Inside the casino, however, is a different scene. A convention is filing out, and the crowd moves with quick, eager strides. Most are young—in the twenty-to-forty range. A stroll through the lobby reveals a mix of race, gender, and accents. This is a crowd that has assembled itself from across the world, and while faces are friendly and conversations playful, there is a steely sense of unity. Of purpose.

Of confrontation.

The Las Vegas convention is the latest installment of The Amaz!ng Meeting. First held in 2003 and colloquially referred to as TAM, it’s the annual mecca for skeptics around the world. In a culture-at-large that reveres faith above facts, skeptics are the vanguard of rationalism. Think James “the Amazing” Randi exposing psychics as charlatans. Think Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman using the scientific method with explosive aplomb. Think merry pranksters Penn & Teller debunking all manner of pseudoscience or conspiracy theory on their former show, Bullshit! These are the people who dare to demand evidence of those making extraordinary claims.They are people who make believers uncomfortable and often make enemies because of it.

In an earlier age, skepticism was not so much a movement as a pastime for older, male, upper-crust academics. It was spirited discussion over cigars and brandy. Today, the new skepticism is a grassroots revolution. Its adherents are media-savvy, and they use memes, humor, Photoshop, YouTube, and social networking to wage a bold offensive against the prevailing belief culture. They are ardently pro-science, descending like a phalanx of logic on creationists, homeopathic practitioners, faith healers, psychics, truthers, birthers, anti-vaccination crowds, and generally anyone else whose position isn’t supported by logic. Skeptics champion reasoned methodology, not blind belief. They respect critical thinking, not emotional reactionism. They are factual heavyweights, and now, after decades of polite disagreements with true believers, young skeptics are ready to take off the gloves.

Skeptical groups operate around the world and across the Internet via popular blogs, podcasts, rallies, meetings, and forums. Skeptical bestsellers flood the marketplace by luminaries like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris. Skeptics count celebrities like comedians Tim Minchin and Eddie Izzard among their ranks. They petition the United Nations to end real witch-hunts in third-world countries. They coordinate, collaborate, and rally their growing numbers.

Beyond TAM, the dedicated skeptic can make pilgrimages to myriad events like the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, QED (“Question. Explore. Discover.”), Skepticon, Skepticamp, and regional pow-wows sponsored by groups like the Center for Inquiry or the New England Skeptical Society. The website Skepchick.org focuses on critical thought with a feminist bent. The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe brings rational examination of the news in the form of a weekly, down-to-earth podcast. And Drinking Skeptically organizes gatherings for likeminded critical thinkers accompanied by some social drinking, and even offers a video chat version.

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) is the veritable base camp for skeptical legions. Founded in 1996, the JREF’s mission is “to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today.”

And to that end, the JREF is remarkably energized. They offer grants and scholarships, they publish works on critical inquiry across all media, they host TAM every year, and they provide a support structure for other skeptical groups. Most popularly, the JREF taunts true believers with the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, promising to award the purse to anyone who can demonstrate, under controlled laboratory settings, evidence of the paranormal. First established in 1996, the challenge is open to all. No one has ever collected the prize money, and numerous “celebrity psychics” have kept their distance.

Randi himself, now eighty-three, continues to make the rounds of the lecture circuit. He’s the field’s leading rock star, speaking to crowds of likeminded rationalists on everything from spoon-bending to UFOs to bleeding statues to religion.

Starting out as a professional magician in 1946, Randi had switched hats by 1972 and has since aggressively “outed” psychics like Uri Geller and John Edwards, demonstrating how mentalist skills—sleight-of-hand and cold reading techniques—can be passed off as magical abilities. He holds particular disdain for so-called faith healers, who charge sick patients thousands of dollars to be “cured.” The patients leave, with lighter wallets and untreated diseases.

Unsurprisingly, skeptics take issue with the opinion that belief doesn’t hurt anybody. Even leaving out religiously motivated murder like the attacks on 9/11, skeptics have plenty of ire on this front. Take, for instance, the anti-vaccine movement, driven largely by the fraudulent claims of British doctor Andrew Wakefield that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism. As a result, vaccine rates saw a decline in the late 1990s and throughout the following decade, and they continue to stay below optimal levels; according to a 2011 study, one in ten parents in the United States are no longer following the recommended schedule of vaccinations. What’s troubling to skeptics is the reason: 81 percent of parents who skipped or delayed vaccines “disagreed” that unvaccinated children are at risk for epidemics. Subsequently, new outbreaks of diseases like measles are on the rise throughout the United States.

In light of such disturbing trends, skeptics see themselves as warriors in a noble tradition, casting off medievalism and marching towards a second Enlightenment. Indeed, they view history as a struggle between superstition and science; after all, it was Carl Sagan, perhaps the most idolized luminary in the cause, who called science “a candle in the dark.” Since Sagan’s death, it is skeptics who have taken that candle, and lit an army of torches to light the way into the future.

The Skeptics Speak

While skepticism has roots in ancient Greece, the modern movement is only about forty years old. It arose from a new pro-science mentality that was promoted, independently, through the writings of James Randi, Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, and even Isaac Asimov. However, it was humanist and philosopher Paul Kurtz who got things organized.

Kurtz began publishing against pseudoscience in the 1950s, and has since authored several hundred articles promoting the skeptical viewpoint. He is the founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, formerly the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry. He was also editor of the Humanist from 1967-1978. Arguing from a rationalist angle, Kurtz tackled everything from religion to psychics to exorcisms. The organizations he founded quickly filled with like-minded thinkers.

And just who are these like-minded thinkers?

Being so ardently pro-science, many skeptics naturally align with the political left. (A social conservative promoting creationism is in for a fight if a skeptic happens to be nearby.) Yet the movement is hardly the political arm of any one party. Young skeptics do tend to be highly educated, liberal, and agnostic or atheist, but skepticism is also rife with political libertarians, nonpartisans, and Goldwater conservatives. In fact, when their acumen takes aim at politics, a common sentiment among skeptics is that America’s two-party system is little more than theater for the masses.

One thing is common to skeptics everywhere: facts matter. The scientific method and critical inquiry trump blind faith and mindless rabble.

If the CSI crowd brought the modern skeptic movement to the plate, social media is now hitting the ball out of the park. In the last ten years, skeptical ranks have swelled, groups have multiplied, and a sense of global identity is bringing it all together.

“The movement has really grown in these last few years,” says skeptic Karen Stollznow. “It’s not just a bunch of older gentlemen who like to pontificate. It’s real grassroots activism.”

Stollznow exemplifies the new skepticism. An expat from Australia with a PhD in linguistics, she came to the United States in 2004 to do research at UC Berkeley. Now Stollznow writes columns for both Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer magazines, hosts two podcasts (Monster Talk and Point of Inquiry) and is a research fellow with the JREF and CSI. In late 2011 she was a guest on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, providing the skeptical viewpoint on people who charge thousands of dollars to remove “curses” from the gullible.

“I don’t really consider it skepticism,” she says. “It’s just the new common sense. Our movement and our way of thinking is growing tremendously. Belief in witchcraft and the supernatural is steadily dying out, and we have something to do with that.”

Ironically, Stollznow’s path to skepticism began with a personal interest in the paranormal. As a child, she was interested in tales of ghosts and ESP, but the deeper she read about them, the more she began to realize that evidence was lacking.

Intrigued, she contacted Australian Skeptics and began to work with them. She went undercover to psychic parlors, where she would receive “wild diagnoses” about her health that follow-ups with a medical doctor dismissed. She was taught to recognize the tricks and trades of psychics, and she realized that opposing them was a cause she wanted to embrace. “Belief isn’t harmless,” she says.

Dr. Steven Novella, director of General Neurology at Yale University School of Medicine, is another prominent voice in the skeptical community. In 1996 he was one of the founders of the New England Skeptical Society, and in 2005 he joined the burgeoning podcast world in launching the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (SGU).

“Systematic doubt and critical thinking are essential to any free society,” says Novella. “Especially in a democracy, where citizens make decisions about their civilization, the ability to think critically—and to question information—is absolutely crucial.”

SGU takes a casual, informal, and accessible approach to its subjects. Comprised of a team of so-called rogues, including Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson, the podcast is one of the finest examples of polished skeptical activism. Its panelists cover news items of scientific interest, feature famous guest interviews, and conduct regular segments like “Science Fact or Fiction” and “Name That Logical Fallacy.” They’ve even started making short films, and in 2011 hosted a special twenty-four-hour talkathon with special guests like Adam Savage.

“If the philosophy of science didn’t work, it would not have borne all the fruits it has,” says Novella. “We build a hunk of metal, send it across the solar system, and are rewarded with pictures of the outer planets—if science didn’t work, that wouldn’t happen. If science didn’t work, it would be just another belief system.”

Novella holds special ire for the alternative medicine and homeopathic industries. “They’re fundamentally anti-science and irrational. You know, it’s really easy to spread fear, and a lot harder to correct misinformation. Social media has been so successful for us, but a lot of our foes are well funded and have PR machines. Social media has leveled the field.”

Novella points to the believer enclaves that carve themselves out online, where “it’s possible to create a very insular community,” and anyone who doesn’t toe the party line is banned.

The skeptical message is often viewed as an open assault on a host of such “believer” camps: creationists, gay conversion therapists, psychics, the aforementioned anti-vaccine advocates, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, moon-landing deniers, Holocaust deniers, astrologers, Feng Shui practitioners, and other purveyors of mysticism and conspiracy theory of nearly every stripe and flavor.

“Ultimately skepticism is a tool, not a belief,” says George Hrab, a professional drummer and guitarist who explores skeptical and scientific themes in music. “It’s just the way you approach data.” Hrab’s involvement in skepticism began in the seventh grade, when he read Inherit the Wind, the play based on the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Not long after that he read Michael Shermer’s book, Why People Believe Weird Things, where he first encountered the word “skeptic.”

Since then Hrab has become an energetic voice in the movement, speaking at skeptic events and hosting The Geologic Podcast, a weekly program of comedy sketches, news commentary, music, interviews, and personal stories.

“There’s this idea that one of the best things you can have is faith, whether it’s in God or in government,” Hrab notes. “The truth is that it’s one of the worst things you can have. If you can believe in things without evidence, it leads to bad decisions. It affects the social construct.”

Says James Randi, “So long as our species continues to believe in magic, miracles, and supernatural powers and abilities, we will be held back from the intellectual progress that we should be enjoying. That’s why it’s so important for skeptics and our organizations to be active at every level, to take on nonsense in the media and give people the tools of critical thinking so they can protect themselves from these harmful distractions.”

