A Follow Up
This is a follow up to my post yesterday about the current contraceptive controversy. Jen McCreight has an interesting post on her blog about the whole contraceptive kurfulfle, It is opinion from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on a religious freedom case in a situation similar to that of the Catholic Church and others with the current contraceptive mandate of the Obama administrator. Just in case you don’t feel like reading it (although you really should), he definitely did not find this kind of issue to be a religious freedom issue.
Religion Gets A Pass. Again
Once again, religion in the U.S. gets a free pass. As you probably know, the Obama administration recently required all employers to offer free contraceptives as part of their employee health plans. This included religious employers who employe people who are not of that particular faith or are non-religious. This created a firestorm of protest from churches across the country, Catholic and Protestant. After weeks of outrage and complaints, the President announced that he will seek to allow religious employers to pass on the responsibility, and the cost, of providing contraceptives onto the insurance companies.
Now, I’m no economist, but it seems pretty obvious that the insurance companies aren’t going to like this very much. The result will probably be higher premiums, which religious employers will likely pass onto their employees. This means that people who are employed by religious organizations will be forced to pay more for “free” contraceptives. This despite the fact that religious organizations and churches are already allowed to operate tax free, even if they don’t use their money for charitable purposes, unlike other non-profits. Now they get to avoid the responsibility for the cost of contraceptives, unlike every other employer in the country.
The religious organizations claim that the rule to provide free contraceptives are an infringement of their constitutional right to religious freedom. This is blatantly bullshit. What it is in reality is an infringement upon their centuries old privileges. What if a white supremacist church, who believe that the Bible condones discrimination agains blacks and Jews, claimed that they didn’t have to provide health insurance for black and Jewish employees (assuming that they would employ them in the first place)? This would never be allowed, as it is blatantly discriminatory and against the law. Yet we allow churches to subtly discriminate against women who want, or sometimes even need, contraceptives. Not only do we them to discriminate against their employees (mostly women), but we allow them to pass on the cost of providing them as well.
The whole compromise it just a thin sheen of slime that allows religious groups to pretend that they aren’t providing contraceptives. Everyone is praising this sham as a great compromise that protects religious freedom, when what it really does is violate the rights of employees of theses organizations to equal access under the law.
I sincerely hope that someone brings a legal challenge to this and see how it plays out in the courts. Even if unsuccessful it will at least, hopefully, publicly shame these religious groups who continue to bend the law to allow them to perpetuate their immoral patriarchal privileges.
Christianity, The Religion of Hate
One Man’s Blog posted about a Fox News story describing a lawsuit to prevent a cross from being erected within the World Trade Center memorial without equal opportunity for memorials of other faiths. The comments on the Fox News site afterwards were filled with hate against atheists with the wish to kill all atheists, along with rape and other violence.
My favorite (if you can call it that) comment came from Sindy Clock who wrote,
“I love Jesus, and the cross and if you don’t, I hope someone rapes you.”
I’ve read the Bible through, several times. I studied the Bible on my own for years before finally dispensing with religion. I am pretty sure I never read about Jesus ever telling anyone that if they didn’t believe in him that they should be raped.
Michael Perii had this to say,
“these people are f’ing scum of the earth. can we start killing them now? few groups fill me with more hatred than atheists.”
Apparently, Michael seems to have forgotten that passage where Jesus tells his followers that they should love their enemies (granted, we aren’t his enemy, he seems to have made us his).
Hanns Anderson has a, well, interesting take on this:
“atheist has no rights a snail has more rights than a atheist has I say throw them out to the sharks let them eat them like the ate bin laden”
Apparently, being a Christian doesn’t require learning how to spell, punctuate, or even write at a grade school level.
Finally, Eileen Rourke thinks that atheists,
“…should go live in another country. You have taken enough of my rights away.”
This last comment is so common among Christians. Many Christians feel that their rights are being infringed upon because some of us dare to insist on equality, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
Christians make up more than 70% of the citizens of this country. It isn’t their rights that are being eroded, it is their privileges. Being able to put crosses up where ever you want, to expect everyone else to pray to your god, is not a right. It is a privilege, and one that no one in a free and democratic society should be allowed to have.
These comments are not an aberration. We see these kind of comments constantly whenever their Christian privileges are questioned. For a group of people who like to preach about how their Jesus a god of love, they sure love to hate.
Pro Life – A Satanic Plot
Edwin Kagin beautifully defends a woman’s right to choose in this tongue-in-cheek piece. It is funny, but powerful. Read it.
Atheists Raise $180,000 for Charity
It is said that this is the season of giving, and you don’t have to be religious to do good by giving. It was reported the other day that atheists have used crowdsourcing to raise $180,000 for Doctors Without Borders. I bring this up because there is this prevalent belief that atheists are amoral, hedonistic, and only concerned with their own self interests. I want to show that this belief is false.
I’m not going to try to pretend that atheists are more giving than their religious brethren, I just want people to realize that we, as a group in general, put a very high value on doing what is morally and ethically right. Our understanding that this in the only life we have leads us to cherish it and, since we don’t believe in any finally judgement where the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, we are greatly appalled at the suffering of others in the here and now. We see the huge injustice that millions are living lives of desperation, with no hope of relief, unless we, as fellow human beings do something about it, today. Nothing is more terrible than the thought that so many innocent people suffer and that a painful death is all that many of them have to look forward to. The waste of human life, of human potential is overwhelming. When you know that this time on earth is all that each of us has, this kind horrible waste and suffering is unconscionable.
The fact that this suffering of millions is often brushed aside because people delude themselves into believing that those who suffer will find peace some other future existence is what makes us so angry. We aren’t angry with god, or with believers in general. We are angry that human suffering is often minimized by reference to some insubstantial afterlife, or worse, justified by the whim of some invisible deity.
We give what we can to help those who suffer, not because we are told to by a holy book, or a church, but because we are moved by a shared sense of humanity to do what is right simply because it is the right thing to do.
There are plenty of charities that you can give to, if you are, like me, uncomfortable with the idea of giving to a religious charity, such as the Salvation Army, which espouses homophobic and bigoted beliefs, or a church where most of the money stays in the church rather than going to where it is really needed. My personal choice is Doctors Without Borders, which I believe is a great charity since they provide needed medical care anywhere in the world that it is needed, with no religious, ideological, or political agenda or strings attached.
Where ever you decide to give to, don’t do it because you expect some ineffable reward in a nebulous, unlikely afterlife, or to please your pastor. Do it because it is the right thing to do.
Its All About (warped) Proirites
PZ Myers had a blog post about a terrible Mississippi proposed law that would declare a fertilized human egg a person. The consequences are dire for mother’s and babies. I am not going to try to speak to this since PZ does it much better than I can. Please go read it. Comment there and/or here.
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a name? you might ask. Well, in India, quite a bit, if you are a girl named ”Nakusa” or “Nakushi,” which mean “unwanted” in Hindi. In a heartwarming CBSNEWS World article, 285 girls changed their names to reflect a new beginning in their lives.
It is hard to imagine, in our society, that parents could choose such a cruel name for their child. This reflects, I think, the sad social insistence in many countries on having male children.
It is known that in many cultures in the past, baby girls were buried in the sand, thrown into rivers, lakes, and seas, or left out in the wilderness to die of exposure and starvation, or be eaten by wild animals. Where this horrible concept that a female child is worthless came from is hard to understand. Ok, I get the idea that many cultures desired male children for the purposes of inheritance, protection, wage earning, and so on. Also, many of those same cultures required that the parents of a daughter pay a dowery when she married, which can be seen as a financial burden. Still, why was no thought given to the fact that females are needed for reproduction, or that a marriage of a daughter to a man from a good family could be a benefit? Then there is the most important reason of all to value daughters: that hey are humans begins just as worthy of love and caring as any male.
These misogynistic ideas have their roots in a major change in human social development.
In their book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá trace the origins of misogyny to the advent of agriculture, which “…changed everything about human society, from sexuality to politics to economics to health to diet to exercise patterns to work-versus-rest patterns. It introduced the notion of property into sexuality.” (Ryan and Jethá, 2010)
What we see here is the result of the male desire to secure a claim to property for himself and his offspring. In order for this to work, the woman becomes property as well. These attitudes have prevailed for close to 10,000 years even though there is really no longer any reason to treat woman as property.
We have made great strides toward sexual equality in the past 100 years or so, at least in the West. I hope that the cross pollination of cultures we have seen in the past couple of decades will have a positive influence on less enlightens cultures around the world. Until then, more girls will be shamefully labeled “unwanted”, both in practice as well as in name.
References:
Ryan, Christopher and Jethá, Cacilda, 2010, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Harpers Collins
Sexism Among Atheists and Skeptics
There is a great blog post from PZ Myers that discusses sexism in atheism. I just want to add that this problem is also found within the skeptical community as well, perhaps not quite to the same extent, but close.
This is just a microcosmic example of what we find in society at large. I would say that the problem of sexism in the atheist and skeptical communities isn’t nearly as entrenched or as vicious as in, say, the gamer, science, or other similar communities, which is a good thing. If we can make the efforts that PZ describes, we can be leaders in including women as equals.
As atheists, skeptics, and secular humanists, we already have a greater sense of, and support for, social justice than the population at large. We need to keep working to include all segments of society in our communities and show the often bigoted, sexist, and racist religious believers what real brotherly, and sisterly, love means.
The Tea Party and Fairness (or lack thereof)
Tea Party Republican Congressman John Fleming, speaking about President Obama’s plan to raise taxed on the very rich made a statement in an MSNBC interview. “…by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 leftover.” Granted, he was talking about only having $400,000 to reinvest in his businesses, but still, his overall attitude during the interview was one of being completely out of touch with what the average American has to deal with. I also would say that the interviewer was obviously biased against the Congressman and the statements and conclusions the interviewer drew were soaked in hyperbole.
Despite this, Congressman Fleming’s comments show just how out of touch with average Americans the Tea Party types are.
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