Educators in Wichita Falls, Texas, may not welcome my praise. But they've done the right thing in deciding not to offer a state-mandated elective course on the Bible for high schoolers. According to media accounts (including

http://www.news-journal.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/2009/08/08/0808bible.html ), a 2007 state law required high schools to offer an elective course on the Bible's impact on history and Western literature. To make sure the classes would be taught in an "objective, academic manner that neither promotes nor disparages religion," the law mandated what the Austin American-Statesman described as "teacher training" and "state-approved training materials." Then the legislature failed to budget $750,000 to produce any of those things. The law goes into effect this fall, commanding school districts to offer the courses even though the state didn't come through with the things the same law says the districts need before they can create the courses.

Teaching about the Bible in public schools is a church-state minefield. Even if the curriculum and materials stick to historical and literary matters, there is wide latitude for individual teachers to turn the classes into forums for evangelizing. The Council for Secular Humanism believes that the Bible is too hot for public schools to handle unless curricula are designed and carried out with the greatest of care. That's just the opposite of what happened in Texas.

If I had a ten-gallon hat, I'd also tip toward Austin schools, where educators announced that they didn't need to offer the electives because existing history and geography courses already deal with world religions. I don't know whether that's true or just an ingenious dodge, but either way it's very, very smart.

Other school districts are playing a dangerous game, say media accounts. They're cobbling together their own elective Bible courses, notwithstanding the state's reported failure to provide good guidelines. The result is predictable: thousands of Texas schoolchildren will have their civil rights trampled when teachers teach Bible courses that champion religion over irreligion … or Christianity over other world religions … or the Southern Baptist Conference over other Christian sects. Another prediction: lots of Texas school districts who can't afford it will burn through thousands of dollars that ought to go toward books, computers, even footballs -- money that will be spent on lawyers instead.

The Bible elective in Texas may be the most perfectly confounded church-state snafu I've seen. It's a recipe for violating religious freedom and busting school district budgets. Yet it's so easily avoided. More Texas school districts should be like Wichita Falls and just say no, or like Austin and find a credible-sounding excuse.

Disappointed but curious, I tuned in that night to see what urgent development had shouldered my interview aside. I’d been replaced by ... Michael Jackson’s lawyers.

This was the time of one of the child sex abuse charges against Jackson. Apparently a putative victim had recounted supposed details about his private parts, and Jackson had been ordered to have them photographed so his genitals could be compared to the alleged eyewitness testimony. The lawyers who went on Larry King had been present at the shoot.

Which is as close as I ever got to either Larry King or Michael Jackson. And that, in the words of Paul Harvey (also deceased), is the rest of the story.

It’s gratifying to see that from the moment we went live, people “got it.” Here’s a declaration I received from Barry Greenstein, a humanist activist in the greater Philadelphia area. No two ways about it, Barry “gets” what pleaseblock.us and the Campaign for Free Expression are all about:

  “I oppose hate crimes legislation. This is not because I support hate groups or violence. I don’t, but I like the idea that a person can be criminally charged for their thoughts even less. That to me is a whole different order of violence.

Consider the scenario most social-change advocates probably expected, say, ten years ago. Inside and outside of the GLBT community, circa 1999 most activists would have predicted that someday, maybe 25 years in the future, GLBT activists would finally succeed in getting some kind of civil union firmly recognized in the law. Same-sex marriage? When pigs fly! No, the old plan was to establish a new, alternative institution for recognizing committed relationships. Legally robust civil unions would one day provide the benefits opposite-sex couples realized through matrimony: community property, clear custody of children, the right to inherit, access in hospital, access to health insurance, and so on.

There were pluses and minuses to this approach. On the minus side, civil unions would never be marriages, not quite: same-sex couples would always have to settle for “second class marriages.” On the plus side—well, civil unions would never be marriages, not quite. Consider that matrimony is a hybrid social institution, rooted partly in the law and partly in the churches. Consider its unsavory baggage: not that long ago, matrimony essentially amounted to the bride’s father transferring property rights in his daughter to the groom. It locked women into relationships where they couldn’t own property, couldn’t vote, where they essentially existed only as legal shadows of their husbands. Yes, those days are gone. But the institution of matrimony still carries that taint on its record. Civil union, a wholly new institution, would not. Further, as a new creation of the law civil union would be utterly secular, free of any historical attachment to the churches.

