I just finished reading The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (published 1980). This activist, revolutionary, brilliant guy embodied the heart of the 60s, and indeed embodies the heart of all activists fighting against a corrupt, messed-up system.
Abbie Hoffman was a smart kid born in 1936 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that was assimilating into a somewhat anti-semitic America right before World War II broke out. Kicked out of high-school, he was a trouble-maker and a hustler early on. His parents managed to get him into a fancy academy to finish high school, which brought him to college at Brandeis.
There he ran into some big name teachers, like Abraham Maslow for psychology, Herbert Marcuse for political philosophy, Leonard Bernstein for music, Eleanor Roosevelt for foreign affairs. He ended up getting his masters in psychology, coming out of Berkeley right at the birth of the 60’s. He saw Castro speak. The CIA had just been born and was already pulling dirty tricks abroad. Students were demonstrating. Allen Ginsberg was composing poems right across the bay (they later would become friends).
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The Victims of Blowjobs
In 2007, the Georgia State Supreme Court released Genarlow Wilson from prison, after he had served 2 years of his 10 year sentence. The court concluded that his sentence was cruel and unusual punishment.
His crime? As a 17 year old, Wilson had accepted consensual oral sex from a 15 year old (the age of consent being 16). The irony? Having penetrative sex with the girl would have netted him a mere misdemeanor with no sex offender registration (because he was himself younger than 18 at the time). The fact that it was oral sex made it a felony with a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. (Note that until 1998, oral sex between a married couple in Goergia was punishable by up to 20 years in prison).
That silly little detail in Georgia law (that oral sex — i.e. “sodomy” — was considered a felony while vaginal penetration was consider a misdemeanor) was amended as a result of the publicity from this case. However, the lawmakers specifically chose the update not to apply retroactively, meaning that people like Wilson would not have their conviction overturned. In other words, anyone convicted under this crazy law would still remain a sex offender for life.
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According to CNN earlier this month, the FBI wants to cook up a gigantic biometric database of peoples’ prints, eye scans, tattoos, face shapes, walk patterns, etc. Of course, they don’t plan to have only criminals in the database, but job seekers and the like — maybe eventually everyone.
According to the FBI, more than half of the queries to the current fingerprint database are not for criminal investigations at all, but run on normal people applying to work in an old folk’s home or with kids or in another sensitive job. Even if the applicant doesn’t match up to any criminal prints, their information might be added to the database and store. The FBI is planning a service for employers to request the FBI to keep applicant biometrics on file and to inform them if the employee ever commits a crime. The FBI says it would require applicants signing a waiver to allow this, but if it’s a condition of employment — especially if it becomes a standard condition of employment — then there isn’t a lot of real choice for the applicants.
But, of course, the government is not just compiling data from job applicants. This month the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the government to force disclosure of border search policies. Apparently lots of normal people at airports and borders have been forced to disclose their login passwords, to allow their laptop data (including web searches, emails and address books) to be copied, to let agents go through their cell phone numbers and text messages (taking out SIM cards).
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How would you feel if law enforcement started scanning all of your email, your file transfers, and your web search history that Google and other companies keep (often going back years)? The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, is proposing just that. It’s for our security, he says.
Security, after all, is a trade-off. We know that staying home all day would generally increase our safety, but is it worth it? Banning cars would decrease traffic deaths immensely, but is it worth it? We face a multitude of situations like this that involving weighing increased security against its costs. (This is to set aside the many cases where security tactics are mere security theater, and may be counter-productive).
Security weighed against costs — unfortunately this common-sense notion has been used to promote a false dichotomy in United States discourse recently: “security versus privacy”. It’s assumed that the more we allow privacy, the more our security is undermined because Bad Guystm can take advantage of it, hide behind it. Making ourselves safe requires giving up some of the privacy we’ve expected up until now.
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A survey from Pew (Sep 2007) reported on Americans’ opinions of various religions.
Basically, most people (76%) tend to have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics, more than half (53-60%) like Evangelical Christians, Mormons and Muslim Americans, though non-American Muslims are viewed unfavorably by about a third of Americans.
But then we see down at the bottom that – what a shock – atheists are the most disliked group. Only about a third of Americans have a favorable opinion while more than half have an unfavorable opinion of atheists. They’re much more disliked than Muslims, despite all the extreme Christians and nationalists media-blitzing on the dangers of Islam lately.
It seems Americans just don’t like atheists. (Note: it doesn’t ask for their opinion of atheism, the belief, but atheists, the people). Not a surprise I guess, given:
- a 2007 Gallop poll showed that more than half of Americans would refuse to vote for an otherwise well-qualified atheist as president (a similar Newsweek poll has the number at 62%). We’re more likely to see someone female, black, Jewish, Mormon, gay, etc.
- a 2006 study Univ of Minnesota study found atheists to be the most mistrusted minority among Americans (even more than homosexuals, Muslims, etc., and we’ve seen how backwards people can be about those subjects).
- a number of states’ constitutions only extend protection from religious discrimination to those who acknowledge a deity; also, many states’ constitutions still bar atheists from public office or testifying as a witness in court. (Thankfully most of these wouldn’t stand up to federal constitutional scrutiny).
- negative popular opinion: for example, in Tampa Bay half of the city council walked out of their meeting because an atheist had been invited to give the invocation.
- in child custody cases, religious parents are preferentially chosen over non-believer parents (under the assumption that a religious education is in the child’s best interests).
- these has never been a known atheist representative in Congress. (The first African-American in the House was in 1870; the first woman in the House was in 1916; the first known gay Congressperson was in 1972, after coming out in 1983).
- common claims of atheists being immoral or criminal…despite the fact that atheists make up less than 1% of the prison population (i.e. underrepresented in crime).
- treatment by public figures: for example, the elder Pres Bush said in 1988 “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” His son has been as bad (the same guy who claimed that God told him to go to war with Iraq). Note we’ve never had a non-Christian president, certainly not an atheist.
- media coverage is generally antagonistic: see example CNN video on Youtube)
- countless personal anecdotes of jobs lost, students assaulted, families harassed, etc. when people find out someone is an atheist. Such harassment isn’t as well-recognized or well-published as some other discrimination because beliefs are not as overt as, say, skin color, but out-atheists can face as much or more persecution than out-homosexuals.
I could go on, but then it’s easy to find a similar list of discrimination against many groups (even majority religious groups still get discriminated against in some instances). Odd to think, though, that at the end of the day the atheists may have the hardest hill to climb, given that they’re the most disliked and mistrusted group in the U.S. right now. Thankfully we’ve come a long way in accepting peoples’ differences in this country, but we’ve got a long way to go yet.