The comments in a recent thread on same-sex marriage have been heading in this direction, so I thought I'd offer some thoughts about polyamorous relationships and how we can view them from a humanist standpoint.

The reason I (and others) advocate full marriage equality for same-sex couples is straightforward. Marriage is a civil ceremony which confers many legal rights on both partners, rights which are either extremely burdensome or impossible to obtain any other way. At present, the law in many states denies certain couples the right to enter into marriage because of the gender of the participants. This is wrong for precisely the same reason as anti-miscegenation laws, which denied certain couples the right to enter into marriage because of the race of the participants. Both of these are discriminatory policies which deny people the equal protection of the laws by treating them differently based on which group they belong to (black/white, heterosexual/homosexual).

However, laws which restrict marriage to two partners are not discriminatory in the same sense, because those laws apply equally to everyone. Unlike with same-sex marriage, therefore, I conclude that there is no straightforward anti-discrimination argument for extending marriage rights to polyamorous partnerships. This is not a case of legal benefits being offered to certain partnerships but denied to others based solely on morally irrelevant characteristics of the partners, like race or gender. Instead, the law is consistent: no one can enter into a legal marriage with more than one partner. One can certainly argue whether this is the most rational policy for society to follow, but it's not a self-evident violation of anyone's human rights.

So far, so good. But now the further question: even if it's not discrimination, is it the most rational policy for society to forbid multiple-partner marriages?

The first thing to recognize, in my opinion, is that once we decide to allow polyamorous marriages, there's no rational cutoff point at which we can limit their size. Any argument which would permit a polyamorous relationship of N partners would equally well permit a relationship of N+1 partners. (In software engineering, my chosen field, a similar principle is called the zero-one-infinity rule: "When processing input, allow none of X, one of X, or infinity of X.")

But this presents us with some problems, because there are numerous rights and responsibilities that come with a two-person marriage that simply can't be extended in a straightforward manner to a multiple-partner marriage. Take the right not to testify against your partner in court, for example, or the death benefits paid to partners of federal employees, or the right to gain residency or citizenship by marrying someone who is already a citizen. Allowing such rights to be extended to an arbitrarily large group of partners could lead to chaos - but having permitted them for two-person marriages, how could we fairly forbid them to larger arrangements?

And then there are the legal issues, which would be orders of magnitude more complex than the already difficult dilemmas that arise in family law. How do you take a new person into a polyamorous relationship - must it be by unanimous consent of all current partners, or a mere majority vote? If such a partnership dissolves, how do we fairly divide up property, or settle on child custody or visitation rights? If you're married to two or more people and become incapacitated, who would have the deciding vote in matters of care? These problems aren't insoluble - but they would be extraordinarily difficult to grapple with. (This, again, contrasts to same-sex marriage, where the nature, rights and responsibilities of the relationship don't change just because we've removed one limitation on who can participate. Polyamorous marriage, on the other hand, would truly be a brand-new kind of relationship requiring its own set of rules.)

All these factors would seem to indicate that our current policy is rationally justified. And yet, the libertarian in me rebels against the idea that the state has any business butting into people's private relationships. Mutually consenting adults should be able to enter into any kind of arrangement they please. I have to admit that I find considerable justice in this argument. If three people rather than two want to share household responsibilities, by what right can we deny them that? A larger family structure might even, arguably, be superior to pair marriages in terms of sharing childcare duties and other responsibilities, and more resilient against tragedies like the death of one partner.

On the other hand, these lofty principles, so clear and simple-seeming in the abstract, inevitably get snarled in the complications of the real world. And here's one whopping big complication that atheists and freethinkers should be especially sensitive to: in the real world, one of the most common manifestations of plural partnerships is in religious cults that use polygamy as a way to keep women subjugated.

Escapees like Carolyn Jessop and Elissa Wall have written grippingly of their virtual imprisonment in isolated sects like the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints - an extremist offshoot of the Mormons), which force girls into harem-like polygamous marriages with older males whom they're expected to obey absolutely. (See also this article, or my older posts on Warren Jeffs.)

This is an evil that no society should tolerate - but if we legally permit polyamory, how can we prevent it? Better enforcement of age-of-consent laws would help, but even so, this would not prevent women who feel they have no place else to turn from being coerced into these relationships of subjugation.

With all this in mind, my qualified conclusion is that society should not legally recognize polyamorous relationships. I certainly don't think consenting adults should be prohibited from doing whatever they want in their private lives, but the full range of legal benefits that come with marriage should be limited to two-person partnerships, at least for now. However, I'm open to counterarguments. Is there a way to treat all kinds of committed relationships evenhandedly without encouraging women's subjugation or opening the door to legal absurdities?

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

Americablog's John Aravosis is up in arms over the news that the Mormon church reportedly staged a "posthumous baptism" ceremony last year for President Barack Obama's deceased mother:

What else to call the Mormon's laughable statement today that their posthumous baptism last year of President Obama's mother was a "rare" mistake that might have been done by "pranksters."

...Yes, all one big unfortunate "rare" mistake. Kind of like a clerical error. Except instead of giving you the wrong change, they just stole your mother's soul.

