Nathan Newman on Romney

Nathan Newman asks a good question about Mitt Romney’s rejection of the godless:

And at some level, why shouldn’t a person’s religious beliefs be relevant?

They should be. However, when one holds a minority belief about religion, one that is widely reviled, then it is to one’s interest to insist that religion be off the table. That’s a purely pragmatic concern. In addition, I think there’s an element of resentment: we atheists have been told so often to sit down and shut up and keep our opinions out of the debate, even by people who don’t believe in religion themselves, that we tend to get a little cranky when we see people of faith indulging themselves in a class of criticisms denied to us, or that trigger howls of protest when we say them.

There is also a sound principle involved. In the next election, I’ll be voting for a religious person for president—there won’t be any atheist candidates, and if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance. I cannot demand that the candidates believe in a certain way, but I can still insist that they govern as a secular leader. That’s the best I can hope for.

But Newman is right that that doesn’t mean we need to lay low.

I think it’s a profound mistake for atheists to demand that such religious debates be taken out of the public sphere, since they will never be taken out of voters’ minds. Instead, us progressive atheists should be engaging in that faith-based discussion more vigorously, laying out our belief systems and helping make voters comfortable with our viewpoint as part of the menu of “religious” options, not in order to convert them but just to integrate it into the terrain of debate that people are more familiar with.

Otherwise, atheism will just remain the unspoken Other, which voters will inherently (and rightly) distrust because they just won’t know what it means personally to the politician involved. So I’m all for a religion in public life debate — and I’m prepared to argue for why progressive atheism leads to the kinds of public policy voters should want. But if we don’t make the case, we can’t expect Christian voters to want anything other than what they are familiar with.

I think debating in order to convert people would be a good thing to do, actually — a large voting bloc of vocal atheists would do wonders for the body politic. I think the issue is one of framing the argument in a positive way: not, don’t vote for Candidate X because she is a [Catholic/Mormon/Pagan/whatever], but do vote for Candidate Y because she is a rationalist who holds sensible secular values. Romney was playing the blind, stupid politics of exclusion rather than promoting the virtues of his ideas.

Edwards for President!

I sure hope time straightens out the race for the presidency, since I find myself unimpressed by the entire field. John Edwards has just moved to the bottom of my list of acceptable Democratic candidates, after Hillary Clinton (after Hillary! That’s pretty low) since he has just allowed Amanda Marcotte to resign. I am unimpressed by the lack of loyalty he’s shown to his employees; I’m not an absolutist on that point, since I think loyalty can be carried too far, to the point of stupidity (case in point: GW Bush). But what pisses me off is that he failed to support her in the face of genuinely vile, trumped-up slanders from his right-wing opponents, people who’d never vote for him no matter how much he sucked up to them. That’s gutlessness, an even more unforgivable sin in a presidential candidate than disloyalty. He got his first Swift Boat attack — actually, more like a slow, leaky canoe — and he collapsed like a frightened rabbit.

So now I look at the slate of Democrats, and to my dismay discover that Obama is currently at the top. How depressing.

What cheers me up, though, is looking at the Republican field. I am perversely looking forward to 23 February, when John McCain promises to address the Discovery Institute. Watching the ‘maverick’ rip out his brain and hand it to the theocrats as his oath of fealty will be entertaining.

Call your legislators and protest, Californians

Take a look at the newly introduced California Bill AB 165.

This bill would establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives within the office of the Governor and would require the
office to serve as a clearinghouse of information on federal, state,
and local funding for charitable services performed by charitable
organizations, as defined, encourage those organizations to seek
public funding for their charitable services, act as a liaison
between state agencies and those organizations, and advise the
Governor, the Legislature, and an advisory board of the office on the
barriers to collaboration between those organizations and
governmental entities and on strategies to remove those barriers.
This bill would also create the Advisory Board of the Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to be appointed as specified,
and require it to provide direction, guidance, and oversight to the
office and publish a report of its activities on or before the first
day of August of each year.