For all these reasons, some social-change activists, even straight ones, wanted nothing to do with traditional matrimony. We were waiting hungrily for the day when same-sex civil unions became legal ... so we could sue to have the same privilege extended to opposite-sex couples.

Today, that’s the scenario that will come about when pigs fly. Six years ago or so, the GLBT community realized that gay marriage might be an attainable goal and quickly abandoned its old strategy of seeking to create robust civil unions. Now it’s on the cusp of victory, an attainment that should not be underestimated. But let’s never lose sight of what was lost along the way. Around the turn of the 21st century, the GLBT movement—arguably the most-powerful, best-organized, best-funded social change movement in America—stopped being an opponent of traditional matrimony. Instead of applying its impressive muscle to creating an alternative to this hoary, unsecular, historically sexist tradition, the GLBT movement opted to support the status quo. If the definition of marriage could just be expanded to include same-sex couples, the GLBT community would stop seeking to overturn matrimony’s monopoly on the legal recognition of committed relationships.

Because of that, there’s essentially zero chance that those of us who find traditional matrimony repellent will gain a genuine alternative in our lifetimes. The GLBT movement was the only constituency with the power to force that sort of reform, and it’s been effectively co-opted into supporting, thus perpetuating, the troubling monopoly of matrimony.

Oh well, it was too late for me anyway. Several years ago my live-in lifepartner and I gave up and tied the knot—in order to get access to family-plan health insurance. I’m happy to report that that ol’ debbil matrimony has not ruined a wonderful relationship. But damn, I wish we could have been among the first plaintiffs to sue for civil unions for straight couples.

(FYI, I wrote an op-ed along similar lines in FI, Dec. 2003-Jan. 2004: http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/flynn_24_1.htm

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 The Council for Secular Humanism congratulates Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, a local group affiliated with the Council and based in Charleston, S.C., for securing such prominent coverage in a front-page story in Monday’s New York Times . “Secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and other Americans who lead value-rich lives without religion are coming out of the closet and overcoming average Americans’ prejudices against men and women who live without invisible means of support,” commented Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council and editor of its magazine Free Inquiry . “We commend the Times and reporter Laurie Goodstein for their evenhanded coverage, and Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry and its founder Herb Silverman for their work in helping to secure this coverage.”

Wow, I finally figured out how to write a short blog post!

1) Priest sex abuse of boys is a bounded phenomenon whose incidence grew rapidly starting in the mid-twentieth century.

2) After all the media attention, all the shame heaped on the Church, and tougher self-policing, priest sex abuse will decline sharply or disappear in the near future.

If there’s compelling evidence for either proposition, I’m unaware of it.

Let’s start first with history. The current priest sex abuse scandal surfaced in the National Catholic Reporter in 1985, bubbled around the margins for a few years, and became an all-consuming top-tier story in the early- to mid-1990s. In short order, a subject that had been all but barred from popular discourse was for the first time common fodder for the nightly news and water-cooler conversation. Some have assumed that the enhanced visibility of sex abuse victims meant that the incidence of sex abuse had grown sharply during the childhoods of victims whose stories began to be told in the 90s. Some Catholic conservatives seized on this as “evidence” that priest sex abuse resulted from the liberalizing reforms of 1967’s Second Vatican Council.

But there’s a problem here. Since priest sex abuse of boys was so passionately excluded from public discourse and the public record before the mid-90s, it’s awfully difficult to establish what its incidence was in the early twentieth century, much less in the nineteenth century and earlier. The phenomenon we know about—an explosion in information about abuse—fits either the hypothesis that abuse rose sharply in, oh, the 1960s ... or the hypothesis that it’s been occurring at roughly the same rate for decades or centuries, but now is the first time in Western history when people can discuss it openly.

