A few weeks ago, I mentioned briefly that the Catholic church had threatened to pull out of Washington, D.C., ending the social services they provide for thousands of people, if the city council passed a law recognizing same-sex marriage. Well, the council did pass the bill, same-sex marriage is now legal in D.C. (congratulations!), and the church looks set to keep its promise, starting with the termination of their foster-care program. They've also decided to end spousal benefits for all employees, including terminating the benefits of existing employees, rather than give those benefits to same-sex partners.

Happily, as AU reports, this story has a positive ending: Since Catholic Charities has shut down their foster-care and adoption program, the service they used to provide will now be offered by other groups, including the National Center for Children and Families, that will get the public funding the Catholic group used to receive. Well done, Washington, and shame on this despicable, bigoted church that would apparently rather see children go parentless than have to provide health insurance to gay people.

On a similar note, there's this story of a 5-year-old who was expelled from a private Catholic preschool because his parents are lesbians:

In a statement sent to 9NEWS, the Archdiocese said, "Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching."

..."No person shall be admitted as a student in any Catholic school unless that person and his/her parent(s) subscribe to the school's philosophy and agree to abide by the educational policies and regulations of the school and Archdiocese," the statement said.

Editorial note: Does this school plan to expel all students whose parents are divorced? Maybe they should also send around a questionnaire asking parents if they use birth control so they can expel the children of the ones who answer yes. Of course, since something like 90% of American adults, Catholics included, use contraception, this might lead to a fairly steep dropoff in those all-important tuition checks. It seems politically safer to only target members of relatively small minorities for persecution, rather than actually try to apply their own rules consistently.

On the positive side, it seems clear that the staff who run the school were appalled by the open bigotry and hatred of their church superiors - another clear sign that American Catholics are more progressive than their benighted hierarchy:

School staff members, who asked to remain anonymous, say they are disgusted by the Archdiocese's decision.

...Staff members said they were not allowed to discuss the decision after it was made. Some of them said they were disheartened to work at a school that preaches peace and love, but also makes this decision.

A memo to these staff members: As this and the previous story make clear, Roman Catholicism does not preach love - at least not in the unconditional, universal sense we generally think of when using that word. It preaches conditional, selective love - love only for people who are willing to submit to its insane dictates and obey the orders of the pompous frauds in charge - and that's a different animal altogether.

The church's shameless bigotry against gays and lesbians is all the more outrageous considering its own continuing crimes and hypocrisy. I wrote in my last post on the Catholic church that, given the sex abuse scandals in America, Ireland and Germany, it was a statistical inevitability that more stories of child rapists among the clergy would appear in other countries as well. Now similar allegations have been made in the Netherlands. More amusingly, there's this scandal in the Vatican itself:

The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.

Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him.

And lastly, less amusingly, there's this story. The Catholic church in Ireland has racked up a $14 million bill for victim compensation after letting sexual predators in the clergy run rampant for thirty years, and the Bishop of Ferns, Denis Brennan, is asking his parishioners to pass the collection plate to cover the costs. As the Independent puts it:

In other words the Roman Catholic Church in Ferns is asking the victims of its own bitter failings to pay the price for the crime -- it is a request which beggars belief.

At this point, the church's callousness and hypocrisy has been demonstrated ad nauseam, so this no longer shocks me. The only thing that still surprises me is that a den of vipers like this one still thinks it has the authority to instruct the rest of us how we should treat our fellow human beings. Personally, I think the Pope and his hirelings ought to turn over all the remaining predators to the police, sell off the treasures of the Vatican to pay their court costs, and spend a few decades in sackcloth and ashes before they should even think of venturing an opinion on moral topics again.

Postscript: Although it's not a sex scandal, there was one more story that came out just after I wrote this that I couldn't omit: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has banned voluntary end-of-life measures in the more than 600 Catholic hospitals and nursing homes around the country. In other words, Catholic institutions will no longer honor patients' living wills stating that they don't wish to be kept alive by feeding tubes if they're irreversibly comatose or terminally ill.

Although the law protects patients from being subjected to any medical treatment against their will, it's easy to see how this decision could be used by Catholic hospital administrators to coerce grief-stricken families and patients who may not be capable of expressing their desires. Even in the best case, it will almost certainly lead to more pointless suffering as patients who don't want to be kept artificially alive try to find another hospital to transfer to that will respect their wishes. We need to publicize the evil and tyrannical pretensions of the bishops, and I suggest this slogan: "If you want to have a feeding tube forcibly crammed down your throat or run through a hole cut into your stomach so you can be kept alive to suffer, then make sure you go to a Catholic hospital!"

