First, my disclaimer: I’m a member of the social democratic New Democratic Party of Canada, and am thus partisan on all the issues I’m going to talk about. I’ll try to stay neutral, but I make no promises. If you’ve followed me on Facebook at all, my rants and arguments have been littering everywhere for about five days now.

So now some background:

Canada is a technically a constitutional monarchy, which means our head of state is the Queen of England, and her representative the Governor General. The monarchy has little to no influence over this country, but the Governor General does need to be consulted for certain events. Our current Governor General is Michaelle Jean. Typically her role is ceremonial, but in certain instances she can use her discretion to look out for Canada.

Canada has five main political parties, and four with seats in our parliament. They are (from oldest to newest); the Liberal Party (centrist policies), the New Democratic Party (or NDP, social democrats), the Bloc Quebecois (website in French; a party for the “protection of Quebec’s interests on a federal level as well as the promotion of its sovereignty” [Wikipedia]), the Green Party (environmentalist party with centre-right economic policies, they have no seats presently), and the Conservative Party (right wing). In comparison to American politics, the Liberals follow the general policies of the Democrats (with a less charismatic leader) and the Conservatives are similar to the Republicans (and even share an evangelical support base – but the Canadian wing is less overt about it).

Finally to introduce the topic, Canada operates as a representative parliamentary democracy. Rather than have three separate branches of government like the USA (legislative, executive and judicial), Canada has a weird blend. When Canadians vote in federal elections, we choose an member of parliament (through a single member plurality or first-past-the-post system, i.e. the most votes wins) who represents us and our constituency in Ottawa (the nation’s capital). Typically, the party with the most seats “wins” the election and the Governor General gives the opportunity to govern to that party. The leader of the winning party becomes the Prime Minister, who chooses his or her cabinet to form the executive branch of government. Contrary to some belief, Canadians do not elect a government or prime minister, we elect representatives who are supposed to do that for us. Usually this system works fine, as the winning party has more than half of the seats in the House of Commons, thereby halving a majority and the ability to pass laws without consulting the opposition.

During the 1990s, Canada was lead by Jean Chretien and the Liberals. They typically received popular votes in the 40%-50% range, while getting a majority of the seats (prompting many calls for alternative electoral systems, but thats another post on its own). In 2003 he stepped down, and his long-time Finance Minister, Paul Martin, took over as Prime Minister. However, a number of scandals overran the Liberals at this time and his government held only a minority of the seats after Chretien left, and eventually fell after the right was united by Stephen Harper. Stephen Harper won a minority of seats for his Conservative party in 2006. He has governed as Prime Minister since.

One of the laws Stephen Harper introduced was a fixed election date law. Citing that the parliament had become dysfunctional, in September 2008 he requested that the Governor General to call an election an entire year early (had his government been defeated by the opposition there would be a required election). Typically in minority governments in Canada, elections occur after a vote of non-confidence occurs. This means that the majority of the members of parliament vote against the government on a bill of confidence. The Speech from the Throne (the first thing read in any session of parliament that outlines the government’s goals for the term), budgets, any finance bills, and any other bills the government puts forth as confidence motions are all votes of confidence. Between 2006 and 2008 the Conservatives used many confidence bills to force the Liberals, still weak and poor since Chretien left, to vote for the government (often the Liberals would fail to show up in parliament as a way to abstain from voting).

After the election on October 14, 2008, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives received a slightly stronger minority government, despite having what many consider a lame-duck leader of the Liberals, Stephane Dion, as their chief opponent. Dion and his Green Shift Carbon Tax were so unpopular with Canadians that the Liberals received their lowest popular vote since the confederation of the country in 1867. With his weakest opposition ever, Harper still couldn’t convince many Canadians to support his party. In fact his party only received a popular vote of 37%. It would seem Canadians are still uncomfortable with Harper and his policies.

Since the election, Harper presented a Throne Speech, which passed with support of the Liberals. The Throne Speech is usually vague enough that most oppositions parties pass it.

On Thursday, November 27 (only a week ago), Jim Flaherty, the Finance Minister, presented an economic update, that the Conservatives promised to use to tackle the economic crisis and recession. To the opposition parties dismay the update contained a removal of the rights of civil servants to strike for three years, removed the guarantee for equal pay for equal work that protected women’s salaries, no promises for bailout or stimulus packages, no conditions for bank bailouts, no money for small or medium sized business, and to top it off, removed the government subsidy to political parties.

