North Carolina votes for... what?

Yesterday, North Carolina voted to ban not only gay marriage, but all legal civil unions, including those of straight couples.

This does not strengthen marriage in North Carolina. No straight, religious, married couple in North Carolina is now going to be married longer, and have a more fulfilling, happy marriage, because of this vote. That's absolutely irrefutable.

Here's what this amendment does do:

• If a gay person is admitted to a hospital and the hospital decides only family can visit that person, his or her same-sex partner cannot visit. It doesn't matter if that couple (yes, they can still be called a couple) has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person dies, the parents, siblings or children of that person - who that person may not have talked to in years - will have all rights regarding the funeral and burial. Regardless of any relationship that person may have with someone of the same sex, even a 20-year-old partnership, that partner can legally be excluded, entirely, from the planning - even from attending. It doesn't matter if that couple has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person gets a job that gives health insurance coverage to a spouse, his or her same-sex partner cannot get that coverage, under any circumstances. 

How does any of that make straight marriage stronger? It doesn't! In fact, straight Christians will continue to sometimes (often?) have relationship and sexual problems, will continue to sometimes (often?) have adulterous affairs, and often get divorced. This amendment does NADA to address those things.

By contrast, without this amendment - if you, North Carolina, allowed gay marriage - here's what would never, ever change:

• If your church does not recognized gay marriage, it would still not recognize gay marriage. Just as a Baptist church is under no obligation to allow Muslim weddings, just as a Catholic church could refuse to marry to non-Catholics, your church would get to continue to refuse to recognize gay marriage. You can refuse to perform such ceremonies, you can ask such people to leave your grounds. That doesn't change no matter how marriage is defined.
• You get to continue to be disgusted by gay marriage, just as I'm disgusted by child marriage, a marriage where there is more than a 30 year age difference between the partners, or religious marriages that require women to stay in abusive relationships. You get to continue to speak out about how you think it's awful, stand up and leave the room in a huff when someone says they support it, ignore people engaged in it, etc.
• You get to continue to refuse to attend any wedding among any two people you don't think should get married, gay or straight.
• Straight people like Kim Kardashian and Brittney Spears will get married for just a few hours/days.
• Gay people would continue to live together, love each other, even hold hands in public.  

So what good did this amendment do you, straight married religious couples of North Carolina?

None. Zilch. Nada.

Consider this, voters of North Carolina: most of you are Christians. But you aren't the same kinds of Christians. In fact, some of you would say that some others of you are NOT Christians. I've heard Church of Christ people say no one else is Christian but them, I've heard Catholics say no one else is a Christian but them, I've heard Baptists say that neither Catholics nor Mormons are Christians, and on and on and on. You people loooove to debate who is and isn't a Christian. You would have gotten to do the same thing regarding gay people had you NOT passed this amendment: you would have gotten to continue to say, "I believe marriage is between one man and one woman and, therefore, those guys over there aren't really married." You would get to continue to believe that, with all your heart. But if you are an intensive care unit nurse, you would have had to keep that belief to yourself when a man came to your unit to see his husband - would that REALLY have been so hard? Are you going to feel better telling that man, "No! You cannot see him! Ha ha!" Is that really what Jesus would do?

Why should your religion - which I do not believe in, by the way - get to determine which loving, adult, consenting couples get to get married? You say marriage is something that is sanctified by God and was created for the purpose of having children - yet here I am, an Atheist who is not having babies, and I was allowed to marry. Are you going to try to take away my marriage now?

This was a vote that was driven entirely - ENTIRELY - by religious people, particularly and especially Christians. And it represents so much of why we Atheists find you just as reprehensible as you find The Gays.

The one true religion

This is what it's like for me when someone tells me why they are a Christian or a Muslim:

The Journey - becoming an Atheist

The journey from religious dogma to Atheism / Secular Humanism isn't one that goes from a place of comfort and certainty to despondency and hopelessness, as those that believe in a magical, invisible friend (or several such friends, for that matter) will tell you.

Rather, it is often a journey from a place of great discomfort and disquiet, a place of fear and and required prejudice, to a place of wonder, joy, acceptance, appreciation and exploration. This article in the New York Times maps such a journey.

...he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius, Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can discuss it.

He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.

He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility of a child?

Beautiful!

Is your religion strong enough for science?

I subscribe to Carl Sagan Quoted on Twitter. Every day or so, a quote from Carl Sagan gets sent out. Here was one recently that I really loved:
“Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.”
This quote really struck me, because it's something I've been thinking about a lot:
Fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalists Muslims, and fundamentalist anything, must say in their minds, "Oh, I trust this medicine that has been developed using the science of biology, and I will get on this plane and fly because of the work of people that applied the science of aeronautics, but I reject evolutionary biology, plate tectonics, and the laws of physics beyond the sphere of the Earth."
While I did, indeed, grow up in the Bible Belt, I was never discouraged from ignoring or rejecting science. It's one of the reasons I continued to attend church for so long despite not having the faith I was supposed to have - I didn't feel a God, but nothing was said against science in most of the churches I attended, and the pot lucks were so delicious - religion continued to accommodate the reality I experienced and everything I learned in school, and since I had no idea there was a viable alternative to attending church, I kept going. Maybe if it hadn't I would have embraced my Atheism much sooner.
I'm not worried about any religion or faith that embraces science. But the ones who don't absolutely terrify me - and defy all logic.

