Back in 2007, Ms. Walden’s employer, C0mputer Sciences Corporation, (CSC) held a contract with the CDC under which it provided counseling services to CDC employees. The issue arose when a CDC employee who was in a long-term same-sex relationship came to Ms. Walden for counseling. During the intake session, the employee (referred to as “Jane Doe” in the opinion) told Ms. Walden about serious and emotionally disturbing issues in her relationship. In response, Ms. Walden told her that her “personal values” prevented her from effectively counseling Ms. Doe, and provided a referral. During that intake session, Ms. Walden never mentioned the source of those personal values, her Christian faith.

Ms. Doe then filed a complaint to Ms. Walden’s superiors, saying that she felt “judged and condemned” by what Ms. Walden had said.  Her immediate supervisor did not take issue with the referral itself. (And neither do I — I’d rather not have LGBT people in a patient/counselor relationship with someone like that).

The program supervisor, Doug Shelton, discussed the incident with Ms. Walden and told her that the implicit judgment in telling a patient that her “personal values” prevented her from counseling the patient was not acceptable.

Ms. Walden rejected suggestions that she give potential clients who are in same-sex relationships some other reason for her referral. At the trial court level, she insisted that

it seemed unfair that [Ms. Doe] was able to talk aboutbeing gay and lesbian, and yet I couldn’t freely talk about me and my religious beliefs, or being Christian . . . . To me, it’s about honesty.  If she can be honest – I mean, I should be honest about why I’m transferring her.

The court held that

undisputed facts inthe record show that Dr. Chosewood and Ms. Zerbe asked for Ms. Walden’s removal from the contract because of how she handled Ms. Doe’s referral and because they believed Ms. Walden would not alter her behavior in similar circumstances in the future, not because of her religious views or her need to refer clients for religious reasons.

Her superiors did not burden her religious exercise by instructing her not to tell patients that she disapproved of their lifestyle. Ms. Walden never claimed that her religious beliefs required her to be honest with her patients about her values. (Which is ironic, since “don’t lie” is actually in there). Her sincere religious belief that she would be condoning same-sex relationships by counseling people who were involved in them was not burdened.

It appears that absolutely no one told her she had to counsel people in same-sex relationships, nor does it appear that she was penalized in any way for deciding to refer those patients to another counselor. I would give my opinion here about why it’s so reprehensible for a counselor to express judgment like that when someone comes to her in need, but Dr. Casey Chosewood, CDC’s Project Officer for Occupational Health and Preventive Services, says it beautifully:

There again, I feel like that statement has some — has some bias in it, it has some judgmental tone in it.  There are many people who believe that homosexuality is like eye color or color of skin, you know.  There’s good science that supports that, as well.  I would not be happy with her saying something like, you know, “My personal belief doesn’t allow me to see someone of your color.”  To me, that’s — it’s just not appropriate in that very vulnerable setting when patients are coming to you maybe at their neediest time. So I feel like a referral, perfectly fine.  And — but to share, to give any, really, sort of expression of judgment or of displeasure with someone else’s situation or choices or life, to me, is not — it does not further the therapeutic relationship in any way.

Because the court concluded that Ms. Walden was laid off (and given instructions how to get another job within the agency) for reasons separate from her free exercise rights, it dismissed her claim. Her attorneys are considering appealing the U.S. Supreme Court, saying “[a] counselor who is a Christian shouldn’t lose her job for upholding the highest professional standards.”

For a fact-selective recounting of the events that is heavy on martyrdom, but light on law, check out this video presentation by Family Research Council:

In spite of the fact that the court viewed all the facts in the light most favorable to Ms. Walden, it still dismissed her free exercise claims. She also made a claim against CSC.

Under the contract it held with the CDC to provide counseling services to the CDC employees, CSC was required to discharge an employee at the request of the CDC. It did as it was contractually obligated to do when it laid her off. In doing so, the court held that it did not substantially burden Ms. Walden’s sincerely held religious beliefs.

The court further held that CSC didn’t violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it provided her with a reasonable accommodation when it offered to allow her to give a different reason for referral. And then again when it encouraged her to find alternate employment with the company. If she had done this within one year, she would even have kept her seniority.

Interestingly, the court relied on a very similar case, Bruff v. North Mississippi Health Services.

There, the court held that

the defendant hospital fulfilled its obligation to accommodate the plaintiff counselor’s religiously-based refusal toprovide same-sex relationship counseling when it gave her thirty days to find another position at the hospital and provided her with the assistance of its in-house employment counselor.

The rulings seem pretty reasonable to me. If the clients aren’t harmed by being referred out to another counselor, then everyone can be happy. Counselors don’t have to violate their religious beliefs that they can’t counsel LGBT people, and LGBT get a counselor that really has their best interests in mind. It’s entirely appropriate for a federal employer to terminate a counselor that it believes will use her position to pass judgment on people whose lifestyles she disapproves of. I’m glad to see the courts standing up for that principle, especially when it’s founded in so much legal precedent.