Indeed, a great many participants in the new skepticism enjoy challenging religious proclamations with snappy, ironic, and witty responses. Consider the event known as Boobquake.

In April of 2010 Iranian Ayatollah Kazem Seddiqi proclaimed that earthquakes could be explained not by plate tectonics, but by God’s anger at women. “Calamities are the result of people’s deeds,” Seddiqi insisted. “Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity, and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes.”

This astounding conclusion was immediately challenged by Purdue science student Jennifer McCreight, a feminist, skeptic, and author of the blog, “Blag Hag.” McCreight decided to use her breasts for science, declaring to her Facebook friends that on April 26 she would wear her most revealing shirt and challenge God to show his displeasure by creating an earthquake of Koranic proportions.

What followed was a media frenzy as more than 200,000 women signed up for the “event” and websites began discussing breasts, religion, and science. Not since Republicans decried Janet Jackson’s nipple as a threat to civilization had mammaries been such a culture war rallying point.

Another example of the new skepticism’s taste for the confrontational occurred back in March of 2008, when the producers of the pro-intelligent design documentary Expelled held a closed conference call to promote their film. Famously short-tempered evolutionary biologist (and 2009 Humanist of the Year) PZ Myers had other ideas; he managed to dial into the conference early, overheard the producers mention the call’s secret code, and then used it to become one of the guest speakers. Myers then proceeded to caustically poke holes in their anti-evolution narrative with a dial-in audience listening.

This is the zeitgeist of today’s skeptics, fighting fire with fire. But not everyone likes the approach. At the 2010 TAM, astronomer and skeptic Phil Plait, who runs the website BadAstronomy.com, gave a little talk entitled, “Don’t Be a Dick.”

“There’ve been some alarming developments in the way skepticism is being done,” Plait told a large audience. “The tone of what we’re doing is decaying. It seems that vitriol and venom are on the rise, and I’m unhappy about that.”

Plait’s speech caused a firestorm in the community. People took it personally. A lot of the ensuing rage was indicative of Internet culture itself—explosive and reactionary. Such was the outcry that Plait was compelled to clarify his position weeks and even months later. “I did not say we should back down when confronted,” he wrote on his blog. “I did not say we shouldn’t be angry. We need our anger, our strength, and our passion. However, being a dick,” he maintained, “almost always works against the bigger goal of swaying the most people we can.”

Aggressive atheists and skeptics like Myers and Dawkins disagree that there’s no place for confrontational voices. Others, like Steve Novella, claim a middle ground:

“I don’t know that anyone has the best empirical answer to promoting skepticism. I’m tolerant when people choose to promote it in their own way. My own approach is to take a more soft-spoken angle, not that I pull punches. And yes, we get snarky at times. But I think there’s room in the movement for any number of approaches, and frankly, some things deserve to be ridiculed if they’re so far beyond the pale. I can’t disagree with that.”

How skeptics engage with each other is at least as important as how they engage general audiences. Perhaps the most inflammatory example within the movement today is an incident known as “Elevatorgate.”

Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick, is a feminist skeptic and prolific atheist activist. Her website was founded, in her own words, as “an organization dedicated to promoting skepticism and critical thinking among women around the world.” Watson promotes skepticism through hard-hitting commentary and ironic playfulness, and she travels the world to do just that. From co-hosting the SGU to having published a Skepchick pin-up calendar to posting frequently on YouTube, Watson is incredibly active.

Elevatorgate happened in 2011, while Watson was at a meeting in Dublin. She sat on a panel during which she discussed the sexism and misogyny she’d experienced first-hand in the atheist movement. Hours after the talk, she was in her hotel elevator when the only other passenger—an unidentified man—asked her if she’d be interested in going back to his hotel room for coffee. She declined. Later, Watson made a video blog in which she casually mentioned the encounter. “Just a word to the wise here, guys: Don’t do that. I was a single woman in a foreign country at 4 a.m. in a hotel elevator.”

Little might have come of it had Richard Dawkins not provided an online response. Addressing a fictional Muslim woman, Dawkins wrote: “Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and… yawn… don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skepchick, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee.”

The ensuing eruption was an outright war, not merely between the sexes, but along numerous fracture lines. Ardent Skepchick fans called for the “elevator guy’s” head, while others maintained that in a free society men and women can propose coffee dates, while still others said it wasn’t the offer, but rather the place and time that were the issue.

Commenting months later, Watson said that she had heard from other women who felt marginalized and sexualized at skeptical events. “I’ve had more and more messages from men who tell me what they’d like to do to me, sexually,” she wrote. “More and more men touching me without permission at conferences. More and more threats of rape from those who don’t agree with me, even from those who consider themselves skeptics and atheists. I didn’t call for an end to sex. I didn’t accuse the man in my story of rape. I didn’t say all men are monsters.”

As with Plait, the incident cycled through fits of Internet rage, but also got people talking about aspects of the movement that had previously been in the dark.

Skepticism Today and Tomorrow

Looking outward, more than ever before, today’s skepticism is about action and collaboration on an increasingly global scale.

Take JREF Field Coordinator Brian Thompson. A typical week for him involves acting as liaison with grassroots skeptic groups, creating educational modules for teachers wishing to discuss skepticism in the classroom, sending out press releases on issues of skeptical concern, and even coordinating with other groups that aren’t necessarily skeptical in nature.

“One of our most recent battles is to fight against shark finning,” Thompson reports. “There’s an entire industry where sharks are caught, stripped of their fins, and thrown back to die. Obviously this is a concern for animal welfare and conservation groups; where we come in is the fact that these shark fins are being ground up and sold as anti-cancer medicine.”

Many skeptics see dubious alternative medicine and homeopathy claims as a chief battleground. The Merseyside Skeptics Society of the UK coordinates with the JREF in an annual 10:23 Homeopathy Challenge. The purpose? Getting participants to “overdose” on homeopathic remedies.

Often confused by the general public as part of the herbal supplement or natural foods industry, homeopathic remedies instead operate on a system of belief: that selling wildly diluted substances is a good way to treat disease. “We’ve done major media campaigns to educate people about this,” says Thompson. “We also petition stores to stop selling these products.”

Homeopathy is predicated on key beliefs, including the notion that a problem (like insomnia) can be treated with something that induces wakefulness (like caffeine). Homeopathy also maintains that a single drop of a substance (say a drop of caffeine) can be diluted in ninety-nine drops of water, shaken, and then a drop from that mixture can be put in another ninety-nine drops of water, and so on. The homeopathic position is that this systematic dilution actually causes the opposite effect: a single drop of caffeine becomes more potent than ever. Needless to say, there is no scientific data to support such a conclusion. Hence, the 10:23 Challenge takes direct aim at this belief by having members willfully drink “dangerously high” levels of these diluted substances; in 2010, protestors from seventy cities in thirty countries participated. No one’s died yet.

One of the most recognized voices in skepticism is that of Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, executive director of the Skeptics Society, and monthly columnist for Scientific American. Shermer sees skepticism on the rise.

“Social media has been huge for us,” he says. “The movement has grown, and the activities of so many skeptical groups has helped legitimize it into more mainstream circles.”

In addition to his publishing and lecturing, Shermer currently teaches a ten-week course on skepticism at Chapman University. No subject is off-limits: Bigfoot, Holocaust denial, UFOs, vaccine controversies, and more. “My goal isn’t to tell students what to think or what to believe,” he says, “but to get them thinking critically about subjects.”

Shermer is also launching a powerful educational resource for other schools interested in skepticism. A seemingly endless series of modules, PDFs, skeptical reading material, syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, and even magic tricks are available at Skeptic.com, further highlighting the benefits of the Information Age to skeptics anywhere in the world. “It’s about teaching our kids to be good scientific thinkers,” Shermer says.

And in this regard, the new skepticism is poised on the edge of a cultural shift. Today, science is embedded in our social patterns. Information is a collective fetish, and it has provided language to describe things once seen as magical and off-limits. The human genome is captured in a single gigabyte, while the tidal impact of data is radically changing all fields of human endeavor—from medicine to transportation to engineering to environmentalism.

Back in Sin City, the TAM crowd retires from another successful meeting. The halls, lobby, and parking lot of the hotel are buzzing with discussion. A gang of high-profile politicians has made another attack on the scientific establishment. Another celebrity has condemned evolution and homosexuals. Another psychic is forecasting the end of the world. For these skeptics, it seems the fight is far from over.

And from the looks on their faces, they’re just fine with that.

Brian Trent is an award-winning novelist, journalist, and producer. He is the author of Lady Philosopher: The Story of Hypatia, and has had numerous works published in the Humanist. His short story collection The Theseus Woman and Other Tales is slated for June 2012 publication on Amazon Kindle. His website is www.briantrent.com.

To spend time with this smart, modest, and thoroughly likable man is to wish Congress were made up entirely of Holt-like thinkers. Here, he talks about the ways in which non-scientists can—must, in fact—learn to examine, assess, and verify any judgments we make or opinions we form.

The Humanist: How do you define critical thinking?

Rush Holt:  Let me define instead what I like to call “thinking like a scientist.” It’s asking questions that can be answered based on evidence; it’s expressing questions in a way that allows someone to check your work. If you don’t have both of those elements, it’s too easy to fool yourself or to get lazy in your thinking. I wouldn’t say that critical thinking is hard thinking, because I don’t want to discourage people from doing it, but like anything else, it’s easier if you practice.

Third graders, for example, are often very good at thinking like scientists. Like scientists, they know that if you ask how something works, what something means, or how something happens, you should do it in a way that allows for more than just pure thinking. There should be some evidence, something empirical. You should form your question so that it allows someone else to ask that same question and observe the evidence to see if they get the same answer as you do. And that’s the essential part of critical thinking. If you say, “I’ve been thinking about this deeply and, by golly, now I understand it,” but then you try to explain it to someone else and can’t, then you probably don’t understand it … or it’s not very reliable knowledge.

I keep trying to get science taught in a way that, even if you can’t remember a single Latin term or are a klutz at solving equations, you’ve learned how to frame questions and sift evidence. I talk about verification but another way of putting it is: be ready for the cross-examination. Prepare to explain yourself.

The Humanist: How valuable is critical thinking to everyday life?

Holt: It’s invaluable, whether you’re making a consumer decision like which laundry detergent to buy or whether you’re trying to decide what career you want to pursue. There are ways to ask yourself both what you’re trying to accomplish and how to measure whether you’ve accomplished it. If you’re able to express it that way, then you’re thinking critically.