Look - as ridiculous and cultish as I find the Mormon notion of "baptism for the dead", this response is kind of over the top. "Stole your mother's soul"? Aren't we being just a little bit shrill here?

Yes, this belief is patronizing and offensive. It's especially insulting and clumsy when the Mormons claim to be baptizing Holocaust victims. But it's not as if they're kidnapping living people and forcibly converting them; all they're actually doing is staging a superstitious little ceremony and then claiming that the deceased now has the opportunity to enter Heaven. If the Mormons are guilty of arrogance for saying that they have the sole power to determine who is saved, almost every other world religion is equally guilty of arrogance for the same reason!

Absurd as this practice is, it doesn't do any real harm to anyone. The only thing the Mormon church is actually accomplishing is making itself a target for ridicule. "Baptism for the dead"? This reminds me more than a little of the cult leader Sun Myung Moon's claim that Jesus, Buddha, Confucius and Mohammed have all posthumously converted and are issuing statements from the afterlife instructing their followers to become Moonies. It just makes them look silly and ridiculous. Who do they imagine they're fooling?

If we want to criticize Mormonism (or any other church), we should focus our fire on actions they take that cause real harm to real human beings. The Mormons' dumping $20 million into fighting marriage equality in California, for instance, is a much more serious misdeed that shows a disdain for the liberty of their fellow people and a regressive, theocratic belief that their religion gives them the right to dictate the course of other people's lives. As far as I'm concerned, whatever the Mormons do in the privacy of their temple is their own business - but they should learn to respect other people's choices to determine the course of their lives.

The past few weeks haven't been good ones for religious bigots. First Iowa and Vermont legalized same-sex marriage in rapid succession; soon afterwards, the state legislatures of New Hampshire and Maine passed marriage-equality bills. (If you live in either state, contact your governor and tell him to sign them!) And now, this stunning poll result from Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com, Two National Polls, for First Time, Show Plurality Support for Gay Marriage:

...a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post gives gay marriage an outright plurality, with 49 percent of adults supporting gay marriage and 46 percent opposed.

...a CBS/NYT poll put support for full marriage rights at 42 percent, versus 25 percent for civil unions and 28 percent for no legal recognition. This represents a significant increase from an identical CBS/NYT poll in March, where the numbers were 33 percent for marriage, 27 percent for civil unions, and 35 percent for no recognition.

Read that last paragraph again: support for marriage equality has advanced almost ten points in just a month, such that it now commands a decisive plurality. Combined with the civil-unions position, there's a two-to-one majority nationwide in favor of granting benefits to same-sex couples. It can now very plausibly be argued that the judges who've ruled in favor of equality are upholding the will of the people, not denying it.

We're on the verge of a sea change in American civic life, thanks to a gay-rights movement that's made far more progress than seemed imaginable even just a few years ago. And as history leaves them in the dust, the religious right is increasingly going into full meltdown mode. They've used absurdly overheated and hysterical rhetoric in the past, but this time they've truly outdone themselves.

Witness Orson Scott Card, a Mormon and board member of the "National Organization for Marriage" who's previously proclaimed atheists unfit to be president. But even that idiocy is nothing compared to the full-tilt frothing lunacy on display in an anti-gay-marriage screed he recently published in the Mormon Times (HT: Americablog). In it, he calls same-sex marriage "the end of democracy in America" and urges citizens to revolt against any government that permits it:

Why should married people feel the slightest loyalty to a government or society that are conspiring to encourage reproductive and/or marital dysfunction in their children?

...What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them.

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Card isn't the most prominent member of the religious right to call for armed rebellion because the government won't cater to his wishes. He's not even the first. (Rick Perry may have that honor, along with a substantial portion of the Texas Republican Party.) But it is frightening that, as society moves away from accepting their views, these calls for revolution become more and more common among them.

What this shows, I think, is that the religious right is unwilling to participate in the social contract: the understanding that we all have a voice in directing the course of the state, but the price of that freedom is not always having one's own way. The religious right has no interest in that bargain. If they don't get to win, they don't want to participate. And as soon as events are not going their way, they immediately begin calling for armed revolt and insurrection, determined to achieve their goals by violence if they can't achieve them by democracy. The most insane aspect of this is that no one is taking away any of their rights - their clamoring for rebellion is purely because they can no longer control the lives of others.

This is anti-Americanism in its purest sense: the refusal to accept the democratic bargain that is the very essence of our nation. And as the fringe members of their movement are increasingly tipped over the edge into real violence by their leaders' reckless words, the people who speak those words increasingly bear moral responsibility for the bloodshed they create.

The one bright side to all this is that, the more extreme and overheated anti-gay rhetoric becomes, the more moderate Americans will become repelled and will flock to the progressive side. We've already seen this in polls that show a continuing exodus from the Republican party. There may come a point where sensible Republicans realize how this issue is destroying them, cut ties with the religious right, and become a real opposition party worthy of being taken seriously again. Or they may continue to ramp up their rhetoric as they dwindle into permanent irrelevance. Either option suits me fine.

It's common for fundamentalist Christians to think of themselves as the moral guardians of our culture, a bulwark against the rampant sex and violence in the mass media. But this self-flattering caricature runs up against inconvenient reality: there is plenty of evidence which shows that Christians as a whole are every bit as drawn to sex and violence as everyone else.