In the U.S., the cause of gay and lesbian rights has made major advances in the last few decades. Anti-discrimination laws are in wide effect, including a recently passed federal hate-crime law; marriage equality is already an established reality in several states; and despite setbacks, the now overwhelming tolerance and acceptance of gays and lesbians among younger generations heralds further progress in the future.

But in spite of these hopeful signs, the hatemongers and bigots of the religious right aren't giving up. As their cause slowly, but inexorably dries up at home, they're spreading their poisonous seed to foreign countries where it takes root in more welcoming soil.

Such is the state of affairs in the country of Uganda, where American evangelicals have long enjoyed a disproportionate degree of influence over the government. Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda and has been for a long time, but Ugandan religious conservatives have learned from their American counterparts that even an oppressed and politically powerless group can easily be depicted as a menacing enemy in propaganda campaigns intended to stir up fear and hate among their followers. Just such a campaign has led to a proposed "Anti-Homosexuality Bill", which threatens to open the floodgates for the state-sanctioned mass murder of gay and lesbian people.

As previously discussed on Daylight Atheism, this bill would imprison homosexuals for life, and in some cases, would establish a crime of "aggravated homosexuality", which is punishable by death. But what I haven't discussed as much is the shockingly large role that American evangelicals played, both in the propaganda campaign that led up to it, as well as in the actual drafting of the bill itself. An article from the New York Times from earlier this month has the details, including the names of several key figures:

Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including "7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child"; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads "healing seminars"; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is "mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality"...

As the article explains, these missionaries visited Uganda in March 2009, giving a series of talks about how "the gay movement is an evil institution" which seeks to prey on boys, eliminate marriage and replace it with "a culture of sexual promiscuity". And just a month later, a Ugandan politician introduced the bill, which threatens to punish gays and lesbians with death.

Naturally, these American evangelicals claim they never wanted this outcome and profess shock that anyone could have misconstrued them in this way. But before Western media picked up on it, they were far less reticent:

But the Ugandan organizers of the conference admit helping draft the bill, and Mr. Lively has acknowledged meeting with Ugandan lawmakers to discuss it. He even wrote on his blog in March that someone had likened their campaign to "a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda."

Whether Lively and the others knew specifically about the death penalty provision is uncertain - but to claim that they were entirely ignorant of what the government was planning is a claim that strains credulity.

In the face of Western threats to withdraw millions of foreign aid, the Ugandan government has backed down slightly - offering to change the death penalty provision to life imprisonment, as if that was an improvement - but whether the bill will pass, and what its final form will be, are still very much open questions. A hint of the attitude that still prevails comes from the Ugandan minister of ethics and integrity, who recently said, "Homosexuals can forget about human rights."

If this bill passes, the evangelicals who played a role in its creation will have bloody hands. All their pious pleas of naivete and innocence cannot change what their actions have wrought. They chose to travel to an extremely anti-gay country and try to whip the populace up into a frenzy of hatred and fear. And they profess shock at the outcome, but they shouldn't be surprised: all that's happened is that the Ugandan government has taken them at their word and proposed a policy that's the logical conclusion of their starting premises.

How else did they expect the government to react to claims, like these ones made by Lively, that the gay movement is raping and preying on children, that they're recruiting and bribing young boys to engage in sexual relationships with older men, that they're importing pornography "to weaken the moral fiber of the people", that they want to abolish marriage and replace it with a culture that embraces "sexual anarchy"? They've systematically portrayed gays and lesbians as evil deviants defying the law and engaging in a malevolent conspiracy to destroy Ugandan society. Did they really think the Ugandan government would do nothing more than build some Christian therapy centers?

To be absolutely fair, I don't doubt that Lively and the others are sincere when they claim they weren't seeking the execution of homosexuals. It's just that their brand of shrill, hysterical rhetoric is what they're accustomed to using; in America, it often gets them their way. But in America, this intemperate language is counterbalanced by a strong feminist movement and an effective system of constitutional rights. In Uganda, neither of those things exist; and again, the Ugandan government didn't treat their speeches as rally-the-troops political posturing, as American politicians and media usually do. Instead, they treated them as literal truth and acted accordingly. This potential theocratic horror is the result.

But this outcome was completely predictable, which is why the American evangelicals will have bloody hands if this bill does pass. If they haven't acted with malice aforethought, they've shown reckless indifference at the very least. Like the right-wing pundits whose deranged rhetoric pushes some of their more unstable followers over the edge, they will bear moral responsibility for whatever may result. (A little more credit, but only a very little, goes to Rick Warren, who after weeks of silence and an onslaught of bad press was finally shamed into offering a grudging condemnation of the bill.)

So, the next time the gay-bashing evangelicals claim to know what's best - the next time they claim to have moral authority over the rest of us - remember this moment. Remember their bloody hands. Remember their guilt and their responsibility. They'd clearly love for this whole sordid story to be forgotten. That's an opportunity we should be certain to deny them.

