Reuters today reported on a great response to the photo of Barak Obama dressed in a turban (purportedly circulated by the Clinton Campaign) and the smear campaign against Obama in general alleging that he subscribes to the Muslim faith:

Obama, a Christian, has fought a whispering campaign from fringe elements that say he is a Muslim. The Democratic front-runner’s middle family name — Hussein — has been used by some to draw a link between him and late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“But it’s interesting,” [Jack] Shaheen [author of Guilty---Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs After 9/11] said, “no one has said so what? What if he were a Muslim?”

I agree with Shaheen up to a point. Simply being Muslim of course doesn’t preclude your ability to be a great leader. Or being Christian, Jewish, or Wiccan for that matter. As Shaheen says, so what?

But what does concern me, and what should be a concern to all voters, is how a candidate’s religion might influence the future choices they’d make as a leader, and if that influence would be balanced with a hefty dose of reason. I don’t care that George W. Bush is a Christian. I do care that he uses his religion as a primary justification for launching war, curtailing a range of freedoms (most notably reproductive), ignoring science, and charitable choice. That his religion is Christianity matters only so far as what doctrine is being invoked.

That’s why religion matters in elections and politics. It’s not what religion a candidate subscribes to. It’s how they use it.

PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is probably one of a handful of programs that George W. Bush can point to and say, “Here is something of true value my administration achieved.” Fifteen billion dollars was distributed over five years in areas like Africa where HIV/AIDS is devastating the population. The United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 (also known as PEPFAR 2) is now up for consideration by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Bush has proposed thirty billion for the next five years, but the Democrats’ version asks for fifty billion, integrating “family planning” with HIV/AIDS relief efforts in Africa. Money would be available to abortion providers under this new integration which has conservatives in an uproar. The Democrats also perhaps unwisely removed a “treatment floor” provision, which specified that 55 percent of PEPFAR money must go to the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients. This may be to allow monies to go to other diseases as well as family planning, but it causes concern that money can be spent without any accountability.

The Bush plan was ABC: Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms if necessary. This has been very helpful but hasn’t been as responsive to the needs of women who are now the highest at risk category. The bill could fund programs that lift the status of women—like microloans and access to food—which have been shown to reduce HIV transmission. Where their human rights are protected, women have the ability to protect themselves. The Bush plan has never addressed women’s needs under the guise of protecting families. As a Humanist I believe the Democrats’ plan introduces some needed money to help women who have been greatly victimized by HIV/AIDS and largely ignored.

See Physicians for Human Rights Press Release, The Democrats’ Pepfar goes to Far, and PEPFAR Reauthorization Bill Includes Pledge Requirement for HIV/AIDS Grantees

Slate provided a wonderful article yesterday on what the words “peer-reviewed” really mean according to the fundamentalist Christian organization Answers in Genesis (yes, the Creation Museum guys) upon the release of their so-called “academic journal,” Answers Research Journal.

Writer Bonnie Goldstein gains a copy of the review criteria for editors reviewing articles for submission and discovers a clearly biased view:

Here the goal is not to ensure that research meets academic standards of scientific inquiry, but rather to ensure that the scholar’s conclusions conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

See the criteria for yourself here.

In addition, editors and writers can submit “pen names” in case they are up for tenure and want to hide their creationist beliefs.

There’s a reason why creation scientists have to hide. They don’t have real science to back up their claims.

Today is Darwin Day, and what better way to celebrate than with some primordial soup and maybe a sandwich? (See TedBlog for the validity of adding the sandwich.)

I’ve been enjoying Evolution on PBS with narration by Liam Neeson. It’s a great resource for what evolution is and how it works, for example, to make an eye or a wing. Other good sources are Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable or the video Growing Up in the Universe.

Why not throw a party with either video? Then there’d be no fooling us about transitional fossils. No one would trick us about complex design of eyes or wings. The only thing not covered in the above suggestions is abiogenesis. Fortunately, you can find abiogenesis on the net.

So I suggest a Darwin Day resolution for a bit of entertainment and education. Besides nothing feels better than being able to say “Why yes, actually, half an eye could be quite useful” and being able to explain why. Ah the power of a little science and a little learning.

It’s Darwin Day!

According to the official Darwin Day website, “Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around February 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin — the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.”

Dozens of local Humanist groups will be celebrating Darwin Day today. To find out if your local group is holding an event, see the AHA’s list of Humanist chapters and affiliates here.

Hundreds of college campuses will also be celebrating with lectures, debates, and other fun events. Secular Student Alliance Executive Director August Brunsman said:

“Darwin Day uses the life and work of Charles Darwin as a spring board to celebrate the many ways that science makes our lives better. We should celebrate science just like family, love, nature, civil rights and the many other things we already celebrate.”

The SSA’s recent press release continued to emphasize Darwin Day’s importance:

The theory of evolution was controversial in Darwin’s time and remains controversial in the United States today.

Recent Gallup polls show that 43 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and instead believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” And at least four 2008 presidential candidates have said they do not believe the theory of evolution.

“There is a continuous threat to evolutionary biology and to science in general that has been posed by fundamentalists who reject entirely a Darwinian worldview because they feel it threatens their religious beliefs,” said Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at the State University of New York-Stony Brook.

