Eideard

She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

“I was amazed,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and has given Jessica $13,000 from support and scholarship funds. “We haven’t seen a case like this in a long time, with this level of revilement and ostracism and stigmatizing.”

The prayer, eight feet tall, is papered onto the wall in the Cranston West auditorium, near the stage. It has hung there since 1963, when a seventh grader wrote it as a sort of moral guide and that year’s graduating class presented it as a gift. It was a year after a landmark Supreme Court ruling barring organized prayer in public schools.

Which illustrates how backwards, for how long, the city of Cranston has persisted in denial.

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The U.S. Supreme Court last week passed up the chance to decide whether opening up a public meeting with a sectarian prayer, usually invoking the name of Jesus — a practice carried out in broad swaths of Red State America — is constitutional.

Every business day, thousands of government bodies at all levels begin sessions with prayers. Those prayers are supposed to be “non-sectarian” — they are supposed to appeal to a Supreme Being without reference to religion. But what if a prayer delivered at the start of a government meeting makes a specific reference to a particular religion, for example, using the name of Jesus?

A panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative U.S. appeals courts in the country, has ruled such specific references are unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week left that ruling in place, but whether the appeals court ruling will have an effect on the government meetings across the country opened with Christian prayers remains to be seen.

The high court could always take on the dispute in some future case. But for the moment the appeals court ruling is the law in the Fourth Circuit: North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia…

The Supreme Court denied the request for review last Tuesday without comment.

And local bible-thumpers will continue to violate the law same as it ever was. You expected different?

As I am wont to say within this context, Separation of church and state – in the United States – is only observed when it comes to paying taxes.

On November 8, Mississippi voters will not only decide who should lead the state, but also indicate whether they agree with the candidates about the status of embryos. The Initiative 26 ballot measure proposes to amend the state’s constitution to redefine ‘person’ as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof”. If approved, the amendment would effectively bestow human rights on fertilized human eggs, making abortion illegal in the state in most, if not all, circumstances.

“The unborn child in the womb is scientifically proven to be a human being, and when it comes down to it we are a human-rights organization,” says Jennifer Mason, communications director for Personhood USA…Ms. Mason, like most of her peers, is deluded, a hypocrite, a liar.

By defining personhood so broadly, the measure would also have an impact beyond abortion—for example, it could rule out research using human embryonic stem cells and put doctors who offer in vitro fertilization (IVF) in a dubious legal position, because not all embryos created during fertility treatment survive the procedure.

“This is a dangerous and extreme government intrusion into women’s health, women’s rights and families’ health,” says Stan Flint, a consultant to Mississippians for Healthy Families, based in Jackson, which opposes the amendment.

Similar propositions have been put to voters in the United States twice before—during statewide campaigns in Colorado, where the personhood movement first emerged as a strategic challenge to abortion laws. But in both 2008 and 2010, personhood initiatives were roundly defeated, respectively winning only 27% and 29% of votes cast…Mississippi could be very different…

The Mississippi vote itself will have little direct impact on human embryonic stem-cell research, because the state is not a major player in the field. The potential threat to reproductive technology is more immediate…

As the campaign for Initiative 26 heads into its final days…defeat of the Mississippi initiative would be a turnaround, but an increasingly vocal opposition movement has thrown predictions of an easy victory for the initiative into question. “Starting from a dead stop at two months out, we have put together a major campaign,” says Stan Flint. “The momentum has swung strongly towards the opposition to this amendment.”

Just as fundraising for organizations like Planned Parenthood were an absolute necessity in the days spent fighting for a woman’s right to choose an abortion, for everyone’s access to birth control – here we are, again, faced with religious nutballs trying to enforce their 14th Century ideology on the Land of Liberty.

Thanks, Ursarodina

A proposed constitutional amendment to lift the ban on public funding of religious groups should be ripped from the 2012 ballot because it is “misleading and insufficiently specific,” according to a lawsuit filed by Florida’s largest teachers union…

“This is designed to open the state treasury to voucher schools, but this is not what the ballot summary says,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association…

By attacking the ballot summary as “misleading,” the teachers union takes aim at a sensitive issue for the Republican lawmakers, who have watched in recent years as the Florida Supreme Court used that very reason to block a series of constitutional changes from the ballot.

In response to the legal challenges, the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a new law this year requiring the attorney general to fix any ballot titles or summaries a court deems problematic and return it to the ballot within 10 days.

The teachers union is also trying to reverse that law in their suit, saying it violates the separation powers provision in the state Constitution…

The ban on public funding of religious institutions, known as the Blaine Amendment, was cited by the 1st District Court of Appeal in an earlier ruling against the program…

Instead of giving religious institutions the right to public funding in the U.S. Constitution, plaintiffs argue the Florida change would mandate it. Union attorneys, led by Ron Meyer, also argue the ballot summary falsely implies the change is required by the U.S. Constitution.

