Notes from a Radicalized Atheist

Must we?

I try to be fair, I try to be respectful, I try to remember that many of the worthwhile things that have occurred over the last couple of millennia are the result either of the church or their believers. And what, I ask myself, have we atheists ever contributed? Have we started soup kitchens, held the hand of the dying, worked with lepers? So shouldn’t I give organized religion a break?

Want the short answer?

Fuck no.

To any nonbeliever out there, it’s been a bad couple of weeks. Consider, for example, the famous Hobby Lobby case, and can I convince you, Horrified Readers, that the religious backgrounds of the five male justices had noting to do with it? That all five of the justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby were catholic (nope, no capitals today, dammit)—that’s a coincidence? Oh, and the other catholic on the court who voted in dissent was a woman—Sonia Sotomayor—otherwise, guess what? It would have been 6 / 3.

Did you know, Hobby Lobby—as yes, I’m addressing you personally, since that apparently is what five people in the US have decided you are—what kind of a crowd you were going against? Because there isn’t one protestant on the Supreme Court (seriously thinking about those caps, too). So you guys walked into the lion’s den and came out unscathed—gotta hand it to you.

Of course, let’s hope your daughter doesn’t work for a closely-held corporation that has strong Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Otherwise, that blood transfusion? Or the vaccines, which oddly enough have gotten prohibitively expensive? Here, courtesy of The New York Times, is the lead from an article entitled “The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs are Soaring:”

There is little that Dr. Lindsay Irvin has not done for the children’s vaccines in her office refrigerator: She remortgaged her home to afford their rising prices.

Guys? Can you imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us?

Now the situation is so bad that a rabid little college in Illinois—Wheaton College—has decided it doesn’t want to fill out a form telling the government that the college is opting out of the contraceptive clause; here’s the Columbus Dispatch on the subject:

The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception.

What’s this about? Simple—the Supreme Court has just declared the right of corporations to impose their religious beliefs on workers.

Nor did the religious right waste any time, because, the day after Hobby Lobby? A whole gaggle of religious groups sent a letter asking Obama to not issue an order directing the federal government to not award contracts to companies; enter The New York Times, again:

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s addlebrained Hobby Lobby decision, several groups wrote to Mr. Obama on July 1 asking him to allow federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their religious objections to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Oh—just for your information, the article is titled “Tax-payer Financed Bigotry,” a statement so pithy that it spares you the need to read further.

Well, we already have the catholic church firing teachers and principals of their schools who have gotten married—to members of their own sex, that is. Oh, and by the way, are those schools entirely self-funded? No nickel of the taxpayers going there?

Here’s a clue:

More than 80 percent of students receiving federal vouchers through the D.C. program attend private religious schools with such civil rights exemptions but no opt-out option for religious instruction. 

Oh, and don’t think, by the way, that all you have to do is worry about federal money, because you also have to worry about what the bastards in your statehouse are doing. Because increasingly, that’s where the action is; consider this, from The Washington Post:

In North Carolina, the state legislature recently passed a bill to divert $10 million of taxpayer money meant for public schools to private schools, including those that “provide an education that is Christ-centered” and teach “the truth of scripture” with “Bible-based facts,” such as: “dinosaurs and humans co-existed on Earth; slave-masters generally treated their slaves well; in some areas, the KKK fought the decline in morality by using the sign of the cross; and gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”

Know what? I’m now radicalized—for (easily) ten years I worked in a company where wearing a gold crucifix around your neck was almost de rigeur, where saying “bien, gracias a Dios” was the standard response to the question of how you were doing. And I shut up because I was respectful, though I admit to fighting the life-size crèche that Human Resources—ladies? Aren’t you guys supposed to be the experts here?—put up one Christmas. But now?

Now, I wish I had turned the company into a battleground. I wish I had said, “god doesn’t exist,” at every turn. I wish I had told everybody that had a crucifix to take it off, because I found it offensive. I wish the whole company had ground to a halt, so that 499 people could have been jumping the throat of little me. I should have duked it out until the end.

Reasonable?

