It’s always a little dispiriting to call and talk to dozens of people whose only rationale for voting against same-sex marriage is “I’m a Christian and this is what the Bible says”.

The surrender of critical thinking to disputed interpretations of texts that are thousands of years older than our understanding of the universe, the picking and choosing of what passages to follow and which ones to ignore, the astonishing surrender to doing what you are TOLD despite what is right, instead of doing what is RIGHT despite what you are told…

It makes me so angry, but more than anything else it makes me sad. Because in a call today, a mother in Minnesota told me she no longer speaks to her son since he came out as gay. And she has the Bible quotes to show why she still thinks that was the right decision to make. This is a woman who has caused and experienced so much pain, for nothing more than misguided words set down on paper by people who didn’t know any better; misinterpreted myths and fables that should NEVER have had that kind of power over her (now destroyed) relationship with her own child.

Her OWN CHILD.

Bronze Age-era superstitions.

How many times over has that same story been repeated over the last few hundreds of years? Any how many more times will it repeat? And how many more dispiriting conversations do we need to have?

I’m in an angry, sad mood today. Next time someone asks why some atheists seem to be angry, think about this: I’m angry, I’m FUCKING FURIOUS that superstition caused this family so much pain, and I’m even ANGRIER that some now want to embed that same hateful superstition into the laws that govern my life, and my friends’, and my family’s, and my loved ones.

If you’re not angry for the same reasons, I truly don’t understand you.

The narrator in a video presentation from the DNC said “Government’s the only thing we all belong to”.

And of course the GOP practically fell over itself claiming that this means the Democrats think the government “owns” all of us, and that obviously explains the policy difference between the two parties. “We don’t belong to government, the government belongs to us,” tweeted Romney’s campaign (I have no illusion that the candidates are actually writing those).

It’s very telling that Romney’s proxy tweeters don’t think he belongs to the government: they think he OWNS it. Presumably since he OWNS the government, he can sell his share in it for a profit when he is done saddling it with debt and charging it millions in management fees, which was the Bain modus operandi.

Of course, as usual, theirs is an out of context misinterpretation. The very next line:

“We have different churches, different clubs, but we’re together as a part of our city, or our county, or our state – and our nation.”

Why wasn’t there a complaint about how aren’t “owned” by our churches? Where was the uproar about us being “owned” by clubs? It’s only if you intend to deliberately and disingenuously claim that Democrats believe we all “belong” (as in being members of) churches and clubs, but we “belong” (as in being owned by) the government, mixing up the meanings halfway through the sentence, that this makes sense. Within the context of the rest of the speech it is quite clear that the statement being made is that we are ALL part of the government, we are all members, we all belong. It is “We, the People”, after all.

I agree with the statement. I do belong to the government of this country, Mr. Romney, in the same way I belong to the ACLU, MN Atheists, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. None of these organizations own me, but one of the privileges of my membership and inclusion means I get a voice in influencing what each of those organizations do.  That’s what belonging means:

I get to vote.

And part of my membership also means that I support the work that they do, with my time, my skills and my money. That’s also what belonging means:

I pay my membership dues.

The ACLU doesn’t own me, and just as with the government, if a majority of us decide we no longer support their goals, we can change the rules. We can even dissolve the club and start another one: if everyone renounced their membership in the ACLU and stopped paying dues, the organization would go away. The powers of government in this country are given to it by the people; by the same token, they can be taken away.

We, the People (the members of government), took a vote in 2008 and made a statement that we didn’t like the way the club was being managed, so we changed the management. We didn’t all agree with that statement, and we don’t all agree today with everything the new management has done. As is our right, thanks to our membership, this year we get to make another statement about the way the organization is being managed.

In this video, one of the groups is very clearly making the statement that they proudly claim me as an active member of the management of the club. Another group hisses and recoils at this inclusive statement, because they prefer to point at management as the source of all problems, while obscuring or denying the fact that they are as much a part of the management as I am. And that it was they, not some mystical “other”, who had a significant hand in causing the problems in the first place. And that whatever problems exist, it is only with all of our help that they can be solved.

I won’t consider membership in a club whose management are so ashamed of themselves that they can’t bring themselves to admit they are members in the first place.

I am a U.S. citizen. I belong to the government, in the same way one belongs to a club, to a church, to the ACLU. And because I do, I pay taxes instead of playing shell games to obscure the benefits I have gained from that membership.

And because I belong to the government, I vote.

If I had $50 million dollars of taxpayer money and I really wanted to improve voter identification and reduce fraud, I would use that money to set up locations at polling stations where people could quickly and conveniently get a government ID that could immediately be used to vote. You would get same-day registration (as we do today), a one-step process, people get a useful ID that can be used for other purposes as well, and as a side effect you get a reduction in the minuscule amount of identity fraud that actually occurs on voting day. It serves the final goal, while at the same time providing a useful service to the hundreds of thousands of people who go through same-day registration today.

