World Poll Finds Striking Connection Between [More] Wealth And [Less Belief That] Belief In God [Is Essential To Morality]
Afghan children learn to read the Quran, Islam's holy book, at a local Madrassa, or seminary, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, March. 3, 2014. Islamic seminaries in Afghanistan are generally considered a source of education for poor families and children whose families could not afford expensive fees of formal schools. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
by Stephen Calabria Posted: 03/13/2014 7:40 pm EDT Updated: 03/14/2014 2:59 pm EDT
The survey of people in 40 countries found that majorities in 22 countries believed that having God in one’s life was essential to being a moral person. Majorities in all five African countries surveyed, as well as every Middle Eastern country except Israel, believed God is vital to a person’s morality.
The reaction was mixed in other parts of the world. While majorities in most countries in Latin America and in the Asia/Pacific region believed God necessary for a moral life, no European country surveyed had a majority saying the same. The United States registered a slight majority believing God was necessary to be an moral person, while Canada registered a strong majority in the opposite direction.
Opinions broke down along largely economic lines. The higher a country’s GDP, the less likely its citizens were to believe God necessary for a moral life. The exceptions were the United States and China.
“Americans are much more likely than their economic counterparts to say belief in God is essential to morality, while the Chinese are much less likely to do so,” the report says.
Pew's survey included telephone and face-to-face interviews of 40,080 people from 2011 to 2014.
Nigeria attacks: 100 killed in attacks on villages in Kaduna
In central Nigeria, the settled farming community has been the target of attacks
At least 100 villagers have been killed in Nigeria's central Kaduna state in attacks linked to disputes between ethnic groups, officials say.
16 March 2014 Last updated at 08:50 ET
Heavily armed men entered three villages in the Kaura district in the south of the state.
It is not clear who was behind the attacks, but residents blame members of the mainly Muslim Fulani tribe.
Central Nigeria has often witnessed violence stemming from disputes over land and religion.
Thousands of people have been killed in recent years in violence blamed on semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen attacking Christian farmers.
A member of Kaduna's state assembly, Yakubu Bitiyong, visited the scene of the most recent attacks, which took place on Friday night.
Most of those killed in the villages of Ugwar Sankwai, Ungwan Gata and Chenshyi, had been so badly burned they could not be identified, he told the BBC. Houses were destroyed by fire and food supplies looted.
Mr Bitiyong said two of the attackers were also killed and their bodies taken away by police, who have sent in reinforcements.
The unrest is not connected with the continuing Islamist insurgency carried out by the Boko Haram group, which wants to impose Sharia law in the north.
The attacks in Kaduna came only a day after reports emerged of 69 people being killed over several days in northern Katsina state when dozens of armed men arrived in villages on motorbikes.
Violence in that area has also been blamed on Fulani attacking local farmers from the Muslim Hausa ethnic group, rather than the Christian community.
Religious Violence Across World Hits Six Year High According To Pew Study 01/23/2014 (Reuters) – Violence and discrimination against religious groups by governments and rival faiths have reached new highs in all regions of the world except the Americas, according to a new Pew Research Centre report [ http://www.pewforum.org/2014/01/14/religious-hostilities-reach-six-year-high/ ]. Social hostility such as attacks on minority faiths or pressure to conform to certain norms was strong in one-third of the 198 countries and territories surveyed in 2012, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, it said on Tuesday. [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/14/religious-violence-pew-survey_n_4596169.html [with comments]
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Ted Cruz Is Now the Tattooed Badass Rock Star of the GOP’s Dreams
While the process has been in the works for years now, the exact moment at which tattoos stopped seeming edgy and cool can be dated to Thursday night in California. The cause of death was a series of posters [ http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/14/Ted-Cruz-Posters-Appear-in-Beverly-Hills ] plastered around Los Angeles of a shirtless Sen. Ted Cruz covered in ink with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, looking like a cross between a gang-banger and a Social Distortion fanboy.
Social Distortion are a very influential So-Cal band known for their bluesy punk and rockabilly style, something I wouldn’t assume needs explaining anywhere else besides an article about Ted Cruz.
Despite having his head photoshopped onto the type of body that Cruz supporters live in mortal terror of on a daily basis, the reactions online to the makeover [ https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/444834924609019904 ] from some on the right have been rather positive.
“Actually, kinda cool looking,” wrote one Free Republic commenter [ http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3133539/posts ]. “Maybe we can all get tats and stuff and form a ‘gang’. Call it the Patriot Gang or something. Put some drive-by fear into the liberals.”
You can’t really blame them, I suppose, this literally being the first time a Republican has ever appeared with a modicum of cool in known existence, unless you count the time Rand Paul came out as a Minor Threat straight-edge hardcore fan [ https://twitter.com/lukeoneil47/status/439852635143688193 ] a couple weeks ago.
Look closer, and the piece on his right arm appears to be an image of the old British Bulldog himself, which makes sense because Cruz is scheduled to appear at the Claremont Institute’s annual Winston Churchill dinner. The dinner in question, however, will be held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, not the Beverly Hilton, as the posters advertise. Perhaps a bit of misdirection from libtards hoping to confuse attendees on their way to their event? Although that doesn’t add up, because anyone attending a Claremont Institute dinner would be cowering in the backseat afraid to look out the window driving in any of the neighborhoods where the posters appeared. Tickets for the sold-out event range between $250-15,000.
UPDATE: The images appear to be the work of a Los Angeles artist Leonard Sabo [ https://www.facebook.com/sabo.unsavoryagent/photos ], who posted an attempt at the design back on March 9. I’ve reached out to Sabo for comment, and will update when I hear back. His political and artistic views are, uh, interesting, to put it mildly, most offensive of which is that he seems to think Cruz could actually be president some day.
