Category: Civil Rights

I Have Come to a Grimm Realization

Wow.

I was preparing a response to a Facebook post, and came to a horrible conclusion.

The post was one of those images that said: “Why is the 2nd Amendment the only one that requires a permit.”

This is what I realized.

The 1st Amendment:
The Speech, Assembly, and Journalism clauses are (by “law”) a fast track to the terror watch list.

The 2nd Amendment is highly contentious, but it really does tend to get trampled.

The 3rd Amendment… Well, this one is pretty much the only one that is good to go. I guess it is because it would be SUPER obvious if they fucked with this one.

The 4th Amendment gets new wholes poked in it every few days. There is a constant, gradual, erosion of the definition of reasonable.

The 5th Amendment, thanks to a recent court decision, is admissible as evidence in a court of law. Pleading the 5th now has the same legal impact as pleading guilty.

The 6th Amendment has been questionably enforced darned near from the start. Impartial is often active fought against by lawyers, and peers has rarely been enforced.

The 8th Amendment is a crap shoot at best. It is pretty much entirely at the whim of the judge to decide what is appropriate, as well as what is cruel and unusual.

The 9th Amendment is pretty much ignored by law makers in its entirety. It is almost as if it doesn’t even exist.

The 10th Amendment has been up for dispute pretty solidly… And the rights of the people presented there? I am not sure if that line would have even made it into the constitution if it were drafted at any point after 1900.

So, yeah, the 2nd Amendment gets abused, but it is far from the only one. The bulk of the Bill of Rights is pretty much under constant attack.

It is ok to have pet issues. It is ok to focus your energies on fighting for a single issue, or a few issues. Just don’t burry the other issues in the process. Do not make light of other issues or pretend they don’t exist.

Fight your fight, but don’t make it harder for your neighbor to fight their fight either. When it comes time to stand together, you don’t want to have to question if you are on the same team or not.

Imagine if You Were Powerless

Trigger Warning. I am not sure how to label it beyond that.
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The Trans Community lost a child last week. It’s probably not big news everywhere, it happens so often, but in my corner of the web things have exploded.

On 28 December, 2014, Leelah Alcorn walked in front of an oncoming truck. She was only a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday.

Since then members of the LGBTQ community and their allies have been posting about it on Facebook, Tweeting about it, and writing articles for various websites (such as the link above).

I have seen people label what happened as abuse and negligence, and I have seen people defend her parents as innocent. I am not going to voice my opinion in this article, because that is not what this post is about.

When she decided to leave, she left a message behind in the form of a set of Tumblr posts that were scheduled to post after the fact. Her Tumblr profile is no longer there but the various articles go into detail about what she said.

What has prompted this article however was what I have seen in conversations on Facebook.

I have seen people defend the parents’ innocence, insisting that they were in no way responsible for their child’s suicide.

I have seen people insist that being trans was a mental illness, a delusional disorder. They insisted that the parents were simply doing everything they could. They insisted that it was up to Leelah to dig deeper into her spiritual reserves to find inner strength to persevere just a little while longer.

I have seen people refer to her as delusional, a coward, selfish. They have expressed no sign of empathy or compassion for a child who was so lost that she would take her own life. They only expressed defensiveness because they felt their religion was coming under attack for the role that it played in this child’s death.

They insist that there was no abuse obvious in the stories they have read, or what they have heard from the family, who told CNN that they loved their SON unconditionally, but just couldn’t support THAT religiously.

For the Christians that are out there, that just don’t understand how there could possibly be any abuse in what the family did, or how it could possibly lead to a child’s death, please read on. I present here a thought exercise.

Imagine this:

You were born into a non-Christian family, but you came to know Christ. At a young age, your family found out about it, and forbid you from practicing.

They tell you it is just a phase and will soon pass.

You aren’t Christian, you are just confused.

They love you, but they just can’t accept this part of you.

They don’t let you talk to Christian friends. They look over your shoulder to be sure you aren’t visiting Christian websites. They go as far as to say there is no such thing as a Christian.

Now extend this out to the rest of your life. None of your friends at school, at least the ones you are allowed to talk to are Christian, and they either blow it off, or they actively attack you.

Imagine half of them don’t believe Christianity is a thing, and the other half believe you will burn in Hell for it.

Some are convinced you are going to aggressively recruit them, and verbally or physically attack you for even talking to them once they find out you are Christian.

Now extend it out further. The city council has voted in laws saying it is legal to discriminate against you because of who you are. You have committed no crime, but this existential part of your psyche is grounds to take away your rights.

People can legally declare self-defense if they attack you because your beliefs freak them out.

Extend this out further: your state legislature has passed laws saying that Christianity is an affront to their faith and an attack of civil society.

Your very existence is a blight on humanity. They are not only not going to censure your city level law makers, they are passing laws forbidding you from even taking the case to a civil or legal court.

