Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1892

Ohio School District May “Sell” Abandoned Building Worth $1,200,000 to Local Church for $1

In 1912, a high school was built on 29 acres of land in Monroe, Ohio. That building is no longer used and now sits in complete disarray, but treating it for asbestos and demolishing it would require more than $1,000,000 that the Monroe Local School District Board of Education doesn’t want to spend.

The board has three options for what they can do with the building: They can sell it to the city (likely for an amount far less than its appraised value), demolish the building, or sell it to the Monroe First Church of God for (literally) a buck.

Oh, by the way, board member Tim Carpenter (below) happens to be a member of that church…

While some local residents are asking him to recuse himself from the vote, the board’s legal counsel says, according to the Journal-News, there’s “no conflict of interest with his participation in the negotiations and discussions.”

Sure there isn’t… Christians are always, always honest.

The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center senses something shady in the works, beyond just the obvious church/state violation, and wants more information on all the available options:

Please be advised that, if the Board chooses the third option, it will be in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in an elementary sense, as it would amount to a seven-digit giveaway to a church in an atmosphere that is highly suspicious and lacking in due diligence and transparency. We hereby demand that the Board of Education refrain from selling, transferring or disposing any of the government’s property to the First Church of God.

…

The Board should understand that a free transfer of a 29-acre property worth over a million dollars, under the undocumented claim that the property requires some cleanup that brings its net value down to zero, is highly suspicious and should require credible documentation. This would include multiple appraisals of both the claimed value and costs. The fact that the transfer would give the property to a church only raises the suspicions higher…

There is no indication that all options for this property have been thoroughly explored so as to ensure that taxpayers are deriving the maximum benefit. Instead, this proposal smacks of a quick sweetheart deal for a local church. Lacking this necessary diligence and transparency to alleviate the numerous concerns that are raised by this potential transaction, your Board must cease any immediate effort to transfer the property to the church.

The board plans to vote on what to do with the old building a week from Monday. If the church deal doesn’t go through, it may be only because they realize people beyond just Monroe are watching them closely.

I’ve Never Had Them Grilled…

They finally opened a restaurant for atheists in Boston!

Sure, the online version of the article has corrected the “mistake,” but now we know the secret menu item…

(Thanks to Brian and Leah for the link)

California School District Apologizes to Student Reprimanded for Sitting During the Pledge

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a seventh grader in the San Jacinto Unified School District in California. He was reprimanded by his teacher after remaining seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. As usual, the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center was on it:

[Teacher] Mr. Burns informed the student, falsely, that the law requires students to stand. Moreover, Mr. Burns questioned the student as to the reason for not participating in the exercise, asking him: “Is it your religion, do you have a personal problem, or do you hate America?” He then proceeded to makes statements obviously intended to pressure the child into participating, suggesting non-participation shows the child is ungrateful for the opportunities America offers and saying he “feels sorry” for the child, as if the child’s stance is pitiable.

That student, 11-year-old Ivan Covarrubias, spoke to local newspaper reporters about what was going through his mind during all of that:

A San Jacinto middle school student said he was “scared” when a teacher admonished him for not standing up during the “Pledge of Allegiance” because it went against his atheist beliefs.

“I was shocked at what he said,” said Ivan Covarrubias, an 11-year-old seventh-grader at Monte Vista Middle School.

It should go without saying, but Ivan did nothing wrong. His teacher, on the other hand, needed a lesson in the Constitution, not to mention how to deal with young students.

That wasn’t even the entirety of the problem. The same teacher had a banner in the classroom reading “Prayer changes things.” The AHA also asked for the banner to come down.

Yesterday, I’m happy to say, the AHA noted that everything had been resolved. The school district informed them that the Pledge issue had already been taken care of before they received AHA’s letter. That said, they will remind all staff members (through their principals) that sitting during the Pledge is an acceptable option for students.

The religious banner has been taken down, too.

“We’re pleased that the school district has recognized the rights of students to remain seated during the Pledge, as well as the need to keep references to prayer and other religious practices out of the classroom,” said David Niose, legal director of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center.

How about a big Internet hand for Ivan, for having the guts to remain seated? It’s not often a middle school student’s silent protest causes this much change.

(Image via Shutterstock. Large portions of this article were published earlier)

This Video, Drawing on Pew Research Data, Claims That the “Tiny Minority” of Radical Muslims Is Actually a Majority

Ben Shapiro probably isn’t Ben Affleck‘s favorite person, but that’s OK – the feeling is mutual.