Ah for every one step forward two steps backward. The Pew Research Center just published a survey [ http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-many-see-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/ (the same as referenced in the first item in this post)] conducted in 40 countries demonstrating that many people in the world still hold onto the idea that one must believe in god to be moral. That view is more common in the poorer countries; and the idea is nearly universal in Africa and the Middle East (with the exception of Israel). The survey is deeply depressing because the idea that faith in god is essential to morality is one of humanity's most dangerous and destructive myths.
Five Pillars
As I argued in Beyond Cosmic Dice [ http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Cosmic-Dice-Moral-Random/dp/0981931103 ], religion pathologically persists in service of five different masters of human weakness: fear of death and the promise of seeing lost loved ones; the need to explain away the unknown; hope for controlling one's destiny; a desire for social cohesion; and the corrupting allure of political power. So we create, each of us, and collectively, a god who is all-powerful and all-knowing to address some combination of these five masters, or all of them.
There is no link between morality and the five pillars; nothing about being moral would lead to a belief in god. The two concepts do not intersect. The history of religion proves the point.
That morality does not derive from, or lead to, religion has been the conclusion of some of our greatest minds, including David Hume, the father of religious studies. Due to certain inconveniences, like the possibility of being burned alive at the stake, Hume restricted his writings to polytheism. But it takes no great leap to read between the lines and apply his words to monotheism and Christianity in particular. Hume did not believe morality is a gift from god because he thought religion a false construct and therefore no foundation for human behavior or thought. Instead, humanity's first beliefs in a higher power were borne of ignorance and fear of the natural world: every disaster that befalls us demands an explanation. Naturally, multiple unknown causes leads to the idea of multiple powers; polytheism is the natural state of a primitive mind.
We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed amongst the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear.
From Many, One
But so too does this apply to belief in one god; one is just a derivative of many. The idea of powerful gods, or a god, controlling each important aspect of our lives would not by itself be satisfying. We want to put a face to the power; we want to be familiar with the deities that control our fate; we want to know them so that we can communicate with them and solicit their interventions. We are all Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, seeking to reveal the nature of the man behind the curtain, hoping to strike up a conversation with whoever is in charge.
By no coincidence then do our gods take on idealized human form. Our egoistic species has a universal tendency to transfer human-like qualities to surrounding objects, giving them characteristics that are familiar to us. This tendency to anthropomorphize everything around us has the consequence that we attribute human malice or benevolence to inanimate objects, and of course to the gods above. With their human form, gods also take on human personalities, with passions and weaknesses that make them jealous, vengeful, spiteful, fickle, wicked and foolish. How comforting to know that one's fate and fortune, tossed about by unknown causes, can be controlled by dialogue with an invisible power that possesses familiar sentiments and intelligence!
But attributing human qualities to a higher power has a paradoxical consequence, one leading inevitably to the idea of multiple gods, at least initially. We raise our own estimation of ourselves as god-like, but diminish the power of the very gods we create by humanizing them. Once again, Hume is right on the money:
They suppose their deities, however potent and invisible, to be nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites, together with corporeal limbs and organs. Such limited beings, though masters of human fate, being, each of them, incapable of extending his influence everywhere, must be vastly multiplied, in order to answer the variety of events, which happen over the whole face of nature. Thus every place is stored with a crowd of local deities; and thus polytheism has prevailed.
The idea that deities are "nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind" of course applies to more than the old discarded gods of the past. The words exactly describe Jesus. The link between the one god of today and the many of the past is forged in steel. The characteristics that originated in polytheism continued to apply even as the number of gods diminished. One could argue, in fact, that today's religions are not truly monotheistic. Christianity has created hundreds of objects of worship in the guise of saints, who have become minor gods to many followers. So this conclusion from Hume is particularly poignant:
...it will appear, that the gods of all polytheists are not better than the elves or fairies of our ancestors, and merit as little any pious worship or veneration. These pretended religionists are really a kind of superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being, that corresponds to our idea of deity.
So we conclude that most of the multiple divinities of the ancient world were supposed to have been human or human-like, thereby diminishing their power. Yet Christianity is no different: we have Jesus, in the flesh, bleeding like a regular guy, no different from what Hume disparages in his idea of a cruder polytheistic god. Like many gods, one god is nothing better than the elves or fairies of our ancestors. Nowhere in this narrative is there any suggestion that morality is linked to religion, or that morality elsewhere derived would lead to a belief in god.
While I emphasize David Hume as the father of religious studies, we cannot neglect to mention its grandfather, Baruch de Spinoza, who preceded Hume by almost 100 years. When Spinoza took on the question of ethics he created a path to secular enlightenment that Hume did not fully assimilate. I raise this here because at no point in Spinoza's masterpiece, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus did he ever link the development of human morality with a future belief in god. As did Hume later, Spinoza concluded that the history of religion precludes any connection at all between morality and religion, in any order.
Poseidon and Morality
Religion's history begs an important question: why of all the gods does the god of Abraham own the right to morality? The history of religion can be understood as the winnowing of gods from many to one. What this means is that all of us are atheists, even the most devout, undoubting, dedicated priest, rabbi or mullah. Atheist means "without god," and all of us are without at least some gods. All monotheistic believers reject all gods, except one. They reject all the Greek elder gods Cronus, Gaea, Uranus, Rhea, Oceanus, Tethys, Hyperion, Mnemosyne, Themis, Iapetus, Coeus, Crius, Phoebe, Thea, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, Metis, and Dione. Muslims, Jews and Christians all deny the existence of the Greek Olympic gods Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Hera, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, Artemis, and Hephaestus. All major religions today dismiss as nothing but myth the Roman gods Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Venus, Cupid, Mercury, Minerva, Ceres, Proserpine, Vulcan, Bacchus, Saturn, Vesta, Janus, Uranus and Maia. Yet this roster of gods was real to multiple thousands of people for thousands of years, every bit as real as the one god worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews today. Was the morality derived from a belief in those gods any different from what we see today with one? If asked, Christians, Jews and Muslims today would use numerous and diverse reasons to deny the existence of Greek and Roman gods, who were so important to so many people for so long. I simply extend that reasoning to include the one remaining god. Everybody rejects as silly the idea of gods; I merely exclude the existence of one more god than those who consider themselves religious.