Meyer also said the ballot title of “religious freedom” is deceptive.

Not that deception is new to political practices either side of the aisle. Historically Democrats have pulled the wool over voters eyes in many cities and states – the usual reason being good old-fashioned graft and corruption.

The New Wave of Republican lies is a lot more ideological. They’d love to return the nation to 19th Century standards of citizenship and practices – including forcing religion down the throats of everyone, official kowtowing to the wants of corporate crowned heads, dismantling any additions to civil rights in the past century – all paid for by taxes destined solely for the backs of ordinary working people.

As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals — that “All men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator” with the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called “American Scripture.”

But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words — “a wall of separation between church and state” — lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a “Christian Nation” and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July…

While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State … “

The idea was not Jefferson’s. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the “shining city on a hill” where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death.

Jefferson regarded this law so highly that he had his authorship of the statute made part of his epitaph, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (Being president wasn’t worth a mention.)

RTFA. Re-examine the history that most Americans sorely have not understood – for the first time.

They assume their religious ideology supersedes the achievements of our Constitution and would rather return to the religious wars of the Crusades in exactly the same way their counterparts on the fringe of Islam would do. They are equally bereft of understanding, deserving of as little support and coddling as any poison in the gut of this modern world.

Catholic University is bringing back single-sex dorms starting with next year’s freshman class. Why? To reduce binge drinking and hooking up, University President John Garvey said this week in The Wall Street Journal. The right place for a CU editorial for sure.

Garvey said studies show that students drink more, and have more sexual partners, when they live in co-ed dorms. His university’s job is to train students in the virtuous life, and certain virtues are best learned and practiced living apart.

He has good intentions, I’m sure, and some 18- and 19-year-old students will be attracted to single-sex living. But I’m not convinced he’ll achieve the results he seeks. Nothing in my 20 years of experience writing about young people suggests that reverting to the old days of male and female dorms will substantially reduce the frequency of drinking or casual sex.

Moreover, his explanation for the change has a let’s-protect-the-women ring to it that is decidedly out of step with the gender roles and expectations of today’s young women and young men…

Author Liz Funk, a New York resident in her 20s who was raised as a Roman Catholic, attended a co-ed college with co-ed dorms. She remembers, “Without the presence of guys, my friends and I had no problem throwing back three to eight drinks in a sitting. And on the occasions where accidents happened … it was always in an all-female context.” No doubt the same in many all-guy drinking bouts… The phrase, “I must have been drunk” comes to mind.

None of this is to say that Catholic University, like other schools, shouldn’t be talking to students about drinking, sex and having fun in a way that is consistent with the school’s values. Students flock to such discussions, depending on who leads them, and more schools — non-religious as well as religious — should offer them.

Garvey ignores what to me has been one contribution of co-ed dorms: the ease with which members of this generation relate to each other as friends, and the depth of their understanding of the opposite sex. I can’t help but believe those qualities will help sustain their intimate partnerships in the future.

This good Catholic official seems stuck into the same ignorance that afflicts his religion at root, its hierarchy, as a matter of course.

Ignore the realities of best practices grounded in modern knowledge – and you induce the same frustration, rejection and confrontation that continues to demolish all fundamentalist sects.

A survey of scientists studying stem cells suggests that the absence of clear federal regulations governing the use of embryonic stem cells and uncertainty over funding for stem cell research…

According to the survey, published…in the journal Cell Stem Cell, nearly half of the scientists questioned who study embryonic stem cells or are considering using the cells said that the climate of uncertainty has had a substantial impact on their research. Many said they had delayed the start of new projects or were considering moving away from the field altogether. While many experts in the field had predicted these negative outcomes, the survey is one of the first efforts to systematically assess the effects of U.S. policy regarding stem-cell research…

Embryonic stem cells are considered one of the most promising tools for regenerative medicine, especially as a source of replacement tissue, thanks to their ability to replicate themselves and to grow into any cell type in the human body. But the topic has been fraught with controversy because deriving new lines of embryonic stem cells requires the destruction of human embryos.

Stem-cell researchers experienced a brief bout of optimism two years ago when President Obama signed an executive order ending a restrictive policy enacted in 2001 by President Bush. That policy had blocked federal funds from being used to study most human embryonic stem cells and led to a patchwork of state regulations governing funding for the field. Current federal policy permits federal funding for research using existing cells but not the derivation of new cells.

The optimism came to an unexpected end last August when a federal judge issued an injunction blocking federal funding for any research involving embryonic stem cells, pending the result of a lawsuit claiming such funding to be illegal. As a result, research and grant reviews at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s largest biomedical funding agency, came to a halt, and scientists who had federal funds were left wondering what to do. The Obama administration successfully appealed the injunction in September, but ongoing uncertainty over the timing and outcome of the lawsuit means that confusion remains.