Back in January, I alluded briefly to the events in Uganda, where Christian abstinence-only programs have reversed the success of comprehensive sex ed and led to a rise in HIV infection rates. At the time, I mentioned Martin Ssempa, a pastor in the country's booming Pentecostal Christian movement, and his involvement in a campaign to criminalize homosexuality.

But this news has taken an even more ominous turn. Homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda, but a bill currently being discussed in that country's Parliament - and staunchly advocated by Ssempa and other Ugandan religious leaders - is even more draconian than the country's current repressive laws.

Under the bill, a person who was convicted of gay sex would receive life imprisonment. But if that person was found to be HIV-positive, this would result in a charge of "aggravated homosexuality", which carries the death penalty. Equally horribly, a person who was merely aware of homosexual activity but failed to report it to the police within 24 hours would themselves face a prison term - an extraordinarily evil measure that seems designed to deny gays and lesbians the right of shelter even among their own family and friends. Advocating for any increased rights for gays and lesbians, which would presumably include advocating a rollback of this bill, would also result in imprisonment.

This story is directly relevant to American readers because Uganda, in many ways, is the darling and the success story of the American religious right. As Kathryn Joyce explains in a Religion Dispatches interview with Rev. Kapya Kaoma, American evangelicals have been exporting their brand of conservative, homophobic culture-war politics to Africa for some time, and have had direct access to government officials in many African countries. (See also this commentary by Michelle Goldberg.)

Rick Warren in particular is held in high esteem there, and Martin Ssempa, the man who's pushing for the mass execution of homosexuals, is a friend and protege of Warren's. He's made multiple appearances at Warren's Saddleback Church in the past. And most shockingly, while Warren claims to have severed ties with Ssempa, he initially refused to denounce this proposed law! As Lisa Miller of Newsweek notes:

But Warren won't go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan antihomosexual laws generated this response: "The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations."

When Warren was pressed on this point, his second response was to post a petulant reply to Twitter, claiming that because no one ever says anything about Christians being martyred for their faith, he shouldn't have to care about legislation that would kill gays and lesbians. The fact that one of the backers of this legislation was his protege is something that he doesn't seem to feel any guilt or moral responsibility at all for.

After several weeks of solid negative coverage, Warren finally issued a condemnation of the bill. Yet, as Archy points out, most of his stated reasons boil down to a claim that it would make the church's mission more difficult, and he tries to dodge some inconvenient connections between himself and influential figures of the Ugandan government (see also). In the end, Warren did the right thing - but only just barely, and again, it's extremely telling how much heat he had to take before he could be shamed into speaking out.

The theocratic terror state proposed in Uganda is the logical endpoint of the religious right's anti-gay agenda and its inflammatory, homophobic rhetoric. Having nurtured and fostered this movement for so long, it's much too late for them to wash their hands clean of it now. If they had any conscience, they would recognize the horrible evil they've created and would repent and devote themselves to opposing this bill before it comes to pass. But instead, their response has been noncommittal, tepid, even mildly supportive. That speaks worlds about what their true intentions are, what they hope to do in Uganda, and what they would do in America and the rest of the world if they have the chance.

Although the New York Daily News has no problem endorsing astrology on its news pages, the idea of giving sympathetic coverage to atheism is apparently too much for them to swallow. In a recent issue, they published this obnoxiously bigoted column from Gabriel Gillen, a Dominican friar, which manages to cram just about every anti-atheist slur in the book into a brief space.

We start with the old standby: pick a controversial atheist, accuse him of hypocrisy or some other charge, and assume that he somehow speaks for or represents all atheists:

...the well-known atheist Peter Singer. When his own mother lay helpless with Alzheimer's disease, he broke all of his own rules, thus throwing away his credibility as a utilitarian philosopher onto the tracks: He came to her rescue.

Let me explain: he went against his own moral code, which in this case would have required him not to help his mother because it is more logical to help others with a better probability of surviving. There is logic to Singer's reasoning, but it just seems too... heartless. Thankfully, Singer's heroic actions speak louder than his radically rationalistic vision.

And of course, what column attacking atheists would be complete without trying to taint us by association with the Nazis and Communists:

The atheistic ideologies of Nazism and Communism did not produce earthly paradises, but only tragic regimes of terror that trampled human dignity and freedom.

Just for the record, these would be the the Nazis who handed out translations of the Bible and wore "God With Us" on their uniforms, and the Communists who made alliances with Christian clergy and persecuted atheists for not falling in step with their political goals.