In a 2004 FREE INQUIRY editorial (URL at the tail of this post), I wrote: “In 1981, I attended my first local atheist group meeting in a Midwestern city. Two ex-Catholics, one in his thirties and one well over seventy, recounted sex abuse that each had suffered as an altar boy. As I attended more meetings, local and national, I heard more firsthand stories of abuse. Victims came from every part of the country; some had been abused the year before, some fifty years ago or more.” Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but a disturbing sign that priest sex abuse was probably occuring at some consistent level long before people started strumming guitars at Sunday Mass.

Consider also that the Servants of the Paraclete, the New Mexico-based order that sought to reform pederast priests, was founded in response to what was already quietly considered a serious problem by church hierarchs ... way back circa 1947.

Finally, let’s consult a really exotic source: popular Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda, starting in Europe soon after the Reformation. If sex abuse was going on but discussion of it was being repressed, its twisted echoes in anti-Catholic mythmaking may be the only tracks it leaves in the record. (Recall that accusations of priest sex abuse of young boys were often dismissed as anti-Catholic propaganda until the 90s, when middle America learned to its horror how many of those accusations were true.) In centuries of anti-Catholic propaganda, some of the most persistent themes have been priests sexually abusing male and female children, priests and prelates having mistresses (a theme the current president of Paraguay knows something about), and priests taking sexual advantage of nuns. It’s an inexact measure at best, but the persistence of these themes may suggest that they were sometimes rooted in truth, and that this was the case not for years, or decades, but rather for centuries.

So let’s think about the future. Despite the shame, the ruinous cost of lawsuits, and the rhetoric of reform, if priestly sex abuse has been going on at more-or-less consistent levels for centuries—if the only real change is that nowadays society will talk about it—what are the odds that its incidence will decline sharply, or in any enduring way, tomorrow?

This is just my personal surmise, but I suspect that priestly sex abuse is inevitable whenever human males are subjected to the deeply unnatural expectation of celibacy and placed in positions of authority that involve frequent close contact with children and families. I suspect that such abuse went on in the 1670s, and the 1770s, and the 1870s ... and for that matter the 1930s ... much as we now know it did in the 1970s. And I suspect that it will continue to go on in the future, despite the best efforts of a great many very sincere people to stamp it out.

To my mind, ending priestly celibacy would probably do more than anything else to curb the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church. Though even that won’t likely end sex abuse among priests altogether: as the examples of prominent televangelists in the Protestant tradition make clear, even being married is no sure protection against members of the clergy using their positions to facilitate adulterous liaisons with consenting adults of either gender.

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Holly G. Prigerson, the study’s senior author and director of the Center for Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care Research at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told the New York Times that terminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.

You’d think it would be the other way around. It makes sense that enthusiastic believers who know they’re going to a better place would be more willing to let go of life gracefully than atheists and humanists who think death is the end. But exactly the opposite turns out to be true. Why? Well, some devout Christians may fear that they’re headed somewhere less than pleasant after death. But Dr. Prigerson thinks she’s pinpointed the real problem: “To religious people, life is sacred ... they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible.”

The difference between the most and least religious patients in the study was profound. Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.

So, what harm can faith do? Apparently the superstition that one’s life is a gift from God inclines the terminally ill to do greater harm to themselves, their loved ones, and society at large. Times reporter Roni Caryn Rabin notes that “[a]ggressive end-of-life care can lead to a more painful process of dying ... and greater shock and grief for the family members left behind.” As for society, there’s an enormous difference in cost between ordinary and heroic care. Medicare spends a third of its budget on patients in their last year of life, and a disproportionate amount of that on patients in their final week of life. It’s impolite to talk dollars and cents when life hangs in the balance, but every dollar spent on terminal care is one less dollar available for medical research, disease prevention, education, infrastructure, you name it ... and strong faith apparently drives the faithful to consume more than their share.

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After painting a stark picture of the resource-starved future that probably faces us all, and soon, Kotler throws down the gauntlet:

“Not too long ago, one of my readers pointed out that I’m pretty good at pointing out what’s wrong in the world and lousy about pointing out solutions. So here’s my simple solution: Stop Having Children.