One of the best examples of this is Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. This movie had a worldwide gross of over $600 million, of which we can safely assume most came from Christian viewers. Of the movie's two-plus hour runtime, nearly all is devoted to depicting the torture and execution of Jesus in obsessive, graphic detail, from brutal floggings to the hammering in of crucixifion nails, even adding extra tortures not mentioned in the gospels. Film critic Roger Ebert called Passion "the most violent film I have ever seen", and Slate critic David Edelstein suggested it should be renamed "The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre".

Another example is the video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a real-time strategy game based on the Left Behind novels. In the game, players take the role of commander of the "Tribulation Force", an army of Christian believers, converted after the rapture, who must battle the forces of the Antichrist. In essence, the player's mission is to either convert or kill all non-Christians. U.N. soldiers are represented as minions of the Antichrist, and the player characters exclaim "Praise the Lord!" each time they shoot one of them.

And then, of course, there are the violent and gory scenes from Left Behind itself, where Jesus returns to earth to slaughter his enemies by the millions:

"Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ."

For deeply religious Christians, it seems that violence is acceptable as long as it's depicted in the proper religious context. When it's presented as God's righteous judgment, they find violence perfectly okay and often even praiseworthy. The Bible itself, of course, is the greatest example of this - considering the many brutal slaughters and wars of extermination it records the Israelites waging against their enemies at God's command, none of which ever seem to give fundamentalists any concern. (The sexual content of the Bible doesn't bother them either.)

Turning to the topic of sex, there's little difference to be found between Christians and non-Christians here as well - or rather, if there is, it's in the wrong direction. It's long been known that, statistically, socially conservative states and evangelical Protestants in particular have higher rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, and STD infection. The "abstinence-only" sex education programs and virginity pledges so beloved by religious conservatives have repeatedly failed to make any measurable difference in sexual behavior.

Corroborating evidence comes from another study, by sociologist Benjamin Edelman, concerning access to online pornography. It turns out that of all American states, the one with the highest rate of subscriptions to adult sites is the socially conservative, Mormon-dominated Utah. The FBI also confirms that Utah outranks most other states when it comes to web searches for explicit content. Nor is this just a Mormon thing, as Edelman adds:

"Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality," Edelman writes. In the 27 states where "defense of marriage" amendments have been adopted, there were 11 percent more porn subscribers than in other states, he reports. Use is higher also in states where more people agree with the statement "I never doubt the existence of God."

Clearly, there's a great deal of sexual repression lurking beneath the surface facades of piety. When it comes to sex and violence, religious teachings may instill an outward attitude of condemnation, but they evidently make little difference in people's actual desires and behaviors.

I woke up this weekend to the extremely welcome news that the State of Connecticut has legalized gay marriage, joining Massachusetts and California as the only three U.S. states with full marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. Although seven other states have civil unions or domestic partnership laws, as did Connecticut before this ruling, the state supreme court held that this was not enough.

I used to believe that civil unions were an acceptable compromise, but I don't believe that anymore. The Connecticut ruling cited the same argument that persuaded me: drawing a legal distinction between civil unions and marriage is the same reasoning as the "separate but equal" argument that was once used to justify racial segregation. The concept of marriage has existed for millennia, but the concept of civil unions has not. By barring gay couples from the former, the state is advancing an unsubtle claim that they are somehow different, not worthy of the same recognition as straight couples. This is the same attitude and reasoning that perpetuates discrimination in the first place. With its enlightened ruling, the Connecticut Supreme Court has recognized the obvious truth that the partnerships of gay couples are no different from the partnerships of straight couples, and deserve nothing less when it comes to legal rights. Way to go, Connecticut!

The religious right must be aware that the tide is turning against them on this issue. Polls have found increasing tolerance and support for gay marriage, which ensures that rulings like these are just the leading edge of many more to come. It's very plausible that America will have full marriage equality, at least in law, within a generation. Anti-gay bigots may be able to slow the tide of change, but they cannot stop it.

That said, one such effort is underway in California. Bigots of the religious right have successfully placed a measure, Proposition 8, on the ballot this fall. If it passes, this measure would overturn that state's supreme court decision and make gay marriage illegal - an astonishing blast of raw hatred that would tear apart the thousands of marriages already obtained by gay couples in the state. For the sake of marriage equality, and for the rights of all Americans, not just gay Americans, to direct their lives free from religious tyranny, this measure must be defeated.

Although most polls have found that Californians are opposed to Prop 8 by a slim majority, recent polling has detected a worrying uptick in support. Much of this can be blamed on the Mormon church, whose members are pouring millions of dollars into the state to outlaw gay marriage. If their efforts help pass Prop 8, it wouldn't be the first time the Mormons have successfully impeded moral progress. From Under the Banner of Heaven:

Over the years, the Mormon leadership has made numerous pronouncements about the "dangers" of the feminist movement and has excommunicated several outspoken feminists. But perhaps the greatest rift between Mormon general authorities and advocates for women's rights occurred when the LDS Church actively and very effectively mobilized Mormons to vote as a bloc against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment... Most political analysts believe that had the LDS Church not taken such an aggressive position against the ERA, it would have been easily ratified by the required thirty-eight states, and would now be part of the U.S. Constitution. (p.25)

Of course, more traditional Christians have joined the Mormons in their campaign of hate. A suitable example can be found at the Evangelical Outpost, which cites a video by the right-wing Family Research Council encouraging its members to vote for Proposition 8. The video purports to be documentation of the grave harm done in Massachusetts by the legalization of gay marriage. I was curious, since I've heard many religious right polemics against gay marriage, but never an explanation of what bad effects they fear would result if it were to be legalized.