Shapiro, who co-founded the conservative media-watchdog group TruthRevolt, put together a video in which he painstakingly tallies (using Pew data) what proportion of Muslims worldwide subscribe to ideas that most people in the West would most likely consider radical — things like favoring Sharia law, expressing support or understanding for al-Qaeda and other terrorists, saying that “honor killings” can be permissible, and so on.

Shapiro comes up with a truly eye-popping number: More than 800 million Muslims are “radicalized,” he says, or more than half of the world total of approximately 1.5 billion.

It seems to me that this estimate is way high. For one thing, Pew’s data don’t explain what being in favor of Sharia means in practice. To many Muslims, Sharia doesn’t mean the brutal Saudi-style justice of disfiguring or beheading convicts; it means having an Islamic family court that decides matters of divorce, inheritance, etc.

The same vagueness is present in the numbers on suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. If I were a Muslim living peacefully in tribal Pakistan, and a drone blew up innocent members of my family in another “collateral damage” horror, damn straight I’d feel justified in trying to strike back. That might make me a terrorist, but it wouldn’t necessarily peg everyone who understands (rather than condones) my motivations as a dangerous radical, much less a would-be member of al-Qaeda.

All that said, Islam has a horrifying 21st-century record of extreme illiberalism, oppression, and violence. We shouldn’t take Shapiro’s (or even Pew’s) numbers at face value, but with all we know, we’d be foolish to cling to the idea that radical or extremist Muslims are merely a “tiny minority.” Even if Shapiro’s tally is inflated by half, or three-quarters, that’s still hundreds of millions of Muslims who really do:

cackle at the murders of Jews, Christians, atheists, apostates, artists, and authors;give two thumbs up to stoning adulterers and lynching gay people;either advocate killing satirists and apostates, or condone such slayings;cheer when bombs built and placed by their co-religionists literally rip the limbs off of Western clubgoers in Indonesia and train commuters in Spain…

… and so on.

We can quibble over the numbers. But as long as extreme violence by Muslims is as common as rain showers, we may well wonder if the message that Islam is “the religion of peace” is getting through to its followers — much less to anyone else.

Is It the Year 2014 A.D. or 2014 C.E.? One Hard-to-Offend Atheist Offers an Alternative (of Sorts)

When I say that we all have gaps in our knowledge, of course that’s meant to make my knowledge deficits sound no worse than yours. But sometimes I wonder.

A few weeks ago, I beheld the term C.E. (coupled with a four-digit calendar year) for the first time. Oh, I’d seen it before, and had easily inferred from the context that it meant the same as A.D., but I suddenly realized I didn’t know what the two letters stood for. So I Googled it.

Common era. Also, B.C.E.: Before Common Era. Right.

They did strike me as fine inventions on one level: I can appreciate that they offer neutral alternatives to what I and probably billions of other people have been taught in school over the generations: the quintessentially Christian terminology of B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini = the Year of the Lord).

But both sets of terms still take as their zero point the birth of the (possibly fictional) Christian savior, so I couldn’t quite see how we’d booked real progress in disassociating ourselves from normative Christianity.

And neither, it turns out, can this guy.

British atheist Lindybeige (real name, as best as I can tell, Nikolas Lloyd) just came up with a pretty funny riff on the subject. He’s a user of A.D. and B.C. himself and has never been bothered by those abbreviations. But to those who are, he proposes that they change, in their minds, what the letters stand for.

Just think of B.C. as Backwards Chronology, he says (because you’re counting backwards from zero; the year 44 B.C. comes before the year 43 B.C.); A.D. can now mean Ascending Dates, for self-evident reasons.

That way,

You won’t have to change any of the old textbooks.

Brilliant!

Except, quips Lindybeige, that the easily offended will probably miss the chance to demonstrate their politically correct pedantry over those who use B.C. and A.D.

Lindybeige has a slightly manic but alluring presentation style (traces of John Cleese), and he seems fond of the kind of low-budget art direction that recalls (just a bit) the early work of Cleese’s Python colleague Terry Gilliam. Those comparisons notwithstanding, the man is an original worth following.