If I had $50 million dollars of taxpayer money and really wanted to suppress voters, I would use that money to set up an alternate, confusing “provisional” voting method that would do nothing at all to help those who have no ID today, while slowing down the entire electoral system, causing endless litigation over the validity of those votes, and throwing away large numbers of those “provisional” ballots because of the difficulties involved in confirming them. And putting in place a process that, in the end, provides NO useful service to those who are actually voting, nor does it help them vote in the next election, and really gains no benefit for that $50 million.

Guess which one the MN Voter ID Amendment puts in place?

If you really want to understand whether a law being proposed is really a voter ID law intended to reduce fraud vs. a voter suppression attempt, just ask your representatives how best to spend $50 million in taxpayer dollars. If their answer involves spending that money to actually help people get an ID and make it easier for them to vote, it’s the first one. If their answer involves spending that money only to make legitimate voters’ lives more difficult, then it’s the second one. If the answer involves making voting more difficult for the elderly, the disabled, lower economic classes and absentee voters, then it’s DEFINITELY a suppression effort.

If the answer means that under the new law, at the end of election day, FEWER total eligible voters will have been able to cast votes than otherwise would have, then you have a law that is being put in place to suppress votes.

Guess which one the MN Voter ID Amendment does?

This is why I’m voting “No” on the Voter ID Amendment.

Minnesota Archbishop John C. Nienstedt sends out another letter stating the church’s support for the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.  According to reports, many people reacted by walking out of the parishes and churches where the letter was read (which included the Basilica of St. Mary).

Are you Catholic and voting no? Number 1: I love you, and Number 2: you can get your “Another Catholic voting NO!” lawn signs by contacting Mary Kay Orman at c4me.stpaul@gmail.com (St. Paul) and Michael Bayly at info.c4me@gmail.com or call 612-201-4534 (Minneapolis).

“But the reality is that marriage is not ours to redefine,” said Nienstedt, the man at the head of the organization that once led the charge to redefine marriage by making interracial marriage legal. Yes, it was a coalition of Catholic bishops that helped support Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case which ended anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. in 1967. We call upon that very same spirit of support today, and the language from that decision:

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law… Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Archbishop Nienstedt, you are not only holding positions that are on the wrong side of history, you are promoting division, misunderstandings, misconceptions and causing unnecessary heartache and family divisions that are contrary to the history of your own Church’s actions and teachings, as well as to the very nature of the country in which you live.

Archbishop Nienstedt: if you can’t stand for love, then it’s time to stand down as the leader of the organization that claims to represent love.

The GOP top brass fall over themselves condemning Rep. Akin’s comments, while at the same time approving strict anti-abortion language in their official platform, which includes no explicit exceptions for incest, rape, or a pregnancy that endangers the woman’s life. Consider then that a major plank in the GOP platform is to call for a Constitutional Amendment that will result in forcing rape victims to bear their rapist’s children, or would force a woman whose pregnancy will kill her to continue said pregnancy regardless, and ask: is that significantly different or any less offensive than Akin’s point of view?

A Presidential candidate for this party who seems to favor exceptions in the case of rape and incest, a VP candidate who doesn’t (and has also proposed bills that would make many forms of birth control and all forms of IVF illegal), then throw in a Neanderthal whose ideas of rape and pregnancy seem to come from early 17th century alchemy textbooks, and stir.

I don’t agree with everything Obama has done. I don’t agree with everything he says. But I can’t even start to convince myself that anything I disagree with Obama on (e.g. indefinite detention, use of drones, extension of Bush-era tax cuts) would be better under a Republican government, and in fact prior experience proves that it would most probably be worse on practically all those issues. Add that to ALL of the issues that I feel VERY strongly about (e.g. healthcare, women’s rights, choice, same-sex marriage, DADT, separation of Church and State) with which Obama’s perspective seems to be ideologically aligned with mine, and the choice for me is clear.

Crystal clear.

Many of the people and organizations rushing to support Rep. Todd Akin are not doing so by saying “He just misspoke, he obviously doesn’t hold those atrocious and ignorant opinions, it was a mistake, he was quoted out of context.” I don’t think that anyone can even honestly say that about him and his opinions at this point. No, they are supporting the original, medieval-era concepts of rape, pregnancy and abortion that he ignorantly spewed, and their main complaint is that he is being criticized for holding them.

