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There’s a lot of hope and excitement in the (more progressive) USA right now. Except of course at Pharyngula.
Bitter ol’ PZ Myers (I know the man’s not truly bitter) wrote a couple of posts since the election of Barack Obama, which “pissed in peoples corn flakes.” He’s written (emphasis mine):
Obama is a conservative/centrist Democrat who will at best implement a small shift in American policies — he hasn’t promised any strong change in Iraq, and his health care plans are an incremental improvement over the existing situation.
…
We’re still afflicted with the curse of religiosity as a political prerequisite, and Obama has strengthened it. That is a poison that will harm us over the long term; we may have made the more rational choice in this one election, but reinforcing the potency of irrationality will come back to bite us over and over again.
I dread the possibility that jubilation will lead to complacency, that moderation will produce stasis, and that what will follow an Obama presidency could be something far, far worse than we can imagine.
I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.
Honestly, I can say I fully agree.
When I look at Obama versus McCain (pre-election, not tied to Palin), I didn’t see progressive leftism versus regressive conservatism. I saw a right to center-right candidate and a right-wing candidate.
I would not vote for either candidate if they were running here in Canada.
The problem, as I see it, is that American democracy has been stolen, not just by the Republicans, but by the Democrats and the Republicans.
By some major scam, the two main parties in the USA have convinced nearly everyone in the country (including the third parties) that “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.” The Democrats blame Nader for costing Gore the election in 2000 (think about the rationality of chastising someone for trying to represent another voice on the stage, and try to reconcile that with the ideals of “rule by the people”) and the Republicans are such a mixed bag of Christian fundamentalists, big businesses, and libertarians that I’m surprised they haven’t killed each other yet.
Yet, despite their disdain for each other, neither party would admit that the American electoral system is deeply flawed.
Why would anyone want more than two choices for government, one might ask? Doesn’t having two parties make it as simple as a governing party and an opposition, and when one doesn’t work, you can vote for the other? (I have actually heard these questions from Conservative Albertans).
This of course makes as much sense as on the Simpsons when Kang and Kodos take control of the US and put each other as the nominees, or Futurama when John Jackson and Jack Johnson run against each other. The essence of the satire is that with only two choices, they tend to become nearly the same politically in order to appeal to the widest demographic. Why do you think American landslides occur when one party gets more than 55% of the popular vote?
So how do you fix this problem?
First, with the Democrats in power, Obama needs to prove his commitment to democracy by capping all election spending, and not at the ridiculous amount he raised and spent, but at something that’s reasonable for a popular (but as of yet unelectable) third party can have an equal chance of getting it’s message out. Election ads can then also be given equal time on the major networks (for all parties, not just the two main ones). This won’t happen, of course, because he’s got power now and won it through raising ridiculous amounts of money. I’d like to be wrong here, but I’m not holding my breath.
Second, strong third party candidates should be included in the televised debates. Canada put Elizabeth May, Green Party leader, on the federal leaders debate (bringing the number of leaders present at the debate to five), and America could follow suit. Having Nader and Barr at the leader’s debate would definitely have rallied their respective supporters and given them realistic chances at least a few college votes.
Third, stop letting partisan companies put electronic voting machines in. Create a federal election overseeing board and ensure some standard. Make sure that this standard can’t be violated by Republicans, Democrats, or anyone. It’s not hard, but it stops things like 2000 in Florida. I think the issue is Americans need to learn that sometimes government isn’t bad.
Finally, although I’m not familiar enough with it, the electoral college system likely needs to be revamped. I’m not sure if this system is still valuable to American democracy, and perhaps change would be for the better.
So in conlcusion, I’m not saying that Canada has a great electoral system (we don’t), but I feel sorry for American voters who had to choose between two candidates who are forced to pander to get as many votes as possible. Take the momentum you have, America, and push for some electoral reform.
But then again, I’m not American, so you don’t have to take my advice.
Christopher Hitchens, bestselling author of God Is Not Great and an advocate of Atheism ranked with the likes of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) appeared on the O’Reily Factor yesterday night. Laura Ingraham interviewed him on the Personal Story segment of the show, where they discussed Hitchens’s unforeseen support of Obama.