The video features a Christian couple in Massachusetts who were upset that their elementary-school-age son was taught about gays and gay marriage. I watched the whole thing, waiting for them to explain how this would lead to greater harm, but there was no follow-up. In their eyes, that was the harm: that their son was merely made aware of the existence of gay couples. Evidently, they want to preserve their right to keep their children ignorant of ways of life other than their own. How dare the public schools teach our kids tolerance, was their message, when we want to teach them to fear and hate! Were there people who raised the same complaint after interracial marriage was legalized, that teaching about the existence of such a thing interferes with their parental right to teach their children racism?

Bigots like the Mormon leadership and the Family Research Council hide their hatred behind a smiling mask or dress it up with hollow slogans about "family values". But disguise it however they will, they cannot conceal its fundamental ugliness. What they want is not the freedom to lead their own lives as they see fit, but the power to reach into the lives of others to oppress, tyrannize, and enforce their own narrow and archaic views.

Gay and lesbian couples are human beings and deserve the same rights as anyone else: the right to live in peace, to raise families, to pledge their devotion and spend their lives with the people they love. They deserve those rights, and it is up to us to protect them. If we win the vote in California - if marriage equality is affirmed not just by the courts, but by popular acclaim - this will be a crushing blow to the anti-gay bigots and will delegitimize their cause as no other development could. This November, much is at stake. Will you join in the fight to liberate human freedom from the prejudices of the past?

Of all the major faiths in the world today, few surpass the bizarreness of Mormonism. The church was founded in the 1830s by Joseph Smith, Jr., who claimed to have been guided by an angel to a set of buried golden plates which he miraculously gained the ability to translate. These plates, supposedly, were the records of a lost American civilization, descended from a family of ancient Jews who had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and founded a large, advanced society in the New World. After disobeying the word of God, this civilization eventually tore itself apart in warfare and fell into ruin; the Native Americans are believed by Mormons to be their descendants.

This fantastic story, unsupported by archaeological or genetic evidence and contradicted by much of what archaeologists do know about pre-Columbian America, would provide material for many installments in this series all by itself. But today, I want to talk about something different: the process by which the Book of Mormon came into existence, and one of the most embarrassing events in the course of its composition.

One of Joseph Smith's earliest converts was a farmer named Martin Harris. Harris gave money to Smith to finance his translation of the golden plates (he would later mortgage his farm to pay for the first translation of the Book of Mormon, and lost it when the book was not a success). Harris also acted as Smith's scribe while the book was being written. With the two of them separated by a curtain, Smith would peer into a hat, which supposedly contained "seer stones" that gave him visions of the translated text, and dictate what he saw. (The physical presence of the golden plates was apparently not necessary.)

The incident in question came several months into the "translation," when Smith had produced about 116 pages of text. Harris' wife Lucy had grown skeptical of Smith and suspected that he was a con man seeking to defraud her husband. In an attempt to reassure her, Harris asked Smith for permission to take the pages home to show to her and other close friends. After several demurrals, Smith finally gave in and gave the pages to Harris.

Both skeptical historians and Mormon believers agree on the events so far. And they also agree on what happened next: when Joseph Smith finally asked for the pages back, Martin Harris confessed that he had lost them.

What exactly happened to those pages is not clear. In her definitive biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, the skeptical historian of Mormonism Fawn Brodie argues that Lucy Harris stole and destroyed the pages. According to Brodie, she also taunted Smith: "If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it."

And indeed, she had a point. After all, Mormon theology is adamant that Smith was not inventing, but merely translating by the gift of God. What would be so difficult about returning to the same place in the tablets and retranslating the parts that had been lost? A word-for-word reproduction of the 116 missing pages would have been powerful verification that Smith was actually receiving divine guidance and basing his work off of an actual text. He should have viewed the loss of the pages as, at most, a minor setback.

But this is not what happened. Instead, according to skeptical and believing histories alike, Joseph Smith went into an inconsolable frenzy, moaning that he had brought disaster on himself. Finally, sorrowfully, he announced that he had sinned by giving away the pages, and that God was going to punish him - although, according to the church's own history, it was God who granted Smith permission to give them to Harris. What was to be Smith's punishment? He would, he said, be forbidden to translate that section of the text again. Instead, he would translate a different section of the plates - one that chronicled the same events but was written by a different author, so the basic storyline would be the same but the wording would be different.

If you've just fallen over laughing, believe me, you're not alone. That was my reaction the first time I heard about this as well. What clearer proof could be imagined that Smith was just making up the Book of Mormon out of his own head? Possessed of only a normal human memory, he was unable to reproduce the story exactly as he first dictated it. Instead, he resorted to re-writing it from scratch and coming up with a contrived excuse for why it was different the second time.