It's good to see the vast majority of the comments on the Daily News' site shredding Gillen. I took it upon myself to write a comment in response as well:

I'm stunned at the lapse of editorial judgment that evidently must have occurred to permit this brazen bigotry to be published in the Daily News. This column is a parade of offensive and revolting stereotypes that no newspaper would even have considered printing if the target was anyone other than atheists, and most of its accusations are outright falsehoods.

Recent surveys have found that up to 15% of the American population are atheists, and that in New York and other northeastern cities, that percentage is even higher. Whether you know it or not, you meet atheists on the street every day. We are policemen, firefighters, military veterans, doctors, teachers. We give to charitable causes, love our friends and neighbors, and care about the welfare of humanity every bit as much as religious people. How dare this despicable apologist imply otherwise? And how dare he accuse us of lacking moral values, when he represents a church that sheltered sex predators and moved them around so they could continue to prey on children; a church that still opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians; a church whose irrational and superstitious opposition to contraception is contributing to the deaths of millions of people around the world from AIDS and other preventable STDs?

Before you criticize atheists, Mr. Gillen, you should set your own house in order. Don't presume to lecture us as long as you still represent the cruel and irrational values of the medieval era.

This past Tuesday, marriage equality suffered another setback at the hands of bigotry in the state of Maine. This defeat is especially disappointing because, from all accounts, the No on 1 campaign did everything right: running a well-organized, well-financed campaign with powerful advertising and a dedicated get-out-the-vote effort. But even the smartest and most well-crafted effort of persuasion can't succeed if people aren't willing to be persuaded, and this was evidently one of those times. The defeat was a narrow one, but I know that's small consolation for the citizens of Maine who've had their civil rights stripped from them by another prejudiced, religious majority.

This result is a demonstration, if another was needed, of the folly of making human rights just another question at the ballot box. This is why we have a constitutional republic in the first place - to protect the rights of minorities by putting them beyond a majority vote. I have no doubt that there are still plenty of places in the U.S. where interracial or interreligious marriage would fail if it were put to a referendum.

Remarkably, even though they've won this round, the enemies of equality are still trying to portray themselves as the victims. Take this column by Rod Dreher, which expresses a self-pitying lament that someone might call people like him nasty names because of how they voted:

...unless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots -- and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice -- maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here.

What that "something else" might be, he doesn't say, but to answer his implicit question: Do I think that people who vote against same-sex marriage are bigoted? Yes! People who would deny equal rights to their fellow human beings, even if they cast their ballot with the most sincere intentions in the world, are still bigots. Why on earth does he imagine that the number of people who vote one way or the other would change our answer to this question? Is he saying that the majority can't be prejudiced?

Even a cursory look back at history ought to disabuse him of this notion. Every prejudice that we've fought and overcome was popular and accepted in its day - from the belief that Africans' natural role was as slaves, to the belief that women lacked the judgment and discernment needed to vote, to the belief that atheists are unqualified to hold elective office, to the belief that the races should not mix. Every civil rights movement began as a small minority of dedicated activists who battled to win people's hearts and minds, who struggled, faced setbacks, met with widespread scorn and demonization, and were ultimately victorious. There is no reason to believe that this movement will be different - and very good reason to believe that those who stood on the wrong side of this fight will, one day, be regarded much the same way as we now regard people who defended those past prejudices.

Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But for those of us who are still on the wrong side of that bend, it can be agonizingly slow. To my GLBT friends and allies, who've already waited so long and suffered through so much, I can't in good conscience ask you to wait any longer. But nevertheless, I say: have patience. I ask this of you not for political or tactical reasons, but out of the simple recognition that time is on our side. Just a few years ago, the idea that same-sex marriage would lose at the polls by only a few points would have been astounding; and more change is already visible on the horizon.

As with many social and scientific revolutions, the biggest obstacle to change comes from those in the older generations who have grown up with their prejudices and are too entrenched in them now to ever give them up. And, to be blunt, they will not be around forever. They will be replaced by younger generations, people who've grown up knowing gays and lesbians not as despised and stigmatized outcasts, but as their relatives, their neighbors, their friends - human beings just like everyone else, who want for themselves the same things that straight people want. If you want to see the future, we got a glimpse of it on Tuesday (see also):

At University of Maine's Orono campus, 81 percent of students voted against taking away equal marriage rights, also showing the generation gap that persists on this question.

That is the generation that will be voting the next time this question comes up on the ballot. The bigots can fight as hard as they want, but their era is ending. They have only a short time left.

And this week's news wasn't all negative. In Washington state, the "everything but marriage" initiative Referendum 71 - which grants same-sex couples all the rights of marriage without using that term - won a slim, but nevertheless historic, victory. Although separate-but-equal isn't the best outcome possible, it's far better than nothing, and a clear sign of the progress that the gay-rights movement continues to achieve. (And for Rod Dreher's sake, note that this initiative, despite not using the emotionally charged word "marriage", was still fought tooth and nail by Christianist bigots. What better evidence could you ask for that the true goal of the religious right is to persecute gay people and deny them their rights?)