Prof. Pigliucci uses Darwin Day to teach the public about how science works “so people aren’t just hearing about science from their local preacher.”

Happy Darwin Day to all!

Did Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution advocate racism and genocide?

Ken Ham thinks so. He is the leader of the Christian group Answers in Genesis and the founder of the Creation Museum built last year in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham just released a book titled, Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots.

The New York Times includes several of Ham’s comments:

”What Darwinian evolution did I would say is provide what people thought was a scientific justification for separation of races,” Ham said in an interview.

In the new book, Ham says that Darwin’s theory that natural selection caused gradual biological changes over time, puts some races ”higher on the evolutionary scale” and others ”closer to the apes.”

”Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it,” Ham writes.

Ham further contends that the theory fanned the flames of ”ethnic superiority.”

”Stalin, Hitler and Mao were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions — and it can be shown they did this because of the influence of Darwinian naturalism…,” Ham writes.

The Darwin Report has this to say:

Historically speaking, Charles Darwin came from a family of abolitionists. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, strongly disapproved of slavery. And Charles Darwin wrote negatively about the slavery he witnessed on his travels in his book, The Voyage Of The Beagle. Darwin’s The Descent Of Man is also an argument against racism, since one of the points in it is the common ancestry of all the humans races. And simply using the word “savage,” as Darwin did, in its 19th century context doesn’t make a man a racist. Political correctness and cultural sensitivity were more than a century away.

But of course, David L. Schultz, associate professor of biology at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, sees the bigger agenda, calling Ham’s attempts as “a ploy to get evolution out of the curriculum.”

”Of course everybody’s against teaching children racism, so if you call it racist, you can have it removed,” said Schultz. He testified before a Louisiana legislative panel that took up the bill that would have tied evolution with racism. The measure was eventually stripped of any reference to Darwin.

I think I’d rather take the words of a true biologist with scientific reasoning on his side instead of a non-scientist, creationism-loving nutcase who believes that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together.

Recently, St. Louis-area junior high school students Tori Shoemaker and Cheyenne Byrd were suspended for two days because they wore home-made t-shirts that read “safe sex or no sex.” The shirts were decorated with condoms, and were meant to protest the school’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum. The students said their shirts were a form of free speech, but a superintendent said that the shirts were inappropriate and a distraction at school (so, apparently free speech is only permissible when appropriate). Watch the CNN report here.

Haven’t we seen this kind of thing before, with students punished for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam war? In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that symbolic speech and political expression were protected under the First Amendment. How are Shoemaker and Byrd’s t-shirts any different from those black armbands, to which the 1969 ruling applied? As the Court wrote, “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In Las Vegas, 16 year-old Devon Smith was kicked out of class on Monday after refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The Spring Valley High sophomore, a nontheist, objects to the Pledge’s phrase “one nation under God.” His teacher, Susan Rheinwald, told Smith he was required to stand for the Pledge out of respect, and sent the teenager to the dean’s office when he refused. (However, instead of going to the dean’s office Smith called his mother, who told him to come home.)

“I wasn’t being disruptive,” Smith said later. “I don’t believe we are ‘one nation under God’ as the Pledge says. I don’t believe in God. So I was just sitting there. That is my right.” Smith is absolutely correct. According to several court rulings–including a 1943 U.S. Supreme Court decision that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech extends to the right of public school students not to be compelled to recite the Pledge, and several Appellate court rulings in the 1970s that public students cannot be forced to stand silently while others recite the pledge–there is no reason that Smith should have been disciplined for his actions.

Yet it seems that teachers in Clark County, where Smith attends school, are trained to requirestudents to stand for the pledge. Debbie Tomasetti, a coordinator for new teacher induction, said that she interprets school district regulations–which state that students with conscientious objections “shall maintain a respectful attitude through the ceremony”–to mean that students must stand for the pledge.

Clearly, school districts and teachers need better training on the constitutional rights of their students. And not just on the right not to stand for the pledge, but also on what type of religious speech is or is not allowed in school–for students and teachers alike. For your own edification, I recommend this site that gives a general overview of religion and public schools.

When Penn State alumnus James Pursley purchased a brick on the school’s Alumni Walk, he wanted it to include the words “Joshua 24:15.” But school officials rejected his application on the basis of a policy that prevented religious messages. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) successfully brought Pursley’s case to trial and won reached a settlement with Penn State before the case could come to trial.

I’m finding it difficult to disagree with the ADF, despite my utter distaste for their mission (“a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth”). Sure, every student should have a right to include a message that holds dear to their hearts. But not everything can past muster. What will Penn State do when a student wants to write “Atheists are going to hell” or “Proud KKK member”? Fellow blogger Lori Lipman Brown commented that this case sets a precedent for bricks that say “Glory to Allah” or “Satan rules!” Would the ADF have a problem with that? (I’d really love to see them representing a Satanist on the basis of religious freedom!)

Penn State had the right to limit messages using an appropriate standard, and while a Bible quote might be harmless enough, this case opens up a can of worms that will make it difficult to stop more dangerous messages like hate speech.