Ingraham begins by noting the variation between his opinion put into his article The War Between the Wars for Slate in July and his newfound admiration for Barack Obama. In the July article, Hitchens wrote:
If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement… the Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. -July 14, 2008; Slate.com
Hitchens then responds by saying that Obama’s values have been getting progressively “better and more teachable”.
During the program, I did notice that Ingraham acted defensively and on several occasions, cut Hitchens off. I think it would be reasonable to say that she behaved unfairly, making connections to her personal life and in support of McCain-Palin in order to give the notion that she was under personal attack. How she performed did not entirely matter, it was just bad journalism.
Though, because of her behavior, it was difficult to extract the real roots of Hitchens’s change in opinion.
I have to appreciate Christianity Today’s post on religion in political cartoons. Here’s a sample (click through for a few more).
James Dobson, the fundamentalist who heads up the dominionist movement known as the Family Research Council is pissing me off. Even after I blocked them they still keep on sending me e-mails; apparently Lagos, Nigeria is no longer the world center of spam -
But the Family Research Council sunk to a new low last week with their so called “Values Voter Summit”. One of the groups that opened a booth at the forum began selling “Obama Pancakes”, ostensibly in order to paint the Illinois senator as – like John Kerry before him – a ‘flip-flopper’. However, as shown by this article, most of the box is not dedicated to Obama’s alleged flip-flops, but rather by portraying him as both a Muslim and a stereotypical ‘lazy black pimp’.
But perhaps the most offensive element of these waffles is the context of it all. African-American house slaves have long been ‘mascots’ of food items – just ask Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima. And to equate them with possibly the next leader of the free world is just demeaning.
This is not to say that James Dobson personally ordered these Obama waffles to be produced or that the FRC even were particularly aware that they were being sold. But I think everyone can agree that they should have known that something like that was being peddled at their forums and done something about it beforehand – ultimately they are responsible for their supporters’ behavior.
Which brings me to the question – are these the people who supposedly have a superior moral compass as compared to the rest of us?
Inspired by this delicious list of lies about Obama, and what (some Republicans) to fear in his presidency, I present a revised list of potentially real things to fear from an Obama presidency.
(Note: I am merely taking the author’s, Roland G. Ley, article and adjusting it to mesh with reality. The original text will be emphasized).
Obama = General Adama
McCain = Colonel Tigh
Palin = President Roslin
Who’s Biden?
Last month, I wrote about how tired I was that so much of this year’s election coverage has been about which of our two leading American presidential candidates loves Jesus more. This remains the case-I still don’t care whether Barack Obama’s old reverend subscribes to liberation theology or not, I still don’t care whose version of Christianity John McCain claims to believe, and I really, genuinely, honest-to-whoever do not care whether or not Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic. In fact, the thing that I love most about Joe Biden is that he is actually about policy and not oblique piety; his is a refreshing turn from political rhetoric that has large devolved into a contest of conservative Christian buzzwords (”values voter” and “culture of life” are my favorites) and infantile political gimmicks designed with the religious in mind.
That being said, what does interest and concern me is the fact that just about everybody else in the country does seem to care about this stuff.
It is simply an unavoidable truth of our political circumstances (and a rather unpleasant truth at that for secular voters) that strong religious beliefs form the perspective through which a great many Americans view their prospective leaders. The normative American cultural assumption is that the Bible is the obvious foundational source of goodness (note its most popular colloquial appellation: “the Good Book”), and so candidates’ political stances are vetted as much by their congruence with Biblical values as they are with their actually being a good or a bad idea. In fact, on this pattern of “reasoning,” several very bad policies have persevered exclusively by their religious appeal, such as the so-called “Mexico City policy” and abstinence-only sex “education.”
And yet these policies persist, despite the fact that both examples above appear so brutally stupid that one most wonder whether they were designed with failure as an objective. This leads one to wonder: what is it about our political discourse that permits stupidity to be tolerable, even virtuous, to many American voters? Why is it that three candidates for helmsman of the world’s most powerful battleship-of-state would be permitted to publicly admit to being evolution deniers and not simply laughed out of our discourse?
