Author: Edd Doerr

Like the Terminator, they keep coming back, and they’re hard to stop. Like Dracula, they want our blood—er, taxes. “They” are the folks who have been campaigning for more than forty years to have all of us pay for faith-based private schools with our federal and/or state taxes through the mechanisms of tax-funded school vouchers …

Sainthood for Pius 12? (Gasp!) Tone-deaf, arrogant, Orwellian, Kafkaesque—the Holy See (the Vatican) is hell-bent on conferring sainthood on World War II-era Pope Pius 12 (née Eugenio Pacelli), known for his timidity regarding the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and other “Untermenschen.” Pius’s canonization, though an internal church matter, would be a grave …

The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus (New York: Random House, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4000-6884-5) 123 pp. Cloth $17.00. In The Death of Conservatism, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and the Times’ “Week in Review” section, has given us a useful analysis of the evolution of the conservative movement in the …

Faith-Based Programs George W. Bush’s signature faith-based initiative providing public funds to religious and community organizations remains popular, according to a report released November 16 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Based on polls by Princeton Survey Research Associates, the report (available online) is complicated but does admit to some generalizations. Sixty-nine …

Swedes R Us—NOT Sectarian and secular special interests promoting school-voucher plans (tax aid for faith-based and other private schools in the United States) are a long way from giving up their crusade despite overwhelming popular opposition in more than twenty-five statewide referenda; from liberal Massachusetts and California to conservative Utah; clear constitutional bans in three-fourths …

Icons of Unbelief: Atheists, Agnostics, and Secularists, edited by S.T. Joshi (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-313-34759-7) 463 pp. Cloth $75.00.   The Faith of Scientists in Their Own Words, edited with commentary by Nancy K. Frankenberry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-691-13487-1) 523 pp. Cloth $29.95.   Here are two books …

The reign in Spain, it’s plain, will strain and pain your brain. (Apologies to Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, and Bernard Shaw.) Spain’s perennial church-state problems are heating up again. The country’s Catholic bishops are trying to impede further liberalization of the country’s twenty-five-year-old law that legalizes abortion in certain circumstances. They oppose sexuality education in …

‘Family’ Values It’s a rather ordinary row house at 133 C Street SE—a short walk from the nation’s Capitol—but it has attracted attention of late because of its connection to Senator John Ensign (R–Nev.), Governor Mark Sanford (R–S.C.), and former Representative Chip Pickering (R–Miss.), whose well-publicized extramarital affairs piqued media interest. The C Street house …

‘Pro-life’ Terror Assassination The terrorist assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, on May 31 was not just a tragedy for the courageous physician who was one of the very few who provided rarely needed reproductive health-care procedures for many women. It was also a vicious attack on the rights of women to appropriate …

Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling, by Robert Kunzman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009, ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0-8070-3291-6) 256 pp. Cloth $27.95. June/July’s Free Inquiry ran my review of Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (“Fundamentalist Stepford Wives”). Almost simultaneously, the same publisher brought out Write These Laws on …

The Other Preacher in Lynchburg: My Life Across Town from Jerry Falwell, by John Killinger (New York: St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, ISBN: 0-312-53858-8) 208 pp., Cloth $24.95. John Killinger, Harvard and Princeton educated theologian and author of more than sixty books, served as minister of First Presbyterian Church in Jerry Falwell’s hometown from …

Voucher Plan Dies On March 10, the U.S. Senate defeated a Republican effort to continue the District of Columbia’s controversial school voucher plan. This is a victory for church-state separation, religious liberty, and public education. In taking this action, the Democratic-controlled Congress was very much in line with the twenty-five statewide referenda from coast to …

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009, ISBN-13/EAN: 978-0-8070-1070-9) 272 pp. Cloth $25.95. Remember Ira Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives? Or the two films based on it from 1975 and 2004? If not, they are science-fiction horror stories about a town in which the guys in a local …

  From Hither . . . The school voucher movement may well be collapsing. Century Foundation official Greg Anrig, writing in the January 27 Christian Century, observed that: The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio, voucher programs have shown no advance over local public schools. The idea that the existence of voucher schools would lead to …

Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, by Phil Zuckerman (New York: New York University, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8147-3) 227 pp. Cloth $35. In the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Free Inquiry, Gregory Paul (“The Big Religion Questions Finally Solved”) exhaustively compared the high degree of religiosity in the United …

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, ISBN 13: 978-0-374-16685-4) 438 pp. Cloth $27.95. Standing on Al Gore’s shoulders, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded sounds a loud, clear tocsin regarding our nation’s and our planet’s pressing energy, resource, biodiversity, environmental, and …

Elections Reflections November 4, 2008, was a pretty good day for church-state separation. It marked the end of the eight-year reign of error of the incompetent, secretive, corrupt, faith-based Bush-Cheney administration. But it may not tally the end of agnostic (sic!) Karl Rove’s signal achievement, harnessing the power of the Religious Right, the “theocons,” to …

Quelle Horreur! Que passé en la terre de laïcité? On a visit to France in September, Pope Benedict XVI called on the country to relax its rather strict separation of church and state—laïcité, or secularism—which other countries in western Europe increasingly try to emulate. The “pontiff” seems to be playing the same card as U.S. …

Of Apes and Embryos United States. Colorado voters this November will vote on a proposed amendment to the state constitution, the “Human Life Amendment.” If approved, it will define human personhood as beginning at “the moment of fertilization.” In other words, all fertilized human ova would be persons, presumably with the full panoply of human …

The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1) 356 pp. Cloth $26.00. In this crucial election year with so much at stake, Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Reason should be on everyone’s must-read list. Jacoby, author of the important 2004 book Freethinkers and program director …

  Sanctified Genocide? In 2006, California politicians voted to place a statue of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. As each state is allowed only two statues, it was decided to remove the statue of Thomas Starr King (1824–1864) to make room. King, a heroic San Francisco Unitarian minister/orator, led the struggle …

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, directed by Nathan Frankowski, starring Ben Stein, Distributed by Premise Media Corporation. 2008. 105 minutes. It was precisely one o’clock on Sunday, April 27, when I slid into my seat in the darkened AMC Rio Cinema multiplex in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to watch what is unquestionably one of the worst films to …

Center for Inquiry Hits Textbook Errors A high-school government textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies, Tenth Edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), has been criticized in a twenty-five -page report issued by the Center for Inquiry/Transnational (CFI) on March 28. The textbook was written by two conservative authors—James Q. Wilson and former Bush administration Faith-Based Initiatives and …

Head and Heart: American Christianities, by Garry Wills (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59420-146-2) 626 pp. Cloth $29.95. “The Federal Constitution was, in short, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a secular humanist text. The delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] were not a very orthodox group of men in any doctrinal sense. The only born-again …

A U.S. district judge upheld a Texas moment-of-silence law, even though it had been amended to call specifically for “prayer.” The U. S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case regarding a neon-lighted Bible display outside a Texas courthouse. A lower court decision that the Bible display must go stands. —TF Global Warming, Population, Clericalism …

Guiliani to Push School Vouchers Presidential aspirant Rudy Giliani has named an Educational Advisory Board whose membership is stacked in favor of diverting public funds to faith-based private schools under voucher plans. The panel is to be headed by voucher promoter Terry Moe and former Bush education secretary Rod Paige, and includes voucher advocates Clint …

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s order that an eight-foot cross be removed from the Mojave National Preserve. The ruling dismissed as a sham the National Park Service’s transfer to a private organization of the land beneath the cross.—TF O, Canada On October 10, Ontario’s conservative Tory Party, led by …

Washington What do you know, it is possible to get in trouble by blending church and state. The U. S. Department of Defense’s Inspector General has charged that six Army and Air Force officers (including four generals) crossed the line when they appeared in uniform and at recognizable locations at the Pentagon in an evangelical …

The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007, ISBN 13: 978-1-59420-22-6) 308 pp. Cloth $25.95. In the wake of his successful book and Oscar-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, former U.S. representative, senator, vice president, and winner of the 2000 presidential popular vote Al Gore has given us The Assault …