statement. The video really is just a desperate ploy by Perry, previous not-Mitt Romney Republican frontrunner to remain relevant in an election campaign that has long since shot him in the knee and left him for dead by the side of the road. This video is absurd, and awful, and seemingly just the sort of thing that should be ignored and pushed to the side in a supposedly civilized society like ours. But, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that is not a viable option.
See, the reason why this video has resonated so much is not simply because of its blatant bigotry, but instead because its warped view of reality is one that is at the forefront of rightwing policy. Sikivu Hutchinson, one of my absolute favorite writers and someone EVERYONE needs to be reading, put it perfectly:
In American politics, patriotism, race-baiting and faith-based pandering are the last refuge of a scoundrel. And this political season militant GOP appeals to white Christian evangelicals have veered into neo-Cold War hysteria. One of the most powerful scenes in Orwell’s 1984 was when Party member O’Brien succeeds in brainwashing protagonist Winston Smith into believing that 2+2 equals 5. The Religious Right has been practically virtuosic in its 2+2=5 mass doublespeak; convincing mainstream America that Christians are the new minority and that commie pinko “secular progressives” (Bill O’Reilly’s preferred “smear”) are at the helm of a socialist conspiracy.
That's right, folks. In the United States, the nation with the highest percentage of Christians in the population in the world, the Jesus-lovers are now a minority and the homo atheist socialists are in control. At least, that's what the Republicans would like you to believe. Personally, I wish with all my might it was true, but that's just me.
Christian nationalism is very much a thing, people. The Ricks Perry and Santorum would like nothing more than our country to become a theocracy, with Pat Robertson at its head. They may not have poll numbers of any relevance, but they have still been elected, in some cases repeatedly, and they have many, many allies in Congress and other branches of government.
I don't think I have to tell you what would happen if they actually managed to be elected to higher offices. They all hate non-straight people openly, hate non-whites a smidge less openly, and if Perry's record as Governor of Texas is any indication, have itchy trigger fingers and plenty of weapons for them. Their platforms are the old fascism of the 30s and 40s wearing new faces. We can deride them, and we should do that, but we must not let that derision stop us from taking these people seriously. They have the capacity to make things awful for all of us, not just make our brains drip out our ears with their inanity.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Cain and Gingrich
Comedians and pundits all across the country let out a great sigh of disappointment a few weeks ago when Herman Cain dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination for the presidency. The mounting pile of allegations of sexual harassment against him just proved too much for the Pokemon and pizza enthusiast who was generous with material for Jon Stewart.
Now, though, his supporters have moved to support Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and the only other person in the race who could be said to have an even more horrifying history with women than Cain. This is the guy who was not just cheating on his wife with another woman before and during when said wife was in a hospital bed recovering from cancer treatments, but actually brought a handwritten contract for their divorce and presented them to her in said hospital bed, then refused several months later to pay alimony or child support. He was cheating on his second wife with his current wife when he was leading the witch hunt against Bill Clinton. It's safe to say that he is a fucking atrocious example of a human being from just those tidbits, but there is so much more. From Lawrence Lewis at Daily Kos:
The rest of that particular article provides a laundry list of his horribleness. Every action he took while in officer seemed to explicitly benefit himself or the wealthy who bankrolled his and his party's campaigns, while waging war against food stamps and other such welfare programs for the poorest in America. His actions became so reprehensible that he was the first Speaker ever to be disciplined for ethics violations. Lovely person, isn't he?
His actions have been so outrageous that after a short period, many conservative intellectuals (I use the term cautiously) are turning against him. George Will said that Gingrich "embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive." Peter King, the biggest Irish Republican Army fanboy in Congress, says that Newt "lacks the capacity to control himself." Finally, Peggy Noonan makes the point that the people most worried about him becoming President are those who worked with him.
Not exactly a stirring endorsement by anyone but himself, then. Imagine that.