Extend it out further: The national legislature is made up primarily of members of this majority religion. Some of them pay lip service to civil rights, but the rest actively work to codify the abuse you are receiving at the national level.

The Supreme Court, every member of which is this other religion, rules almost unanimously that there is no reason to protect your rights.

It’s your choice to believe in your God. They hold up the handful of Christians in the legislature as examples of why everything is perfectly fine.

Extend this out. The UN pays lip service to civil rights protections, but don’t really give a fuck. After all, they are all in the majority religion, or one of the larger groups.

The fact that it is unofficially, but effectively legal to kill you in the streets like a rabid dog is a primarily domestic issue.

Beyond that, your nation has veto power if the UN did decide to move.

There is a small ray of hope. There are obvious natural allies in the world, people who should understand your plight entirely. There are other Abrahamic religions who are also persecuted. They stand together with each other, and it would be expected that they should stand with you as well. Except they don’t most of the time.

Most of the time, members of these other two religions will pay lip service to having you around. They might even drag you from one party to another sometimes, to prove they have a Christian friend. When your back is against the wall though, they are just as freaked out by your Christianity as the members of the majority religion.

I know this sounds outlandish, but all I have really done is taken a description of the life of a member of the Trans community, and replaced them with religious labels and terms.

Even in places where great strides have been made for gay and lesbian men and women, trans people have been left in the dark. When they speak up, they are told by the LGB community that they are being selfish and asking for too much. I left off the T and the Q, because in this context the L and the G may as well be a bunch of cis straight dudes.

Try looking at the story through different eyes and see how different it looks.

Don’t look at everything from the perspective of the straight conservative Christian who is feeling insecure because someone has said their religion has caused harm to some minority.

Look at it for a moment through the eyes of a scared child, who belongs to a class of people who is a minority within the minority, whose very existence is treated as an abomination, and isn’t even allowed the strength that friends and family could provide.

Then ask if it is such a wild idea that she could have broken, that she could have found herself walking off into the darkness with no beacon to guide her home. The people who were responsible for holding the light up for her were the ones that took it away and left her to wander.

 

 

“Studies”

So,

About once a year we see “studies” released by research institutes that just happen to be run by religious organizations or conservative think tanks, that say that [Insert Minority Group A] tends to have a higher rate of suicide than those who are “normal.”

The one that sparked this response just happens to be a post saying that Atheists tend to have a higher suicide rate than Christians.

There is one factor that this willfully ignorant bastards consistently ignore when they interpret the “findings” from their “studies.”

Any time you have a group that is consistently physically and emotionally abused, ostracized, otherized, and treated in general as sub-human, you are going to have a higher rate of suicide.

Atheists, LGBT folk, Pagans, and other groups that the majority deems to be “unfavorable,” face very real persecution in this country.

And by persecution, I don’t just mean they get offended on a regular basis, or that their feelings get hurt. I mean that society looks the other way as they are attacked, physically and verbally. Society looks the other way as their homes and businesses are burned. There is an entire history of Atheists, and homosexuals being killed in the streets and the police shrugging it off and moving on. Just as often it happens in the back woods where their families aren’t even given the benefit of a proper funeral until their bodies are found months later.

For those in power who keep screaming “I’m being persecuted,” persecution is a real thing. And yes, persecution tends to lead people to be more inclined to do something stupid.

They do these “studies,” and point to them as evidence that whatever thing they find uncomfortable was obviously unholy and unnatural to begin with, while totally ignoring Human nature.

A person being an Atheist does not make them unstable or an abomination.
A person being gay does not make them unstable or an abomination.
A person being human does not make them unstable or an abomination.

A person being abused to the breaking point, being told that they are abominations, being told that they are un-American by their very existence, being kicked out of their homes, outcast by their families, abused by people that should be their friends, constantly in fear that they might be the next dead queer/witch/heathen in some assholes back pasture… THAT makes a person unstable.

The text of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

I do not normally copy and past other people’s work, but this piece of work is a very important one, and has been in the public domain for well over a century, especially given that it is a piece of legislation.

It is worth a read.

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An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
======

Jefferson later wrote, of the statute, that it contained “within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

This was the same man who wrote and championed the First Ammendment of our constitution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom

What Happened at the Congressional Hearing on Religious Accommodations in the Military?

So,

There was this thing recently with Congress. They somewhat set the tone a few months ago, when they up and canceled after all the involved parties had already landed at the airport.

Sadly, the tone continued, and Congress (or at least the sub-comity that deals with the military) has reinforced that they only take religious liberty seriously when it applies to their brand of their religion.

Yes, Weinstein is loud, and flamboyant, and angry, but he is also one of the handful of people who have had the will power and determination to take on this cause. He also was not near as angry a decade ago.

The goal is not to secularize the Chaplain Corps.

The goal is not to stomp out Christianity in the military. The only people you hear talking about that are the talking heads who make money off of fear.

The goal is simply to make room for the measurable number of service members who are currently unrepresented in the military.