This subsidy grants $1.95 to each party for each vote they get in a federal election. It was introduced by Chretien to replace corporate and union donations to political parties, as well as caps on individual donations. Since then the Greens and NDP rely on the fund for half of their budget, the Liberals for two-thirds, the Bloc for 86% and the Conservatives for only a third. The government claimed that this represented each party “tightening their belts” during the hard times to come, and that they would stand to lose the most money (since they received the most votes). However, the disproportionate hit that some parties would take (it is common knowledge that the Conservatives are “swimming” in cash and can afford to run campaigns nearly all year long, while elections have fixed campaign spending limits) along with the extreme right-wing nature of many of the points in the update seemed to signal a strategic partisan attack on the rival parties.

Immediately after the release of this update, all three opposition parties slammed it. By the next day the Liberals and the NDP had recruited Ed Broadbent (leader of the NDP in the 1980s who brought them to their most successful showing) and Jean Chretien to spend the weekend discussing a coalition that could bring down the Harper Conservatives. The update, being a fiscal bill, was scheduled to be tabled on Monday, December 1, along with what’s known as opposition day (when the opposition parties get to table bills). By the end of Friday, the Liberals let out that they were potentially tabling a motion that said the House of Commons had lost confidence in the current government and that a new government could be formed within the current house, as well, fearing heating rhetoric, Harper delayed the votes by a week, postponing any non-confidence motions until December 8.

By the end of Saturday, Harper and Flaherty had removed the party funding aspect of the update, as well as the removal of the right to strike. However, it seemed too late to slow the momentum of the budding coalition.

Also over the weekend, a member of the Prime Minister’s Office released a tape recording of an NDP caucus teleconference where they discussed past attempts to work with the Bloc to topple the Conservatives. In Canada, recording a conversation is legal so long as one party involved in the conversation is aware of the recording. It is unclear whether the tape was recorded legally, so the NDP are calling for a criminal investigation. The Conservatives maintain that an invitation was mistakenly sent to one of their employees who recorded the conversation.

On Monday afternoon, the leaders of the Liberals, NDP and Bloc signed an agreement stating that the Liberals and NDP would enter into a coalition, supported on confidence votes by the Bloc, and sought to replace the Conservatives at the earliest possibility. The coalition promised that a Liberal government would take control, but would give a quarter of the cabinet seats to NDP MPs. This would represent the first coalition government in Canada since the First World War. While the Liberals and NDP combined have less seats then the Conservatives, with the support of the Bloc they represent a majority of the House and a majority of the popular vote from the past election.

Now, one of the options the Governor General has when the government loses a confidence motion is to ask if anyone else feels they can govern with the confidence of the House. This has only happened once in Canadian history.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday parliament was in session and denigrated quickly into shouting matches and harsh allegations. While Dion and the coalition challenged Harper to face a confidence vote, the Conservatives called the coalition “traitors” for working with the “separatists” of the Bloc. The Conservatives further attacked the coalition calling it “undemocratic” and forged in “back room deals.” Quickly it was found that in 2004 the Harper Conservatives had attempted a situation almost exactly the same to attempt to oust then Prime Minister Paul Martin. Further, in 2000, the Canadian Alliance (the precursor to the Conservatives) attempted to form a coalition with the Bloc and Progressive Conservatives to oust the government.

On Tuesday the Conservatives launched radio ads attacking the coalition and on Wednesday Harper took to national television for a five minute speech in which he chastised the opposition as undemocratic and wrong for Canada. He refused to use the word “separatist” in the French translation, opting instead for the less divisive word “sovereigntist.” After his speech, which provided no new information, Stephane Dion gave a rebuttal, which suffered from low quality, arriving late to the networks and Dion’s weak English.

On Thursday (today) morning, Harper visited the Governor General, who ended her European trip early, to request to prorogue parliament. To prorogue parliament essentially means to take a time out. Everything is put on pause for a break. Typically it occurs when a government needs a bit of wind down time for the year end or summer break. No Prime Minister has ever requested to prorogue to prevent a vote of non-confidence. While being generally symbolic, it would have been within the rights of Ms. Jean to deny Mr. Harper the request and instead ask him to face the music. However, setting precedence, the request was granted and parliament was closed until January 26. The government is still able to spend money and operate, however no new bills will be presented and any spending to occur should be approved when parliament resumes.