Something that we all reject is hardly a sound basis for morality. A more compelling basis would be the Tooth Fairy. Hear me out. No adult takes the myth seriously, of course. Yet the evidence for the existence of the Tooth Fairy is in fact more compelling than that for any other belief system. As a child, you put your recently yanked tooth under your pillow. The next morning, lo and behold, you have a dollar where the tooth used to be. That is concrete, real, undeniable evidence that the Tooth Fairy came to visit during the night. What other explanation could be possible with such incontrovertible evidence? What could be more compelling: you can hold that dollar in your hand, and you know for a fact that the previous night only a tooth lay beneath your head. The Tooth Fairy exists, end of story. Now, science might try to convince you, as a five-year-old, that there indeed is a more rational explanation for the nocturnal switch, such as a caring parent acting the part, for example, but you will have none of it. You believe the Tooth Fairy exists, have evidence to support your belief, and dismiss the scientific explanation as heretical. Just a bunch of pointy-head liberals who don't understand that of course the Tooth Fairy is real.
Fortunately, we all grow out of believing in the Tooth Fairy. Well, no, we don't. We just transfer that belief to something we call "god." God is the Tooth Fairy, and the Tooth Fairy is god. Instead of looking for a dollar under our pillow, we look to miracles as evidence to support our belief, ignoring the fact that belief cannot be supported by evidence. Yet, we insist. We see statues of the Virgin Mary crying blood, or the face of Jesus on an eggplant, or witness a healer laying hands giving ambulation to the disabled. Instead of the story involving a tooth and quarter, our narrative becomes more complex (we are adults after all), with the plot thickening to include creation and an afterlife. But both stories are made up, figments of our imagination, equally supported by "evidence." Both are valid only because we believe. The first impulse would be to dismiss as completely absurd any equality between god and the Tooth Fairy. But resist the temptation, and ask yourself a simple question: how do the two really differ? Whatever argument you come up with to support a belief in god, can you not also apply to the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, or trolls under a bridge in Ireland? Yes, of course, the concept that the Tooth Fairy is real is lunacy. But so, too, the belief in god. The notion that god exists is as childish and as silly as the belief that a mythical creature enters your bedroom at night to give alms for your milk teeth. This is a poor foundation for human morality.
Morality and Biology
Fortunately, we can understand the basis for morality without invoking god either as a cause or a consequence. Morals are not derived from religion, nor god's grant of free will, but instead arise from inherent characteristics embedded in human nature as a consequence of our sociality. What we view as moral behaviors -- kindness, reciprocity, honesty, respect for others -- are social norms that evolved in the context of a highly social animal living in large groups. The evolution of these social norms enabled a feeble creature to overcome physical limitations through effective cooperation. Morality is a biological necessity and a consequence of human development. Morality is our biological destiny, deeply embedded in the human psyche. Our moral characteristics are primeval adaptations that helped our ancestors survive. In a world of dangerous predators, early man could thrive only through mutual cooperation: good (moral) behavior strengthened the tribal bonds that were essential to survival. What we now call morality is really a suite of behaviors favored by natural selection in an animal weak alone but strong in numbers. Religion has nothing to do with morality: our understanding of human history, and the development of religion over the ages provides compelling evidence that morality is not derived from religion, nor leads to a belief in god. Morality is an embedded human trait that has been corrupted and lost in the cathedrals of false promise and empty threats of eternal damnation. Human are moral without being bribed and cowed; we are moral because we are human. We do not need religion to offer us a morality nurtured on fear and hope or based on the ideas derived from primitive nomadic tribes from 2000 years ago; our morality is stronger than that.
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The logistics of Noah's Ark. People actually believe this story. It's time for a dose of reality. The YouTubers known as KaseyAkira, Bluetrilobite, and Vashcat encouraged me to debunk the story of Noah's Ark.
http://www.mq.edu.au/ Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell and leading American atheist and co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Dan Barker debate the topic, 'Without God we are nothing'. The debate was a joint venture between two student groups, the recently-established Macquarie University Atheist League and the Catholic Society of Saint Dominic at the University. The debate took place in March 11, 2010
Richard Dawkins and Catholic Cardinal George Pell discuss religion, morals and evolution on Q&A. (10-4-2012 ABC TV) It baffles me how the Catholic hierarchy can concede most of the bible stories are myths, but continue to teach it as fact in Sunday school, religious schools and in church. The only part of the bible the Catholic church stands by is the death and resurrection of Christ. If the most senior catholics dont believe 99% of the bible why should anyone else?
Cardinal George Pell has admitted there was a systemic cover-up of child abuse at an inquiry. Loretta Ryan and Derryn Hinch discuss the day's hot topics.
How did Pell rise to prominence? How has he handled abuse claims in the past? What motivates him, and how deep does his political influence go? Marr answers all that and more with Heather Ewart chairing the conversation.