Yep, California legislators will be considered establishing a Faith-Based Office. That’s all we need—the legitimization of more unsupported nonsense in our government. Please, let’s stick to evidence based leadership, OK?

Whitewash!

One sign that the fading Bush administration knows that they’ve been on the wrong side of reality is that they’re now busy scrubbing the archives, trying to change what was said in the past. Chris Mooney catches a blatant attempt to rewrite the administration’s history on global warming.

Man, the GW Bush Presidential Library is going to be a real work of art, isn’t it? Maybe it should be called a “propaganda archive” rather than a “library”.

This is one way to narrow the field of viable Democratic candidates

If this is true—that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing—he has lost my vote.

The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps — John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

I’ll want to see some confirmation from the targets of this rumor first, but if it’s true that Edwards would rather heed the screams of right-wing sleazebags like Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue than the people he’s supposed to represent, then he has lost. We don’t need another timid Democratic candidate who flits away at every gust of noise from the Republican slander machine.

Zuzu says more, much more. Jebus, but I’m tired of craven Democrats.

Reality is a constituency

Alan Sokal—who has a history of criticizing the irrational Left—and Chris Mooney—who has come down hard on the anti-science Right—have teamed up to write an op-ed that makes suggestions to keep both sides from falling into the same trap again.

I think the root cause of the problem is that we have a democracy in which education is an insufficiently high priority, and either party can succumb to the temptation of going for votes by appealing to the most uneducated segment of the electorate. The Republican party has thrived in the past by going the other way, and building its base in the wealthy elite (which, unfortunately, has no certainty of being coupled to reason and education); they’ve long since learned that religion is a handy bridge to get votes from the most irrational side of the population, and have ridden the crazy train to power.

Democrats have long been populists, but I suspect that the focus on labor has at least grounded the party in practical concerns. That focus is fading away fast, and I worry that in an attempt to rebuild a solid majority they are also going to cast a covetous eye on the religious masses (hence my reluctance to support Barack Obama) and get there in the wrong way.

Sokal and Mooney propose some top-down safeguards against the further encroachment of anti-science bias into government. These are good ideas.

To address this new crisis over the relationship between science and politics, we propose a combination of political activism and institutional reform. Congress needs to establish safeguards to protect the integrity of scientific information in Washington — strong whistle-blower protections for scientists who work in government agencies would be a good start.

We also need a strengthening of the government scientific advisory apparatus, starting with the revival of the Office of Technology Assessment. And we need congressional committees to continue with their investigations of cases of science abuse within the Bush administration, in order to learn what other reforms are necessary.

At the same time, journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence. For, in the end, all of us — conservative or liberal, believer or atheist — must share the same real world. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us. As physicist Richard Feynman wrote in connection with the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “nature cannot be fooled.”

To avoid nature’s punishment, we must take steps now to restore reality-based government.

I’d just add that we also need more bottom-up preventive measures: more education. I want a reality-based government, and the best way to get there is to increase the pool of reality-based voters.

(Crossposted to The American Street)

In which I waffle undecidedly over the Democratic field

When will the Democrats learn? We are in an unpopular and failed war, and what a successful presidential candidate has to do is openly and uncompromisingly slam this unjust travesty and the incompetents who initiated it, yet Clinton and Edwards are enabling war fever, if not directly feeding it. Face it, war with Iran is off the table. It is not an option, unless we want to ruin our military and our economy; and the nuclear option is evil and unconscionable, and would utterly destroy our fast-fading moral standing. I wish we had a candidate who would just come out and say that.

I hate to say it, but Barack Obama seems to be one of the rare candidates thinking about doing something against the war. He could still win me over, especially if he continues to make specific proposals like that, but I’m still worried that any presidential race with him in it would turn into a “Who’s Holier?” piety contest, and we simply do not need more religiosity in American politics.

I might be willing to overlook that (for now) if we can just get a candidate who shows some real awareness and concern about policy, is unambiguously against war and torture, doesn’t use the prospect of terrorism to terrify the populace, and is pro-science and pro-education. An anti-George W. Bush, in other words.