False Statements Under Oath: One More Sin in the Catholic Church’s Abuse Scandals

During a deposition in April 2014, Archbishop John Nienstedt (below) of Saint Paul and Minneapolis testified to his lack of knowledge concerning a priest’s prior conviction of child abuse, saying he had only discovered that sordid history “during the last six months” and that he had never known much about the abuser’s past.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

Parishioner LaLonne Murphy was able to provide copies of letters she sent to Nienstedt more than six years ago, in which she detailed the history of Rev. Gilbert Gustafson, a convicted pedophile, and expressed her dismay that such a man continued to work as a parish consultant. Murphy became aware of Gustafson’s continuing involvement in Catholic affairs when she encountered him at a Florida church summit (which she was likely attending in her capacity as a director of liturgy and music for her own parish community).

In her original letter, Murphy — who herself carries memories of priestly sexual abuse from her youth, which she disclosed to Nienstedt in a subsequent letter — wrote:

From the public documents I have seen, [Gustafson] spent four and a half months in jail, completed probation, and paid a $40 fine. The people he abused and their families will never be able to fully recover. What he took from them has no time frame and no financial amount.

Set aside, for the moment, the absurdly light punishment for a man who abused his position of trust to sexually violate children in at least four separate cases. The point here is that Nienstedt had far more knowledge about Gustafson — specifically about his criminal past, including the fact that he was sentenced and jailed — than he claimed in his deposition, and had it years sooner than his testimony indicated. And we need not take it on faith that Murphy’s letter is authentic, or that Nienstedt received it, because we also have a copy of his official response.

(Say, wasn’t there something in the Ten Commandments about bearing false witness? Or did we throw that one out with the bit about mixed fibers?)

Nienstedt stands by his original testimony, insisting that he was unable to remember the information from Murphy’s letter. In a statement, Nienstedt said:

I was as accurate as possible in my April 2014 deposition, recalling details from years past to the best of my ability… While I tried to remember details of Gilbert Gustafson’s status during my four-hour deposition, I was not able immediately to recall specific details or that I had received correspondence from Ms. Murphy six years earlier. I receive thousands of letters every year.

As far as Ms. Murphy is concerned, that’s simply not good enough. She says he has lost moral credibility and should be removed from his position by the Vatican. In her opinion:

Either he chose not to tell the truth in his deposition or he didn’t remember. And I think each are morally questionable. To not remember means he didn’t care. It didn’t have enough of his attention that he didn’t have it as a priority of something that he would have to make note of.

Those inclined to give Nienstedt the benefit of the doubt, take note: this is the second instance in which his deposition has been called into question. In August of this year, documents came to light concerning another priest, the Rev. Kenneth LaVan, who was accused of sexual assault in the 1980s but remained in active ministry. Nienstedt insists that he acted as soon as he learned of LaVan’s past, but several documents indicate that Nienstedt was aware of the accusations well before LaVan’s eventual departure from ministry in 2013.

The LaVan documents also indicate a friendly social relationship between the two men, which could explain Nienstedt’s willingness to turn a blind eye. Here we find another parallel with the Gustafson case: Murphy’s 2008 letter points out the cunning way Gustafson netted his consulting position by connecting through a family member of his legal representation. Again and again, we glimpse the old boys’ network that sacrifices Catholic children’s safety for the sake of personal relationships between priests.

After all, what’s a couple of altar boys between friends, right?

NYPD Confirms That Man Who Smashed an Axe Into Police Officer’s Face Is a Convert To Islam

On Thursday night, the New York Police Department still described hatchet-wielding attacker Zale Thompson as “just an angry man,” downplaying the possibility that he was a terrorist.

Then the cops looked at his Facebook page and searched his computer, and whaddaya know – the would-be murderer is a fan of Allah, with a fondness for violent jihad.

A man who attacked New York City police officers with an ax had converted to Islam in recent years and the assault appears to have been a lone-wolf terror attack. … One officer who was struck in the head with the ax by Zale Thompson on Thursday is in critical but stable condition, Police Commissioner William Bratton said. A second officer was also injured. Thompson, 32, was shot and killed by two other officers as Thompson charged them with the ax, Bratton said.

Deputy Commissioner John Miller, who is in charge of counterterrorism for the department, said a review of Thompson’s computer showed that he had visited websites affiliated with radical groups, including al-Qaeda, ISIS and al Shabaab. “It appears from the electronic forensic piece of this, this is something he has been thinking about and thinking about with more intensity in recent days,” Miller said.