Now, though, his supporters have moved to support Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and the only other person in the race who could be said to have an even more horrifying history with women than Cain. This is the guy who was not just cheating on his wife with another woman before and during when said wife was in a hospital bed recovering from cancer treatments, but actually brought a handwritten contract for their divorce and presented them to her in said hospital bed, then refused several months later to pay alimony or child support. He was cheating on his second wife with his current wife when he was leading the witch hunt against Bill Clinton. It's safe to say that he is a fucking atrocious example of a human being from just those tidbits, but there is so much more. From Lawrence Lewis at Daily Kos:
The politics of Newt Gingrich are obvious. Not only is he a cookie-cutter Republican champion of the 1 percent, he also is an enemy of the 99 percent. A typical Republican hypocrite on fiscal responsibility, he espouses a balanced budget but after voting for the policies of Reagan and the elder Bush that created the largest federal deficits in history, he then voted against the Bush tax increases that were meant to begin to address them. He then voted against the Clinton tax increases on the wealthy that helped balance the budget and spark the economic boom that created near full employment. And while opposing most of the best of President Clinton's policies, he supported President Clinton's worst policies.
The rest of that particular article provides a laundry list of his horribleness. Every action he took while in officer seemed to explicitly benefit himself or the wealthy who bankrolled his and his party's campaigns, while waging war against food stamps and other such welfare programs for the poorest in America. His actions became so reprehensible that he was the first Speaker ever to be disciplined for ethics violations. Lovely person, isn't he?
His actions have been so outrageous that after a short period, many conservative intellectuals (I use the term cautiously) are turning against him. George Will said that Gingrich "embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive." Peter King, the biggest Irish Republican Army fanboy in Congress, says that Newt "lacks the capacity to control himself." Finally, Peggy Noonan makes the point that the people most worried about him becoming President are those who worked with him.
Not exactly a stirring endorsement by anyone but himself, then. Imagine that.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Language and Community
In the past few years, as the atheist movement has really begun to gain traction and grow, it has become generally accepted in the community that trying to organize a bunch of nonbelievers is akin to herding cats. Since what could arguably be called the beginning of the movement in 2004, there hasn't really been a huge emphasis on activism; especially in America, where atheists are among the most loathed people in the country, most organizations have been focusing more on building safe communities rather than getting out and making change. The rationale is entirely logical, but as I've written before, I feel strongly that there needs to be a shift in the movement towards activism.
But how does that happen? I return to the herding cats metaphor. Over the past several years, all kinds of different organizations for nonbelievers have either formed or come to prominence: the American Humanist Association, American Atheists, the Secular Coalition of America, the Center for Inquiry, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Secular Student Alliance, to name but a few. Each organization is ostensibly working towards the same goal of making the country more welcoming for nonbelievers, but all have different methods, or are more focused on certain things: the FFRF is a legal body that works to maintain separation of church and state, the Secular Coalition lobbies in Washington, etc. With each group comes their own egos and beliefs, and thus, conflicts.
Back in October, the Boston Globe published a story about the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy, an organization at that university which is "dedicated to building, educating, and nurturing a diverse community of Humanists, atheists, agnostics, and the nonreligious at Harvard and beyond." And, as you might have guessed from the name, their community takes on many aspects of what could be called, well, a church service. The head of the organization, Greg Epstein, has the title of chaplain. James Croft, who occasionally writes at In Our Words, says that just because they "leave behind their religious beliefs doesn’t mean they stop having those needs. But secular society has not yet come up with a way to give them moments of significance with the same level of beauty and care that goes into religious ceremonies. That is a big gap.’’
There was a lot of blowback on this issue from nonbelievers of all sorts, especially PZ Myers of Pharyngula, whose response you can read here. Rather than re-hash all of the arguments for and against, I want to take issue with the nature of the HHC's language, which, above all, seems to be the main complaint from detractors of the organization. I should point out here that I am not a linguist; I'm not about to infuriate you by nitpicking every root and ending of a word and completely ignore the context. (I've just had a very infuriating run-in with a linguist in a Facebook debate. They're on my shitlist at the moment). I'm much more interested in why the HHC is so desperate to align themselves with religious images.