Mormons who reject this most obvious of explanations are forced to believe that, regardless of whether Smith sinned or not, God passed up a perfect opportunity to prove his involvement with this new religion to the world, and instead forced his prophet to do the exact thing a fraud would be forced to do in that situation. That convoluted and contrived story is far less parsimonious than the alternative - that Smith was a swindler, and the Book of Mormon his own invention - which is why I ask Mormons: Do you really believe that?

Other posts in this series:

• Do You Really Believe That?

Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a speech in which he argued that his Mormon religious beliefs should not prevent Americans from voting for him.

I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions... I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.

The main intended audience of Romney's speech was the Republican Party's base of right-wing Christians, many of whom are deeply suspicious of Mormonism and consider it a cult. In this respect, Romney faces a similar dilemma to another famous American politician who confronted skepticism about his faith - President John F. Kennedy.

The first (and still the only) Roman Catholic ever to be elected President, Kennedy likewise had to persuade the public that his religion would not cause him to impose doctrines on them which they did not share. In a famous 1960 speech, Kennedy effectively laid those doubts to rest with a resounding defense of the importance of separation of church and state:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

...I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

Clearly, Romney wants to invoke the image of President Kennedy; he alluded to this speech in his own address. But Romney is in a far more difficult bind, because the audience he's trying to reach is vehemently opposed to the separation of church and state. Right-wing Christians want to force their own theological vision on the nation, and for Romney to assert that he'll keep religion apart from government would only further push them away from him. It's no surprise, therefore, that Romney's allusion to Kennedy's speech was a very brief and glancing one. He said only that "Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president," omitting Kennedy's argument for an expansive view of separation.

Romney's own proposal was a very different one:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom....

...The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'

This vague, ecumenical-sounding statement is, in fact, a bolt of vicious bigotry directed at atheists. This fact was noticed and pointed out by a Christian blogger, Slacktivist (who also capably dissects the other absurdities in the speech):

If freedom requires religion, then the a-religious and irreligious, the non-religious and un-religious are the enemies of freedom. Romney believes, in other words, that atheism is incompatible with freedom. Whatever it is he means by "religious liberty," he does not believe it can safely be applied to atheists.

By repeating the right-wing rhetoric about how separation of church and state is fully compatible with official sanction of belief in God and discrimination against atheists, Romney shows what his intent is. He doesn't truly want a candidate's religious beliefs to be considered irrelevant. He's just pleading for the circle of religious bigotry toward outsiders expanded slightly to include him - so that he can be on the inside, hurling barbs at those who believe differently, rather than on the outside, on the receiving end of those barbs from his fellow theocrats.

Romney's stance is remarkably like that of his fellow Mormon, Orson Scott Card, who likewise argued that America is a secular nation with no religious test and then proceeded to arrogantly dismiss all atheist Americans as unqualified for elected office. Far from pleading for a truly universal tolerance, Romney, like so many other aspiring theocrats through history, wants just enough tolerance for himself, but has no intent or desire to extend that same tolerance to others. His plight as a member of a distrusted minority has given him surprisingly little insight or empathy toward others in the same situation. Rather than abolish religious persecution, he simply aspires to be part of the majority so that he can redirect that persecution toward his chosen adversaries.

Religion has always been used to sanctify inequality here on Earth, in the present no less than in the past. By teaching their followers that they are God's chosen rulers, religious authorities can accustom the flock to obedience and ascend to positions of power without the consent of the majority. The fundamentally oligarchic and anti-democratic nature of most established religions, in which the church leaders choose their own successors, testifies to this.

These anti-democratic beliefs are all too readily exploited to justify the most horrendous abuses of power. One of the most obnoxious and sickening tendencies of fundamentalist religion is the way in which its leaders use their supposedly God-given status to claim the pretense of moral superiority over their followers, even when they are the ones in the wrong. Two recent criminal cases bear witness to this phenomenon.

First, take Warren Jeffs, the fugitive Mormon cult leader who was captured last year and whose trial has now begun. Jeffs was the patriarch of a polygamist Mormon enclave in the deserts of Utah, and from all accounts ruled with an iron fist. Women in this community live like prisoners, indoctrinated into absolute obedience from a very early age, and are usually "given" in marriage to far older men who already have many wives before they are old enough to give consent. It is this practice that has led Jeffs to be charged as an accomplice to rape. A witness for the prosecution, a former member of Jeffs' cult who, at the age of 14, was married to an older male cousin without her consent and then raped, gave horrifying testimony of the ordeal she endured:

"I can't do this, please don't," she said she told her husband. "I was sobbing. My whole entire body was shaking I was so scared. He didn't stop. He just laid me onto the bed and had sex."

Afterward, the woman said she felt dirty and took two bottles of painkillers. "I just wanted to die. I didn't want to deal with (my husband) anymore. I didn't want to deal with Warren, or the prophet, or my mother... I was so hurt by them," she said.

When she sought out Jeffs, the only authority she knew, and pleaded for help, he harshly rebuked her and sent her back to her abusive marriage:

"I told him (Jeffs) I was sorry I had failed so severely... He told me that I needed to repent, that I was not living up to my vows, I was not being obedient, I was not being submissive and that was what my problem was," she recounted.