Today (5 March 2014) is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and a day of fasting and abstinence. Catholics are called to give up meat and limit meals on this day - we do this in order to overcome our attachments to earthly things, and draw closer to God -- just as Jesus did during his 40-days in the desert. Have you prepared your resolutions for the next 40 days? To kick-start your Lenten journey, here is reflection for Ash Wednesday by Cardinal George Pell, who is now the Prefect of the new Secretariat for the Economy, Rome. Today is a day to make a change in your life... are you ready?
By Jessica R. Posted: 03/14/2014 11:52 am EDT Updated: 03/14/2014 11:59 am EDT
The Affordable Care Act makes effective birth control more affordable for millions of women by requiring employer-based health plans to include no-cost coverage for contraceptives. On March 25, the Supreme Court will hear arguments [ https://www.aclu.org/religion-belief-reproductive-freedom/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-conestoga-wood-specialties-corp-v ] from companies that want to violate this law. Here is a story from one of the many women whose boss has tried to deny her birth control. For fear of losing her job, she requested to remain anonymous. Jessica R. is not her real name.
For the past three years, I have worked at the same Catholic university that I attended as a student. I love my job, and I can't afford to lose it. But I'm afraid that I will be fired if I press my employer about whether contraception should be covered in our health plan. No one should be forced to choose between her job and her dignity, but that's what I feel I'm being forced to do right now.
When I was first hired, the Human Resources secretary quickly told me that neither of the school's two health insurance options covered birth control. But when I looked through the plan brochures, I noticed that contraception was not actually listed as something that was excluded. When I called the insurance companies myself, I found that they did both cover birth control -- HR just didn't want me to know it.
For over a year, I had no problem getting my birth control pills covered. I went off of birth control to have a child -- a beautiful baby girl. After she was born, I went back on the pill because my husband and I weren't yet ready for another child.
You can imagine my surprise when my pharmacy told me out of the blue one day that my insurance company had denied coverage for my monthly prescription. Assuming it was just some sort of administrative error, I called my insurer. But there was no mistake -- my employer had demanded that the insurance company refuse to cover birth control for employees unless they had a "prior authorization" from their OB-GYN. My doctor agreed to write a letter explaining that I needed birth control for contraceptive purposes. But according to the insurance company, family planning isn't "medically necessary," and the insurance company denied coverage again. I had to go back to my OB-GYN and ask her to tell the insurance company the second reason why I need birth control pills: to regulate my periods. My doctor did, and the authorization was ultimately accepted.
After the insurance company first denied me birth control, but before I learned that it was my employer who'd demanded they change their policies, I made an appointment with the university's Human Resources director. I assumed it was a problem with the insurance company, and thought our HR director would want to know. Boy, was I wrong. The HR director told me that birth control is something the university should never be expected to cover, and that I should be more responsible for my reproduction and "proud" of my child. Using birth control is the responsible decision for me and my family, and I was outraged that he would suggest that my family planning decisions somehow called into question my love for my daughter.
Ever since that conversation, the HR director gives me dirty looks whenever I pass him in the hallway. I discussed the situation with my boss, who was sympathetic, but advised me not to bring it up to anyone else in the university's administration... because they might fire me.
I love my job and can't afford to lose it, which is why I bite my tongue when I see the HR director, and why I'm not using my real name in this blog. But I should not have to choose between keeping my job and losing my dignity.
Maher on GOP Voters: ‘Corporate America’s Useful Idiots’
by Evan McMurry | 12:03 pm, March 16th, 2014
On Sunday morning, Meet the Press’ Harry Smith profiled Bill Maher during the comedian’s red state tour, and found him just as pugnacious about the GOP’s “useful idiots” on their home turf as he is on his HBO show.
“In the last twenty years, it’s not really been a choice,” Maher said as to whether Democrats or Republicans were more to blame for the country’s current malaise. “They just drove the short bus to crazy town.”
“I understand why the richest 1% vote Republican,” Maher continued. “They deserve those votes. They represent the richest 1% perfectly. Anybody else who does, just corporate America’s useful idiots.”
But Maher said his show went over like gangbusters, even in Romney strongholds. “There is not a place in America so red that I can’t get 3,000 screaming atheists to come see me — on a Sunday,” Maher said.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Media Should Stop Giving Space To Climate Change And Science Deniers
by Jack Mirkinson Posted: 03/10/2014 8:16 am EDT Updated: 03/10/2014 9:59 am EDT
Count everyone's favorite astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, among the list of people who think the media should stop giving equal time to climate change deniers and their ilk.
I think the media has to sort of come out of this ethos that I think was in principle a good one, but doesn't really apply in science. The ethos was, whatever story you give, you have to give the opposing view, and then you can be viewed as balanced...you don't talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let's give equal time to the flat-earthers.
Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick. You know, I said this once and it's gotten a lot of Internet play, I said the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
I guess you can decide whether or not to believe in it, but that doesn't change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.
Cosmos: A SPACETIME ODYSSEY Presented by FOX Sun 9/8c and National Geographic Mon 10/9c Full Episodes Watch Latest Episode: Standing Up In The Milky Way Season: 1 Episode: 1 Expires: 49 days A thrilling, new adventure across space and time begins. http://www.cosmosontv.com/watch/183733315515
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (linked in):
Justice Scalia's Past Comes Back To Haunt Him On Birth Control
AP Photo / Evan Vucci
Sahil Kapur – March 24, 2014, 6:00 AM EDT42087
When the Supreme Court hears two landmark cases about birth control .. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/supreme-court-birth-control-mandate-hobby-lobby .. on Tuesday, few observers doubt that Justice Antonin Scalia's sympathies will be the Christian business owners who charge that the mandate violates their religious liberties.
The Reagan-appointed jurist is a devout Catholic who has extolled "traditional Christian virtues" and insists the devil is "a real person." He even has a son who's a Catholic priest. He voted in 2012 to wipe out Obamacare in its entirety and has been President Barack Obama's most outspoken foe on the Supreme Court.