In the current environment, there are no Humanist Chaplains, Secular or otherwise. People seeking to become Humanist lay leaders have to run a gambit, and fight an uphill battle, just to prove that they have a right to exist much less be allowed space in the Religious Programs. In fact, a few days ago the one “Atheist” lay leader that the Navy had approved was reclassified by his CO to fall under MWR rather than the Chapel. “This re-designation aligns the atheist-freethinker leader under the appropriate non-religious instruction.” Is how they describe this. I know that the guy apparently considers himself Atheist rather than Humanist, but still…

Some branches are better than others, and some commands are better than others. I personally have dealt with Chaplains that will do everything they can to support everyone spiritually, regardless of faith. I have also dealt with Chaplains though that would be all smiles and politics while a perspective lay leader is in the room, and then once they left specifically suggest that I not support that person because he is not sure he wants their kind in the Chapel.

Christianity is not in any danger of being driven out of the Military. It is not even in any danger of being replaced as the majority religion. There is no danger there. What does feel like a very real and present threat though, especially with the new comity leaders that are coming into place in congress, is the danger that many minority groups may be trampled, with the vast majority of the herd that is trampling them not even knowing it is happening.

The majority of Service Members are Christian. This is true. Not all are though. Many service members are not Christian, Muslims, or Jews. The military handles these three faiths just fine.

A large number of service members either have no religion or fall into a category not currently available in the military records system.

A measurable number of service members specifically consider themselves Humanists. The last time I checked, the reported number was 3.6%. That is a higher percentage than some Christian groups that have multiple chaplains, and have no problems getting lay leaders approved. That is three times the rate of Jewish service members, and the military is actively seeking Rabbis.

Embedded in all of the appropriate documents, from the manuals that organize the military, all the way to the instructions that organize and direct the Chaplain Corps of the various services, is a message of inclusiveness. On paper, the military does not endorse ANY religion, or “faith group,” and supports them all.

In practice, we still have a long way to go.

Humanists have been doing everything they can to express the need for support. Congress has done everything they can to make it known that they do not give a damn what we need.

The most screwed up part is that the party giving us the most grief is the one who has screamed “Support our Troops!” at the top of their lungs for at least as long as I have been alive.

I actually typed most of this a few days ago, but I got side tracked mid-rant. This is probably a good thing, because on review, I think this is a good stopping point for now.

I will include a link to an article on the subject. The first link I saw was written by Mikey Weinstein. He has been in the fight too long, and what he wrote showed it. The guy needs a rest. This article was posted on a Humanist news site, and is a lot more level headed. Anger may be useful for rallying the troops, but it isn’t the best tool for explaining your needs to those who don’t quite understand.

http://thehumanist.com/news/national/what-happened-at-the-congressional-hearing-on-religious-accommodations-in-the-military

When You Say “Support Our Troops,” Think About What That Actually Means

General rule of thumbs:

If you are not prepared for people to voice their opinion, avoid making controversial posts.

If you have comments to make about the troops, and you have troops on your friends list, assume that they are likely to see those comments. Assume that there are going to be times that they cannot hold their tongue.

And when you make comments about the troops, remember that they do not all think the same. Even if what you are saying is something that is agreed upon by about half the troops (that is a higher percentage than you can actually expect for us to agree on anything), the flip side of that is that about half don’t agree.

Supporting the Troops does not automatically mean supporting the regime that is sending them to die.

Supporting the troops does not mean buying into every bit of ra ra Jingoistic propaganda that you see.

It sure as hell doesn’t mean blowing the troops off when their opinions don’t match the image that you have in mind of how they should think and act and feel.

I hold my tongue on a lot. I hold my tongue on most things. There are limits however beyond which I have a moral obligation as a member of the United States Armed Services, as a Citizen of the United States of America, and as a plain old Human being to speak up and say something.

If I see posts that are purely religious in nature, I am generally going to ignore them. It is your right to hold whatever religious beliefs you want. I am not going to judge that.

I ignore a lot of posts that are just plain dumb, or misinformed unless it is something I can actually be of help on in some way.

I generally try to avoid offending people whenever I can.

However, when I see posts talking about the constitution, about people’s rights, about what a person thinks it means to support our troops, those are kind of things I have to speak up on if I disagree. They are things that are very personal to me, and quite often have a direct impact on me and my way of life.

When people say “Support our Troops,” I am one of those troops.

When people say “The troops fought and died for your right to do such and such,” we also generally fight and die for your right not to do it as well.

When people speak about freedom of religion, and how something is trampling their rights, Freedom of Religion is Freedom to practice ANY religion, not just yours.

When someone says that preventing them from trampling someone else’s rights is taking away their rights… There is a world for that, and it is plain old bullshit.

I am opinionated about certain things, but as a general rule they are things that I am very passionate about for one reason or another. When it comes to issues of what our troops fight and die for, that one is about as personal as you can get.