This is important on every level, not just on a personal level, not just in regards to consumer decisions or life choices. I think it’s quite likely we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq if more people in the CIA or in Congress had been thinking critically and asking, “What’s the evidence? You say Saddam Hussein is doing things that will hurt our national interests. Now tell me exactly: what is he doing? Does he have chemical weapons, nuclear weapons? Where’s the evidence?” Of course, there wasn’t any.

The Humanist: Recent neurological studies confirm that we humans have problems recognizing our own biases, and that we have faulty memories. How can we persuade people to spot-check their thinking by questioning their own positions?

Holt: You’ve got to keep from fooling yourself. When I’m talking to kids, I always say, remember: the easiest person in the world to fool is you. That’s why replication or the ability of someone else to check your work is so important. You have to express your thoughts and conclusions in a way someone else can follow.

The Humanist: That’s so logical. Why aren’t we teaching more scientific thinking in the schools? How do we promote it?

Holt: By pointing out that you don’t need to wear a lab coat to think like a scientist. Most school children can do it. Instead we start dividing kids, sending them down one track or another: you’re going to be a scientist; you’re not.

The Humanist: You talk about third-graders thinking more scientifically before we track them, which makes me wonder: can we teach adults?

Holt: Daniel Kahneman is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how irrational markets are by putting together a catalogue of biases. When he taught at Princeton he would test his students to show them how their brains worked—or didn’t work—and the biases to which they fell victim. You have to be aware of such biases. Then there are specific steps you can take to help you frame your questions. Don’t tell yourself, “I’m not a scientist, so I can’t do this” or “It’s too hard.”

Also ask yourself: Am I forming a question in a manner that will yield the most precise, least vague answer? Am I recording my thoughts in a way that others can look at them? In science, publication is critical. You must publish if you want to be considered a scientist. You must express yourself in a way that can be reviewed and that would mean something to other people who look at it.

The Humanist: Is politics incompatible with critical thinking, with the embrace of a careful, rational process?

Holt: Each politician’s thinking can be critical, but part of that thinking has to recognize individual and communal irrationality. You can actually get irrational behavior even if each person in a group acts rationally. This is something Kahneman showed: groups have minds of their own, so to speak. In voting, it’s possible to get a result that’s not in everyone’s best interest. Even if each person thinks that he or she is voting in his or her best interest, you can get irrational results. If you give three points to your top choice, two points to your second choice, and one point to your third choice, and everyone does that, you can still get screwy outcomes. Each politician can think critically but should be alert to the irrational aspects of individual and societal behavior.

Still, I don’t want to over-emphasize the irrationality; it’s present but not usually dominant. Sooner or later, people tend to act in their own best interest. It’s why the United States has done so well for so long. There have been many times, not unlike today, when we just wanted to tear our hair out. As Churchill said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing … after they’ve tried everything else.” Lately, everyone’s been complaining about the United States and our government and I want to say, “Well, if it’s so bad, why have we done so well?” It’s the same country, it’s the same government; it’s the same irrationality we’ve always had and it’s worked pretty well—pretty well.

The Humanist: But we could do better; our politicians could do a lot better.

Holt: Each politician should be thinking critically. Just because politics is a non-linear system in which you can’t always know what the outcome will be, or even if you might not have enough information, it doesn’t mean you should therefore be irrational. It doesn’t mean that all bets are off. It doesn’t mean that just because you can’t quite predict the future, you can act capriciously all the time.

The Humanist: But what happens when politicians and others feel they’re acting with conviction and refuse to be interrupted by the introduction of evidence? What if they aren’t willing to subject their beliefs to critical review?

Holt: There was a wonderful phrase in a New York Times op-ed by James Shapiro about the premise of the recent movie, Anonymous. [Author’s note: the film suggests that William Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the work attributed to him and that a deliberate effort was made to hide the identity of the real writer, a contention dismissed by critics as being without merit.] Shapiro writes that it is “a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence.” For some of the new Tea Party members in Congress, ideology trumps evidence. Of course there are people for whom ideology will always trump evidence, but many fall victim to that tendency and don’t realize it; you have to correct them.

Regarding the film’s premise, some may say, “Well, who cares if it wasn’t Shakespeare who wrote the plays because the writing is still great.” I have a problem with the premise because I have a problem with conspiracy theories. Conspiracy thinking is among the most delusional kind of thinking there is. Of course there is such a thing as a conspiracy; but there aren’t nearly as many conspiracies as there are imagined conspiracies. Even so, it doesn’t take much to get people sucked into that kind of thinking. The op-ed’s point was that questioning who wrote the plays and poems of Shakespeare isn’t a simple academic venture. It’s an attempt to overturn common understanding, and if someone is going to do that they’d better have a good reason and good evidence. That’s important for moving forward, for our thinking, regardless of what the issue is.

The Humanist: I worry that people are backing away from thinking like a scientist (to use your phrase) and taking certain words with them and redefining them, like the word “theory.” When people say, “it’s just a theory,” you wonder if they know what a theory really is.

Holt: Sure, like when people say evolution is “just a theory.” My response is: “so is gravitation.” We can argue about gravity all day long but no, a theory is not simply a hunch.

The Humanist: What do you think is the proper place of religion in politics?

Holt: Religion is the social expression of many people’s most important values. You’re dealing with the meaning of life, and you would hope that everybody cares about what that might be. We should welcome, but not insist on, the expression of values; they are protected so that anyone can get together with other like-minded people to sing uplifting hymns or speak a catechism or whatever it might be.

Politics is the means by which we balance competing interests. When these deeply held values and beliefs that may or may not be socially expressed conflict with each other, politics has to be involved. Our Constitution and backup documents (such as Jefferson’s “Declaration of Religious Freedom”) are political documents, ingenious documents, because they talk about freedom of religion and freedom from religion. A lot of people forget that religious expression is freer when restraints are in place on where it can be expressed. If there is no state-sponsored religion, it means no state can impose a religion on you, which gives you more freedom to practice your religion or not practice any religion. The separation of church and state doesn’t actually restrict the practice of religion; it makes it more possible.

The Humanist: Yet there are politicians who say that we must take steps to acknowledge that we are a nation under God; that we are a Christian nation.

Holt: A few years ago, I got into some political hot water because I voted against a resolution recognizing Christmas. But it didn’t just recognize Christmas—it said something about Christians believing that Jesus was Christ the Savior, and I thought, “No, no. This doesn’t belong in legislative language; we shouldn’t do this.” So I voted “present,” which is a vote I save for legislation that never should have come to the floor. It’s not “yes” or “no”: It just says the legislation doesn’t belong there.

A month or so later, during Ramadan, there was a resolution recognizing Islam’s peaceful elements and practitioners. I voted “yes” because it was about the social expression of a religion and whether it was constructive or destructive, whereas the other aimed to legislate in the area of people’s deeply held beliefs. The resolutions were completely different. I received numerous irate e-mails and, to this day, I’m sure there are people out there who think I’m the Antichrist because I voted against Christianity and for Islam.

The Humanist: This is the kind of thing that makes secular humanists, agnostics, atheists, and nontheists nervous—really nervous. There are people here in the United States afraid to express their doubts about the existence of any deity because of how they’ll be treated.

Holt: Well, I’m not too surprised. Speaking for myself, I am more a questioner than a member of a faithful flock. I take my religion seriously and look for the best expression of it. But I can’t bring myself to finish a speech with “God bless America.” I have trouble with that.

I’d like to see “America the Beautiful” replace our national anthem, but there is the phrase “God shed His grace on thee,” and in the second verse, “God mend thine every flaw.” The latter phrase is nice in that it asks for help in correcting the errors of our ways but I’m not quite sure I can reconcile my overall discomfort with my desire to replace “The Star Spangled Banner”—a military hymn—as the national anthem. Certainly either of those is preferable to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which is becoming the de facto anthem. I might even prefer God shedding his grace to God blessing America.

The Humanist: Some do seem to make assumptions about the divine source of American exceptionalism. Madeleine Albright says in her book, The Mighty and the Almighty, that while Americans may hope that God blesses America, we should never expect it.

Holt: Nor should we declare it as if it’s a foregone conclusion or God’s ongoing practice.

Nikki Stern (www.nikkistern.com) is the author of Hope in Small Doses, which will be published by Humanist Press in June. Her other book, Because I Say So, is available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble in both print and e-reader versions.

During her final year, 2009, in her required practicum Ward was assigned a student for counseling. Reviewing his file just two hours before their scheduled meeting and noting his same-sex orientation, she called her faculty supervisor and requested that this student either be immediately referred to another counselor or that she begin counseling him but make a referral if he brought up any relationship issues. The faculty supervisor canceled the session and reassigned the student but also proceeded to set up an informal disciplinary hearing to deal with Ward’s unorthodox request, unprecedented in her twenty years of teaching and which she saw as creating an “ethical dilemma.” Counselors in training were expected to work with clients from a wide range of backgrounds and holding a broad array of views. Ward’s position, here and earlier, evidenced an inability—or unwillingness—to tolerate sexual orientations and preferences different from her own.

In the meeting that followed, which also included Ward’s academic supervisor, Ward reiterated her position that she couldn’t, in good religious conscience, “affirm” a same-sex relationship—a term that, it should be emphasized, does not mean to endorse or agree with, but rather to support or uphold the validity of. At one point her faculty supervisor gave her two options: voluntarily withdraw from the program, since she couldn’t agree to abide by EMU’s counseling guidelines—in line with those of the American Counseling Association (ACA); or request a formal review from a committee made up of three faculty members and one student representative to further evaluate the charge of improper behavior. Ward opted for the latter.

Prior to this meeting, Ward was told that she’d violated two provisions of the ACA’s code of ethics, namely, “imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” and “engag[ing] in discrimination based on … sexual orientation.” Incorporated into the counseling program’s student handbook, these non-negotiable stipulations were already known to Ward. When the formal hearing began and Ward was presented with these allegations, she protested that she didn’t discriminate against anyone, and that she was willing to counsel gay and lesbian clients—as long as she didn’t have to affirm their sexual orientation. In essence, she was arguing that she should be given the freedom to adhere to her religious beliefs and not be obliged to honor, or confirm, those whose practices she frankly found repugnant.

Not surprisingly, her defense failed to give the committee any reassurance that, going forward, she’d abide by the ACA’s requirements. She couldn’t claim that her Christian beliefs wouldn’t interfere with carrying out her professional duties counseling gays and lesbians, while in the same breath claiming that she couldn’t affirm their lifestyle because they were guilty of the “sin” of non-heterosexuality. By declaring herself unable to recognize the entire LGBT population as worthy of acceptance and respect, she was confessing that she couldn’t leave her theological prejudices at the counseling room door.

Two days later Ward received a letter telling her of the committee’s unanimous decision: that she had violated the code of ethics and, given her refusal to alter her discriminatory behavior, she was expelled from the program. Ward appealed the committee’s verdict to the dean of the College of Education and was denied. She then filed an action against the members of the formal review committee, the two faculty members who conducted her earlier informal hearing, the dean, the president, and the members of the University’s Board of Regents—claiming that her expulsion violated her free-speech and free-exercise rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The district court to which the case then went concluded in a summary judgment that the university had legitimately enforced a neutral, generally applicable curricular requirement necessary to performing its basic educational mission, and that Ward had not been targeted for her speech or religious beliefs. In short, case dismissed.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals: A Legal, Ethical, and Ideological Debate

Whereas everything up to this point had gone against Ward, here is where her case became knotty, entangled mostly by a legal technicality clearly in her favor. Although the appeals court did not disagree with many of the previous court’s arguments, it focused on Ward’s referral request, an issue that hadn’t adequately been dealt with in the initial case. Consequently, even though it didn’t overturn the lower court’s ruling, it felt obliged to send it back to them.

In arguing for Ward’s expulsion, EMU had focused on Ward’s violation of the ACA ethical code prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. It also maintained that Ward’s required practical skills course (her practicum) did not permit her the freedom to refer clients whom she disapproved of. (It should also be noted that Ward’s supervisor, in reassigning the gay student, wasn’t so much honoring Ward’s wishes as deciding on her own that it would be unethical to assign such a client to someone who’d already made it clear she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—affirm them.) Walter Kraft, EMU’s vice president for communications, stressed that it wasn’t Ward’s evangelical beliefs that precipitated her dismissal, nor was it her stance toward homosexuality. Rather, it was her refusal to abide by the ethical code held not only by the ACA but also the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), which requires counselors “not to allow their personal values to intrude into their professional work.”

At her informal hearing, Ward read a letter she’d sent to her academic supervisor affirming her belief that “God ordained relationships between men and women,” and that people should “strive to cultivate sexual desires for persons of the opposite sex.” Additionally, she claimed that in her professional work she was “morally obliged … to express the biblical viewpoint regarding proper sexual relationships,” vowing, “I would not sell out God.” This supervisor, later testifying against Ward in her formal hearing, alleged: “It is my professional opinion that Ms. Ward is selectively using her religious beliefs in order to rationalize her discrimination against one group of people.”

The ACA supported EMU’s decision to expel Ward for refusing to treat clients who wished to discuss homosexual relationships or premarital sexual relationships. In its amicus brief it stated: “This conduct showed deficiencies in her ability to become a counselor, and her supervisors were obliged to respond accordingly.”

Countering these arguments was Ward’s lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco, of the Alliance Defense Fund—a Christian legal advocacy organization that describes itself as “defending religious liberty, sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.” Tedesco noted that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they [EMU and the ACA] can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer. … Does [their ethical code] require a Jewish counselor to affirm the religious beliefs of a Muslim client?” he asked, also pointing out that the ACA does permit its members to choose not to work with terminally ill patients considering end-of-life options.

In Tedesco’s estimation, a public university had no right to compel students to violate their religious beliefs to obtain a degree. And he contended that Ward’s wanting to refer homosexuals wasn’t indicative of same-sex prejudice, given that her alleged non-compliance with EMU’s policies would also extend to heterosexuals “whose [sexual] practices went beyond the bounds of [her] biblical morality.”

David Mach, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, took a somewhat different approach in his amicus brief, contending that the canons of the profession justifiably put the needs of the client before the sensibilities of the counselor. He also argued that a high school counselor might be the only understanding adult an LGBT youth could turn to. And for them to feel discriminated against, negatively judged, or even turned away—especially in crisis—could be devastating. Moreover, any counselor who sought to avoid gay people (or, for that matter, adulterers or those engaged in premarital sex) was holding an untenable view of the profession.

Weighing in for the American Psychological Association (APA) was Douglas C. Haldeman, a former chairman of its committee on lesbian, gay, and bisexual concerns. Describing the court’s emphasis on referrals as “misplaced,” he went on to state the APA’s position categorically: “We don’t train our students in discriminatory patterns of treatment, and we don’t permit them.”

Notwithstanding the strength of the various arguments against Ward, Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton (nominated to the court in 2001 by George W. Bush) held that Ward’s case needed to be re-examined because of what a jury might construe as EMU’s intolerance of her religious values, as well as the arbitrary nature, or illegitimacy, of challenging her request that a gay student be referred to another student counselor. He hypothesized that a jury might find that EMU deployed her request “as a pretext for punishing Ward’s religious views and speech.”

Echoing Tedesco, Sutton reflected that the religion-based ban on discrimination “surely … does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct [or] an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God. … Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.”

These analogies (and others Sutton made) border on the absurd, or at least suggest that he (like Ward) lacks any genuine understanding of what affirming a client is all about. Affirmation has nothing to do with compromising, renouncing, or betraying one’s own values. It’s simply a matter of setting them aside, recognizing the subjective validity of the client’s differing belief system, and dealing with the client on their own terms. It’s adopting a non-judgmental attitude (de rigueur for anyone entering the field) and respecting that all of us believe what we do because somehow it “works” for us. Therapists and counselors alike are taught, humanistically, to treat clients with respect, dignity, compassion, and understanding—the very essence of what Carl Rogers termed “unconditional positive regard” (and perhaps what, finally, contributes most to a client’s improvement). If a counselor cannot offer this, even though the client’s behavior, however maladaptive, is neither illegal nor immoral (according to any generally accepted secular/societal standard), they really aren’t suited for the profession.

Moreover, should a client question a counselor about the latter’s beliefs, it’s perfectly okay for the counselor to candidly disclose that his or her ideology differs from the client’s, as long as they can also demonstrate acceptance of the client’s contrasting viewpoint. For the huge majority of counseling students, this acceptance wouldn’t put their own beliefs, or integrity, at risk. But Ward’s moral righteousness clearly prohibited her from empathizing with, honoring, or open-mindedly supporting, a position perceived as “against God.” As she debated repeatedly with EMU’s faculty, she could not validate another’s sexual orientation without changing her belief system—and the university had no right to tell her to do so.

The truth is that EMU had tolerated Ward’s fundamentalist Christian biases from the outset but objected to her unwillingness to validate any client whose sexual orientation or beliefs were theologically distasteful or abhorrent to her. And this is really the crux of the case: Ward’s biblical convictions appear to have rendered her incapable of seeing sexual practices alien to her own as legitimate.

Judge Sutton’s final position on EMU’s and the ACA’s referral policies is more difficult to refute. He argued that their shared ethical code “expressly permits values-based referrals.” And while EMU’s defendants contended that the school maintained a different policy for practicum students, they could not, Sutton noted, “point to any policy articulated in [the program’s] course materials, the student handbook, or anything else forbidding practicum students from making referrals.” Additionally, at no point had any professor explicitly informed Ward that such a policy existed.

Because the university failed to sufficiently substantiate its claim of a no-referral principle for practicum students, the Appeals Court decision was to “reverse and remand to the district court for further proceedings.”

But the paramount issue here isn’t whether Ward was, or should have been, within her rights to request a referral. Rather, it’s about whether Ward, once licensed, could be expected to keep her religious biases independent of her professional obligations. And as a school counselor, she would not have the luxury of referral. Ethically and practically, counselors in such a setting can’t pick and choose the students they’ll work with. And this is why EMU’s faculty wanted practicum students to learn how to work comfortably with any student who might be assigned to them. 

Humanist Manifesto III declares: “We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity.” This statement could virtually have been extracted from the ethical code of any of the helping professions. Although this ideal doesn’t necessitate denouncing Ward’s moral righteousness as such, it indirectly calls attention to the grave problems inherent in her moralistic exclusivity. Such an attitude is inevitably correlated with an ethic that by definition must be biased and discriminatory—and the very essence of what EMU found academically, professionally, and ethically unacceptable about her position.

Additionally, believing in facts over faith, the humanist—cognizant of the scientific research on homosexuality—would be obliged to conclude that Ward’s prejudice against LGBTs wasn’t reality-based. When asked by EMU faculty whether she believed that homosexuality was a choice, she responded unequivocally that it was. And, of course, she’d have to. If she believed otherwise, then the entire LGBT population would have to be viewed as part of God’s divine plan.

To Thine Own Religion Be True—But Just How “True” Is It?

Many of the extensive comments following a January 27, 2012, Huffington Post story on this case critically explored Ward’s position on homosexuality as it’s specifically grounded in biblical teachings. What’s so fascinating about this particular subject is how self-contradictory the Bible seems to be on the matter. Or maybe what’s really contradictory is how differently individual Christians interpret scripture. Beyond the culture wars there is accumulating evidence that Christianity (not unlike some other religions) may be fighting an ideological war with itself.

One respondent argued that “Jesus was about love” and that “he never, ever took a stand against homosexuality.” Biblical verses only inveigh against “the non-consensual sex between Roman soldiers or the Roman elite and their slaves or other boys,” since such forced relations weren’t loving but predatory. This stance would seem to undermine the position of Christians who express outright contempt or hatred toward consensual same-sex relationships.

Another writer alluded to Jesus’s edict: “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” perceiving Ward as totally oblivious to her savior’s message and what he was attempting to instill in others. In the more extreme forms of Christianity, intolerance does predominate, and the live-and-let-live philosophy (which depicts a far more humanistic outlook) has generally been abandoned. Another respondent asked: “What would [Ward] say to the unwed pregnant teen? Would she counsel heterosexuals who were having premarital sex?”

Again, the question arises as to whether the Bible can reliably determine who deserves to be counseled—or better, whose values warrant affirmation by the counselor. Clearly, scripture has no inherent or consistent answers to help resolve this issue. And efforts to authoritatively decipher its deeper meanings leave room for anyone to exploit its verses to their advantage. As Shakespeare famously put it in The Merchant of Venice: “The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”

Another subject that came up in comments to the article was whether specifically Christian-trained counseling students could comfortably ignore the ACA’s code of ethics. According to one respondent:

Before I began my practicum work on my way to a master’s in Christian counseling, I had to agree to and sign that same national code of ethics. … Counselors help their clients decide what path is best for them. We really had it drummed into us that telling a client what to do or steering the counseling in the direction of our personal preferences was a gross violation… that would result in the immediate loss of our license.

Another Huffington Post reader, who identified as a professional counselor, wrote:

I could … listen to this fundamentalist bigot if I were her counselor. Let’s say she even came to me with the problem of  “People are disrespecting my beliefs.” I could help her deal with that without asking her to change her beliefs, even if I loathe them. You don’t think counselors get clients all the time they probably could not stand if they met on the street? But you do your job. Suppose you had a neo-nazi walk in? To what other therapist would you refer that person to get “affirmed”?

Unyielding Fundamentalism and Its Scary Ramifications

If, after being awarded a degree and becoming a licensed counselor, Julea Ward were to go into private practice, she could freely refer gay clients to other therapists for help with issues related to their sexual orientation. But working in an institutional context (her stated intention), where referrals are rarely possible, she’d have to work with LGBT individuals or almost certainly be fired.

Since her religious commitments would require her to let “sinful” clients know that their actions were immoral (or “unaffirmable”) to her, she’d have to face the fact that, according to her profession’s ethical code, she was flagrantly crossing the line—in fact, behaving in a way that could get her license suspended or revoked.

What if Ward found herself in a situation where—whether out of fear, embarrassment, or shame—her client initially withheld their sexual orientation? If this information were revealed later on (which isn’t unusual), referring the client elsewhere or prematurely terminating treatment could cause that client substantial psychological harm.

For these reasons and others, Ward clearly sought to avoid working with LGBT individuals altogether. At some level she must have realized that her career aspirations and fundamentalist Christian dictates were irreconcilable. She unrealistically hoped that the counseling profession’s ethical code would be changed, exclusively for her, to allow her to discriminate in a way compelled by her religious views. In this context it’s especially curious that Ward claimed she’d been the victim of intolerance from EMU’s faculty, although such “intolerance” was clearly in response to her own. Nor, practically, did EMU have any other option. For altering their policies would mean violating the ACA’s ethical code and risk losing their accreditation. “Isn’t it amazing when the religious right claims they’re being discriminated against when they’re punished for discriminating against [others]?” asked yet another HuffPo reader.

Perhaps it wasn’t so much Ward’s client that needed a referral as Ward herself—to some sort of theological school or seminary, or maybe an institution like Bob Jones or Liberty University, where a counseling program would embrace her extreme Christian views. Rather than fight EMU, a public institution, to allow right-wing biases, she could transfer her credits to a school where her negative religious sentiments against gays might be confirmed. Completing her counseling program at a private, non-accredited religious college would doubtless limit her professional mobility. But at least it would allow her to seek employment in like-minded private schools where she could practice counseling free of any threat to her sense of integrity. Given Ward’s religious allegiances, this alternative constitutes the only solution capable of honoring and respecting both sides.

Given Ward’s demonstrated recalcitrance, such a resolution doesn’t seem likely. And in the improbable (but not inconceivable) event that her demand for religious freedom goes all the way to the Supreme Court—and is actually granted—it could open the gates for legal discrimination and further erode the separation of church and state.

In fact, in March the Michigan House Education Committee approved House Bill 5040, also known as the “Julea Ward freedom of conscience act,” that would prohibit religious discrimination against students who are studying counseling, social work, or psychology.

Ward’s case goes vastly beyond whether she should be allowed to return to EMU to complete her degree. It’s about whether our courts and legislatures, if they accommodate such Christian extremes, would thereby be authorizing—or “institutionalizing”—prejudice and discrimination for all.

Leon F. Seltzer, a humanist therapist who holds PhDs in both English and psychology, currently practices psychology in Del Mar, California. The author of two books, he also writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called “Evolution of the Self.”

I’ve participated in countless nonviolent protests of torture, including congressional lobbying, panels and seminars, online petition writing, bird-dogging of politicians and judges and professors. I’ve met victims and told their stories and reviewed their books. But I had never spent a day with a crowd of lawyers and doctors who deal with the medical and court struggles arising out of torture cases, not until I attended a conference in February at American University in Washington, DC, entitled “Forensic Evidence in the Fight Against Torture.”

The doctors, lawyers, and others attending and speaking at the conference were from the United States and many other countries. It was not lost on them that they were addressing something different from a “natural” disaster. In their public comments and private discussions I found universal agreement that torture has gained dramatically greater, world-wide public acceptance during the past decade, and that the United States has been the leader in promoting that greater acceptance. While Juan Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, pointed his finger at Hollywood movies and TV shows in which harsh interrogation techniques succeed in aiding crime solvers, several experts independently told me that by granting legal immunity to torturers, the United States has led by example.

It may be hard to recall that a mere decade ago torture was almost universally condemned here, and had been almost universally condemned in the Western world for centuries (racist exceptions for slavery excluded). By 2004, 43 percent of U.S. respondents to a Pew Research Center survey were saying that torture was often or sometimes justified to gain key information. By 2009, 49 percent said so. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that public support for torture increased in the United States from 27 percent in 2004 to 42 percent in 2010. AP-GfK polling found U.S. public support for torture at 38 percent in 2005, increasing to 52 percent by 2009.

That was the society I left behind as I entered the conference rooms of AU’s Washington College of Law to join an international gathering of professionals who still viewed torture as the evil it had been considered by the authors of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which included an absolute ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

In broad historical terms, many forms of violence are being eliminated or are diminishing significantly in frequency, in the United States and abroad. But the flipside of recognizing that there is nothing “inevitable” or “natural” about cannibalism or infanticide or the burning of witches, or—for that matter—fist fights, spanking, child abuse, spousal abuse, or cruelty to animals, is that trends away from such practices can easily be reversed. We may be living through such a reversal on torture.

Some of the torture cases discussed at the conference involved U.S. victims; most did not. Some implicated governments that receive support from the United States, such as that of Bahrain. So the United States is unable to advocate against torture from a persuasive position to governments it opposes, not only because of its own conduct but also because of the conduct of governments it supports, including the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. This problem was confirmed for me by various conference attendees, including U.S. government grant recipients and some federal employees.

Our government helps fund support of torture victims, both through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), both of which create grants to aid the victims of torture by any government other than the United States. The United Nations, partially funded by the United States, provides grants without that limitation. I spoke with participants at the conference who worked at centers in the United States helping torture victims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Fiji, and other countries. There is a National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs that was holding its own meetings in DC around the same time. While these groups were new to me, I had worked in the past with the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition, an organization that seems to bridge the gap between treating victims and addressing the root problem of torture acceptance through political mobilization.

Examination of how individual cases of torture are being addressed suggests another trend of recent years. Even as torture has been gaining acceptance, a nonprofit complex of treatment centers and non-governmental organizations has been developing the tools with which to more expertly diagnose, document, and testify on torture, and to aid the victims. While in the United States best-selling books by former president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney contain passages in which both openly admit to authorizing the waterboarding prisoners, numerous other nations have been codifying the procedures of the “Istanbul Protocol: Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” published by the United Nations in 2004. This conference, in fact, was the culmination of a three-year project funded by the European Union.

While both of these trends—the acceptance of torture and the development of a professional system of response to it—lead to greater public awareness of torture, they have opposite effects in terms of the amount of torture that occurs. It’s not clear whether torture is on the rise or is declining in practice, but I heard at the conference many stories of systematic state torture and careful documentation thereof, and many stories of aid provided to victims including helping them to obtain asylum. I didn’t hear any stories of top government officials being held seriously accountable for torture.

The possible exception to that rule is Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt overthrown by nonviolent protest in 2011. Speaking at the conference, Mostafa Hussein of the El Nadim Center for Psychological Treatment and Rehabilitation in Egypt told the story of Khaled Mohamed Saeed, a young man who was beaten to death by Egyptian secret police in June 2010. The police lied about the cause of death, but photos of their victim’s horribly disfigured corpse went viral online, and public pressure grew. Experts from the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) produced a report. (The IRCT was a sponsor of the conference I attended.) Eventually two low-ranking police officers were given seven-year prison sentences, an outcome widely seen as insufficient after decades of systematically torturing thousands. Saeed was seen as a martyr, and the resulting outrage was channeled into the movement that took over Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011 and drove Mubarak out of power. Protesters painted Saeed’s portrait on the wall of the Ministry of the Interior.

But Hussein told me that the public prosecutor hasn’t changed, and dictatorship hasn’t been dismantled. Although activists entered the Ministry of the Interior in March 2011, he said, they brought away very few documents, destroying many more. Omar Suleiman, the former head of Egyptian intelligence, is out of office and being sued by an Australian who says Suleiman oversaw his torture in Egypt on behalf of the United States prior to shipping him to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Suleiman is also accused of having performed a key service for the United States by torturing Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi until he said that Saddam Hussein was tied to al Qaeda, a statement al-Libi later recanted and which conflicts absurdly with the facts. Will Suleiman be brought to justice? Mostafa Hussein wasn’t holding his breath. “Only the faces have changed,” he said of the new Egyptian government.

After Tunisia and Egypt, the Arab Spring of 2011 emerged in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain, a protectorate of the United States and Saudi Arabia, and the port where the U.S. Navy keeps its Fifth Fleet. Bahrain has hired U.S. police chief John Timoney, who made his name by infiltrating and brutalizing nonviolent protesters in Miami and Philadelphia, to lead the crackdown on protesters in Bahrain. On the weekend of the conference on torture in DC, U.S. friends and allies of mine were being tear-gassed, beaten, and arrested in the streets of Bahrain. Speaking at the conference was Dr. Ala’a Shehabi, a British-born Bahraini civil rights activist, economist, writer, and a founding member of the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) established in January 2012.

Shehabi said that, according to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry established by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, 3,000 protesters have been arrested in the past year, 500 of whom are still in prison. 4,500 people have lost jobs. There has been systemic excessive force and torture, with over sixty documented deaths, according to Shehabi. The commission’s report finds that torture has been used systematically as a deliberate government policy both for compelling confessions and for retribution and punishment. The report also found a culture of impunity and recommended prosecutions. But, said Shehabi, there hasn’t been a single conviction, and torture continues, including at the National Security Agency, the basement of which the commissioners were not permitted to enter. The judicial system in Bahrain still allows forced confessions as evidence and dismisses all allegations of torture.