We send our best wishes to injured officer Ken Healy and his family.

After Atheists Blow the Whistle, Sioux Falls Officials Pull Back on Religious Snow Plow Messages

Two weeks ago, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the city held an event called “Paint the Plows.” It’s a cute idea. They get representatives from local schools (and youth groups) to paint the snow plows the city will use when the snow hits.

The problem is that two of the participating schools were Christian and painted religious messages on the plows… which could be a problem when the city begins driving them this winter:

Students at Lutheran High School of Sioux Falls spent time and effort designing the plow blade they submitted for the city’s Paint the Plows event, Principal Derek Bult said. Painted red and adorned with the phrase “Jesus Christ” in white, the religious symbolism was hard to miss.

…

[Siouxland Freethinkers board member Eric] Novotny contacted the city attorney’s office after seeing Lutheran High School’s “Jesus Christ” plow blade, and another painted with the phrase: “Happy birthday Jesus.” The latter was submitted by elementary and middle school-aged students at Sioux Falls Lutheran School.

The atheist group didn’t even threaten a lawsuit — but the city saw the writing on the wall and contacted both religious schools to let them know they couldn’t use the plows as is, but the students could repaint them if they wanted to. Neither school took the city up on its offer. Their loss.

There are the usual cries of oppression, and free speech, and “Think of the children!” in comment threads about this story… but there’s an easy experiment anyone can perform to see how seriously we should take them:

Some residents might be upset about a protest of Christian-themed art on city snow plows, but all they need to do is consider a role reversal, Amanda Novotny said.

“It would have no business on a plow, I would never do it, but if I painted a plow that said ‘There is no god,’ I think people would be very, very upset about that,” she said.

No kidding. Though, in the middle of a snowstorm, that message might actually unite everybody…

(via Religion Clause. Image via Lutheran High School of Sioux Falls)

Congratulations, Atheists! America is Growing Increasingly Churchless

A new study released by the Barna Group, in conjunction with David Kinnaman‘s book Churchless, shows that more people than ever before have no need for a church, even if they’re religious.

That’s one of several factors Kinnaman uses to describe those he calls “post-Christian” (which is quite the euphemism):

Nearly two-fifths of the nation’s adult population (38%) now qualifies as post-Christian… That includes 10% of Americans who qualify as highly post-Christian. Another one-quarter is moderately post-Christian (28%). Examined over time, our research shows that the proportion of highly secularized individuals is growing slowly but steadily.

I’m thrilled — because even if a lot of the churchless are Christians, they’ve already taken the first step in loosening religion’s grip on their lives. Not going to church means they’re not subject to pastors who constantly rail against LGBT issues, women’s rights, and solid science. They’re not immune from that, of course, but it’s much harder to organize an army of voters when everyone is scattered all over the place.

And I suspect these numbers will move even more in our direction as we see more secular alternatives for everything churches offer: close-knit communities, a way to pass on moral values, a way to get inspired, a way to volunteer, etc. It turns out church isn’t the only game in town anymore, and we’re so much better off because of that.

(via Religion News Service)

Fox News Thinks Ohio Couple Is Clever For Erecting a Jesus Sign After ACLU Forced It From a Public School

Cathy and Terry Hodgson, a couple from New Concord, Ohio, went on Fox News the other day to share photos of their new lawn ornament. It’s a four-feet-tall picture of Jesus and some bleating creatures under the text “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

Why did Fox deem this worthy of national attention? Because a year ago, the ACLU informed a local public school that a similar sign that had been displayed in the building for more than forty years was in violation of the law and asked that it be removed. In a five-to-zero vote, the school board agreed to take the sign down.

Fox News’ Steve Doocy seems to be positively gloating over the Hodgsons’ lawn art, presenting it as some clever end run that the couple had done around the ACLU. But why? While the sign may bother people who are allergic to religious kitsch, there is nothing constitutionally wrong with it, and I know not a single atheist or civil libertarian who’d be offended by it in its new location. (In public schools or on government property, however, that’s another matter.)

By the way, note how the text at the bottom of the TV image says, at various times, “The Fight For Faith” and “Faith Under Fire” — and sometimes both. ‘Cause that’s fair and balanced, right?

Also, that’s not how you spell “shepherd” (1:03). Maybe the Murdoch empire could invest in a dictionary? Or at least pray for one?