As long as that arc is, it's still bending. The question isn't whether we will eventually win - it's only a question of when. The progress of equality can be slowed, but it can't be denied. I know many of you are saddened and angry and frustrated, and I am as well. But if it means anything, remember: We know who we are, and we know what we stand for. No vote can take that away from us.

Because this strategy worked so well for Elizabeth Dole, another conservative politician has decided to make a play for the bigot vote by stirring up anti-atheist prejudice against a challenger. In this case, it's on a smaller scale: a race for city council in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You can read about it in the New Mexico Independent, a local paper. (HT: Daylight Atheism reader Brian Westley, who was also the first one to tell me about the Dole ads. He's good at finding this stuff!)

According to the mailer, sent out by city council member Don Harris:

David Barbour, recently moved here from San Francisco. He is a donor to Atheist organizations and speaker at Atheist events and attends radical political protests even in foreign countries. [italics and caps as in original —Ebonmuse]

Evidently, Mr. Barbour was a presenter at a 2004 event titled "The Importance of Being Atheist," hosted by a Unitarian Universalist group, and contributed to a scholarship essay contest run in 2008 by San Francisco Atheists (source). And I say, good for him! We need more civically minded, politically engaged atheists taking part in our great democracy. We have as much right to participate in the electoral process as any other citizen.

Mr. Harris, on the other hand, has a great deal to be ashamed of. Making a campaign issue out of someone's religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is a disgusting, despicable tactic. Whether someone is atheist, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or anything else makes no difference in their ability to serve their country, and trying to imply otherwise is a form of out-and-out bigotry no different than urging voters to defeat a candidate because they are black or because they are female. Whether in races for Senate seats, city council seats, or anything in between, this naked and shameless appeal to prejudice is an evil that no one should tolerate.

Unfortunately, this story was reported too late for us to help out Barbour's campaign - the election was today, in fact. I'll post an update when I hear how it turned out. But let this be a reminder to us that we must always be vigilant in fighting prejudice wherever and whenever it rears its head. By volunteering and contributing to support atheist candidates for political office, we can dispel anti-atheist bigotry and erect a bulwark against the forces of theocracy that are always seeking to push their way into our government.

Over the past two weeks, an individual calling himself Steve Leone has attempted to leave about half a dozen variations of the following comment on my thread about the "miracle" of Fatima:

"Oh yeah? Well, how did three illiterate Portuguese peasant children know that some strange atmospheric phenomenon was going to appear in the sky over Fatima at the exact date and time they predicted? Answer that, you smarty-pants atheists!"

Here's an entirely typical example from my moderation queue:

Author: Steve Leone (IP: 205.188.117.11, cache-dtc-ae07.proxy.aol.com)
Comment:
Whatever the thousands of people witnessed at Fatima, one has to ask: How did 3 peasant children know that something would occur at that time? Among all those in that varied crowd of people there was present newspaper reporters from Lisbon who witnessed and so reported the phenomenon that occurred. Agnostics, Atheists, Fanatics, yes even Fools were also present in that crowd of THOUSANDS. There can be no question that a spectacular event occurred. Without computers, 3 children alerted all to the event at the predicted hour. Solar activity was not in the mind of that crowd at that hour since it was rainy and overcast. The children did not fantasize, did not profit materially, did not conspire etc. Make of all this what you want but logic must prevail at the end.

While I don't demand that commenters agree with my viewpoint, I do insist that people who disagree with me take the time to read my posts and respond to the arguments I make. Since it was obvious that this person hadn't bothered to read or comprehend the Fatima post - if he had, he would have known that his criticism is completely irrelevant to the explanation I actually propose - I didn't approve any of these comments.

Then, in the past few days, I've started getting comments of a much more disturbing nature, submitted by someone calling himself "White Power Atheist". Here's one example of the kind of garbage this individual routinely submits:

Author : White Power Atheist (IP: 205.188.117.11, cache-dtc-ae07.proxy.aol.com)
Comment:
We must assassinate all believers

For even more obvious reasons, none of these comments made it out of my moderation queue. But it seems that "White Power Atheist" has suddenly become active on a variety of atheist blogs, as you'll see if you do a Google search for his handle. See this thread, for example, to understand the sort of filth he spews. (These comments were posted on Words of Wrath, a site run by an atheist blogger of color, which I'm sure was intentional.)

Now, if you look closely at the header information for those two comments, you may notice something: Steve Leone and "White Power Atheist" have exactly the same IP address, an AOL proxy server. Their comments also started being sent in to my site within a few days of each other.