Jeffs told her to go home "and give myself mind, body, and soul" to her husband.

Thankfully, this woman later escaped Jeffs' cult, but there are doubtless many young women who still suffer in its clutches. Criminal considerations aside, Jeffs' awful reaction to this woman's cry for help - telling her to go back and submit to her rapist husband, and blaming her for not being submissive to his wishes, rather than giving her shelter and seeking legal help as a good person would have done - shows clearly that he totally lacks empathy and human feeling. Religious authorities, who see human beings as pawns to be moved around at whim, too often take such a stance.

On another note, there are further developments in the story of Thomas Weeks, the megachurch leader accused of savagely beating his estranged wife in a parking lot. In his first statement since his arrest, Weeks asked his fellow believers not to pass judgment and then, in an act of supreme arrogance, announced that he forgave his wife. For what? He should be begging her forgiveness, not acting as if she did something wrong and he was graciously choosing to pardon her!

Fortunately, we live in a society that has separation of church and state, and a civil justice system that does not recognize any accused person's delusions about being the anointed servant of God's will. Still, even when facing lengthy prison terms, it's incredible that these religious leaders continue to act as if their alleged victims, not they, are the ones who have done something wrong. As both these stories show, women especially suffer the results of this, since they are most often on the receiving end of theological justifications for inequality.

LATE-BREAKING UPDATE (9/25): Warren Jeffs has been convicted and faces up to life in prison.

The campaign of Mitt Romney, a Mormon, for the Republican presidential nomination has caused rifts within the party's base, as evangelical Christians agonize over whether they could support a candidate who believes slightly different things about God than they do. The latest spat in this conflict comes in a post by Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who argues that Mormons are not Christians. Sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card, himself a Mormon, fires back. (Via.)

I have little interest in watching angels dance on pinheads, so I don't intend to take sides in that debate. However, some of Card's offhand remarks are worthy of a much more in-depth response.

Card makes some trenchant remarks about how America was founded with a look back at the bloody religious wars of medieval Europe, and how our founders sought to distance themselves from faith-based slaughter by creating a republic where church and state would be kept separate. He perceptively notes that Mitt Romney is not running for "Pope of America", which made me laugh.

Then his essay starts to go off the rails:

That's something that I would look for about any candidate, from any religious tradition. Does he live by what his religion teaches? Or is he a member in name only?

[Romney's] profession of membership in a Church gives us a way to find out about the standards of good and evil, of right and wrong, that his religion teaches. Where I would be worried is when we have a candidate who does not profess any religion, or does not live up to the standards of the religion he professes.

Yes, folks: apparently, as far as Orson Scott Card is concerned, atheists are unfit to be president. And yet, just a few paragraphs later, he says this:

We are as legitimate, as citizens and therefore as potential officeholders, as anybody else in America. Because there is no religious test for holding office in America.

And if you try to impose one, by saying that all persons belonging to this or that religion should never be elected president, then who is it who is rejecting the U.S. Constitution? Who is it who is saying that people with certain beliefs are second-class citizens, for no other reason than their religion?

The aroma of hypocrisy lingers thickly over this piece. Card says that we are voting for a president, not for a head rabbi or chief minister: in other words, the office of president is a secular position, not a religious one. So far, so good. He also says that there is no religious test for office, should be no religious test for office, and anyone who says otherwise is un-American. Again, I cannot disagree with that. But sandwiched in between those two sensible assertions is a careless, dismissive slap at atheists, saying that an atheist, regardless of experience or qualifications, is unfit to serve in national office. How can he overlook the glaring contradiction that rips through the heart of his own words? For someone who is so sensitive to prejudice directed to his own religion, he seems far too ready to dispense it to others.

Card's sole explanation for this ugly prejudice is that he doesn't think he can tell what an atheist thinks and believes, since they do not belong to churches or profess creeds that lay this all out for onlookers:

How then would we find out what he really believes? What his standards are? How well he keeps his commitments?

I have a simple suggestion, Mr. Card: if you want to know what an atheist believes, ask him. Is that such an outlandish suggestion that it has somehow escaped you? If you want to know whether an atheist keeps their commitments, research their background and their history. If you want to know what an atheist's moral standards are, just ask. I'm sure there are plenty of us who'd be happy to tell you.

In any case, evaluating a candidate as an individual is the only option for a voter who cares about making the right choice, regardless of that candidate's religion or lack thereof. People are not herd animals whose distinguishing characteristics can be completely summed up by the religious brands stamped on their foreheads. Simply because a person professes a creed is no guarantee that they believe it or will follow it; simply because a person belongs to a religion is no guarantee of how they will interpret it or act on it.

Card himself notes this, yet inexplicably fails to draw the obvious conclusion from it. Like far too many religious people, he seemingly has no qualms about dismissing atheists as a class without making any serious effort to understand them. In fact, he suggests that all religious believers should join together to suppress atheism, rather than fighting over theology with each other. He even throws in the by-now standard, utterly fictitious, claim that atheists want to "exclude" religious people from public life, which is ironically hypocritical considering his own essay expresses that very desire directed at atheists.