And yet, Scalia's past jurisprudence stands contradictory to the argument for striking down the Obamacare rule in question, which requires for-profit employers' insurance plans to cover contraceptives (like Plan B, Ella and intrauterine devices) for female employees without co-pays.
In 1990, Scalia wrote the majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith .. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/494/872 , concluding that the First Amendment "does not require" the government to grant "religious exemptions" from generally applicable laws or civic obligations. The case was brought by two men in Oregon who sued the state for denying them unemployment benefits after they were fired from their jobs for ingesting peyote, which they said they did because of their Native American religious beliefs.
"[T]he right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability," Scalia wrote in the 6-3 majority decision, going on to aggressively argue that such exemptions could be a slippery slope to lawlessness and that "[a]ny society adopting such a system would be courting anarchy."
"The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind," he wrote, "ranging from compulsory military service, to the payment of taxes, to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races."
That opinion could haunt the jurist if he seeks to invalidate the birth control rule.
"Scalia will have to reckon with his own concern in Smith about the lawlessness and chaos created by liberal exemptions to generally applicable law," said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA. "For him to uphold an exemption now is to invite more of the lawlessness that he warned about."
Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell, also addressed the tension.
"Justice Scalia's opinion in the Smith case offered a number of grounds for the conclusion that the Free Exercise Clause does not entitle religious objectors to exceptions from neutral laws of general application," Dorf wrote in SCOTUSblog .. http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/02/symposium-why-is-rfra-still-valid-against-the-federal-government/ , observing that Scalia also posited that judges weren't "competent" to decide which religions were deserving of exemptions.
In response to Scalia's decision, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, which says any law that "substantially burden[s]" a person's exercise of religion must demonstrate a "compelling governmental interest" and employ the "least restrictive means" of furthering that interest. That's the basis under which Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, two businesses with religious owners, are suing for relief from the birth control rule.
And that might offer Scalia an escape hatch. Experts say he could conceivably decide that the First Amendment doesn't permit a religious entity to be exempt from the law but that RFRA suffices to let Hobby Lobby and certain others off the hook from the birth control rule. But even then, the RFRA argument isn't clear-cut. Nineteen Democratic senators who voted for the law in 1993 have filed an amicus brief .. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/democratic-senators-supreme-court-birth-control-amicus-brief .. insisting that it doesn't -- and was never intended to -- give for-profit companies a pass on the law.
It's up to Scalia and the other justices to parse that question. If he axes the mandate on the basis of RFRA, he still has to contend with his earlier argument that such an outcome carries grave dangers for the rule of law.
"To permit this," he wrote in Smith, quoting from an old court decision, "would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."
This article has been updated to clarify the religious background of the plaintiffs.
It’s fairly common for conservative economists to try and shout down any discussion of income distribution by claiming that distribution is a trivial matter compared with the huge gains from economic growth. For example, Robert Lucas .. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3333&; :
---- Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. ----
The usual answer to this is to point out that we don’t actually know much about how to produce rapid economic growth — conservatives may think they know (low taxes and all that), but there is no evidence to back up their certainty. And on the other hand, we know how to make a big difference to income distribution, especially how to reduce extreme poverty. So why not work on what we know, as at least part of our economic strategy?
---- An increase in GDP per capita resulted in an insignificant decline in stunting. And when the researchers compared the changes in GDP to the changes in the number of wasting and underweight children, there was no correlation at all.
“It wasn’t that [the association] was just weak or small,” Subramanian told Shots. That was the case, he said, especially for stunting. More striking was the fact that the effect overall “was just practically zero.” He says things like unequal income distribution and lack of efficient implementation of public services are possible causes. ----
Yes, rapid growth is good, but it doesn’t solve all problems even if you know how to make it happen, which you don’t.
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.
By RANDALL BALMER May 27, 2014
One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.
This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.
Some of these anti-Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
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Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
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So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”
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Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders, especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
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Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience, toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad, evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this issue of human life, and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? is causing real waves, among church people and governmental people too.”
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes.
Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals. And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed imperial ambitions.
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
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The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
FILE - This May 17, 1954 file photo shows, from left, George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit joining hands as they pose outside the Supreme Court in Washington. The three lawyers led the fight for abolition of segregation in public schools before the Supreme Court, which ruled today that segregation is unconstitutional. On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races. (AP Photo, File)
Updated: 3:10 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014 | Posted: 3:08 p.m. Friday, May 16, 2014
EDITOR'S NOTE: On May 17, 1954, a hushed crowd of spectators packed the Supreme Court, awaiting word on Brown v. Board of Education, a combination of five lawsuits brought by the NAACP's legal arm to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court decided unanimously that "separate but equal" education denied black children their constitutional right to equal protection under the law, effectively removing a cornerstone that propped up Jim Crow, or state-sanctioned segregation of the races.
AP reporter Herb Altschull chronicled the court's decision and what it meant for segregation, which in 1954 permeated many aspects of American life. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change. He noted that Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Herbert Brownell, the current attorney general, were in the courtroom. He reported the immediate, steely resistance of Gov. Herman Talmadge and Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, where opposition to integration was strong. He described how Chief Justice Earl Warren departed from procedure and read the decision before distributing copies, and he quoted an optimistic Thurgood Marshall, the "Negro attorney from New York" who argued part of the case, as saying he believed Southerners would honor the Brown decision.
More importantly, Altschull explained that segregation wouldn't disappear overnight, and "a lengthy delay" in implementing Brown was likely — a statement that proved prescient.