A forensic doctor from Turkey, working for the IRCT, also attended the conference. She had produced expert opinions on torture cases in Bahrain that disproved claims made by the government, which routinely blames the deaths and scars of torture on responses to “resisting arrest.” This is dangerous work in Bahrain, where doctors and lawyers who try to help are themselves targeted. Thus far, fifty doctors have been prosecuted for treating protesters. Some doctors, having lost their jobs and been tortured themselves, are helping out at the rehabilitation center. However, Bahraini doctors are not allowed to study, be licensed in, or practice forensic medicine. That’s a job for the government. Not one psychologist has been found willing and able to assist. And only a handful of lawyers are putting up a defense for those charged with crimes for nonviolent demonstrations.

The man sitting next to me during the discussion of Bahrain turned out to be Mohammed Isa Al-Tajer, a lawyer currently representing over 150 protesters in Bahrain. He was himself imprisoned for three and a half months, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement last year. When he was arrested on April 15, 2011, the government also seized his computers, documents, mobile phones, and office keys, compromising his clients’ confidentiality. He still faces charges.

At the conclusion of a discussion of all-too-similar torture practices in Mexico and Zimbabwe, someone asked about the value of offering trainings for police in the requirements of the Istanbul Protocol. Exactly zero people in the room expressed a belief that such trainings would have much value in these countries. One person expressed the opinion that it would be of greater value to get these nations to ratify the optional protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which would allow monitoring of interrogation sites. Others responded to this with accounts of secret sites and even ad hoc torture sites, which in Zimbabwe have even included hospitals. Several people passionately declared that the only thing that would actually work to stop the torture would be to end impunity and hold individuals accountable, especially the most powerful individuals. Ala’a Shehabi said that what was needed was fundamental governmental change from dictatorship to democracy.

Of course, a government can call itself a democracy while treating torture as a legal policy option. On the Monday following the conference, the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, filed a ruling against a petitioner seeking asylum who claimed that he would likely be tortured if sent back to India. Regardless of the merits of that ruling, it was made by Judge Jay Bybee, who had been appointed to his position by President George W. Bush after obediently signing off on memos legitimizing torture in the U.S. Department of Justice.

The asylum process was a major topic at the conference. Doctors and lawyers from Germany, New Zealand, and the United States described their experiences providing expert reports and testimony for asylum seekers. Roger Haines from New Zealand provided evidence that expert forensic reports detailing ingested substances, lesions found on the body, bone fissures or fractures indicating blunt force trauma, and so forth can make the difference in obtaining asylum. He also noted that an expectation has now developed that weighs against applicants lacking such reports. One example he cited was a case from Canada decided against the applicant by the Convention Against Torture committee in 2010. This man had been arrested and tortured in 1995 in Uzbekistan, Haines said. He fled to the United Arab Emirates and then to Germany, where his request for asylum was rejected. He tried to seek asylum in Norway, using a false name, and was rejected. He then tried Canada in September 2001 and was rejected “on credibility grounds.” Canada pointed out that he had no medical report from Uzbekistan. The CAT committee also rejected his claim, pointing out that he had no medical report from 1995 in Uzbekistan or from 2001 in Canada. Haines pointed out that torturers don’t usually provide medical reports with their services and that a report from six years later might not have shown anything at all.

The truth is that many torture victims don’t have visible injuries. Mental injuries can be examined by experts, whose testimony can at least suggest the likelihood that someone has been tortured or not. Their testimony can also assist judges and officials in understanding why torture victims might have difficulty coherently retelling their entire experience.

Mendez, the U.N. Special Rapporteur, described torture as prevalent and widespread: ”Some time ago we thought abolition was around the corner.” But, he added, no one thinks that now. Instead, he said it will take much more work and imagination to eradicate it. Mendez then proceeded to argue for an inclusive definition of the actions to be abolished. In Mendez’s view, solitary confinement and death row (for any period of time) meet the threshold of both “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” and torture, both of which are illegal. The United States has tens of thousands of people in solitary confinement, and still allows the death penalty. Mendez believes solitary confinement for over fifteen days should be absolutely forbidden. (Incidentally, following the conference Mendez formally accused the U.S. government of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being a major source for WikiLeaks.)

Mendez argued for greater educational efforts by forensic scientists. ”In daily life,” he said, “we talk about torture without the details. But it is the details that make a difference to our moral sense.” He also proposed forensic science as an alternative to harsh interrogation in the task of solving crimes, a moral and legal but also more effective alternative. That may be a lesson that even Hollywood is learning to accept as it proliferates crime-solving dramas with forensic scientist heroes.

Mendez rejected the notion that torture can work. Of course, some confessions will be true, he said, but others won’t be, whether in the imaginary ticking time-bomb scenario or otherwise. Meanwhile, he added, societies pay a heavy price for engaging in torture, damaging innocents and their families but also the institutions that do the torturing.

Let me end on something of a positive note.

It comes from the remarks of Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers in the UK. He has acted in significant recent human rights cases in the UK, including those of Al Skeini, Al-Jedda, and that of Rose Gentle, who sued Prime Minister Tony Blair for the death of her son as a soldier in Iraq. Shiner represents the family of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi man kicked and beaten to death while in British custody in 2003. The UK, Shiner explained, has done everything in Iraq that the United States has, including hooding prisoners. But the UK judicial system allows torture cases to be brought to court.

Shiner and his colleagues argued that hooding qualifies as cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, that it had been banned by the Ministry of Defense, and that all such policies of modern scar-free torture (hooding, stress positions, and deprivation of food, water, or sleep) had been banned by the UK in 1972. But British troops were hooding Iraqis, including Baha Mousa, with multiple sand bags in extreme heat for many hours. In Baha Mousa’s case and every other case known, Shiner said, the hooding was combined with other exacerbating factors creating medical risk. In this case, as well, the IRCT helped out with a statement pointing to numerous medical risks from hooding, including asphyxia and heat-related problems. Hooding also distances the torturer and thereby exacerbates torture, makes identification of the torturer by the victim more difficult, and spreads as a practice when photos are released, as in the case of the images of U.S. Army torture from Abu Ghraib prison brought to public attention in 2004.

So, why was hooding standard practice in Iraq? Shiner answered his own question: The invasion was illegal. It was an invasion along with the United States. The United States does not respect international law. And records were not being kept.

Shiner and his colleagues compelled the government of the UK to hold an extensive inquiry on the case of Baha Mousa, which released a report in September 2011. On October 3, 2011, the High Court ruled on another case brought by Shiner, that of Alaa’ Nassif Jassim al-Bazzouni. The court ruled that hooding is always cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. Shiner welcomed the decision, noting it means no UK forces anywhere may be associated with hooding and that any UK troop who thinks another state is hooding is required to report it.

I discussed the Baha Mousa case with a Professor Vivienne Nathanson, who was attending the conference from the British Medical Association. She pointed out that a doctor and a chaplain had witnessed hooding and beating but had done nothing, and that the report had recommended prosecution. “Sins of omission need to be prosecuted,” she said, as the day’s meetings wrapped up and the world went about its business.

Video of the conference is at http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/video.cfm.

Reports and other materials are posted at http://auw.cl/sp12fet.

David Swanson is the author of War Is A Lie and Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled House recently passed a bill (House Bill 2625) that would allow employers to interrogate female employees about their private sex lives—what they do in their bedrooms and why they would want to use birth control. These are the same types of questions that, when asked by an employer or supervisor, normally fall into the category of sexual harassment. Except in Arizona, for now.

The rationale is that health insurance policies often cover the cost of prescription birth control, and while insurers may not charge a premium for the added coverage (which usually winds up saving them money), employers might object to their employees using birth control and hence object to company-contracted insurance providers covering it.

While this might sound like a rationale for a single-payer healthcare system where all patients could access the medical procedures they deem necessary, regardless of their employers’ prejudices or views about their personal medical choices, it doesn’t play that way in Arizona. There, Republicans argue that an employer has the right to know why an employee makes the contraceptive decisions she makes and, if the employer is not in agreement with how the employee conducts her sex life, to have her insurance company deny her contraceptive coverage. I use the word “she” here, since there is no such provision to question men about the use of sex-related prescription drugs such as Viagra. In fact, no Republican legislative movement exists in any state to curtail health insurance plans paying for such penis-stiffening medications.

Republican Governor Jan Brewer, about whose sex life or contraception use I have no right to ask, doesn’t understand the controversy surrounding this legislation, terming the debate a “Democratic ploy” to drive a wedge between women voters and the Republican legislators who want to legalize their harassment.

Yes, it is a wedge, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that Democrats, Greens, liberals, or anyone other than the Republican legislators who proposed this bill put it there.

Thou shalt lie to thy patients

Meanwhile, Republican state legislators in Kansas are trying to enact a new law that would both allow doctors to lie to patients about the health of their zygotes and fetuses and mandate that they lie to them about breast cancer risks.

The first category, the permitted lie, would protect doctors from malpractice lawsuits resulting from their intentionally lying to patients about the results of blood tests and ultrasounds, as long as those lies tricked a patient into carrying a zygote or fetus with a devastating medical condition full term to a surprising birth. Republicans in Oklahoma and Arizona are also proposing similar legislation to protect doctors who intentionally lie to their patients.

The Kansas law, however, goes the furthest, not only protecting liars but mandating that honest doctors must lie as well, or face judicial sanction for speaking truthfully. That portion of the law requires doctors to recite a scripted lie to their patients seeking abortion, claiming that their abortion procedure will raise their risk of breast cancer.

According to the National Cancer Institute, rumors of such a link, which date back to the 1950s, were firmly disproven by the ’90s. In 2003 the NCI convened a meeting of the top researchers in the field of breast cancer, who jointly issued a statement confirming that “having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.” Interestingly, they did note that giving birth at a young age cuts the juvenile mother’s long-term breast cancer risk. But I don’t see Kansas passing a law against teen abstinence programs.

Legislating forced rape

More common than the lying doctor bills are forced vaginal penetration bills, which mandate that women who desire an abortion must first endure a medically unwarranted, unnecessary, rape-like violation. Currently, Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia have new laws on the books mandating that women who want abortions must have an ultrasound, which in many cases would be an invasive transvaginal ultrasound, whereby the victim’s vagina is penetrated with a long, rigid, cylindrical probe.

I use the term “victim” instead of “patient” here since the procedure is not ordered by a physician for a medical purpose, but is instead mandated by an overreaching big government for reasons that are debatably punitive.

The Virginia bill originally mandated specifically that the vaginal penetration method of ultrasound be administered to women requesting abortions. The language of the bill—naming a specific medical procedure that, when administered against a patient’s will, would, by most definitions, constitute rape—was a bit much for even Virginians to swallow. So the bill was rewritten to remove reference to transvaginal ultrasounds. But like Texas’s similar law, the change is mostly semantic. The law still mandates that the procedure result in a clear image of a fetus and an audible heartbeat, which in early stages of pregnancy can only be obtained by inserting a probe into the vagina. Texas Governor Rick Perry termed this an “emergency” piece of legislation that needed to be fast-tracked into law, despite the fact that Texas seems to have survived well enough for 177 years without forcing the hand of government into women’s vaginas.

Of course, not everyone agrees that forcing a woman to undergo medically unnecessary vaginal penetration is akin to assault. CNN political analyst and right-wing St. Louis-based radio talk show host Dana Loesch argues that the women who would be forced to undergo such procedures “had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.” In this dystopian vision, there is no difference between consensual lovemaking and having the state order your vagina penetrated by strangers wielding tools, since both, technically, result in vaginal penetration.

“You just have to close your eyes”

Idaho and Pennsylvania are now considering similar laws. The latter’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett, who as attorney general in 2009 failed to act on a pedophilia complaint against Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky, has taken forced ultrasounds much more seriously, following Rick Perry’s lead and making passage of House Bill 1077 a legislative priority. The Pennsylvania proposal, however, goes further than most in making clear the punitive nature of the bill, mandating that a monitor showing the forced procedure be placed in the victim’s line of sight. According to the legislation, the attending medical practitioner must “position the screen so that the patient is able to view the ultrasound test in its entirety, with a view of her unborn child.”

If a woman doesn’t want to watch, according to Corbett, “you just have to close your eyes.”

The law also mandates that a woman be given two copies of the image captured by the probe, and that a third image be added to her medical records. In addition, when the patient is finally allowed to proceed with her abortion, her doctor must, according to the bill, offer to show the patient a state-approved video “which accurately depicts an unborn child.”

The financial charges for the forced ultrasounds, in all states that require or hope to require them, will be borne by the patient, adding about $150 to the cost of an abortion, making the procedure more out of reach to the poor while raising costs to insurance providers that provide abortion coverage. The Pennsylvania plan, however, mandates that abortion providers give patients a list of facilities that “offer ultrasound services free of charge,” channeling patients into a more horrific penetration experience at the hands of anti-abortion-activist-run “clinics.”

Our language barely has the words to describe this outrageous, morally reprehensible, legislatively sanctioned and coordinated, hateful abuse of women. Meanwhile, Republican statehouses in Illinois (HB4085), Michigan (SB150), Kentucky (SB103), Iowa (HF2033), Idaho (S1349), Mississippi (HB1107), Alabama (SB12), South Carolina (H3026), and Alaska (SB191) are considering or have passed similar legislation.

Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College. His previous columns are at www.artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com, and available globally through syndication.

“The world began when I was born
and the world is mine to win.”
—Badger Clark

As much as the anthropocentric arrogance and subjectivity of the above statement contradict obvious facts, it could be said that every mind is a world, that the world begins, to each one of us, at birth and ends upon death. This adage represents an insight into the limited nature of our knowledge as mortals.

When I recently stumbled upon the picture of a much-beloved cousin of mine who died several years back, I was flooded with memories and burst into tears, wishing that the dead could speak again. That they could hug us and give us comfort. Death is the parent of religious fantasies and beliefs of all kinds, which so often contradict each other. As a nonbeliever I have pondered and sought meaning for death, or at least a respite from the pain caused by it, in Buddhist and Epicurean ideas.

As one tale about Siddhartha Buddha goes, there once was a mother whose infant child died and she could not bear the pain. She heard of the miraculous man called Buddha and went to him in the hope that he could resurrect her child. But Buddha’s teaching centered on the acceptance of the impermanence of all things in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. How could he perpetuate the notion of eternal life?

And so Buddha told her to knock on every door in her village until she found a household that did not know death. She began knocking on every door and every time she visited a home, the families would tell her that they were sorry but they did indeed know death: a mother, a son, a brother, or a father had died, and they fondly shared memories of their loved ones with her. As she went from home to home, she realized that death was universal and the negative energy of her suffering was transmuted into empathy and compassion, which translates as shared suffering. Humbled, the woman went back to Buddha and thanked him for his teaching about impermanence.

This realization that it’s not my pain but our pain—that we’re all in the same boat—is where compassion originates, and it’s also why Buddha is a type of humanist icon. He taught that all true virtues could be cultivated simply by contemplating death, pain, and all other human experience with mindfulness.

There is no need for gods or supernatural theories in Buddhism, but locking hands with fellow human beings is essential to the realization of its humanist virtues. Epicurus said that good friends are one of the most important ingredients for happiness. We can suffer through almost anything, as long as we have wholesome associates and friends who walk the path with us and make us stronger. Alone we are usually weak but together we are usually strong.

Epicurus also said:

So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist death is not yet present, and when death is present, we do not exist. Therefore it is relevant neither to the living nor the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist. Most people flee death as the greatest of bad things and sometimes choose it as a relief from the bad things of life. But the wise man neither rejects life nor fears death.

Some critics of Epicurus claim that he doesn’t factor in the complex reaction to the finality of human life, particularly when such strong bonds exist between us. But this, again, is not unique to humanity. Apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants form bonds and the death of loved ones is extremely painful and traumatic. Elephants are known to visit the graves of their family members and observe in what appears to be a solemn state when in the presence of the bones of their ancestors.

This, some may argue, sounds like the beginning of spirituality in another species, and it probably is. At least it hints at the possibility of a sophisticated level of philosophical curiosity among elephants. But it doesn’t provide factual evidence for an afterlife: those are two quite different claims. Loving bonds between family members serve an evolutionary purpose, but they are not in any way evidence for the eternality of our individual minds, as painful as this realization is.

Death is final. This means that time is sacred in the sense that it cannot be recovered.

I respect the maturity with which Buddha preached on the universality of impermanence, which in Buddhist doctrine is considered one of the three marks of existence. Rather than entertain religious fantasies and the persistent belief in the afterlife, Zen Buddhists accept that there is only now. There is so much freedom and insight in this realization.

The simplest and most painful insight that we can take in with a smile is that it’s okay.  Everyone dies. And everyone hurts. Paradoxically, crying and being vulnerable require true courage.

In the end, human life on Earth is the true wonder. We can think and breathe. And we, of all earthlings, have become aware of our presence and our place here after billions of years of evolution. Life, not death, should be our source of awe.

Hiram Crespo is a blogger and freelance writer. He lives on the north side of Chicago.

Despite this prime example of the liberal whose worldview is confined to a Martha’s Vineyard soiree, she was not usually so blinkered. While the Left of the early ’70s was lionizing blacklist era screenwriters and filmmakers like Dalton Trumbo and Lillian Hellman, Kael denounced them as joyless agitprop merchants whose politically correct comedies sank the screwball genre. She characterized their Hollywood descendants such as Robert Redford and Warren Beatty as creatively imprisoned by limousine liberalism.

Her ability to alienate both sides is all the more remarkable when one considers that these offenses occurred during the era of the “Silent Majority” and the New Left. Writers have compared Kael to such legendary film critics as James Agee and Otis Ferguson. Fellow critic Owen Gliebman even called her “the Elvis or the Beatles of film criticism.” But the figure she has the most in common with is George Orwell. Both warred against ideological fashion. Both approached their topics empirically and not with any preconceived theories. Both were willing to find value in pulp (Orwell in post-war boys’ weeklies with names like Modem Boy, Wizard, and Hotspur, Kael in Michael Keaton’s Batman). Both were uncomfortable with immorality: Orwell famously described Salvador Dali’s autobiography as a “book that stinks;” Kael’s condemnation of The Exorcist for the filmmaker’s willingness to exploit a thirteen-year-old actress and the script’s instructions for the priests to abuse her character mirrored the sentiments of conservative Christians at the time. In fact, Kael’s negative review of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange could have been written by Orwell himself:

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools.

There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality.

Kael never even attempted to be hip. She was old-fashioned enough to appreciate the charm of Cary Grant and to lament that Richard Lester’s gritty and wised-up 1973 version of The Three Musketeers didn’t even attempt heroism. Her ideology—which she described herself as George McGovern liberal—didn’t prevent her from finding vigilante films appealing, such as 1973’s Walking Tall, and locating that appeal in fears for her own safety in Miranda America.

It is this combination of refusing to be one with the herd and relentless honesty that makes The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael—including reviews of other dated films like Billy Jack and The Poseidon Adventure—so timeless.

Nothing in her background could have indicated such iconoclasm. In Brian Kellow’s excellent biography, A Life in the Dark, we see Kael as a Berkeley dropout in 1936 during the heyday of American Communism. From there, she migrated to Greenwich Village in New York City before returning to that most bohemian of cities, San Francisco. She was hired on the spot by City Lights when an editor heard her discussing film and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. One might have predicted that she would have drawn on her Berkeley experiences in approaching Chaplin, the darling of leftist intellectuals. But Limelight, which she referred to as “Slimelight,” was in her view a sickeningly sentimental film, not an expression of the superstructure. This recoil from crowd-pleasing pablum continued through the sixties. The Sound of Music, Kael wrote in a 1966 review, was “a sugarcoated lie that people seemed to want to eat.”

Even her writing process defied the tune-in-drop-out zeitgeist. Kellow’s biography shows a workaholic fueled by coffee and liquor, an anti-elitist who attended movies with the crowds rather than on nights set aside exclusively for the critics. Despite working at the stately New Yorker she was irreverent to the point of self-destructiveness; she could be depended upon at glittering parties to insult whoever was the publisher’s pet celebrity of the moment.

Kael’s determination as a critic to be one against the herd sometimes meant that films she denounced later became classics, and others she championed failed to age well. It almost felt like a reflex, a form of mindless rebellion when she raved about Straw Dogs, The Warriors, and Man of La Mancha (with a singing Sophia Loren) while roasting It’s A Wonderful Life and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Still, in today’s culture-war climate, where every reviewer has to be a pundit, reading Kael’s work is refreshing. It’s hard to imagine her praising someone like Michael Moore; one can imagine her saying his filmmaking resembles those religious documentaries that preach to the faithful. She may even have ended her review, as she frequently did, with an insult. Sadly, Kael’s brand of entertainment and relentless honesty is something of the past.

Ron Capshaw is a writer living in Midlothian, Virginia.

With these words, Richard Dawkins (yes, the Richard Dawkins) begins the foreword to Herb Silverman’s Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt, and Silverman deserves every word.

I first met Herb Silverman in the 1990s when we served on the board of the American Humanist Association, where his humor, clear thinking, and thoughtful nature helped move our meetings along. However, his attire and appearance, which trended toward the hippie end of sartorial splendor, explain why I was shocked to find a photo included in the book of Silverman dressed in an oversized tuxedo for a presentation he gave at Oxford. For a moment I thought Abraham Lincoln had risen from the grave.

Before reading Candidate Without a Prayer, I already knew of Silverman’s efforts on behalf of humanist and atheist causes, and that he’d taught mathematics at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, but his opening chapters were a revelation. Why? Because we grew up in very different worlds—I in an average Northern Minnesota family where religion or ethnicity was never an issue, and Herb in a Philadelphia family where Jewishness was everything. For young Herb this included a loving, “control freak” mother whose attentiveness to her son included ironing his shoelaces. (Yes, you read that right.) Thus, when Herb arrived at college, his roommate had to teach him how to boil water and change a light bulb.

I had expected Silverman’s pre-college chapters to be a bit of a slog (mine certainly would have been), but instead they provided a keen and unique look into Jewish culture. Though the entire book is first rate, those opening chapters were, for me, among the best. In addition to such valuable insights, it also turns out to be the most expensive book I’ve ever read. (More on that later.)

I was surprised to learn that Silverman had joined a fraternity in college, then pleased that he’d been elected its president. I was not surprised that he had been arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, that he had been an early advocate for women’s rights, or that, upon learning in 1990 that the South Carolina constitution prohibited atheists from holding public office, he decided to run for governor. Incidentally, that was when he met his future wife, whom he calls his first and only groupie. Silverman wasn’t elected governor but, as he puts it, “with politics in my blood … I decided to try to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a notary public.” This time he won. Bigotry lost.

In the ensuing years, Silverman founded the Secular Humanists of the Low Country, followed by the Coalition for the Community of Reason, which later evolved into the Secular Coalition for America (SCA). His tireless work for reason and against bigotry makes inspiring reading in chapters titled, “Discussions on Religion,” “Debates on Religion,” and “Essays on Religion.” Silverman then turns to his first occupational love in the chapter titled “Mathematics and God.”

Candidate Without a Prayer (Humanist Press’ first ebook) is a candid, well-written, and captivating read, but be advised: it might cost you. I was so moved by Silverman’s remarkable story, I donated $200 to the SCA. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

George Erickson is a former board member of the American Humanist Association and the author of four books, including Eyes Wide Open: Living, Laughing, Loving and Learning in a Religion-troubled World (2010). Visit his website at www.tundracub.com.

Born in the hinterlands of the Shenandoah Valley in 1922, Haun belonged to a rather different sort of farm family. Both of his parents were college educated; his father graduated from Hartford Theological Seminary, his mother from Lynchburg College. They were quite traditional when it came to matters of faith, however, and were deeply pious Christians. His father moved between teaching and preaching as a Congregational minister, school principal, and college professor, while his mother raised their children and taught music.

Unbelievable! is the story of Haun’s journey from that very traditional Christian rural upbringing to atheism, humanism, and the cutting edge of modern agricultural research. As he recounts his growth out of a somewhat laissez-faire fundamentalist family, via horse-drawn wagon, into the discipline and discovery of a life in science and agronomy, the author’s abiding pleasure is evident everywhere.

Like many others in his generation, Haun served in the military during World War II and was able to advance his education via the G.I. Bill, eventually earning a PhD in plant physiology. He went on to work for DuPont, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Clemson University. Along the way he developed the Haun scale, a measure of plant development that’s used around the world to predict crop yields during the course of a farm season. While the unpretentious author doesn’t make much of his contribution to science, a quick Internet search turns up page after page of references to the scale in a multitude of studies and applications, such as for the growth and development of cereal crops. (If you’re going to fold your hands and thank anyone before a meal, you should probably thank Joe Haun.)

The imperative story Haun conveys in this memoir is that fundamentalist religion poses a threat to human survival because it substitutes faith in authority for trust in reason and science. The benefits of pharmaceuticals over beseeching gods, of explanations from astrophysics over reliance on Genesis origin myths seem quite clear. But the author goes further in demonstrating how he was able to traverse the path from traditional religious faith to Enlightenment principles of conjecture, experiment, and proof, and shows how others can too.

Haun’s low-key style and traditional dedication to family and community may very well speak to a wider swath of Americans than Dawkins’ erudition or Hitchens’ pretentious stylizing. Haun’s life is an everyman tale, his shining accomplishments cast as attainable by anyone with a desire to know and a willingness to do the work required. His might be an easier path to follow for many who are caught between the faith of their ancestors and the clarity of the scientific method.

If there’s a fault in this volume, it’s that it tends to be a bit too prosaic in places. Tales of house building reminded me of Helen and Scott Nearing, those back-to-the-land academics who somewhat overtold their homesteading story. And a final section suggesting nonprofits and activist groups for the reader to support felt somewhat tacked on. Yet, home construction and charity are part and parcel of Joe Haun’s life—the very practical responses of a secular humanist making his way in the world and making the world better along that way.

Cecil Bothwell is the author of eight books including The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire and Whale Falls: An Exploration of Belief and Its Consequences. He is a member of the city council of Asheville, North Carolina.

I pointed out that the pill had emancipated women by making it possible for them to more effectively balance careers with families, and I suggested that religious groups should accept this because we aren’t going back. My opponent responded by accusing me of employing “tired 1970s rhetoric.”

I wish I had responded, “it’s more modern than your 1370s rhetoric!” (I always think of the best replies after the show’s over.)

I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately while researching the history of birth control. What I’ve learned is enlightening—and a reminder of how far we’ve come in a short time.

Here’s the short history: For quite some time reliable birth control was elusive. Men relied on methods like withdrawal, and women attempted to block access to the cervix with material like cotton or wool. Animal bladders were occasionally used to fashion a type of condom.

The vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear in the mid-nineteenth century was an important step forward, producing a more reliable condom. But these early versions, being thick and brittle, were hardly ideal. It wasn’t until the invention of the latex condom in 1920 that this form of birth control became widespread.

There were a few other options, but nothing short of a revolution occurred in 1960 with the invention of the oral contraceptive pill by Carl Djerassi. The pill has been called one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century, and that’s not hyperbole. Convenient, affordable, and reliable, the pill gave women and their partners the power to regulate family size. The term “family planning” entered the national lexicon, and a social movement was born.

But social revolutions often spark backlashes, and this one certainly did. By decoupling sex from procreation, the pill was seen as a great threat by entrenched religious interests holding prudish views on human sexuality. They went on the warpath.

Nineteenth-century Comstock laws in many states had not only banned birth control—they’d banned any material discussing it. But the New England region, then under the thumb of politically powerful Catholic bishops, had some of the most repressive laws in the country. So these archaic laws were dusted off and pressed into service in the post-pill era.

In 1967 birth control advocate Bill Baird was arrested for distributing contraceptive foam to students during a public lecture at Boston College. Interestingly, Baird’s arrest came a full two years after the Supreme Court had ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that a Connecticut law banning the sale of birth control to anyone—even married couples—was unconstitutional.

The Griswold precedent didn’t faze Massachusetts authorities. Baird’s crime, they said, was that he gave birth control to unmarried people—and that was still a violation of state law. Baird contested the arrest in court, and in 1972’s Eisenstadt v. Baird the Supreme Court voided his conviction and struck down the Massachusetts law.

I should note that the Massachusetts anti-birth control statute was no antiquated law with minor penalties. It was enforced, and violations were considered felonies. Baird had been facing ten years in prison for violating it.

I talked with Baird by telephone in March, just a few days after the fortieth anniversary of the high court ruling that bears his name. Now eighty, he is as feisty as ever and shared recollections with me about the 1967 fracas.

Baird recalled holding up the package of contraceptive foam for the audience to see. He had earlier arranged for a nineteen-year-old student to accept the package from him. “The moment I put it in her hands, the police came forward to arrest me,” Baird said, recalling that at the time of his conviction, standing in court, the judge declared him “a menace to society.”

Progressive religious groups made their peace with birth control early on, but the Catholic hierarchy and some extreme fundamentalist Protestants still maintain that contraception is a violation of God’s will or that “natural law” should govern how many children a woman has. These groups have worked to block every attempt at making birth control more accessible, both in the United States and abroad.

Baird knew early on that birth control would come into popular use over the objections of conservative religious groups. “From day one,” he told me, “I said this is a holy war.”

Given the widespread use of birth control these days, Catholic clerics often try to appear to be moderate over this issue in public. They say they’re not trying to block access to birth control and argue that they simply don’t want to provide it to the people who work in their programs.

The problem is, many of their programs—colleges, hospitals, and social service agencies—serve the public, are heavily subsidized with taxpayer funds, and hire lots of non-Catholics. Yet the bishops still demand the right to impose a medieval view of sexuality on their employees, many of whom don’t agree with it. The hierarchy’s view on this issue is so backward and out of step with the times that the overwhelming majority of U.S. Catholics stopped listening to them long ago. Surveys show that Catholic women use birth control at the same rate as non-Catholic women.

And make no mistake, the only reason the church hierarchy isn’t trying to ban birth control outright is because they know that under Griswold and Eisenstadt it’s a non-starter. So they pursue the next best thing: making it harder for people to obtain and use birth control.

To younger Americans, the idea that contraceptives might not be available sounds too far-fetched to even contemplate. After all, you can buy a package of condoms at any 7-11. But the fight is no longer about condoms. Especially for women in monogamous relationships (for whom the risk of STDs are low), it’s about the more expensive and more efficient forms of birth control—the pill, IUDs, implants, shots, patches, and even sterilization. These are the methods commonly covered by insurance plans, and it’s here that the bishops are making their assault.

The bishops are lobbying for a federal law that would allow any employer at any type of business, religious or secular, to deny birth control coverage to all employees if he or she is personally offended by it on religious grounds. If the church has its way, your reproductive rights could hinge on where your boss goes to church.

We may be far away from the days when the police dragged Bill Baird off for publicly displaying birth control devices. But if current trends continue, we may be very close to a day when millions of Americans lose access to a healthcare option they often take for granted.

Humanists like Baird led the fight to decriminalize birth control, a battle that improved the lives of people nationwide. With that right increasingly under attack, humanists once again need to step up and make it clear that access to safe, affordable, and effective contraception is a fundamental human right.

Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a board member of the American Humanist Association.