Reading Time: 7 minutes In an editorial appearing in the June/July issue of Free Inquiry, Robyn Blumner, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science, claims identity politics and cancel culture have “torn apart” the Humanist movement (as far as there is one) mostly because people criticized […]
Center for Inquiry
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Atheists Warn Louisiana District Against Multiple First Amendment Violations
Reading Time: 3 minutes No school district has the right to force students to obey a “patriotic” ritual or sit through a loudspeaker prayer.
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An Atheist Just Sued the State of Illinois for Not Allowing Secular Celebrants to Solemnize Marriages
Reading Time: 2 minutes In Illinois, the only way atheists can have their weddings solemnized is by going to a judge or having a religious leader (even one from an online church) sign the paperwork. A Secular Celebrant just filed a federal lawsuit against the state arguing that it’s a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to prevent him from offering the same opportunity to non-religious couples.
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Bangladeshi Blogger Shammi Haque, Threatened for Her Secular Views, Granted Asylum in Germany
Reading Time: 2 minutes Shammi Haque is one of several Bangladeshi atheist bloggers whose life is currently in danger. Some of her colleagues have already been murdered. She could very well have been next — she received death threats and saw her name on a “hit list” going around online.
But the Center For Inquiry is trying to prevent that fate for Haque. Using donations from their Freethought Emergency Fund, and with the help of the German government, they helped her move the hell out of Bangladesh:
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The Saudi representative was desperate to quiet her, demanding that the council president “shut that woman up!”, but delegations from the U.S., Ireland, Canada, and France stood up for Josephine’s right to deliver her statement. (You can read my full writeup here.)
I finally managed to actually make contact with the hero of the whole story, Josephine herself, who’s been busy traveling and without regular Internet access. I took the opportunity to ask her about the whole episode and to learn a little about what motivates her, too. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. I’ve emphasized some key portions.
The Woman Saudi Arabia Tried to Shut Up: An Interview with Josephine Macintosh
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last month, I wrote about the remarkable events at the UN Human Rights Council, where Saudi Arabia attempted to shout down Josephine Macintosh, a representative of my employer the Center for Inquiry, as she delivered a forceful statement condemning Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses, specifically the persecution and imprisonment of Raif Badawi and Waleed Abu al-Khair (who just this week was sentenced to 15 years in prison).
The Saudi representative was desperate to quiet her, demanding that the council president “shut that woman up!”, but delegations from the U.S., Ireland, Canada, and France stood up for Josephine’s right to deliver her statement. (You can read my full writeup here.)
I finally managed to actually make contact with the hero of the whole story, Josephine herself, who’s been busy traveling and without regular Internet access. I took the opportunity to ask her about the whole episode and to learn a little about what motivates her, too. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. I’ve emphasized some key portions.
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[Note: This is an expansion on a previous post, meant to give full context and background to the story for those just learning about this issue.]
The human rights abuses of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are not secrets. A monarchy under Islamic Law, with only rare and arbitrary local elections, and almost total subjugation of women, the West looks on with disapproval, but impotence. They are, infamously, a U.S. “ally,” being a huge source of oil and perceived as a bulwark against Islamic terrorism in an unstable region of the world. We see the oppression, the medieval treatment of half its population, and the astounding opulence of its aristocracy, and we shrug. It’s their culture; what can we do?
What Made Saudi Arabia Panic at the UN Human Rights Council?
Reading Time: 6 minutes
[Note: This is an expansion on a previous post, meant to give full context and background to the story for those just learning about this issue.]
The human rights abuses of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are not secrets. A monarchy under Islamic Law, with only rare and arbitrary local elections, and almost total subjugation of women, the West looks on with disapproval, but impotence. They are, infamously, a U.S. “ally,” being a huge source of oil and perceived as a bulwark against Islamic terrorism in an unstable region of the world. We see the oppression, the medieval treatment of half its population, and the astounding opulence of its aristocracy, and we shrug. It’s their culture; what can we do?
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Saudi Arabia Tries to Shout Down Center for Inquiry at UN Human Rights Council
Reading Time: 2 minutes Yesterday, we got a rare glimpse of how sensitive Saudi Arabia is to its human rights abuses being exposed. At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council, a representative of my organization, the Center for Inquiry, was repeatedly shouted down by the Saudi representative in an attempt to stop her from delivering our statement condemning its crackdown on free expression and belief, and its persecution of dissidents such as Raif Badawi and Waleed Abu al-Khair.
And lucky for us, there’s video.
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Making #TwitterTheocracy about Pakistan and Blasphemy Laws
Reading Time: 3 minutes Secular organizations came together last week to support a campaign (going by “#TwitterTheocracy”) that addressed Twitter’s compliance with Pakistan’s request to censor “blasphemous” tweets and Twitter accounts. Or, that’s one way to phrase it. Another might be that secular organizations came together to address the fact that Pakistan was demanding that Twitter censor certain material and block certain users under the aegis of its blasphemy law.
See the difference? One version makes Twitter the campaign’s target. The other makes Pakistan the target.
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I can’t stress how broad this campaign is — and it needs to be. Atheists and skeptics should be concerned with any number of health care-related issues.
Center For Inquiry Launches Campaign to "Keep Health Care Safe and Secular"
Reading Time: < 1 minute A new campaign launched by the Center For Inquiry aims to educate the public on the importance of keeping health care “safe and secular“:
I can’t stress how broad this campaign is — and it needs to be. Atheists and skeptics should be concerned with any number of health care-related issues.
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And, importantly, it was said before a conservative religious audience. The president said:
President Obama, at Prayer Breakfast, Defends Rights of Those with 'No Faith At All'
Reading Time: 2 minutes Let us take it as a given that the President of the United States’ participation in the National Prayer Breakfast his highly problematic to say the least. When we make a tradition of the elected chief executive publicly kissing the ring of sectarian religion, it turns it into a quasi-official event, flying in the face of basic secularism and the Constitution. It’s a bad thing.
All that said (and said with fervency), via RNS’s Brian Pellot, we learn that at said breakfast, President Obama had a positive message that we secularists wholeheartedly embrace: the need for people of all religions and of no religion to believe and express themselves as they will, without threat of retaliation, discrimination, or criminalization.
And, importantly, it was said before a conservative religious audience. The president said: