The Non-Controversy of Patrick Greene

I don't hang out at Ray Comfort's blog much these days - he posts about the same half dozen arguments with slightly different phrasing on a rotating basis and that gets old - but on my last trip over there I noticed that he was complaining about some mean atheist guy who was threatening to sue him. The gist of the story is that Ray's henchmen sell bumper stickers that say "National Atheists Day: April 1st" and an ill-humored atheist guy named Patrick Greene saw one, got offended, and made a bunch of noise about how he was going to sue Ray for libel (somehow).

In all honesty, I kind of assumed that the story was, shall we say, embellished. After all, my pal Ray has a story every couple of days about how fierce atheists chase him, yell at him, and occasionally slap him around for, well, being kind of an annoying guy. It seemed as likely as not that Patrick Greene was fictitious and Ray was just trying to sell more bumper stickers. Apparently, however, Greene's real and he's actually an ill-humored guy who complains a lot. I suppose that's egg on my face.

Greene has been grousing around some of the other atheist blogs out there, most prominently Atheist Experience, trying to garner support for his ill-conceived attempt to sue Ray. If he's been looking to muster a storm of righteous fury then he's looking in all the wrong places, because pretty much every atheist site that's mentioned him has done so in the context of "don't do this kind of stupid stuff". I mention him for the same reason: This kind of crybaby, litigious silliness is just plain asinine and gives Comfort and others like him the opportunity to paint atheists as a bunch of sniveling whiners. Ray is well within his rights to make backhanded bumper stickers, and there's no grounds to claim that it's libel because he's not really making any specific claims about anyone. The Constitution and common sense are both on Ray's side (That's a rare occurrence), and all Greene is doing is providing Ray with fodder for his voluminous claims of victimhood.

A few atheists, myself included, have even noted on Ray's blog that Greene's acting like a dingus. Freedom of speech either applies to everyone or it doesn't mean a thing, and going hand in hand with that is the understanding that no one has the right not to be offended. That applies to Ray, me, and everyone else. Disappointingly (though somewhat predictably), Ray has refused to acknowledge that a number of atheists have "crossed the lines" to stand beside him on this matter. Rather, he claims that other atheists "have turned on [Greene]" even though he "thought he was doing the right thing". That's wonderful, especially coming from someone who devoted a lengthy blog entry to mocking the guy - An atheist can either side with Greene, thereby proving that we're a bunch of humorless pricks who can't take a joke, or we can take Ray's side and prove that we're a pack of backbiting wolves who'll savage one of our own if bad publicity strikes. What a great choice.

So that's where it stands. Greene's behaving like a thin-skinned weenie and Ray, as usual, comes across like a smiling jerk...and the world spins on.

Et tu, Chuck Norris?

An ongoing internet meme is currently engendering a lot of good will towards erstwhile action star Chuck Norris, and I certainly encounter him hawking the Total Gym on TV almost every evening, but I'd never actually gotten a whiff of his politics until this morning. Who ever woulda' guessed that Chuck Norris is a fundie? Now, granted, I can still enjoy "Braddock: Missing in Action III" (or not) regardless of whether Norris has a skewed view of the foundations of our country's government, but this is still a disheartening development. How can we secularists hope to win the day if the fundies have enlisted such a powerful force of nature as Chuck Norris to their cause? I mean, this is a man who counted to infinity - twice!

By the way, I found above commercial on Bay-Of-Fundie, an absolutely swanktastic site devoted to skewering cultural absurdity.

When life gives you Lemons

Once upon a time in the a faraway land called "Pennsylvania", in a faraway time called 1968, there was a legal dispute that ultimately evolved into the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Lemon vs. Kurtzman. At issue was the question of whether or not the Superintendent of Public Instruction could be allowed by the state to reimburse private schools for textbooks, teacher salaries, etc. using public tax money. For example, would the state of Pennsylvania be allowed/obligated to reimburse a Catholic school for its textbook expenses, or would that violate the Constitution's Establishment Clause?

In 1971 the Supreme Court, headed by conservative Nixon appointee Warren E. Burger, struck down the Pennsylvania law and established what is now called the Lemon Test as a shorthand method of examining whether or not a government action may be in violation of the Establishment Clause. In short, it states that in order to be in keeping with the First Amendment, a law must meet three criteria.

1.) It must serve some clear secular purpose.
2.) It must neither advance nor hinder religion.
3.) It must not result in excessive government entanglement with religion.


The Lemon Test has sadly been used only inconsistently by the Court in the intervening years, but it is still worth using by us lay folk who want to examine the goings on of our increasingly theocratic American government. For example, let's use the Lemon Test to look at Tuesday's House Resolution 847. Now, I'll grant that both Congress and the various state legislatures pass all kinds of silly resolutions stating that this, that, or the other is awesome. However, given the current climate of "culture war" and religious fervor going on in the U.S. today, H.R. 847 poses a special threat to the legacy of government secularism that our founders intended. Anyway, on to the test:

1.) Does H.R. 847 serve a clear secular purpose? Hardly. Heck, most of these generic resolutions in support of Christmas or Karate or Ultraman or whatever else hardly serve a clear purpose of any kind. 847 compounds its general meaninglessness with explicit statements in support of Christian Theology.

2.) Does H.R. 847 advance or hinder a religion? Seems like. Numerous conservative sites are already touting it as an endorsement of a Christian America.

3.) Does H.R. 847 excessively entangle the government with religion? Almost certainly. By explicitly stating, for example, the government's gratitude to Jesus for dying for our sins, the government is taking on a priestly tone that is far from consistent with the views of the founders.

So, clearly, H.R. 847 fails the First Amendment test that was first established by a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court. Yet it's being met with adulation rather than abject horror by most of our populace. The founders would be appalled.

Consitutionally speaking...

I recently finished reading The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore and I have to recommend it to anyone interested in the the historical and Constitutional roots of secular government in the United States. My only real gripe is the odd system of citation used in the book, which has no footnotes but utilizes a chapter by chapter bibliography just before the index. Regardless, the book is a worthwhile and easy read (an unusual combination) about one of the most important subjects facing our nation today.

I've grown somewhat bolder about leaving my nontheistic books lying around in the open at work lately, so a couple of days ago the title of The Godless Constitution happened to be noticed by one of my (quite) religious colleagues. "What's that about," she asked, "are they saying that they want to establish a Constitution without God in it?" I assured her that no, the book was a discussion of the Constitution under which we currently live. "No," she said, "we have a Christian Constitution. Don't we?"

The discussion went on briefly about how, for one thing, the Constitution contains no direct references to God and only mentions religion in the context of the "no religious tests" clause in Article 6, section 3. My coworker was courteous about everything but seemed unconvinced, especially when I mentioned that "under God" was only tacked onto the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s as a way of giving the finger to the godless commies. In the end, all she said was "I'm shocked", though it was unclear to me whether she was shocked about the enshrinement of secularism in our nation's founding document or shocked at the realization that one of her coworkers was an atheist.

In any event, the whole episode reminded me that there has been a colossal hijacking of our national narrative on the part of the religious right. They labor under an inaccurate belief that somehow the United States was founded as some sort of uber-Christian utopia that has slowly been perverted by us maniacal secularists, when in fact the reverse is true. While peopled at all times by at least a nominally Christian majority, the United States government was founded principles of secularism and government non-involvement with religion. The Constitution, with its complete lack of Christian symbolism and rhetoric, has been under attack since even before its ratification for its secular stance, as has the idea of a secular government in general. References to God on our money and in our pledge, as well as the end of Sunday mail service and countless other nods to Christianity, are chinks that have been carved into the original wall of separation, not the last few bricks of the Christian Camelot that some people imagine our country to have been.

The most amazing thing about our Constitution is its lack of religion. It serves as a reminder that our leaders get their power from us, not from some unquestionable divine mandate. The Constitution should remind us that our government serves us at our pleasure, not God's, and that the government holds absolutely no control over anyone's conscience. These are important ideas, ideas that our ancestors fought and killed and died for.

The American Revolution ended in 1781. Now, barely two and quarter centuries later,
there are politically powerful elements of our society that are committed to the destruction of one of this country's most important founding ideals. It would almost be funny if it weren't so damned frightening.