Additional action by the Supreme Court was required before integration finally took hold in U.S. classrooms, and vestiges of segregation linger to this day. Among the justices who heard those cases was Marshall, who was head of the NAACP's legal operation at the time of the Brown decision and went on to become the Supreme Court's first black justice in 1967.
Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making Altschull's compelling report available to its subscribers.
By HERB ALTSCHULL The Associated Press May 17, 1954
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled today that the states of the nation do not have the right to separate Negro and white pupils in different public schools.
By a unanimous 9-0 vote, the high court held that such segregation of the races is unconstitutional.
Chief Justice Warren read the historic decision to a packed but hushed gallery of spectators nearly two years after Negro residents of four states and the District of Columbia went before the court to challenge the principle of segregation.
The ruling does not end segregation at once. Further hearings were set for this fall to decide how and when to end the practice of segregation. Thus a lengthy delay is likely before the decision is carried out.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state under former President Harry Truman, was in the courtroom to hear the ruling. He called it "great and statesmanlike."
Atty. Gen. Brownell was also present. He declined comment immediately. Brownell and the Eisenhower administration, like Truman's, opposed segregation.
For years 17 southern and "border" states have imposed compulsory segregation on approximately two-thirds of the nation's Negroes. Officials of some states already are on record as saying they will close the schools rather than permit them to be operated with Negro and white pupils in the same classrooms.
In its decision, the high court struck down the long-standing "separate but equal" doctrine first laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 when it maintained that segregation was all right if equal facilities were made available for Negroes and whites.
Here is the heart of today's decision as it deals with this hotly controverted doctrine:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities?"
"We believe that it does."
James C. Hagerty, presidential press secretary, told a news conference the White House would have no comment at this time. He noted that Warren's opinion said formulation of specific decrees must await later hearings.
Gov. Herman Talmadge, one of the most outspoken supporters of segregation, hit back from Atlanta that the court's decision had reduced the constitution to "a mere scrap of paper."
"It has blatantly ignored all law and precedent and usurped from the Congress and the people the power to amend the Constitution and from the Congress the authority to make the laws of the land," Talmadge said.
Thurgood Marshall, Negro attorney from New York who had argued the case against segregation last December, said he was highly pleased that the decision was unanimous and that the language used was unequivocal.
"Once the decision is made public to the South as well as to the North," Marshall said, "The people will get together for the first time and work this thing out."
He said he was not in any way fearful lest the final decree nibble away at the principles in the decision. Marshall said, too, he believes the people of the South will abide by the ruling. "The people of the South are just as law abiding as any other good citizens," he said.
Marshall is a special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has spearheaded the drive against segregation. He said NAACP people will meet this week to discuss "what we are going to do."
Today's decision was the first major ruling of the Supreme Court since Warren became chief justice last October, succeeding the late Fred Vinson.
The court confined its ruling to the question of the segregation of Negro public school pupils, but it obviously is applicable to the exclusion from public schools of any minority group-- Orientals, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and so on.
Today's decision was the latest in a series of court rulings wiping out legal restrictions on Negroes.
In previous cases the Supreme Court had:
1. Ruled that colleges must admit Negroes to study professional courses not open to them in Negro colleges.
2. Ruled that Negroes may not be excluded from train and bus coaches operated in interstate travel.
3. Ruled that Negroes may not be barred from eating in restaurants in the District of Columbia.
The "separate but equal" doctrine was set forth in a 7-1 decision on May 18, 1896 in a case involving Homer Adolph Plessy, who was part Negro.
Plessy boarded a train for a ride from New Orleans to Covington, LA., and took a seat in a coach assigned to white passengers in violation of a Louisiana law which required segregation of whites and Negroes on trains.
The conductor asked Plessy to leave the white coach but he refused. A policeman arrested Plessy and took him to jail in New Orleans.
That set off a vigorous legal battle in which the Louisiana Supreme Court eventually upheld the state law. Plessy appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States and the decision went against him.
Justice Henry Billings Brown, who wrote that decision, said the Louisiana law was not in conflict with the U.S. Constitution since Plessy was not refused the right to ride in trains so long as he stayed in a coach restricted to Negroes.
Thus grew up the philosophy of "separate but equal" facilities. Warren, in today's decision, wrote that the Plessy case involved transportation, not public schools. Inasmuch as he called special attention to the distinction, it is apparent that the court is not now dismissing all forms of segregation.
Warren said that when the 14th Amendment was enacted, "education of Negroes was almost non-existent, and practically all of the race were illiterate. In fact, any education of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states."
"Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences as well as in the business and professional world."
Warren noted that in the early 1870's when cases dealing with segregation first went to the Supreme Court, "compulsory education was virtually unknown" and that for this reason the question of school segregation was unimportant.
After the 1896 decision, Warren wrote, American courts began using it as a basis for decisions on all matters dealing with separation of Negroes and whites.
But it was not until the present cases were brought before the court, Warren said, that the "separate but equal" doctrine was challenged insofar as it might deal with public school education.
Warren noted that the lower courts, in finding against Negro appellants on the basis of the 1896 decision maintained that the Negro and white schools involved had, in fact, been equalized "with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers and other 'tangible' factors."
But, the Chief Justice said, "our decision. cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education."
The Warren opinion recalled that in an earlier decision dealing with the question of whether Negroes should be admitted to graduate courses in segregated universities, the court had said this:
"To separate them (Negroes) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."
Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and in some cases strongly critical.
Sen. Russell of Georgia, leader of Southern Democrats in the Senate, termed the decision "a flagrant abuse of judicial power." He said questions like that of segregation should be decided by the lawmakers, not the courts.
Other Southerners were plainly unhappy, but they did not go so far as Russell. Sen. Daniel (D-TEX) said the verdict was "disappointing" and that he couldn't see how the court could arrive at such a decision.