Basketball is my religion

Want to make a Kentucky Atheist angry? Show up at my door to proselytize during March Madness. WWJD? Not do that.

Remembering Butterfly McQueen

Not many people know that Atheists / Secular Humanists played essential roles in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This article in USA Today reviews efforts to recognize the contributions of these Atheist civil rights workers, as well as efforts to focus attention on black Atheists in the USA over the years. Many recent efforts have been in conjunction with Black History Month (February), but efforts are ongoing. For instance, Norm R. Allen Jr. of the Institute for Science and Human Values, a humanist organization based in Tampa, Fla. has promoted recognition for African-American nonbelievers since he founded the group African Americans for Humanism in 1989.

But there's a name I'm not seeing in all these efforts, and it needs to be there. And that name is Butterfly McQueen.

Butterfly McQueen was "Prissy" in Gone With the Wind. That's all most people know about her, and goodness knows we've all imitated her famous line, "I don't know nuthin' 'bout birthin' no
babies."

But there's soooo much more you should know about her.

I got an inkling that there was a lot more to this person than I had imagined when a friend of mine back in my home town, obsessed with Gone with the Wind, found addresses for various people who were in the movie and still alive, including for Butterfly McQueen. She wrote all
of them. Butterfly McQueen wrote back a terrific, full-page, hand-written letter that was so full of enthusiasm and charm and a geniune warmth and kindness. My friend had it framed. We gawked over it on more than one occasion.

I cobbled together information about her from various Internet searches a few years back, and I was shocked at what I discovered the more I read about her:

After playing maids in the movies, on TV and the stage over many years, McQueen took a break from acting and worked a succession of jobs, including as a taxi dispatcher, a saleslady at Macy's, and a seamstress at Sak's. She told The Guardian during a visit to Great Britain in 1989: "Any honest job I have taken." She returned to acting occasionally; I remember her from an "ABC Weekend Special", a really charming story called The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody that I adored. She also had a tiny role in Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford.

But she was also a continual student, taking classes at five universities and even reading Gone with the Wind in Spanish. In 1975, at the age of 64, she received a bachelor's degree in political science from New York City College.

And in 1989, she received the first ever "Freethought Heroine" award from the Freedom from Religion Foundation at its national convention in Atlanta, coincidentally held during the 50th anniversary of Gone With the Wind. McQueen had been a member of the Foundation since 1981. After brief remarks and a poetry recitation before that audience at the convention, she sang Paper Moon, accompanied by piano. I now can't hear that song without thinking of her and imaging her child-like voice singing that song. If I had a time machine, it would be one of the moments I would like to go back and witness for myself.

She told Gayle White, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (Oct. 8, 1989): "As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion."

McQueen was raised a Christian, but questioned the value of organized religion even as a child - something I can most definitely identify with. She related one eye-opening experience with clergy as a youngster, when she was riding a train to New York and offered to share her lunch with two young preachers. Instead of taking "one sandwich and one piece of cake, they took the whole thing."

She also said Christianity and studying the bible has "sapped our minds so we don't know anything else."

She said she tithed not to religion but to friends and neighbors. This included "adopting" a public elementary school in her beloved neighborhood of Harlem, where she patrolled the playground, picked up litter and looked after the children. "They say the streets are going to be beautiful in heaven. I'm trying to make the streets beautiful here. At least, in Georgia and in New York, I live on beautiful streets."

"If we had put the energy on earth and on people that we put on mythology and on Jesus Christ, we wouldn't have any hunger or homelessness."

Sadly, she died of injuries suffered in a kerosene-heater accident at her Augusta, Georgia home on Dec. 22, 1995. And it surprised many people when it was revealed that she remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

Her life is fascinating, full of dignity, grace, compassion, a love of learning and a passion for critical thinking. If Black Atheists are going to be recognized, then let's make sure Butterfly McQueen is there as well.

Why won’t the U.S. accept its atheists?

In God We Must
Why won’t the U.S. accept its atheists?
A terrific blog by Julian Baggini
Posted Sunday, Feb. 5, 2012

In the history of Congress... there has only been one avowed atheist, Pete Stark, who has represented ultra-liberal Oakland in California since 1973 but only acknowledged he did not believe in a supreme being in 2007. Even he is a member of the non-doctrinal Unitarian Church, prefers to refer to himself as “non-theist” rather than atheist... This compares with at least six openly homosexual representatives.