This is the sort of bigotry that atheists must routinely confront. In truth, Card's sentiments are probably shared by a great number of Americans, people who feel a vague discomfort about atheism and feel more confident voting for a candidate who believes in some religion, any religion. It's reminiscent of the remark attributed to President Eisenhower: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious belief — and I don't care what it is."

In spite of its widespread adoption, this claim is terminally incoherent. It makes no sense to say that any religious person, regardless of their beliefs, is morally superior to any atheist, regardless of their beliefs. I have dealt with this fallacy before. If this prejudice is widely held, that is only all the more reason to attack it and show it to be false.

In our society, it is still widely considered rude to criticize opinions and practices that arise from religious belief, no matter how evil or abhorrent they are. Even when it comes to the murderous fanatics who kill in the name of Islam, politicians and other public figures who criticize them often take pains to label their actions as arising from a twisted or self-serving interpretation, as though it would be impossible for a legitimate and sincere interpretation of any religion to inspire believers to commit evil acts.

However, the reality is that sincere religious beliefs and legitimate interpretations of scripture can, and very often do, cause immense evil and harm. And when a more enlightened future age arrives to tote up the harms done by religion, I am certain that the systematic oppression and denial of basic rights to one-half of the human race will rank near the top. Back in March, I wrote "That Monstrous Regiment" about the extreme denigration of women in the Christian tradition, but there is more to be said. This net can be cast wider, and it is time to do so.

Every major world religion - without exception - is intensely patriarchal. Every one of them engages in the systematic devaluation of women, in the systematic exclusion of women from positions of authority, and in the systematic oppression and even enslavement of women. I have yet to find a single major religion that bucks this trend. Considering how little many of these religions have in common otherwise, this is a truly remarkable pattern. A few denominations, influenced by the feminist movement and other moral advances, are only now beginning to redress this glaring inequity, but for the most part progress has been extremely slow and the vast majority of religions still treat women as less than human.

Despite its having been housebroken by the Enlightenment, Christianity is one of the worst offenders. Although some Christian denominations have taken faltering steps towards women's equality, all those denominations still believe in and endorse the Bible, which is without a doubt one of the most misogynistic books in existence.

In the book of Genesis, for example, the very existence of women is depicted as a divine afterthought, and the fall of the human race out of original Paradise into a world of toil and death is unambiguously depicted as a woman's fault. The text makes it clear from the very first that women are expected to be obedient and submissive to men:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

—Genesis 3:16

The Ten Commandments proclaim wives to be their husband's property, listing them together with livestock and servants as "thing[s] that [are] thy neighbor's" (Exodus 20:17). The Torah states that women who give birth to daughters are "unclean" for twice as long as women who give birth to sons (Leviticus 12) and values women's lives at half the value of men's lives (Leviticus 27:3-7). It rules that women who are raped in cities and do not cry out are to be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:22-24), while those are raped in the countryside are merely required to marry their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).

The New Testament joins in the denigration of women as well. It endorses the Old Testament's subjugation of them to men, saying that "the head of the woman is the man" (1 Corinthians 11:3). It also commands women to remain silent in church, saying that it is "a shame" for women to speak in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-35), and adds that women must "learn in silence with all subjection" and must never be allowed to teach or hold authority over men (1 Timothy 2:11-15).

And then there is one of the most subtly and pervasively sexist ideas in Christian thinking: the Trinity. The early Christians had three gods to choose from and made every one of them male. I often wondered, when I was a child, why the set of three contained Father, Son and Holy Ghost and not Father, Son and Mother. That seemed like the logical arrangement to me, but I did not grasp then, as I do now, that this doctrine was invented by an exclusively male and misogynist church hierarchy that sought to deny the female gender any role in creation or in the divine. (Indeed, a recent Harris poll found that over one-third of Jews and Christians believe God is male, while only 1% believe God is female. What would it even mean for God to have a gender?)

Many modern denominations have followed these anti-woman verses to the letter. The Catholic church, one of the worst offenders in this regard, still denies women the ability to join the priesthood, even despite a crippling lack of trained clergy to fill many available posts. The Southern Baptists have likewise declared that women should be submissive and obedient to their husbands, as though it was exclusively the man's job to command and a woman's job to follow. The Russian Orthodox church has stepped into the act as well, with a prominent bishop's recent claim that the idea of equality between the sexes is "destructive" to families (source). It is astonishing to me that Christians who claim to be "pro-family" go out of their way to disparage the gender that makes the existence of families possible.

The offshoots of Christianity have followed a similar path. Most notable is the Mormon church, which from its beginning endorsed polygamous marriage - for men only, of course; it was considered an unspeakable sin for a woman to attempt to take multiple husbands. The institution of polygamy in Mormonism reduced women to little more than property, intimidating them into being obedient and submissive lest their husband decide to take additional wives as punishment, or worse, lest they be damned, for Mormon doctrine originally held that women who opposed the doctrine of polygamy would be condemned to Hell. Mormon belief also holds that a woman cannot access Heaven alone, and that only through marriage can a woman be saved - by her husband, who will "pull her through" to the other side upon her death (source). (One wonders what happens to women who die before their husbands.) Though the Mormons were forced by external pressure to disavow polygamy, many of their other sexist beliefs and practices remain in effect.

