Why Edward Snowden Should Be Pardoned

June 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment
AllSeeingEye

I've been assembling some thoughts on the NSA leaker Edward Snowden who revealed the existence of top-secret government surveillance programs, including the PRISM project to tap into the customer data of the nation's largest internet companies, and a court order requiring Verizon to turn over metadata on all calls in its system on an ongoing basis (I'm still astonished that any court could ever have considered that request to comport with the Fourth Amendment). Already there are fierce … [Read more...]

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Submission Theology Is Abuse Theology

March 8, 2013 By 24 Comments

I've written a lot about the child-abuse coverup by the hierarchy of the Catholic church, but not because I believe Roman Catholicism is the only religion guilty of these crimes. Far from it! Any religion that preaches the virtues of submission and obedience is inherently vulnerable to abuses of this kind. When religious leaders are believed to possess special wisdom or special favor from God, it's only too easy for them to abuse that power to violate those who trust them. It's happened at a … [Read more...]

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Weekend Coffee: February 10

February 10, 2013 By 2 Comments
Coffee

• No matter how many compromises the Obama administration offers, Catholic bishops just don't want people to have access to birth control. • Beliefnet is afraid of feminism, telling liberal Christian pastor and blogger Kristine Holmgren that she wasn't allowed to use the word in her header or her blog (at which point, to her credit, she broke ties with them). • Astrophysicists have calculated, on the basis of data from NASA's Kepler telescope, that six percent of red dwarf … [Read more...]

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The Dying Branch of Bigotry

November 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The 2008 elections, in which pro-gay-marriage campaigners won a sweep at the ballot box, is a clear sign that the tide of society is shifting in favor of equality. We've known for a long time that this was coming, since the younger generations now replacing the older ones are overwhelmingly comfortable with equal rights. In the Western world, prejudice is like a dying branch - it may still have leaves, but it's dead at the base, and the rot is only going to spread upwards. Still, there are some … [Read more...]

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Putting an End to Pulpit Politicking

November 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Now that the election is over, it's time for American freethinkers to turn our attention to some unfinished business. And here's one thing that should be at the top of the list. Churches in America receive a broad array of special tax privileges and exemptions, in exchange for which they have just one meaningful restriction: namely, that they can't tell their members to vote for or against a specific candidate. This is a narrowly drawn and easily evaded rule, but for a long time now, right-wing … [Read more...]

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Weekend Coffee: October 21

October 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Some links from the last week: • As you may have heard, my good friend and awesome secular activist Greta Christina was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. It's fully treatable, but she needed some help to cover her living expenses while she recovers, and the atheist community came through in spades, meeting and exceeding what she had hoped to raise in barely 24 hours. • Dinesh D'Souza, the well-known Christian apologist, showed up at a conference last week with a much younger woman … [Read more...]

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How to Ruin Your Moral Authority

July 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of clergy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in shielding pedophile priests from the law and reassigning them to positions where they could harm more children. At least one boy suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, Edward Avery, whom Lynn assigned to duty in the boy's parish without warning any of the parishioners, despite knowing that Avery had a history … [Read more...]

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Complicated Thoughts on Citizens United

June 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

At Netroots Nation last week, I attended a panel on Citizens United, the infamous case in which the Supreme Court tossed aside decades of campaign finance laws and ruled that corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. This gives them an incalculably greater amount of power than before, and not just because corporations can spend in total secrecy, without disclosing the amounts or even the fact of their involvement to the public or even to their own … [Read more...]

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Weekend Coffee: June 3

June 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There are a couple of stories from this past week that I wanted to mention: • A three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, two of whom are Republican appointees, have struck down part of DOMA, ruling that it violates the Constitution for the federal government to deny benefits to same-sex couples legally married in their home state. • You may remember a notorious net kook named Dennis Markuze, who engaged in a longstanding campaign of harassment and threats against … [Read more...]

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Weekend Coffee: March 17

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There's a heap of news I didn't get to write about in greater depth this week, but all these stories deserve at least a look: • Remember the Anglican church, that blandly, Britishly polite bastion of modern liberal Christianity? So it turns out that they're officially against same-sex marriage. In a hilarious piece whining that they should get to vote on the rights of other human beings, Anglican homophobes also argue there should be no such thing as civil marriage in the U.K., that … [Read more...]

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