Take, for instance, Croft's quote from the paragraph before: secular society, he says, does not offer the same kinds of significance and beauty that religious ceremonies supposedly provide. Not being a regular churchgoer myself, and relying on my experiences as a troublemaking seven year old who hated Sunday school because I had books about the Big Bang and space travel which were SO MUCH COOLER than the Jesus fellow... I just don't understand what he means. To me, church has always looked like this:
Take, for instance, Croft's quote from the paragraph before: secular society, he says, does not offer the same kinds of significance and beauty that religious ceremonies supposedly provide. Not being a regular churchgoer myself, and relying on my experiences as a troublemaking seven year old who hated Sunday school because I had books about the Big Bang and space travel which were SO MUCH COOLER than the Jesus fellow... I just don't understand what he means. To me, church has always looked like this:
Not too much exciting about your typical Christian service, I would wager. So, what is Croft talking about? The only thing that seems to make any sense in this context is the spiritual part of religion: the great sense of belonging, everyone believing in one thing, maybe being inspired by the tone or content of the man in fancy robes standing at the front of everyone. In essence, the irrational, hive-mind aspect of religion. The part that's at the core of our resistance against religion.
The thing is, as far as I can tell, the HHC doesn't really do that sort of thing. They have potlucks and philosophical debates and guest speakers who talk about things like discrimination against atheists in the military. The Globe article mentioned meditation, but that's hardly supernatural in character: even fanboy darling Sam Harris does that kind of thing, and attempts to explain it using neuroscience. In essence, all very rational activities that are not based on any kind of dogma. Yet, both Croft and Epstein claim that the HHC fulfills that supposedly missing aspect of secular society, something that the latter claims in that Globe piece that groups like the Secular Student Alliance cannot. Yet, they deal in the rational, while that missing piece they talk about seems to be entirely irrational.
I'm not hating on the HHC here. I'm not interested in burning bridges or yelling at anyone unless they really deserve it. I think they're a good organization doing interesting and important work, and boy is that Chris Stedman a charming little hipster. (Seriously, though. He is.) But I do find their language problematic for its religious connotations, especially in a movement that is so supposedly based on rationality as ours is. That "supposedly," by the way, is a topic for a whole other righteous rage piece. But another time.
I hope this is taken as a constructive criticism, and if I have indeed mischaracterized James' statement, I'd love for him to correct me; print journalism these days doesn't necessarily always quote in context. I'm not PZ Myers, though I do love him: I'm just a perpetually furious progressive philosophy major searchin' for some truths. Or something like that.
I hope this is taken as a constructive criticism, and if I have indeed mischaracterized James' statement, I'd love for him to correct me; print journalism these days doesn't necessarily always quote in context. I'm not PZ Myers, though I do love him: I'm just a perpetually furious progressive philosophy major searchin' for some truths. Or something like that.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Yes, Virginia, We Can Be Mad at Obama.
Ah, 2008. Remember that year? That was a fun time. Television writer's strike, Eliot Spitzer got taken down for being anti-Wall Street, the first blows of our economic catastrofuck, and the country was all aflutter for Barack Obama, that suave, eloquent, handsome Senator man from Chicago who played basketball and unapologetically smoked weed during his college years. His speeches were rousing, he had a catchy slogan, and with grouchy Old Man McCain as his opponent, he was always going to be the popular choice.
Predictably, he swept into office on the back of his message of hope and change, and even more predictably, he has unequivocally failed to deliver on his promises. In fact, he's been doing his finest George W. Bush impression: despite ordering the closing of Guantanamo Bay, it hasn't happened. He let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans be renewed. He has extended the Patriot Act. He has been the worst president for whistleblowers in history, and has turned a blind eye to the torture of Private Bradley Manning by US intelligence. And that is just his domestic policy.
In the Congress, it's been even more frustrating. Obama entered office with strong majorities in both houses of the legislature, but in some strange, Doris Kearns Goodwin fantasy of his, instead of pushing through as much good legislation as possible, the President decided that attempting to work with the Republicans, that most reasonable and calm of political parties, was a better idea. It backfired spectacularly, leading to progressive laws like the health care bill and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell either being gutted, endlessly delayed, or dying out altogether.