These abstract beliefs have had a concrete and devastating effect on women's rights in the real world. As Jon Krakauer writes in Under the Banner of Heaven:

...perhaps the greatest rift between Mormon general authorities and advocates for women's rights occurred when the LDS Church actively and very effectively mobilized Mormons to vote as a bloc against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (despite a fact that a poll published in the church-owned Deseret News in 1974 showed that 63 percent of Utahans approved of the ERA). Most political analysts believe that had the LDS Church not taken such an aggressive position against the ERA, it would easily have been ratified by the required thirty-eight states, and would now be part of the U.S. Constitution.

Religious sexism occurs in Judaism as well, especially the conservative sects. Orthodox (male) Jews are taught to pray to God in thankfulness every day that they were not born as women, and some ultra-Orthodox sects refuse to send their children to school when the school buses are driven by women. In accordance with Biblical law, Orthodox women having their menstrual periods or who have recently given birth are considered unclean and forbidden to have any physical contact with a man. Orthodox women are often strongly discouraged from taking any public role in a position of leadership, or from acquiring an education beyond the most basic aspects of religious observance and homemaking.

Islam, too, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to women's rights. Consider the following verses from the Qur'an, which, like the Bible, considers women as less valuable than and inferior to men. It states that men are to control women, while good women are obedient to men, and it explicitly gives men permission to beat disobedient women:

"Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other... So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them."

—4:34

The Qur'an also states that a woman's testimony is worth only half as much as a man's, and her inheritance likewise is only half that of a man:

"And call two witness from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not at hand, then a man and two women..."

—2:282

"Allah chargeth you concerning (the provision for) your children: to the male the equivalent of the portion of two females..."

—4:11

And when fundamentalist Muslims gain political power, the repercussions are far too obvious. Despite the overthrow of the Taliban, there are still many Islamic countries that implement the evil and barbaric law code known as sharia, which has many cruel effects on men as well but degrades women by far the most, reducing them to slaves and nonpersons. The sharia code denies women their right to an education, to medical care, or to go out in public unaccompanied by a male relative, in addition to many other inhumanities, and punishes transgressions with barbaric acts such as flogging and stoning. In many Muslim countries, the practice of "honor killing" - murdering female relatives who have been raped, as a way to cleanse the shame they have brought on their family by being the victim of such a crime - still occurs. And then there is the best-known manifestation of Islam's inhumanity to women: the suffocating shrouds of black cloth designed to strip them of their individuality and to make them faceless, invisible and less than human.

Even the supposedly more enlightened Eastern religions are not much better when it comes to treating women as equals and as human beings. In Hinduism, the most infamous example is probably the practice of sati, in which widowed women were expected to burn themselves to death on their husband's funeral pyre. Although this was allegedly a voluntary act, in practice it was often involuntary, with women drugged, bound or otherwise restrained before being committed alive to the flames. As recently as 2002, incidents of this nature have been reported in India (source). Other Hindu traditions, less violent but still terrible, enforce seclusion and isolation on widows in the belief that some sin of the woman caused her husband's death, and expect her to atone by spending the rest of her life in silence and destitution. This rule, which I mentioned in a post from June titled "Why Do We Care?" and dramatized by the filmmaker Deepa Mehta in her 2005 film Water, was applied even if the widow was a young child in an arranged marriage who had not even met her husband prior to his death.

Buddhism, as well, despite its reputation as a socially progressive faith, has its share of discriminatory teachings about the role of women. In one passage from the Theravada Buddhist tradition, the Buddha's own aunt, Prajapati, shaves her hair and walks barefoot for many miles to meet with the Buddha and entreat him to permit women to join the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community. The Buddha at first refuses her plea outright, and only relents when his disciple Ananda persuades him to change his mind; however, he imposes a set of eight rules upon nuns that are stricter than those demanded of monks, and in some variants, warns that the sangha will only last for five hundred years due to the presence of women, when it would otherwise have lasted for a thousand. (See here, here and here for some retellings of this story.) In modern Buddhism, Thailand in particular has shown strong patriarchal tendencies, refusing to allow women to be ordained.

It is tragic, but understandable, why so many men throughout history have supported these sexist and patriarchal belief systems. More incredible is how many women have willingly taken part in their own subjugation by joining and participating in religions that have done their utmost to deny them the full equality and equal rights which they deserve. Many, perhaps, have fallen prey to the ancient and transparently obvious deceit that by doing so, they will gain access to an eternity in Heaven. (Although, given that most religions straightforwardly extend their earthly conceptions of hierarchy to the afterlife and picture Heaven as an eternity of male dominance and female submission, one wonders just how appealing that promise could be.)

Not all women have been taken in by this con, however, and there have been and are many women who work for reform and equality within their own religious tradition while continuing to believe in it. This is a noble effort, but I believe it is ultimately misguided. Religion in general, especially the large, institutional, male-run churches like Catholicism, is too dogmatic and too oligarchical for any progress to be made soon enough to help the millions of women who are still suffering under sexist yokes. And as long as people continue to believe in books and traditions that contain these sexist injunctions, the seed of bigotry will always lie dormant, waiting to be rediscovered and reborn. There is only one realistic way to end religion's harm to women, and that is to cut it off at the source: every feminist should be an atheist.