(In response to this post.)

Jacob Kramer of the National Atheist Party was at a Town Hall meeting for Duckworth Wednesday night and asked her how she would represent her atheist constituents should she be elected:

Without pandering to him, I thought she gave a very respectable answer. It’s exactly what we need in regards to contraception (“Contraception is part of a woman’s basic health care”) and she didn’t even seem to flinch at the word “atheist” — something that can’t be said about other candidates.

I quoted Chelsea Link before, but I’ll do it again here (emphasis hers):

These are the types of conversations we need to be having with all our elected officials, because these are the conversations that will actually get us somewhere. If all the NAP did was record and publicize five-minute discussions like this one with every congressperson, they would immediately advance the public discourse on religion and government far more than any other party has in years.

Hats off to Jacob and the NAP folks for putting candidates on the spot like this. Please keep it going. We deserve to know how candidates would vote on our issues and whether they have our best interests at heart.

One of the chapters from the book discusses the prospect of an atheist getting into the Oval Office and Paul was kind enough to let me reprint it here (I’ve omitted all the footnotes below, but I assure you they are there):

The 2000 film The Contender featured as its protagonist an avowed atheist senator, selected to fill a vacant vice-presidency. The contender in question was eventually confirmed, but even the character’s portrayer, Joan Allen, found the prospect unrealistic. “That’s where the film takes latitude,” she has said. “It’s idealistic, I knew it was a very gutsy thing for my character to say. But I don’t think Americans could tolerate an atheist in that office.”

Allen’s political analysis is right on. As the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in 2000:

Forty years [after John F. Kennedy was elected president] religious prejudice, which never carried quite the sting of racism, has never been weaker. Only nonbelievers are left out of the atmosphere of ecumenical warmth: it is inconceivable that a professed atheist or agnostic could be elected President today, and even an unchurched Deist like Jefferson wouldn’t stand a chance.

Had Kennedy been an atheist, he would have never been given a chance to tell the country what it ought and ought not ask of its country. Gallup polls leading up to the 1960 presidential campaign showed heavy resistance to a hypothetical atheist candidate, with outright refusals to vote for such a person never dipping below 74 percent. Not until the turn of the millennium did polls begin to show that a majority of Americans would at least refrain from ruling out voting for a well-qualified atheist candidate for president. In 2000, a Zogby poll showed that figure to be at 59 percent, dipping seven years later to 51 percent. In the 2007 survey, no group fared more poorly on the presidential level than atheists. 39 percent declared that atheism would rule out the possibility of their vote, while gays, Mormons, and Arab-Americans all outperformed atheists.

Different surveys from the same period can yield very different results on the question of the acceptance of an atheist presidential candidate. While some polls did show the tide turning in the 2000s in the atheists’ favor, a Princeton survey in 2006 showed the percentage of Americans who would vote for an atheist candidate mired at 33.

In 2006, a Gallup poll showed that a meager 14 percent of Americans thought their fellow citizens were “ready” for an atheist president. Democrats were the most pessimistic for nonbelievers’ chances, with only 8 percent thinking the country prepared, as compared to 14 percent of Republicans and 21 percent of independents. This is mirrored in a 2007 Fox News poll that had the number at 15 percent confidence in the prospect. One must take into thorough consideration, however, what is meant when a poll asks whether the respondent feels America is “ready” for one kind of candidate or another. Certainly, the question can be heard as to ask the respondent what they think of the current cultural climate, but it can also be filtered by the biases of the respondent or the prejudices of their immediate surroundings. To what the respondent thinks they are responding can make a great deal of difference, and may not reflect the reality of the public’s attitudes as a whole.

In the face of these daunting numbers, Christopher Hitchens, characteristically, scoffs. “How do they know they wouldn’t [vote for an atheist]?” he asks, “They haven’t had an offer from a decent atheist yet…if Republicans had been asked in the seventies, ‘would they vote for a divorced ex-movie actor for president,’ they probably would have said ‘no.’”

John C. Green of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life knows that an atheist would have great trouble reaching national elective office, but offers a remedy: “A good way to change perceptions is to have effective atheist candidates and officeholders.” In other words, some atheists will have to throw their hats in the ring to begin making gains for future office seekers. Of course, Pete Stark is the beginning of realizing this prescription, but there is little else on the horizon.