“I call it the 5 Year Ban. For the next five years let’s not have any kids. All of us. The whole freaking planet.

“I don’t think this should be a top down approach. I don’t mean a literal government ban. I mean a grassroots movement of responsible adults behaving like responsible adults. I mean a populist moratorium on childbirth.

“Why 5 years? Because it’s a manageable number. Because it would mean a billion less people. Because a billion less people is a good place to start.”

That passage really hit home with me, in part because around forty years ago I made my own decision to join Kotler moratorium. (No doubt that was some years before he thought of it.) I found a woman who felt the same way. We’re childfree by choice and have never regretted it.

Every few years FREE INQUIRY does another issue on the population crisis. As it happens, the next one comes out in a couple of days, with a lead article by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. If I’d seen Kotler’s piece when it came out (it’s dated February 8), I probably wouldn’t have sought to reprint it in FI; it’s a little over the top when Kotler urges slamming fertility treatment abuser Nadya Suleman (you know, Octo-Mom) into jail. And he’s relentless in portraying just how dire the issues we face genuinely appear to be.

I’d urge you read Kotler’s piece with an open mind. And ask yourself, aside from the jail-Nadya-Suleman part, what you can really find fault with. Who knows, maybe a reader or two (or more) will join the moratorium.

As for me, I eat meat, drive a car that’s on the efficient side of middle of the pack, mileage-wise, and don’t always recycle. But Sue and I have always lived in an apartment instead of an energy-wasting, four-walls-exposed-to-the-wind detached house, and we’ve never added mouths to this overpopulated world. So on balance I feel like I’m doing my part for the planet.

How about those smelling salts? Just pinching myself doesn’t seem to do the trick.

“The free expression of religious belief, together with what James Madison called ‘the full and equal rights of conscience,’ should apply to people of all religious traditions—including atheists. Government should no more penalize a person for professing atheism than for professing a belief in Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam,” said the Becket Fund’s letter. Commenting to the media about the letter, Becket Fund litigation director Eric Rassbach said, “It signals to U.S. citizens and to the rest of the world, that the freedom and sanctity of conscience—including the right to believe there is no God at all—is a fundamental right for all people.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I applaud the folks at Becket Fund for coming down on the right side of this issue. But I can’t help wondering what their real agenda is. Is this an effort to curry favor with unbelievers on a “symbolic” issue, in hopes of amassing political capital they hope might deflect atheist protests next time they take the conservative side of some church-state issue?

If so, I suppose I should look on the bright side: This is the first time I’ve ever seen one of the “anti-ACLU” civil liberties groups indicate any interest whatever in what nonreligious people think of it!

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Well, I’m wrong—maybe. In Arkansas, Rep. Richard Carroll has filed an act to amend the state constitution to repeal its provisions barring unbelievers from elective office and testifying in court. (Look it up: http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/assembly/2009/R/Pages/BillInformation.aspx?measureno=HJR1009  .)

Carroll represents northern Little Rock, and is the highest-ranking elected official in America affiliated with the Green Party. He also won his last election by a margin on the order of 80 percent ... which may explain why he feels comfortable taking on a cause that’s noble, but also sure to be deeply unpopular among conservative churchgoers.

Kudos to Rep. Carroll for taking on this important act of symbolic housecleaning. I wish him success, but I’m not placing bets. After all, this is the same Arkansas whose state house quashed a 2005 resolution to affirm support for the separation of church and state ... the same Arkansas where a proposal to declare this past January 29 as Thomas Paine Day died in committee. The solon who sponsored the Paine resolution got so much flak that she felt compelled to “assure her colleagues that she was not an atheist,” notes David Waters in the <em>Washington Post</em> On Faith blog. “Which they would have known if they’d read the state constitution.” (See http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2009/02/an_advocate_for_atheists_in_ar.html .)

Will Rep. Carroll open his living room drapes one day to see a torch-wielding mob outside? Stay tuned ...