Since AOL users all access the internet through these proxies, it might happen by coincidence that two separate people could leave comments from the same IP address. That would be a reasonable explanation if this had only happened once. But my suspicions were up, so I went back and scanned comments submitted to my moderation queue for the past two weeks. Here are the IP addresses used by Steve Leone for the comments he submitted:

64.12.116.69   [18 August 20:21]
205.188.117.11 [24 August 17:03]
205.188.117.11 [24 August 19:45]
205.188.117.11 [25 August 11:07]
205.188.117.11 [25 August 15:10]
64.12.116.69   [5 September 16:14]
205.188.117.11 [6 September 12:50]

And here are the IP addresses used by "White Power Atheist":

205.188.117.11 [4 September 22:15]
64.12.116.69   [6 September 16:00]
64.12.116.69   [6 September 16:03]

I also checked the database of existing comments. These are the only two commenters any time within the past month who have used either of these IP addresses. The fact that both of these commenters appeared within the same general time interval, as well as the fact that they both use these two IP addresses and no other current commenter on my site uses either of them, leads me to conclude that they are the same person. The fact that the Christian-apologist comments appeared first, and with greater frequency, indicates to me that their subject material is the author's primary concern, which leads me to conclude that the Christian persona is the true one and the racist-atheist persona is a masquerade. The implication is that this is a Christian pretending to be a racist atheist in an attempt to smear all atheists with the taint of racism.

The next time you hear Christians complaining about being persecuted in America, remember this story.

You probably know Hemant Mehta, author of the blog Friendly Atheist. What you may not know, and what I didn't know, is that by day he's a math teacher at a public high school in Illinois. And it seems that a right-wing Christian group, outraged by the thought of an atheist being a teacher and potentially a role model, is now trying to get him fired.

You can read the story in Hemant's own words in three posts, Why the Illinois Family Institute Is Angry With Me, Illinois Family Institute Goes After Me Again, and most recently, Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute Issues an Open Letter to Me.

Hemant does a superb job of telling the story himself, but the summary is that he outraged the Illinois Family Institute, a gay-bashing religious right group, by writing a blog post sarcastically criticizing a "warning" they issued about same-sex couples kissing in public. The IFI was terrified that - gasp! - young, impressionable children might see gays and lesbians engaging in acts of affection!

In response, the IFI's director, Laurie Higgins, sent a letter to Hemant's school board to insinuate that he should be fired for being an atheist:

...He, of course, has a First Amendment right to write whatever he pleases on his blog "The Friendly Atheist" during his free time, but it’s unfortunate that a role model for students would write some of the things he writes.

When this failed to produce the desired effect, Higgins then sent letters to parents in Hemant's district, suggesting that they should be horrified by an atheist teacher and should demand that their children be removed from his class:

...as I mentioned in my earlier article, parents have the right not to have him as a teacher and a role model for their children. I want to be very clear about what I'm suggesting: I am suggesting that parents who have serious concerns about Mr. Mehta's potential influence on their children's beliefs politely insist that their children be placed in another teacher's class.

The IFI's fearmongering follows the usual religious right smear-job tactics: dig around for anything controversial that can be linked to the person they're attacking - especially anything having to do with sex, which the Christianists are obsessed with to the point of paralysis - and then describe it to make it sound as upsetting to mainstream sensibilities as possible. Gasp! Another poster on Hemant's blog answered an e-mail from someone who practices polyamory! Gasp! Hemant linked to the "obscene column" of "homosexual activist" Dan Savage! Heavens, won't someone please think of the children?!

Notably, not even Higgins has claimed that Hemant has said or done anything in the classroom to promote atheism to his students. Her sole concern is that he might be a good teacher, such that students will find him inspiring and look up to him, will then Google his name, find out he's an atheist, and be drawn to atheism themselves! (Really. I'm not kidding. That's actually what they say.)

I've heard nothing to indicate that Hemant's job is in jeopardy, but if the school board does take any kind of retaliatory action against him, he would have a very strong legal case for religious discrimination. I'll post an update if I hear anything more on that front, and I'd gladly help raise money in his defense.

In the meantime, to Laurie Higgins and the IFI: shame on you. How dare you, here in America, try to get a man fired for expressing his views? How dare you suggest that speech protected by the First Amendment makes him any less fit as a teacher or as a role model? You should be ashamed for such a sleazy and contemptible attack on a good American citizen who's serving his community by teaching its children.