You have to remember these ill-informed, harmful opinions every time a new bill is introduced that defines “personhood” as beginning at conception, every time a new law is passed requiring a new restriction on choice (medically unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasound, anyone?), any time there are attempts to redefine “rape” or “pregnancy”. The majority of GOP Presidential candidates this season don’t even believe in allowing abortion in the case of rape and incest; the GOP VP candidate co-sponsored a bill with Todd Akin to differentiate “forcible rape” from “non-forcible rape” when banning abortion funding.

There are valid, considered, intelligent, nuanced and reasonable arguments to debate the pros and cons of abortion: but these are not the arguments or reasoning behing these bills proposed by this group of people. Akin’s comments boil down to “if she got pregnant, then she’s lying about being raped, therefore she can’t have an abortion”. That’s the ignorance behind his proposed bills.

Ignorant opinions have no place in law, and ignorant politicians have no place in politics.

What a difference a generation makes. Voter youth calling with MN United in St. Paul, calling voters mostly in their early 20’s, I got a majority of people pledging to vote “No” on the “Limiting Marriage” Amendment, and zero people voting “Yes”.

The younger generations recognize that love is love, and anything you would do to restrict a loving, consenting couple from sharing happiness is not right. It’s a lesson that many in the older generations, having been raised in a world where the rules were different, are still struggling to wrap their minds around.

Want to help me change more minds? Come and join me at the Loring Park offices of MN United this Thursday at 6:30pm. I’m training, so you get to listen to me make dumb jokes for a while, then we go and call voters to see what they think, and talk to them about our experiences with love, with LGBT folks, with marriage and relationships and commitment. It’s easy, and it’s fun: want to join?

We need you. We’re not winning outright in the polls, and we need to make sure that everyone who supports equality comes out to vote. Come in and help turn it around.

Interesting results.  As one of the interviewees commented in the article, I tend to agree that this has less to do with people actually losing their faith and more to do with people being more comfortable with declaring their atheism as the stigma is lost.  Thanks in the most part to the public awareness raised by people like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett, but also to advertising, awareness campaigns and more public participation in political events, as well as pushback on separation issues, from groups like American Atheists, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the FFRF and the ACLU (PS: support them with your voice and your money. They are the ones who protect your religious freedom just as much as they protect freedom from religion)

More people seem to be starting to understand that being a good, moral person does not require belief in a deity, and never has… and I love that.  You might be surprised how many people argue that it IS required, but the number of people who have used that argument has steeply declined recently (in my experience).

Now if we could only convince more people that fighting for plurality and religious freedom and preventing people from imposing their beliefs on others does NOT mean they are being “persecuted”…

Republican Presidential candidates at the Ames Straw Poll. From left: Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Thaddeus McCotter, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A year ago today Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race after coming in 3rd in the Ames Iowa straw poll, behind Michele Bachmann (who came in first) but ahead of Rick Santorum (4th).

It sure feels that it was a lot longer ago, doesn’t it? Like, mid-17th century?

You would think that a Presidential campaign that included Bachmann and Santorum would be more contemporary with, say, Galileo’s trial for heresy or the Salem witch trials, than with a country putting an nuclear-powered robotic exploration device on Mars.

It’s fascinating to me how the phrase “I’m a Christian, so I believe <Y>” is almost completely non-predictive to what <Y> is. Pro-life or pro-choice? Pro- or anti- same-sex marriage? Spank your children or not? For or against the death penalty? Welfare supporter or “welfare queen” detractor? Will the Rapture happen in our lifetimes or not, or is it impossible to know? Is divorce OK or not? Evolution: “real” or not? War: “turn the other cheek” or “eye for an eye”? Ghosts? Global warming? Universal healthcare? Or to go back in time a little: pro-slavery or anti? Or even further: does the Earth go around the Sun, or vice versa, or neither?

To put it another way: in the phrase “I’m a Christian, so I believe <Y>”, there are a greater number of non-trivial beliefs than can be substituted for <Y> (including contradictory ones) than those that are universally considered unacceptable by all who speak the phrase.

It’s especially fascinating when the sentence is followed by the supposed final word on the matter: a biblical quote. If you can equally support both sides of the argument in the same collection of books, while at the same time claim the other side is taking their quotes (from the same book) “out of context”, or confusing literal statements with metaphor, or using a mistranslation of the “true meaning of the text”, or applying other factors to decide which parts still apply and which no longer do… it should give you pause as to the usefulness of the text, and a little humility over proclaiming that one happens to have been born into the only small subsection of the population that got the interpretation just right.

Why if I didn’t know better I’d think that people just generally believe what they already believe (read: what they were taught by their parents, largely determined by where in the world they were born) and then just pick and choose the parts of religion that fit. It helps that they use a book written over centuries by people who had wildly different and inconsistent beliefs, therefore can justify practically any position you take.

But that’s just my belief, and we all know the Devil can quote scripture for his own purposes (Luke 4:9-11).