The absurdity of a nation with a self-professed history of freedoms having to waste funds and years fiddling in court with 19th Century moralizers is more than frustrating. It looks like researchers who picked up and left the country with the advent of the Bush Taliban controlling the Republican Party may have made the safe choice.

Though mainstream religions kept an easy truce between church and state for decades, the assumption of a mantle of infallibility among the fearful who have crawled into the bosom of fundamentalist demagogues – has constructed a wall of fire and brimstone between essential civil service and the ranks of scientists, educators and scholars. The latter didn’t set out to spend their career explaining the Age of Reason all over again to ignorant opportunist politicians every four to eight years.

Poland is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, still conservative and still religious, especially when compared with its European neighbors. But supporters and critics of the Roman Catholic Church all acknowledge that the society is changing. They agree that church representatives in Poland have lost authority and credibility, and that much of the population is moving toward a more secular view of life, one with a greater separation between church and state, and a rejection of church mandates on individual morality.

“We are considered the European museum of Catholicism, but let me tell you we are no longer,” said Szymon Holownia, program director for Religia TV, a relatively new station that aims to convince Poles that faith can and should be relevant in modern life with programs like a cooking show led by a nun. “The relationship between faith and state is changing; it is changing dramatically in Poland,” Mr. Holownia said. “It is really huge.”

“Twenty years of freedom and religion is evaporating,” he said. “This is the crisis of Christianity in Poland.”

Church supporters said the trend was evident in the numbers: 95 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholic, but only 41 percent attend Sunday Mass regularly. In the big cities of Warsaw and Krakow, only about 20 percent attend Mass regularly on Sundays, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Church. Supporters of the church also said that the numbers dropped far below the 41 percent when it came to accepting moral mandates about issues like divorce and in vitro fertilization, both of which the church opposes and a majority of people appear to support.

“It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide…

Antichurch sentiment has run so hot that one of the most popular politicians in the country, Janusz Palikot, started a political party based largely on an anticlerical platform…

RTFA. Lots of rationales and excuses offered by clergy who obviously are panicked over their loss of stature within Polish politics, fear of a massive reduction in social and political power in daily life.

That’s what happens when your ideology is irrelevant. That is, in nations where education and learning aren’t limited [or self-limited] to exclusively parochial concerns. True throughout Europe. Becoming true through Asia and Latin America.

Two Red Devils together after the Labour Party conference
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

New Labour leader Ed Miliband does not believe in God, he has said.

Mr Miliband had previously said his religious views were a “private matter”, and his declaration means two of the three leaders of major British political parties are self-proclaimed atheists.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also confirmed he does not believe shortly after being named Liberal Democrat leader, while David Cameron last year said religious faith was “part of who I am” but admitted he did not go to church regularly…

In an interview on Radio 5 Live, Mr Miliband was asked by presenter Nicky Campbell: “Do you believe in God?”

The Labour leader replied: “I don’t believe in God personally, but I have great respect for those people who do. Different people have different religious views in this country. The great thing is that, whether we have faith or not, we are by and large very tolerant of people whatever their view…”

Despite spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s famous comment to reporters that “we don’t do God”, Mr Blair has confirmed since leaving power that his religious faith was “hugely important” to his premiership. He said he did not speak publicly about his belief while in office out of fear voters would think him a “nutter”.

Since leaving Downing Street, he has converted to Roman Catholicism, and in his recent memoir, A Journey, he wrote: “I have always been more interested in religion than politics.”

Confirming that he is a nutter.

They certainly wouldn’t be elected to any office requiring intellectual honesty, knowledge of science or insight into history. Fortunately, none of these is apparently needed for Congress or the White House.

The Haskell County, Oklahoma, Commission has 10 years to pay attorneys’ fees of $199,000 after it was forced to remove an 8-foot-tall Ten Commandments monument.

The county has been in litigation with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma since 2006, after it allowed a resident to pay for and erect the granite monument on the courthouse lawn in Stigler.

After a series of court decisions up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, the ACLU prevailed. The monument was removed in March, and the attorneys’ fees were settled last week, ACLU attorney Micheal Salem said…

“It’s a very unwelcoming thing for those who do not subscribe to the Judeo (Christian) belief system. The government should not be in the business of showing favoritism or endorsing religion,” ACLU’s Chuck Thornton said. “The ACLU would never have been involved if it was somewhere other than public property. We don’t want to squelch anyone’s rights of free expression.”

Haskell County is a community of more than 12,000 residents southeast of Tulsa.

Let’s see – that’s a bit over $16.58 apiece just to show the world how important their religion must be.

I don’t know about y’all; but, if I had a spare $16 to blow on what I believe – I’d probably spend it on buying someone a meal or supplies for schoolchildren.