Had the request been denied, Harper’s government would have fallen on Monday, and he would be visiting the Governor General to request an election (the second within as many months). She would then have the ability to deny that request and allow the coalition to govern.

Harper has promised to present a budget as soon as parliament resumes, the earliest a budget has ever been presented. However, the coalition claims that without “monumental changes” they will bring down the governing party at first chance.

If the government falls in January, it may be more reasonable for the Governor General to call an election, since, although they haven’t done anything yet, it will have been a longer period of time since the past election.

Current polls show little support for either the coalition of a continuance of Mr. Harper’s government. At this point, the likely consensus of Canadians is that the government should settle down and get to work. The problem lies in the best way to accomplish that, be it by coalition or a more cooperative Conservative Party. Also, rumblings have been heard from within the Conservative Party that it may be time to replace Stephen Harper as their leader.

The biggest cog so far for the coalition has been Stephane Dion. Still few people like Mr. Dion, and he has pledged to step down in May when the Liberals choose a new leader (one of Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, or Dominic LeBlanc). Canadians are also very inexperienced with coalitions as compared to their European counterparts, where coalitions are the norm in government. Many see a coalition between ideologically different parties as disastrous and they question if it will even survive until January.

So now, until January 26 Canada will be under a PR war between the Conservatives and the Coalition. Both will claim to stand for Canada and democracy. Both will launch extensive ad campaigns, and fight for the hearts of Canadians, even if the key decision lies with Mr. Harper, his cabinet, and the Governor General.

As a purely masochistic thought experiment, I began to wonder what practical impact this amendment would have had on non-abortion-related laws had it not been prematurely terminated by the democratic process. Here are some things I managed to come up with:

• Miscarriages would be treated as manslaughter. With or without an abortion, a miscarriage would now involve the death of an individual with full legal recognition, so it seems an obvious corollary that even the unintentional extermination of an unborn American citizen would require extensive legal inquiry to find out who is to blame. Women who consume chemicals that are dangerous to fetuses (coffee, deli meats, alcohol, etc.) would find their wombs turned into crime scenes while it is discovered to what degree the mother is responsible for the death of their children.
• Traffic cops would have to carry around pregnancy tests and routinely administer them to women that are pulled over during traffic stops. Why? Because driving with a child in your lap is illegal. Because a quick visual inspection of the outside of a woman’s womb isn’t enough to tell if a woman is carrying an unborn child in her lap while driving, we would need to test them. Not only that, but women who are pulled over while driving apparently alone in carpool-only lanes would have to be tested to see if there was, in fact, an (unborn) child in the car with them, thereby protecting them from tickets.
• Choosing a natural birth over a cesarean section might be child abuse.
• No pregnant woman would ever be able to go to an NC-17 movie, a nightclub, a bar, an adult entertainment store, a wine-and-spirits market, or a gun store, thanks to the fully recognized minor sucking blood out of her placenta.
• Children would obviously have to be enrolled in primary school nine months earlier, because the child’s age would now be calculated from conception and not from parturition. The obvious extension of this is that the childhood vaccination schedule would have to begin while the child is still in the womb.
• Gynecologists or ultrasound technicians who do this or that to the naughty bits of women might have to be classified as child abuse.
• Having sex with a pregnant woman would probably make you a pedophile.

25% of the voting citizens of Colorado are in favor of making state law harmonious with this list. Good thing only one fourth of voting Coloradans are complete idiots.

Here’s an interesting bit from a recent interview with president-elect Barack Obama:

JIM ANGLE: He was asked what he’s been doing to get ready for office and whether he talked to any previous Presidents.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: I have spoken to all of them, that are living, obviously, President Clinton — I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances. [emphasis added]

Obama later apologized for apparently mocking the supernatural belief system, but that doesn’t remove two facts:

1. It was Hilary Clinton who did séances, Reagan used astrology, either way, superstition. (I imagine Laura and George just used good ol’ fashioned prayers).
2. Obama is willing to make fun of superstitions. People who generally buy this stuff don’t do that. This means there is potentially a sceptic in the White House. Imagine the ratifications of that – a president who consults knowledgeable advisers before acting. It’s the most promising thing I’ve heard about him so far.

