Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [174]
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The case for secular humanism’s religious credentials stems from a footnote to a 1961 Supreme Court case in which Justice Hugo Black suggests, “Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.” (Christopher P. Toumey, “Evolution and Secular Humanism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 61:2 [Summer, 1993]: 277-278.)
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The president of the Organization of Christian Schools even complained about modern math because “it teaches very strongly that all things are relative and there are no absolutes.” (“Christian School Administrators Vow to Fight Judge’s Decision,” Wilmington Morning Star, 112:2 [6 Sep. 1978]: 2-A.)
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Unlike O’Reilly, Homer saw the theory of evolution at the heart of the conspiracy. He wrote, “Every single anti-Christian ‘ism’ that has come down the pike in the last century or more has found as its pseudoscientific foundation in the idea of evolution. Whether we are talking about Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Secular Humanism, Freudianism, Behaviorism, or any one of a dozen other ‘isms,’ they all rest their case on evolution.”
The extreme right seems to have a thing against isms. For example, in 1965, a KKK grand dragon declared his opposition to “niggerism, Catholicism, Judaism, and all the isms of the whole world.” I would call the phenomenon anti-ism-ism were it not for the risk of a mind-blowing paradox. (Homer Duncan, Secular Humanism: The Most Dangerous Religion in America, [revised] tenth printing, 1984 [Lubbock, TX: MC International Publications, 1979]: 41; John Herbers, “The Klan: Its Growing Influence; Membership Placed at 10,000 in South,” New York Times, 20 Apr. 1965: 24.)
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The Year 2000 Humanist World Domination Project has been indefinitely delayed. For an updated schedule, please purchase the revised edition of this book, Blowing Smoke: But Not for Much Longer (Diabolical Laughter), scheduled for publication in 2012.
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According to the New York Times, On Golden Pond, rated PG, “includes some slightly vulgar words in its dialogue.” (Vincent Canby, “Fonda at His Peak in ‘On Golden Pond,’” New York Times, 4 Dec. 1981: C10.)
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“Decent books.” Hawthorne, Twain, and Shakespeare, all of whom had been censored in their lifetimes by crusading moralists, were no doubt furiously knocking their skulls against the walls of their respective coffins.
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Before winning his Senate seat, Sessions failed in his own attempt to become a federal judge because senators accused him of calling the NAACP “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” and to his labeling a white civil rights lawyer “a traitor to his race.” (United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Jefferson B. Sessions III, to be U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Alabama [Washington, DC: United States Senate, 1987]: 30, 66, 339.)
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First place went to the 1859 Mississippi Supreme Court. In rejecting the cross-state inheritance claims of a freed slave in Ohio, the court determined that black people occupied an “intermediate place between the irrational animal and the white man.”
The justices expressed concern that should the state of Ohio grant citizenship to “the chimpanzee or the ourang-out-ang (the most respectable of the monkey tribe),” Mississippi would be forced to honor the primates’ property rights—a classic slippery-slope argument. (The court did not elucidate the reasoning behind its praise for the “ourang-out-ang.”)
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Schreber eventually concluded that God also lusted after