You have no right to demand that students in public schools only be exposed to opinions that are exactly the same as their parents'. That is a foolish, reprehensible and ignorant expectation. The whole point of education is to expose kids to new ideas. And when was the last time you complained about a religious teacher expressing their views? Have you ever issued press releases trying to frighten parents into pulling their children out of some class because the teacher is a Christian or a Jew? Have you ever written to the school board to complain because a teacher wears a crucifix in class? Hemant doesn't even so much as wear an atheist pin!

No teacher, atheist or theist, should proselytize their students in class (although religious ones too often do). The First Amendment requires that public institutions be secular and religiously neutral. But what constitutionally-protected opinions a teacher holds and expresses on their own time, that's their business. The IFI, a gang of small-minded bigots if ever I saw one, thinks they have the right to close down the circle of opinions to only the ones that they approve of. It's too bad for them that they live in America, a nation founded on precisely the opposite ideal.

In the days before Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation, we witnessed a strange spectacle: religious-right Christian after religious-right Christian spoke out against her nomination on the grounds that she valued empathy, and that this was an undesirable quality for a judge to have.

Coming from a religion whose founder supposedly said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," this is laughably absurd. Empathy is one of the founding moral teachings of Christianity, and here we see prominent Christians viciously attacking it. But in a deeper sense, I think this tells us something important. I don't believe attacks on empathy are a temporary position employed by the religious right for political advantage. I think that they're sincere when they claim to detest empathy, and that their abhorrence for it is an essential part of their worldview.

Let me refer again to Dave Schmelzer's Confessions of a Turncoat Atheist. Although Schmelzer's more willing than most to credit atheism for the good it's brought about, he still seems unable to avoid the atheists-are-angry-misanthropes invective that's ubiquitous in Christian apologetics books:

"[T]he tone... in the case of the 'nastiest' atheist writers, at least - does tend toward arrogance and sanctimony. I mean, do these authors seem happy to you? Is that worth noting?" [p.38]

and then there's this classic bit of propaganda, an exchange which he claims happened while he was speaking to an atheist students' club at a local university:

"In my presentation, I had told some inspiring (to me) stories about heroic, faith-driven responses to Hurricane Katrina, so I hazarded, 'To you, then, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is not so much that so many people were killed or driven away from their homes, families, and community. You're saying that that's no more tragic than, say, whatever damage was done to the coastline.' He agreed with that and pressed his point by saying, 'A person's death and a tree's death should have the same value in the big picture.'" [p.111]

Atheists think humans are no more valuable than trees! (Insert gasp of horror from Christian readers here.)

Call me a skeptic, but I just can't take this story seriously. I think I can say that I'm pretty familiar with what atheists tend to believe, and I've never met or heard of an atheist who believes anything remotely like this. I'm all but certain that Schmelzer has misreported this conversation. It may not have been intentional: knowing what we know about the fallibility of memory, he may have misremembered it in a way that fits with his conception of how atheists think.

What does this have to do with empathy? I'm coming around to that.

Having read countless deconversion stories, I've seen one element that reappears in many of them: the moment when a person, on the brink of losing their faith, begins to see atheism as a genuine possibility, as a live option, and is exhilarated by the thought:

For a few seconds, I was not a religious mind, viewing atheism from behind a plexiglass shield and handling it with industrial gloves, but a neutral mind, considering what the world looked like through both religious and atheistic eyes. For an ephemeral moment, I saw that the anomalies present in my religious perspective dissolved in the light of atheism. (source)

The more time that I spent reading essays by atheists, agnostics and freethinkers/humanists, the more I began to realize with a mixture of both fear and joy that I was thinking more like an unbeliever, similar to before I actually became a Christian approximately seventeen years earlier. I felt a certain kind of excitement building inside of me that was a very freeing experience. (source)

Perhaps more than any strictly intellectual argument, this is the factor that makes you most likely to convert to a given worldview: whether you truly empathize with the people who hold it, whether you can put yourself in their place and understand their reasoning.

The religious right, of course, has no interest in people coming to think this way about any worldview other than their own, which is why they disparage empathy in general. But they're especially terrified of people coming to think this way about atheism. This is why every presentation of atheism in their writing is carefully tailored to horrify ordinary Christians - to depict atheists as evil, immoral misanthropes (people no more important than trees!) whose views are so obviously beyond the pale that they can be dismissed without further reflection.

This is why, if you ask a theist why they think people become atheists, you rarely get an answer other than cartoonish stereotypes like, "They hate God and want to rebel against him." They can't give good answers to this question because they've never thought about it themselves. By design, they specifically steer away from thinking about it.

This is also why proselytizers so often spread the lie that atheists have no basis for morality, and try to blame us for every evil under the sun. I've attacked this falsehood often, but I've come to realize that it's more than a merely factual confusion. We can't just point out that apologists are wrong about this and expect them to stop saying it. They say it because they need to say it - because it's a crucial part of their worldview that atheism be blamed for everything bad that happens, in order to keep their followers safely away from it.