I think that the answer to this question is what may sound like a contradiction: that the United States can be said to be in the softcore stages of a democratic theocracy. By this term I do not just mean any theocracy that permits voting (since even Iran allows its citizens to choose a President, though the Supreme Leader is appointed), but rather, a democratic theocracy would be any state where certain religious values are so endemic in a society’s values and customs that little to no legal framework whatsoever is even necessary. To be more specific, I think that a modern democratic theocracy has three relevant, salient features:
I do not for a moment believe that the United States is at risk of becoming the next Iran. I do not entertain even an inkling that formal oppression of the non-Christian is around the corner (which is to say that I am nowhere near as paranoid as many of the religious are!) and I have never, ever feared that my open secularism would ever threaten my personal well-being. What I do fear, however, is that the socially normative Christian sense of entitlement is growing- we have always seen it in our politics, and far more scarily, in our military. Our government, at least by the letter, is formally intolerant of theocracy, but our society seems to thirst for it. The majority opinion wants God and his Creation Week taught in our schools, the majority opinion wants God on our money and on the lips of our children and politicians day and night, the majority thinks that I will be on fire forever after I die.
If I could ever be accused of paranoia, it would be for the opinion that society appears to me to be becoming more tolerant of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry than the ongoing liberalization of formal government policy in respect to religion would suggest. With the economy turning sour and the evangelicals letting their old frustrations about government fester at the prospect of a Democrat sweep this fall, I can only wonder what the next step in our social development will be. Will we finally permit our values to be congruent with the values of our secular republic’s government? Or will the religious majority let its anger and its devotion mix and grow until things become even worse for those whom it is already bad? Do we really want to let the best-armed members of our population (our military) be the most uniformly convinced that Jesus is the only one to build either a life or a state? I do not.
I worry about my country. Even as you and I get to watch the meteoric rise of a unified, highly-motivated secular movement in the United States, we also get to watch its backlash use our success as rallying cry. Perhaps I worry needlessly, but I wouldn’t be slinging words like “theocracy” and “religious police” around if I didn’t think that we were in a real danger of having to fear some of our religious neighbors far more than we will ever have to fear our religious leaders.
I’ll admit it. I had caught Obama fever.
It started when my girlfriend’s mother gave me a copy of Dreams from my Father, Obama’s bestselling 1996 biography. Reading it got me very excited about Obama’s candidacy, and once it became clear that it was going to be a contest between Obama and McCain I enthusiastically threw my support behind Obama. A McCain presidency promises a fresh social conservative in the Supreme Court following Justice Stevens’ imminent departure, something that, as a freethought activist, I felt I had to oppose. Meanwhile, Obama has been explicit in several speeches about his staunch support of church-state separation. To me, the choice was obvious.
Then my wake-up call came, in the form of Obama promising to promote and enhance faith-based initiatives across the country. I was shaken; was there any candidate who could help us progress as a society, who would not actively promote conformity to mainstream religious modes?
The answer is simply no. This election is noteworthy, among many other things, for the fact that the Evangelical Christian bloc is up for grabs for the first time in recent memory. They carried Bush II to victory in the 2000 and 2004 elections, swinging states like Ohio into the Red and helping him capture the White House. However, the evangelicals are not as excited about McCain as they were Bush II, and both camps know that they have to mobilize to target this very motivated group of voters. The first real appearance of the two candidates together was the recent Saddleback Church forum, hosted by celebrity evangelist pastor Rick Warren. Before they debated on real issues, they instead got on-stage in front of the nation and tried to out-Christian each other, jumping through the Judeo-Christian hoops to prove that they are Christian leaders who will lead a Christian nation with Christian values towards a Christian world.
As an non-believer and a secular freethought activist, this sickens me. Many who decry the role of religion in Middle Eastern politics passionately advocate a Christian stranglehold on our own government, the worst of which we have seen since Bush II came into office. Christianity disproportionately dominates our government, unreflective of the true nature of the American religious demographic: anywhere from 4%-14% of Americans(depending on who you ask) consider themselves to be non-believers, not including many who keep their mouths shut about their disbelief. Despite this fact, one has to ask: where are the non-religious politicians? Well, here’s one, and he’s not the first; California Gov. Culbert Olson, a Democrat who served from 1939 to 1943, declared his atheism as well. But these men “came out” close to or after the end of their political careers, when they had little left to lose by such an admission. It would seem as though the non-believer is among the last of the political outcasts; the Democratic Party has a black man running for president with a Catholic as his running mate, and it came narrowly close to nominating a woman. A Jewish man was a Vice Presidential candidate in the 2000 election. The Democratic party openly supports civil unions for homosexuals. Yet, for all of its talk, the “party of inclusiveness” shuns those whose worldview tends toward the skeptical.
Given the current socio-political landscape, this makes bitter sense. To formally recognize non-believers as a political entity would be instant suicide for any political party. The best that we can hope to do is to vote for someone who would hurt our cause less, and in this case, the choice is clearly Obama. However, it is a regrettable choice, one that hurts more and more with each election cycle as we grow as a subset of the population while facing the same political disenfranchisement year after year. Perhaps someday the non-believers will know the joy of having a real say in politics, like women, minorities and soon homosexuals. Until then, we’ll fight the good fight until the world considers our voice a legitimate one.
Chris, you ignorant slut. In your recent article “Faith in 2008: Enough Already” you rightly assess that the media has completely overblown religion in the current race for the White House, however you miss several key points that should make secularists less disgusted.
The first, and key, is that among Obama’s changes to the Faith-Based Initiatives Office, the majority of the changes reduce the ability of religion to use taxpayer dollars to proselytize. A bit of reading reveals what Obama actually wants to do:
- They were required to set up a separate 501(c)3 organization to receive federal funds. This prevented federal money from being funneled directly to houses of worship, where oversight of how those dollars were being spent (i.e. for secular vs. religious purposes) would have been a tricky task.
- The separate 501(c)3 groups were required to provide services that were secular in nature. This means groups couldn’t use federal money to engage in sectarian religious activities, such as proselytizing.
- The social services administered by faith-based groups and funded by government money were required to be available indiscriminate of religion. In other words, an evangelical group couldn’t make its services available only to other evangelicals. Jews, Muslims, atheists, and others — religious and non-religious — also had to have access.
- Faith-based groups couldn’t discriminate on the basis of religion in their employment decisions for positions that were funded with federal money. (Note the caveat: “with federal funds.” Religious groups only had to adhere to the above regulations if they were spending government money. Where they used their own private funds they were exempt from these rules.)
In summary: the plan will remain, appeasing the fundies and getting Obama votes, but will tie the hands of religions that want to apply to only doing the same thing a secular charity could do. Sound’s pretty darn secular to me.
So I have to say your statement Chris,
Obama’s stance seems to be that atheists are either too stupid or too greedy to make charitable donations to religious groups, so we’d better just take their money and do it for them
Is a total mischaracterization of what Obama is trying to do. You’re still able to donate to whatever charities you want, Obama just wants to keep Christian votes while preventing state-sponsored evangelism.
What does all this come down to? The media is obsessing about religion, and so Obama’s pandering in a way that he needs to in order to be a viable presidential candidate.
Is it admirable and desirable? No, but I think Obama represents a clear move towards secularism from the past eight years of the growing American theocracy.
Conservapedia on Obama
Thursday, October 16th, 2008We all know that you can search for about anything left of the centre or non-religious on Conservapedia and come up with gut-wrenchingly hilarious results. But with that laughter comes a loss of faith in humanity’s ability to reason clearly. Usually I just brush off the pain that comes with reading utter stupidity, but this one was too much.
Whoever wrote this article must have been jumping at the gun to get it off their chest that they think Obama is a Muslim. It comes in the first paragraph. Usually on a Wiki negative remarks like this are left for the criticism section, and then there’ll be something about how it’s only speculation. Not Conservapedia. They’ll throw all honesty and objectivity out the door to accomplish their goal – in this case to slander Obama.
At least they try to back up their claim that Obama is a Muslim with this list of weak evidence:
As if perpetuating the myth that Obama is a dangerous Muslim isn’t enough, this Conservapedia article goes on to attack another enemy of contemporary conservatism, elitism.
It says alot for the status of bigotry, racism, and stupidity of some people in the United States that people would actively contribute filth to such a widely read Wiki. But hey, a spades a spade – it isn’t called Conservapedia for nothing. Anything they don’t like they consider anti-American, and they’ll twist facts any which way to fit their perspective. Just look at the first picture of Obama in this article:
Stupid Conservatives, you think that the reason Obama isn’t holding his hand over his heart for the pledge of allegiance is because he’s not American.
Wrong answer.
The correct answer is….
Muslim’s don’t have hearts. Jeeeezzzzzzz. Get it right Consveratives.
Tags: conservapedia, conservatism, islam, Obama, stupidity
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