Done with it!

Personhood for Chimpanzees!

Whew—that’s a relief. In the course of sifting and winnowing (all right, a good of scrounging, too) an email dropped into my lap and luck with the news: the bastards are still up to their bastardry.

No surprise, right? What’s surprising is the astonishing breadth and depth of the affair. For it seems that twelve countries—United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei—are getting together to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), a little venture which, according to Julian Assange “would trample over individual rights and free expression.”

Well, he should know, because he released the 30,000-word draft of the document on November 13 of this year, and that was pretty much the first time anybody had any idea what it was all about. Here’s The Guardian—surprise, surprise!—on the issue:

In case you were wondering why we had to get this information from WikiLeaks, it's because the draft negotiating texts are kept secret from the public. Even members of the US Congress and their staff have extremely limited access. Thus the much-maligned WikiLeaks has once again proven how valuable and justified are their efforts to bring transparency to important policy-making that is done in the darkness – whether it is "collateral murder", or other forms of life-threatening unaccountability.

Is it just me, or does anybody else have a knee-jerk reaction to anything done at this level of secrecy? And what, exactly, does the TTP intend to do? The Guardian quotes Public Citizen’s Global TradeWatch:

…set US policy on non-tariff, and indeed not-trade, issues in the context of 'trade' negotiations.

Ummmh?

At least that was my reaction, so I read and then reread and then figured it out—there are some concepts simple guys like me can’t get. So would the answer come later in the article? Quite possibly, and it did. Check this out:

Laws to protect the environment, food safety, consumers (from monopoly pricing), and other public interest concerns can now be traded away in "trade" negotiations. And US law must be made to conform to the treaty.

Well, the email that I got from Alice Jay at Avaaz.org put it a bit more graphically:

Monsanto’s about to celebrate their biggest coup ever, but we’ve got until the weekend to stop them.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a huge, ultra-secret deal among twelve major countries that would give corporations unprecedented power -- allowing them to use new global tribunals to sue our governments for passing laws that protect us, but reduce their profits! This could apply to everything from labeling GMO foods to protecting internet freedom. Wikileaks has broken the story and opposition is building fast, but the countries are rushing to seal the deal in 48 hours.

OK—let me imagine it. The US decides, at long last, to ban genetically altered wheat, since our foreign market doesn’t want the stuff. But Monsanto decides to raise the middle finger, and argues that the ban infringes on their right to make a profit. So they take us to a new global court, and sue us on the basis of this treaty.

All of this, asserts Assange, is an attempt to impose the United States’ strict interpretation of intellectual property rights, under which a seed becomes an idea, as long as you’ve altered its DNA.

Wonderful, isn’t it, what corporations are doing, and what they’ve become. They’re no longer things, or legal concepts—but people. So under Citizens United, corporations, like people, can donate money to political campaigns. Oh, and they can have religions, too, which is why Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supplies will argue this year before the US. Supreme Court that they have the right to not offer certain types of contraception through their employee health plans. Nor, by the way, are these particularly small companies: Hobby Lobby employs over 13, 000 people, Conestoga over 1000.

The following information, by the way, comes from the liberal website Slate.com. But it seems that the sword cuts both ways, because I’ve just read that animal rights activists, citing Citizen’s United, are now looking for jurisdictions that would take the adventurous step of declaring chimpanzees legal persons. (The article was entitled “Seeking Citizen’s United Victory for Chimpanzees”—of course I had to read it….)

Back paddling hard back to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there’s one thing to bear in mind: the process in the US may be fast-tracked. And that is, you ask? The Guardian comes through again:

…fast track, which first began under Nixon in 1974, was not only a usurpation of the US Congress' constitutional authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations".

It also gave the executive branch – which is generally much less accountable to public pressure than the Congress – a means of negating and pre-empting important legislation by our elected representatives.

So what’s our time frame? According to the email which alerted me to the issue, it’s 48 hours.

Here’s the link, dear Reader. You know what you have to do….

    http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_champagne_for_monsanto_loc/?bpRuwbb&v=32155