But if we suppose the polls look harsher for atheists than is actually the case, what would happen if a plausible atheist candidate took a run for the White House? Fearing for the prospects this candidate, atheist blogger Brent Rasmussen has written in fervent opposition, believing that the current political climate allows only for a major backlash against atheists should such a candidate run. “I believe that a candidate who made an issue of their atheism would become a laughingstock gimmick,” he has written. Rasmussen thinks the only chance for an atheist candidate is for a series of closeted atheist politicians to declare themselves to the point that the concept becomes dull and insignificant. But for now, he insists that someone waiting for an atheist to throw his hat into the ring is “dreaming,” saying, “It’ll never happen in our lifetime. In fact, if the country swings back towards the conservative end of the spectrum again in a few years…I wouldn’t be surprised if atheists were rounded up and placed into detention camps — just for being atheists.”

If an atheist were to fight his or her way to the general election, that candidate would almost certainly be a Democrat. Those describing themselves as liberal were far more likely to support an atheist candidate for president, according to a February 2007 Gallup poll. 67 percent of liberals showed a willingness to support an atheist candidate, versus 48 percent of moderates and only 27 percent of conservatives. (Blogger Robert Ellman, however, imagines an atheist presidential prospect rising from the Republican ranks, musing, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if an attractive atheist candidate with a photogenic family took on the GOP’s radical Christians? I suspect many secular minded civil libertarians would be both relieved and appreciative.”)

If there is to be any plausibility to such a run, national political figures who are not atheists themselves (and none of them seem to be) will have to do some convincing on nonbelievers’ behalf. Indeed, very few of any import since George H.W. Bush have gone so far as to utterly dismiss atheists as potential commanders-in-chief. Al Gore was asked in 2000 whether it would bother him if a non-believer ascended to the presidency, to which he responded:

No, it would not. I think that it would depend on who the person was, of course. But do I believe that someone can have an understanding of our Constitution [and] a true spirit of tolerance without affirming a particular and specialized belief in God? Yes, I do. I think that is incumbent upon anyone who affirms a respect for tolerance.

Such a candidate would face their first hurdle vying for the nomination of their party, and for argument’s sake we will assume the party to be the Democrats. As we have seen, the nonreligious are most plentiful in the West, and that may well be where our atheist Democrat makes his or her stand, gathering up delegates in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. In order to make it out West, though, the atheist candidate would need to prove themselves in the first slate of contests. The Iowa caucuses may be trouble for such a candidate, but the first actual primary may hold more hope. New Hampshirites were given the chance to expound on their attitudes concerning politics and irreligion as their state was readying to be invaded by the 2008 primary season, and emblematic of the Granite State’s penchant for independence, 61 percent chose, in a hypothetical match-up, the candidate who was an atheist that shared their political views, versus only 21 percent who would opt for the candidate of their same religion, but did not agree with them on the issues. If New Hampshire is a bellwether, as it often is, the atheist candidate could find the potential for an early victory, or at least a respectable showing, here.

Still, the prospect for a presidential Bright looks, well, dim in the current political climate. Short of a major cultural change toward tolerance of the irreligious, such a candidate would likely need to benefit from a disaffected party that is refraining from turning out for primary elections, leaving many contests to the energized secularists who finally have one of their own on the ballot. Maybe, just maybe, the party of Jefferson might then nominate the personification of the wall of separation.

The general election would be an even steeper hill to climb, of course. The GOP would likely need to have nominated someone as fervently religious as the Democratic candidate was nonreligious, someone so zealously right wing as to turn off the moderate center of the electorate. Even that seems less than plausible, as a Pew survey in 2007 revealed that 69 percent of Americans felt that a president should have “strong religious beliefs,” while only 27 percent disagreed. As Kenneth Woodard of Newsweek once advised, “If you want to be president of all the people, invoke a generic deity everyone can salute.”

Of course, Michael Medved rejects the idea of an atheist president out of hand, writing in a column that there would be no way to bridge the spiritual gap between the president and his religious constituency, given that belief “drives the life and work” of the vast majority of Americans, and asserts that a president who rejects such a fundamental belief held by so many will be seen as condescending, no matter his or her intentions. There is certainly some truth to this claim, especially at a time in American politics when condescension is seen as the most mortal of sins (as Barack Obama has learned following comments that “bitter” religious Americans “cling” to their faith due to difficult and unsure times).

America may need a generation or two before such an atheistic ascension could truly take place, and it would almost certainly have to be an America in which Muslims and homosexuals could be considered to have respectable chances for the same (we have established now that Jews, African Americans, women, and Mormons are no longer relegated to the back bench, even if they have not yet sat in the Oval Office).

The work would have to start now, of course. Atheist politicos would need to begin nurturing and training candidates for offices at all levels, and be prepared to lose many, many elections, if only to begin to wear down Americans’ resistance, and make the idea of atheist candidates commonplace. They will have to make common cause with organizations and interests in areas unrelated to faith or lack thereof. They will have to prove to religious voters, at least liberally religious voters, that they pose no threat, and will be a friend.