You'd think, then, that the establishment of the Left would be pissed at Obama for failing to live up to even a modicum of his hype. But it's there that you'd be wrong; there's a new trend now of middle-left Democrats accusing their more progressive peers of being unreasonable, of asking too much. Our own mayor called those who criticized so-called Blue Dog Democrats for balking on the health care bill "fucking retarded." Jonathan Chait, war apologist and the guy those Blue Dogs have posters of on their walls, wrote a feature for New York Magazine two weeks ago making this claim:
Why is this? Chait makes the claim that liberals have a strong case of Reagan-envy: that is, a figure of idolatry who is made to epitomize all that is great and good about the party, a demigod. Chait concludes that
So, what Chait wants liberals to do is stop questioning and challenging our leaders and blindly follow the path, as the Republicans have done for so long. Besides the incredible hilarity of the fact that he's ignoring the fact that many, many Democrats already do this, isn't it just a fucking awful thing to want anyways? Sit down, shut up, be happy with what you get, don't try to make change? Great, that's an inspiring message to tell your children. That's exactly what we should be teaching: be mediocre, and you'll never be disappointed.
So, is it reasonable to be disappointed with Obama as a liberal? You bet your ass it is. Should it come with certain caveats, since the Congress is incredibly messed up? Sure. But don't call for your fellows to be satisfied just because of that. Disappointment is an inevitable part of life, so use it as a driver to make change, not an excuse to give up.
Predictably, he swept into office on the back of his message of hope and change, and even more predictably, he has unequivocally failed to deliver on his promises. In fact, he's been doing his finest George W. Bush impression: despite ordering the closing of Guantanamo Bay, it hasn't happened. He let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans be renewed. He has extended the Patriot Act. He has been the worst president for whistleblowers in history, and has turned a blind eye to the torture of Private Bradley Manning by US intelligence. And that is just his domestic policy.
In the Congress, it's been even more frustrating. Obama entered office with strong majorities in both houses of the legislature, but in some strange, Doris Kearns Goodwin fantasy of his, instead of pushing through as much good legislation as possible, the President decided that attempting to work with the Republicans, that most reasonable and calm of political parties, was a better idea. It backfired spectacularly, leading to progressive laws like the health care bill and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell either being gutted, endlessly delayed, or dying out altogether.
You'd think, then, that the establishment of the Left would be pissed at Obama for failing to live up to even a modicum of his hype. But it's there that you'd be wrong; there's a new trend now of middle-left Democrats accusing their more progressive peers of being unreasonable, of asking too much. Our own mayor called those who criticized so-called Blue Dog Democrats for balking on the health care bill "fucking retarded." Jonathan Chait, war apologist and the guy those Blue Dogs have posters of on their walls, wrote a feature for New York Magazine two weeks ago making this claim:
Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.
Why is this? Chait makes the claim that liberals have a strong case of Reagan-envy: that is, a figure of idolatry who is made to epitomize all that is great and good about the party, a demigod. Chait concludes that
If recent history is any guide, they are simply not capable of having that kind of relationship with a president. They are going to question their leader, not deify him, and search for signs of betrayal in any act of compromise he or she may commit. This exhausting psychological torment is no way to live.
So, what Chait wants liberals to do is stop questioning and challenging our leaders and blindly follow the path, as the Republicans have done for so long. Besides the incredible hilarity of the fact that he's ignoring the fact that many, many Democrats already do this, isn't it just a fucking awful thing to want anyways? Sit down, shut up, be happy with what you get, don't try to make change? Great, that's an inspiring message to tell your children. That's exactly what we should be teaching: be mediocre, and you'll never be disappointed.
So, is it reasonable to be disappointed with Obama as a liberal? You bet your ass it is. Should it come with certain caveats, since the Congress is incredibly messed up? Sure. But don't call for your fellows to be satisfied just because of that. Disappointment is an inevitable part of life, so use it as a driver to make change, not an excuse to give up.
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