Today’s episode of All in the Family had Archie and Meathead arguing over little Joey Stivic’s religion (or lack thereof) when Meathead — gasp —- gives the Lord the raspberry.
This is relevant because I’m trying to get my arms around Kay Hagan’s forthcoming visit to Boston to ‘hang out with atheists.’ I took a look at Hagan’s hosts, Wendy Kaminer and Woody Kaplan, both of whom are advisory board members with the Secular Coalition of America.
OK, on the face of it, the Secular Coalition seems like your basic civil liberties group looking out for the rights of the ‘nontheistic Americans’ with the belief that atheists are the country’s last political outcasts.
Fair enough, I guess. But do a little more research on Kaminer and you’ll find some interesting quotes that, in my mind, reveal a slight contempt for religion:
Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack (on the World Trade Center and Pentagon), we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative.
…..Why should it be socially acceptable to make fun of psychics and not priests? What’s the difference between crossing yourself or hanging a mezuzah outside your door and avoiding black cats? Believing that you’ve been abducted by aliens or that Elvis is alive, is, on its face, no sillier than believing that Christ rose from the dead or that God parted the Red Sea so that Moses and his followers might traverse it.
Then this one from a 2002 Boston Phoenix story, with some interesting observations from a sympathetic author:
Wendy Kaminer put it this way: “Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.”
Identity politics can be dreary and smug and self-satisfied in its embrace of victimhood, but it has its uses. I’m unconvinced that the atheists are as persecuted as they think they are. Nor have they succeeded in making reality their exclusive franchise.
But it’s not a bad thing that they’re here to blow away the hypocrisy and the icky piety of what passes all too often for religious discourse in this country.
Does Hagan believe this, or is she just hanging out for the money? I think she’s just hanging out for the money. I wonder what the mainstream media thinks.