Exciting times.

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.

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.

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Which sermon is Palin talking about? Why this one of course -

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A funnier, abridged version of the event -

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*Is that Bill Gates to the left?

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?

I have lived in Texas for the last 18 years. In my time in Texas I have seen one part of the 1st world in which religion and anti-intellectualism have a stranglehold on the culture.

I lived in Houston, Texas first which is the city that gave us Tom DeLay. For those of our international readers who don’t know who Tom DeLay is, he was a congressman for many years who is famous for things like blaming school shootings on the teaching of evolution in public school. My personal favorite proclamation from DeLay , while the smoke had scarcely cleared from the 9-11 attack, he called euthanizing Terry Schiavo “medical terrorism.”

Tom DeLay was not some wingnut who weaseled his way into the United States congress through a sketchy political appointment. No. Tom DeLay was democratically elected by the people in his congressional district in Houston, Texas. His blatant anti-intellectualism and theocratic leanings helped him get elected.

I have spent the more years in the city of Lubbock, Texas than anywhere else. Lubbock is a typical city in Texas. Locals in Lubbock, Texas will brag that Lubbock has one of the highest per-capita of Churches in the nation, and I have no qualms saying that there is a church walking distance from anywhere in Lubbock, Texas.

The primary activity for teenagers in Lubbock, Texas is participating in their local youth group in their church, and proselytization attempts are constant. Even from one youth group to another, Baptists trying to save Catholics, trying to save members of the Church of Christ, and Charismatics telling them all that they belong to dead churches. Religion is serious business in Lubbock. It is a simple fact of economics that you cannot have a church on nearly every street corner, as Lubbock does, and not have enough donations in the collection plates to keep those churches in business.

One last note about Lubbock, is that having seen the disturbing documentary Jesus Camp and having lived in Lubbock for many years I can say with confidence that programs like the one seen in Jesus Camp are totally normal in Lubbock, Texas.

When the Texas government proposed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage, the lines at the polls were longer than any other political election.

It was my education at Texas Tech University that made me begin to truly see a problem with the Texas political culture, as I learned the importance of scientific reasoning and saw how it did not factor into people’s political decision making.

It was not until I moved to Dallas, Texas that I abandoned my religious beliefs altogether. I also found myself living in a city which is a major business center in the United States, that had a quantity of mega churches that I could never have imagined. One of my favorite cultural indicators to the backwardness seen in Texas, is that Dallas, which is largely evangelical has given rise to mega churches with malls in them. Churches with their own bowling alleys, S, full food courts, toy stores, etc. Why? To not have to interact with the secular world.

Now I see Sarah Palin within reach of the white house. I would wager that Texans who were hesitant to vote for McCain are now safely in his camp. The more I read about Sarah Palin the more I become convinced that rural Alaska is very similar to rural Texas. Indeed, I have been to many places in the United States, and fear that Palin’s appeal to Texans is extremely universal throughout the U.S.

When I was choosing which secular organization to put my energy into, I chose carefully, and did a great deal of research. Precisely because of the things I have observed which have convinced me that the forces of backwardness in the U.S. definitely have the numbers.

I am extremely conscious that I have a finite amount of time and resources to contribute to any organization, and when trying to amass a list of organizations which I would have sympathies with on the issues of secularism and anti-intellectualism I counted something around 40 nationwide. That excludes local organizations .

While I would love to be like Dr. Manhattan in the comic book The Watchmen, and be able to duplicate myself into 40 copies to get more work done, this cannot be done.

To be truly useful I had to chose one organization to try to make a difference.

I never thought of my involvement in this movement as anything but a high stake political decision. Sometimes I feel like some of my peers in the secular humanist movement treat the whole affair as carrying their life in high school debate club into their adult lives. They seem to want to nitpick every effort being made by others, as though we were working on a textbook, not trying to better the world. I have also noticed that these attitudes tend to exist more in regions which are more secular.