Although we need to keep speaking out against this tactic, it isn't a battle we can win by words alone. As I said, the religious right says this because they need to, because instilling fear of different viewpoints is a vital part of their strategy, and no correction we offer will convince them otherwise. What we need to do is to be visible - be outspoken, be loud and proud, and don't be afraid to introduce ourselves as atheists. The more people get to know us, the more they'll see that religious stereotypes about us have no basis in reality, and the more isolated and ineffectual the people who insist on pushing those stereotypes will become.

The history of anti-Semitism in the Christian church is a long, sad story. Ironically, this faith which began as a sect within Judaism has been responsible for many more atrocities against the Jewish people than any of their other enemies.

For centuries, Christian Europe reviled Jewish believers as Christ-killers, and Jews were accused of ludicrous crimes like "host nailing" (stealing consecrated communion wafers and driving nails through them, to crucify Jesus anew) or draining the blood of Christian children to bake in matzoh. Throughout the Middle Ages, thousands of Jews were tried and executed, or simply murdered by mobs, after wild accusations such as these incited Christian communities to frenzy. One of the most notable Christian anti-Semites was Martin Luther, who wrote a book titled On the Jews and Their Lies which argued that Judaism should be outlawed, synagogues should be burned down and Jews should be enslaved for forced labor.

At the root of all this anti-Semitic hatred and bloodshed lies a matter of first-century politics. At the time of Christianity's origin, there was a necessity to blame someone for Jesus' death. But blaming the Romans would not have been wise - Christians existed at Rome's sufferance in any case, and depicting their founder as a criminal executed by the Romans for treason would have been inviting far worse persecution. The natural alternative was to cast blame on the Jews, whom the gospels depict as conspiring to murder Jesus with, at worst, the reluctant cooperation of the Roman authorities.

As Christianity cast off its Jewish origins, this story was found useful to serve other purposes. Finding few converts among the Jews, Christianity's evangelists began targeting Gentiles for conversion. The depiction of the Jews as a stubborn, hardhearted people, cursed by God with blindness and unbelief as punishment for their sins, was readily integrated with the Gospel story and used to explain why these people had so widely rejected the faith that was born among them.

Consider some specific examples of biblical anti-Semitism. While all the gospels record Jesus as engaging in debate with the scribes and Pharisees, only the Gospel of John elevates these disputes to an accusation of corporate guilt against "the Jews" in general: "And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him" (5:16). The fourth gospel also says of Jesus: "He would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him" (7:1) and adds darkly that "no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews" (7:13). In the crowning accusation, John depicts Jesus as accusing "the Jews" as follows:

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

—John 8:44

When Jesus is tried before Pilate, John writes: "The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die" (19:7), and adds: "Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews cried out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend" (19:12).

Ironically, the single most anti-Semitic verse of the gospels comes in the book that otherwise shows the most understanding and sympathy for the Jewish viewpoint, the Gospel of Matthew. In this bloodcurdling verse, the Jewish spectators demand that responsibility for Jesus' death be placed on themselves and on all their descendants:

"When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children."

—Matthew 27:24-25

The anti-Semitism continues in the Book of Acts, where the apostle Stephen is made to say what would become a common Christian refrain against the Jews - that they had always been a sinful and stubborn people with a history of killing prophets, culminating in the supreme atrocity of their killing God's only son:

"Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers."

—Acts 7:51-52

The epistle of Titus adds another pervasive element of anti-Semitic lore, the Jews' supposed obsession with money, and adds threateningly that "[their] mouths must be stopped".

"For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake."

—Titus 1:10-11

The first epistle of Thessalonians, in what may be a later interpolation, alludes to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem as a deserved punishment from God:

"For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost."

—1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

And the Book of Revelation repeats John's accusation that the Jews were secret demon-worshippers:

"Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee."

—Revelation 3:9

Rivers of innocent Jewish blood have been spilled through the ages because of verses like these. Today, to their credit, the mainstream Protestant churches have gone a long way toward banishing anti-Semitism to the shadows - but it is far from dead. It still has some prominent backers, such as John Hagee (as well as Mr. "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" himself), and the Catholic church is intently moving backward.

However, Christian anti-Semitism has taken on a more subtle form: the so-called "Christian Zionist" movement, which encourages militant Jewish settlers to further expand their settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank. What few of these people mention explicitly is that they encourage the settlers because they believe it will more swiftly bring on the End Times, in which one-third of Jews will be converted to Christianity and the rest will be slaughtered and then eternally condemned to Hell. This veiled wish for a new Holocaust, one condoned and directed by God, must be the most virulent manifestation of anti-Semitism to be found in all the dark history of Christianity.