Sen. Ellender (D-LA) said, "I am of course very much disappointed by this. But I don't want to criticize the Supreme Court. It is bound to have a very great effect until we readjust ourselves to it."
He said there would be "violent repercussions" if enforcement were ordered too quickly.
Rep. Keating (R-NY), a strong backer of civil rights legislation, said "There is no doubt about the soundness of the court's decision."
Gov. William B. Umstead of North Carolina said in a statement put out by his office that he was "terribly disappointed."
J.M. Hinton, South Carolina conference president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said:
"Christianity and democracy have been given a great place in America through the elimination of segregation in public school and communism has lost a talking point."
The appeals from the four states - Kansas, Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina - challenged the legality of segregation on the ground that it violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The District of Columbia complaint alleged violation of the 5th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment, put through shortly after the end of the Civil War, was designed to reinforce the rights of the newly freed slaves. It said that no state may deprive any person of due process or equal rights under the law.
The 5th Amendment gives all persons involved in court cases dealing with federal matters the right to due process of law.
Actually, the court did not decide the question purely on the basis of these amendments.
Warren wrote that the court "cannot turn the clock back" to the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868 or the imposing of the "separate but equal" doctrine in 1896.
"We must consider public education," Warren wrote, "In the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the nation. "
"Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws."
"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments... It is the very foundation of good citizenship... In these days it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."
"Such an opportunity where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."
The court minced no words in applying the "equal rights" section of the 14th Amendment to the issue of school segregation. It said:
"We hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the action has been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."
It disposed of the "due process" section in this way:
"This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the due process clause..."
That was for the cases of the four states. But in the District of Columbia case, the court applied the due process provisions of the 5th Amendment, saying:
"We hold that racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the 5th Amendment to the Constitution."
Warren's opinion noted that enforcement of the court ruling raised "problems of considerable complexity."
It was for this reason that the court ordered further arguments in the fall. Brownell and the attorneys general of all states where segregation is now permitted were invited to take part, so that appropriate decrees can be worked out.
Briefs must be filed by Oct. 1.
The decision was made public in a highly unusual manner. Normally, copies of Supreme Court rulings are given to reporters simultaneously with the start of their reading from the bench.
In this case, no copies were given out until after Warren had finished reading the opinion. Thus it was not until he was well into it was the full import of the court's decision known— that segregation had been ruled unconstitutional.
No reason was announced for this departure from the usual practice.
The court had weighed the issues for a long time. The first arguments on the cases were held in December, 1952. Rearguments were heard in December, 1953, after the Eisenhower Administration took over.
EDITORS NOTE: On May 17, 1954, AP reporter Herb Altschull reported on the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a lawsuit brought by the NAACP to challenge racial segregation in public schools. The high court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Using the style and language of journalists of his era, including a reference to Asians as "Orientals," Altschull noted the magnitude of this decision and captured the uncertainty hanging over a society on the brink of seismic change with the downfall of Jim Crow. Sixty years after its initial publication, The AP is making this report available to its subscribers.
A new study found that when resources were scarce, white people had different definitions of "black" and were less generous toward people with darker skin tones than toward people with lighter skin.
But according to a new study, jobs and wealth weren’t the only things we lost in the recession. All of those economic woes might have also influenced how people perceive other races and have made people less generous toward those who look different from them.
For the study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/04/1404448111.abstract ] published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall.
First, the researchers asked 70 people to fill out a questionnaire that assessed their concern about economic competition between races. (The statements included things like, “When blacks make economic gains, whites lose out economically.”) They were then asked to identify the races of an array of images of faces, which had been created by fusing different percentages of a picture of a white person with an image of a black person.
PNAS
The authors found that the more the subjects believed that whites and blacks were locked in a zero-sum rivalry, the likelier they were to see the lighter-complexioned faces as “blacker.”
Then, in a second test, 63 subjects primed with words suggesting a lack of resources, such as "scarce," saw mixed-race faces as more “black” than they actually were. For example, they considered a face that consisted of two-thirds a picture of a white person meshed with one-third an image of a black person as fully “black.”
Finally, in a money-allocation game, the subjects were given $15 and told to split it between two versions of one image—one lighter and one darker in skin tone. They gave about 70 cents less to the darker face.
Of course, past studies have also shown that scarcity and resource competition fosters distrust between groups. The ingroup/outgroup cognitive bias [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups ] theory holds that we prefer people who resemble us. But this research suggests that financial strain can cause the very definition of the “out” group to change, as well, by nudging us to view people of other races as even more dissimilar to ourselves.
Black Americans were especially hard-hit by the recent economic slump: From 2007 to 2009, median household wealth decreased by 16 percent for whites and 53 percent for blacks. In hard times, it could be that minority groups are disadvantaged not just by structural economic factors, but also by our attempts to alienate those who look different from us.
“At a broader level, it shows that the effects of scarcity on these socioeconomic patterns might be driven by psychological processes at the individual level,” Amodio said. “The fact that resources are scarce in society is enough to change the way an individual looks at other people.”
Krosch and Amodio write that although many people harbor subtle prejudice on some level, those negative thoughts are “kept in check through effortful cognitive control.” But economic scarcity is mentally taxing [ http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/ ] – poverty makes it harder to maintain socially acceptable beliefs and allows ugly prejudices to sneak through.
“This would play out in one-on-one situations – like when someone is applying for a bank loan, or dealing with their mortgages, or interviewing for a job,” Amodio said. “These are all situations where the mindset of the person in power could affect how they're seeing this person and forming impressions of this person.”