Those candidates will have to be charismatic, eloquent, and approachable, and spotlessly moral. They must tap enthusiasm within Americans for things that are not limited to the supernatural, but tied to the best of what humans can do right now, right here on Earth, both for themselves and for the many generations they will leave behind. Indeed, atheists will need their own Great Communicator, less reactionary than the policers like Michael Newdow, and less confrontational than instigators like Sam Harris.

If so, perhaps Pete Stark is right about Ron Reagan Jr. What better name to ease the concerns of Americans who wish to see a new morning in America? Atheist Americans will not have faith in this possibility, but they might have hope.

Is there really any hope for atheists in the political arena? What do we have to do to make a secular America a reality? What would a victory even look like? Those are the kinds of questions Paul addresses in Under the Stained Glass Ceiling and the book is now available on Amazon.

(via Calamities of Nature)

If you look near the bottom of the list, you see the Montréal Canadiens. In 11^th.

Their playoff hopes don’t look great since only the top 8 teams get to go into the postseason and they’re quite a ways back in the points column, so what should their fans do?

According to the Archdiocese of Montreal, they should pray. And to help them out, the Church took out a full page ad in a local paper:

(Paul Chaisson - The Canadian Press)

The Canadiens are purposely left off the list of 15 teams. They’re replaced by “Prions” — French for “let Us Pray” — in the coveted 8^th slot.

Faced with declining church attendance rates, the archdiocese is known for employing slick, clever ads that appeal to the public at large when it solicits funds each year.

“You know, the Catholic church doesn’t have the same means as other advertisers, so they need to make an impact,” said Hugo Leger, vice-president of Bos advertising agency, which designed the ad.

Leger said when people get past the joke, they will find a simple message that encourages prayer: “We just want to remind people that the church exists,” Leger said. “And when we say pray, that could mean for the Canadiens, or an invitation to pray in general.”

Commenters below are quick to point out that the English definition of “prion” is “a protein particle that is believed to be the cause of brain diseases” — which sounds about right, too…

Good thing they’re acknowledging that it’s a joke or else someone might accidentally mistake the ad for foolishly suggesting anyone’s prayers would give the team the boost it needs. If they do make the playoffs, it’ll be because of their talent (or the collapse of a higher-ranked team), not because people clasped their hands together in desperation.

(Thanks to Dorothy for the link!)

• Everything since the Big Bang can be explained naturally
• We can only speculate about what “caused” the Big Bang
• Ethics do not require a God
• Religion is man-made
• The God of the Bible is especially implausible
• The idea of prophecy is even less plausible than a God
• Only humans can solve human challenges

Dave goes into more detail in his Psychology Today article.

Are there any items on that list you would disagree with?

The motto is “Opus Dei Cum Pecunia Alienum Efficemus,” Latin for “Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money.”

Except they’re not doing “God’s work.” I’ll be honest; I read the description of what the RCO does and it still doesn’t make much sense to me, but it’s pretty evident God is nowhere to be found in that office. So there’s no reason for the patch to say that.

The Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers pointed that out to Air Force officials and — surprisingly — they changed the logo!

Here’s the new patch:

In Latin, it reads “Miraculi Cum Pecunia Alienum Efficemus.” In English: “Doing Miracles with Other People’s Money.”

It’s not really any better. The RCO isn’t performing miracles any more than it’s doing God’s work — but if you see the word as a metaphor, I suppose it’s a small step up.

In any case, it’s probably a net positive since Republican Congressperson Randy Forbes is irate:

‘It is most egregious,’ Virginia Rep. Randy Forbes told Fox News. ‘The Air Force is taking the tone that you can’t even use the word “God”.’

‘(It is a) bridge too far in terms of the rights of men and women who serve in our services and their ability to express their faith.’

Right. Because we all know how hard Christians have it in this country when they want to express their faith…

Forbes sent a letter (PDF) to Air Force officials, co-signed by 35 other members of Congress, asking them to reverse their decision. If the officials are interested in doing the right thing, they’ll toss that letter right in the trash where it belongs.

No one is taking away any rights from religious military personnel. They’re simply removing an unnecessary reference to God in a logo that’s meant to be a symbol for everyone in the Air Force, not just the religious people.

However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.

Sen. Constance Johnson, D-Oklahoma City, said that while it takes two people to create life, Crain’s measure focuses only on half of that equation.

My amendment seeks to draw attention to the absurdity, duplicity and lack of balance inherent in the policies of this state in regard to women. Oklahoma already incarcerates more women than any other place in the world. Under the latest provisions, a woman in Oklahoma may now face additional criminal charges and potential incarceration for biological functions that produce or, in some cases, destroy eggs or embryos, such as a miscarriage. In vitro fertilization, involving the fertilization outside the womb for implantation into the womb, would also potentially represent a violation of the proposed Personhood statute.

Finally, this amendment seeks to draw humorous attention to the hypocrisy and inconsistency of this proposal – from the Republican perspective of down-sized government and less government intrusion into people’s private affairs.