I cannot afford to think this way. I live in a part of the country where I honestly believe if it weren’t for the restraints placed on local governments by the U.S. constitution local governments would pass blaspheme laws akin to those found in Islamic theocracies.

I chose Cfi. as the organization to put my efforts into because it seems to me to be the most effective secular humanist organization out there. It has the biggest war chest, it has the most direct political impact, it is international, and it is aggressively expanding.

I write this post to try to persuade you all that Texas does not exist in isolation, I think it is representative of the larger culture of the United States. I think progressive, pro-intellectual, and secular parts of the United States are the exception, not the rule. I fear that Texas is grotesquely normal, and have seen evidence of this in my travels to places like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arizona. All of these states have paralleled my experiences in Dallas, Houston, and Lubbock in disturbing ways.

I write this post to convince you that the stakes are high for what we are all doing with projects like Edger and organizations like CFI.

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:

• A de facto state religion is already in place, so no overt de jure state religion is necessary. One of the principles of a true democratic theocracy is that there need not be any legal strictures requiring high officials to be of a particular religious persuasion, as is the case in totalitarian states like Iran and Vatican City, because the voting popular electorate does all of the enforcing on its own. It would be wildly paranoiac of me to say that this is exactly the case in the United States in every instance, but even the most optimistic observer must concede that this is the case in many instances. The religious demographics of the United States Congress, for example, help to draw this picture: somewhere from 12-16% of Americans call themselves “not affiliated” with any religion, but only about 2% of Congresspeople decline to declare a religious affiliation (even atheist Peter Stark calls himself a Unitarian). The Presidential demographics are even more appalling; only one non-Protestant Christian has ever been elected President, both of the current likely candidates are fighting furiously for the votes of the devout, and who among us would doubt that both candidacies could be imperiled by even a very minor slight of religion-based public policy? Why does Obama feel the need to quote the Bible when advocating the elimination of poverty, which any half-witted humanist knows is a good idea without particularly caring whether or not the Bible approves?
• “Religious police” are not necessary because the religious body politic is fiercely self-policing. Again, nobody in the United States is going around killing their neighbors for picking up sticks on Sabbath, but we do have our own, peculiarly American ways of enforcing extremist religious values. Public criticism of any religion’s favorite metaphysics is obviously strictly off-limits for elected officials (even if such metaphysics are absolutely, demonstrably loony- note that the few politicians who do oppose teaching creationism in schools often do so on grounds of “keeping religion out of the classroom” rather than the factually appropriate “creationism is unscientific gobbledygook”), but this rule is more appropriately applied on the social level. People with sexual inclinations towards the same gender are essentially terrified into hiding the truth about themselves because they have good reason to fear such things as expulsion from their families, the obliteration of their good standing in certain communities, lifelong subjection to vitriol and venom from near and afar by the religious, and of course alienation from many religious communities. Where does this peculiar hatred of the homosexual come from? What logical reasons would we have for hating the gay, the secular, and the science teacher if not for our fellow citizens who place metaphysics above reason?
• A nation’s values, especially the value of its electorate, are inextricably congruent with explicitly religious values. Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the ACLJ, the aggregate of American bishoprics, and their counterparts across the spectrum of American Christianity do such a fine job of telling voters how to vote, who to vote for, and why the Bible says you should vote this way for this person, that official regulations forbidding formal religious tests for high office are useless. Creationist think tanks like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Science Evangelism are so good at deceiving the public into thinking that there is some kind of “controversy” about evolution within the scientific community that the United States (one of the most savagely anti-evolution nations in the world) can maintain a majority popular stance in favor of young-earth Creationism despite having public schools that are required to teach the exact opposite. This is particularly effective where lax homeschooling standards permit parents to feed whatever garbage pseudoscience they desire to their children because there is often little to no real accountability for students who never learn how to think differently from their parents. Also unlike nearly every other wealthy liberal democracy in the world, the United States is afflicted with a massively revisionist historical complex wherein the Puritans, a cult of totalitarians who left Europe only because they weren’t permitted to brutally oppress their children in the manner they desired, can be portrayed as devout victims of injustice who went on to found an (explicitly Christian) nation with the help of a loving creator-god named Jesus. No other national history so ruthlessly corrupts reality as to build what could only be called an official founding-mythology plagiarized unabashedly from another theocracy’s playbook.

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.