The bitter tears of the American Christian supermajority
Why Christians — America’s most populous religious group — feel so victimized
by Chase Madar March 30, 2014 7:00AM ET
The most persecuted minority in the United States is not Muslims, African-Americans or immigrants. It’s our Christian supermajority that’s truly oppressed.
Verily, consider three anecdotes from the past few weeks.
was posted on YouTube to drum up buzz for an upcoming revival show. A few atheist blogs object to uniformed police taking part in a church publicity stunt, but far more people who saw the YouTube video (24,082 [now 26,153] views), in Ohio and elsewhere, took this media stunt as reality — confirmation of their wildest fears about a government clampdown on Christianity.
On Feb. 26, Arizona’s conservative Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses to refuse services to people who violate their sincerely held religious beliefs — for example, gays and lesbians. Fox News pundit Todd Starnes tweeted [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/02/26/conservative-media-are-outraged-that-arizonas-a/198248 ] that Christians have been demoted to second-class citizenship in Arizona, an opinion widely shared on the right-wing Christian blogosphere, which sees Brewer’s veto as a harbinger of even greater persecution to come.
And the feature film “Persecuted [ http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Persecuted-movie-Christian-Fred-Thompson/2014/03/10/id/557015/ ],” a political thriller about a federal government plan to censor Christianity in the name of liberalism, is due out in May. Featuring former Sen. Fred Thompson and Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, the movie received a rapturous reception at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on March 10 and is of a piece with other Christian films such as “God’s Not Dead [ http://godsnotdeadthemovie.com/ ],” about a freshman believer bullied into proving the existence of god by an atheist professor.
To be sure, there are Christians in the world who face persecution, from Copts in Egypt to Catholics in northern Nigeria. But in the U.S., the Christian faith and its institutions have never been more pampered by the state.
And yet the persecution complex of American Christianity blares its sirens, well beyond the surly hype about a “war on Christmas” that has become as much a part of the yuletide season as eggnog. Take the Catholic bishop of Peoria, Ill., Daniel R. Jenky, sermonizing in 2012 against the Affordable Care Act, blasting it as of a piece with governments that “have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide within the confines of their churches,” not skimping on comparisons to Stalinism and Nazism. Texas Gov. Rick Perry asserted that “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America” and vowed to “end Obama’s war on religion” during his 2012 presidential campaign. Another former presidential candidate, Mitt Romney also accused [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-obama-waging-war-on-religion/2012/08/09/192c4e02-e213-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMv28sYQzCY {next below})]
The persecution of Christians is the historical equivalent of a false memory, she argues. Early Christians were persecuted by Rome only sporadically, less for religious heterodoxy than for political insubordination in an empire that was draconian across the board. Early Christian writers Irenaeus, Justin Martyr and Tertullian chronicled such incidents as proof of the faith’s righteousness, laying a scriptural basis for a self-image of eternal persecution.
But it was Eusebius, bishop of Caesaria and the first important historian of the church, who “encoded the understanding of the church as persecuted into the history of Christianity itself.” His martyrdom stories and those of other fourth century hagiographers were written to shore up orthodoxy (writers used martyrs as sock puppets to denounce heretics) and drum up tourism for local shrines. These tales of persecution — full of blood, cruelty and dodgy “facts” — were enjoyed at the time, Moss writes, much in the way that modern audiences take in horror movies, and the lowbrow gore has long been justified by embarrassed exegetes as a response to the strain of persecution. Except, as Moss argues, the textual evidence indicates all these tales of persecution were composed after, not before, Christianity had become the favored religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. In short, they belong to an invented tradition of victimization.
Historical record aside, who can resist the deliciousness of having both the upper hand of power and the righteousness of the oppressed? Such persecution mania is dangerous, writes Moss, because “martyrdom is easily adapted by the powerful to cast themselves as victims and justifying their polemical and vitriolic attacks on others,” as freshly empowered Christians swiftly proved by trashing pagan temples and punctuating the centuries since with internecine bloodbaths and the odd crusade.
Moss’ study has earned favorable reviews for its scrupulous scholarship; it has also aroused much nastiness from Christian critics. Even before the book was released, she told me via email, it was denounced by conservative Christian commentators and she has since received hundreds of angry messages, letters and phone calls. She wrote:
Most of these people appear not to have actually read the book but, rather, have heard about it and see it as a further example of persecution. Many of them write to the university and ask it to fire me. An alarming number think that I deserve to be beaten, raped or killed (although blessedly very few of them threaten me directly). Many of the comments are about my character and appearance, but I hear that’s very common for female writers. I’ve been called a “female Judas Iscariot”, a “demon,” possessed by Satan, evil, the Antichrist and a Holocaust denier.
All of which only confirms Moss’ point about how belligerent some Christians can be in their dealings with heterodoxy — always under the pretense of a righteous response to an alien threat.
Apart from its roots in church history, this persecution complex also stems from day-to-day experience in 21st century America. The United States is, after all, a frequently humiliating place to work and live, with fewer social protections and weaker labor laws, compared with other rich countries, and an increasingly thuggish criminal justice system. “If all the cross marked was someone’s humiliation, then the pavement would be so thick with crosses, there would be no space to walk,” as the parish newsletter of St. Brigid’s [ http://brooklyncatholic.blogspot.com/2008/08/st-brigid-bushwick_26.html ] in Brooklyn, N.Y., once put it — and quite accurately too.
With mass alienation from both major political parties and a labor movement that, bright spots aside, appears to be expiring, the only institutional outlet for the shared grievances of millions of Americans is their church. A great many Christian churches and other places of worship channel these social energies into mutual support and good works that add to the commonweal. But some of these energies also find expression in a centuries-old persecution mania, with its distinctly belligerent edge.
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