ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 274

Report on clergy abuse in limbo, awaiting decision from Pa. Supreme Court

By Lindsay Lazarski

The Pennsylvania District Attorney Association is the latest group to support releasing the grand jury investigation into decades of sexual abuse and cover-up in six Roman Catholic Dioceses across the state.

The report — the culmination of a two-year investigation by the Attorney General’s office into the Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton Dioceses — was expected to be made public last month. But it was delayed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court due to appeals from unnamed clergy members who say their due process rights will be violated by its release.

Identified only by initials, several former and current clergy members question the facts of the report and say the release of the investigation would wrongly damage their reputations.

Attorneys for the unnamed clergy members said they’re not trying to silence the grand jury, but to ensure the accuracy of the report.

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Trump-Appointed Judge OKs Administration’s Attack on Family Planning Funding

By Jessica Mason Pieklo

A federal district court judge on Monday ruled the Trump administration could move forward with efforts to restructure the federal Title X family planning program by prioritizing abstinence programs.

United States District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, appointed by Trump in 2017, ruled the courts do not have the ability to review the proposed changes because they are not a “final agency action.”

“The substantive tweaks to the program priorities and key issues are neither new nor incompatible with Title X, instead they rephrase similar priorities and issues that appeared in prior funding announcements without objection or notice-and-comment rulemaking,” McFadden wrote.

The fight over Title X funding started as soon as the Trump administration took power. In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it was terminating all multi-year grants under Title X. That meant even though competitive Title X grants had been awarded on overlapping three-year cycles, all Title X grantees would need to submit a new application for Title X funds in 2018.

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What Was Maria Butina Doing at the National Prayer Breakfast?

By Katherine Stewart

Does it seem strange that, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Monday by the Justice Department, a Russian woman stands accused of “acting as an agent of a foreign government” in part because she hoped “to establish a back-channel of communication” with American politicians at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington?

It shouldn’t. As Jeff Sharlet, an associate professor of English at Dartmouth, has pointed out, the National Prayer Breakfast has long offered “a backdoor to American power.” And America’s homegrown Christian nationalists have evinced an admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader that appears to have grown apace with his brutality.

On Tuesday, Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian whose name was spelled Mariia in court papers, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Russian Federation. According to the complaint unsealed on Monday, Ms. Butina’s promotional activities for Russian political interests included attending the National Prayer Breakfast twice.

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Question of the Week – 7/18/2018

The social media videos parodied by the McGill Office for Science and Society are all over platforms like Facebook and Twitter. What’s the most ridiculous or outrageous claim you’ve seen in one of those videos? Were you able to figure out whether it was false?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? E-mail submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)

More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution

By Matt Wilkins

The only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary proportions. And it’s true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint. The lie is that blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our individual habits will fix it.

Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place. The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place.

As an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I have had a disturbing window into the accumulating literature on the hazards of plastic pollution. Scientists have long recognized that plastics biodegrade slowly, if at all, and pose multiple threats to wildlife through entanglement and consumption. More recent reports highlight dangers posed by absorption of toxic chemicals in the water and by plastic odors that mimic some species’ natural food.

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Living a double life: Indonesia’s atheists fear jail or worse

JAKARTA (AFP) – As a university student, Luna Atmowijoyo prayed five times a day, refused to shake hands with men who weren’t relatives and was “more fundamentalist” than her pious Muslim parents.

But a decade later, Atmowijoyo has turned her back on Islam and is among a small number of atheists in Indonesia who live in fear of jail or violent reprisals from religious hardliners.

Leading a double life – devout Muslim on the outside, non-believer on the inside – is often the only choice for atheists in the world’s biggest Muslim majority country.

Atmowijoyo, who lives with her parents, still wears an Islamic headscarf to escape the wrath of an abusive father who knows nothing of his daughter’s change of heart, which started when she was told to avoid friendships with non-Muslims.

“A lot of simple things started to bother me,” said the 30-year-old, who asked AFP not to use her real name.

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Pardoned Oregon Rancher to Focus on Putting God in Public Schools

By Stephanie Mencimer

Last year, Western land activists and other conservatives had been lobbying President Donald Trump to pardon rancher Cliven Bundy, who in 2014 had engaged in an armed standoff with federal officials trying to confiscate his cattle that were trespassing on public property. But earlier this year, a federal judge dropped all the charges against Bundy thanks to misconduct by prosecutors, and there was no longer any need for Trump to pardon him. So Trump last week did the next best thing: He pardoned Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven, whose 2012 convictions for arson on federal land had inspired Bundy’s son Ammon to lead the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.

The takeover ultimately resulted in the death of one of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, who was shot by an FBI agent while fleeing the site, and it turned the Hammonds into a causecélèbre for activists in the West who believe federal land should be returned to the states. The Hammonds had battled the feds over a variety of land infractions for two decades before they were finally prosecuted for setting a fire that spread to federal land.

The Hammonds negotiated a short prison term for the arson charges and served just a few months. But in 2015, prosecutors succeeded in convincing a judge that the original sentence had failed to follow federal guidelines, and they were resentenced to five-year terms, a decision that helped set off the wildlife refuge takeover. The Bundys pressured the Hammonds not to report to prison, but they ignored the requests and turned themselves in as required.

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Charities Can Reject Foster Parents for Immigrant Kids Over Religion

By Justin Rohrlich

Private charities housing undocumented immigrant children in several states are permitted by law to reject prospective foster families based on religious objections.

Under current policy, undocumented minors apprehended by Customs and Border Protection are sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. From there ORR tries to place the kids with a sponsor, usually a relative. The last option is a “licensed program willing to accept legal custody; or an adult individual or entity seeking custody.”

Right now, HHS oversees more than 100 shelters in 17 states, a number of which are operated by nonprofit providers housing kids separated at the border by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. In nine states, providers are protected by law if they reject an applicant (or child) on religious grounds.

In Texas, Republican-sponsored legislation passed last year guarantees organizations that refuse prospective foster or adoptive parents “under circumstances that conflict with the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs,” won’t be penalized or lose government funding because of it.

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Judge denies Catholic Social Services discrimination claim in foster care case

By Julia Terruso

Philadelphia can require its foster care agencies to adhere to its nondiscrimination polices, a federal judge said Friday in a decision that could have national repercussions.

U.S. District Court Judge Petrese B. Tucker found that the city did not violate the religious liberties of Catholic Social Services (CSS) when it suspended its contract with the agency for foster-care services after discovering that the agency would not work with same-sex couples.

The Department of Human Services had a legitimate interest in ensuring “that the pool of foster parents and resource caregivers is as diverse and broad as the children in need of foster parents,” Tucker wrote in a decision Friday denying CSS’s request for a temporary restraining order to resume its work for the city.

The city welcomed the news.

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Humanists campaign for more non-religious NHS ‘chaplains’

By Catherine Pepinster

For people of faith, when they face serious ill-health or an operation, being able to seek solace in their beliefs is vital. Even more so when they reach the end of life.

Now humanists are campaigning to end what they see as discrimination against non-religious people being treated by the NHS, by urging that chaplains – or what they term non-religious pastoral carers – are hired to cater for non-believers.

Humanists UK has been advertising – including in the Observer – to raise funds to support pastoral workers and train them, because it says there is a disproportionate number of religious chaplains in the NHS, given how many people in the UK do not have religious beliefs. The latest Social Attitudes Survey said 53% of Britons have no religion.

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