In rural Canadian County, Sheriff’s deputies say they found the worst case of child abuse they have ever seen. Lawmen say the parents, Edward and Krystal Everett, locked their little boy up in a bare room. When deputies discovered him Thursday, they say he was in the fetal position covered in bruises.

Neighbor George Heupel drives past the quiet, country home. He says he was clueless. “I wouldn’t even treat my animals that way,” said Heupel.

Investigators say the parents kept the six-year-old in a room with a small mat to sit on and a bucket to use the bathroom. Investigators also say the parents only came in to feed him once a day and to shock him with a cattle prod.

The parents told deputies they locked the child in the room because he was possessed by demons. They claimed he heard voices and hurt himself.

“It’s really an outrageous case of child neglect,” said Undersheriff Chris West.

Three younger children were in the home too. Lawmen rescued them all.

http://kfor.com/2014/05/16/deputies-oklahoma-child-abused-locked-up-like-wild-animal/

“[O]ur right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life,” according to the campaign website of Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who won his party’s nomination to the United States Senate on Tuesday. Nebraska is a solid red state that preferred Romney to Obama by a massive 21 point margin in 2012, so Sasse is now all but certain to succeed retiring Sen. Mike Johanns (R) this November. If he does, Sasse promises to promote an almost anarchistic vision of religious liberty as a member of the Senate. According to Sasse’s website, “[g]overnment cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances.”

Here’s a screenshot of the relevant part of Sasse’s website:


The question of when religious belief exempts believers from following the law is at the forefront of our national debate right now, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether religious business owners can refuse to offer birth control coverage as part of their employer-provided health plans, even when doing so would violate federal law. Yet, even the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court acknowledge that religious liberty is not an absolute right to violate any law at any time. As the crafting chain Hobby Lobby says in its brief to the justices, the government may limit religious believers actions when it uses “‘the least restrictive means of furthering’ a ‘compelling governmental interest.’” This is the standard set by federal law, although there is some uncertainty about how the justices will interpret this legal standard in its Hobby Lobby decision.

Sasse, however, apparently believes that this law does not go far enough, even if the Court gives Hobby Lobby everything it is asking for. His proposed rule — that government cannot require someone to act counter to their religious beliefs “under any circumstances” — would mean that literally any law could be ignored by someone who held a religious belief counter to that law. According to National Geographic, for example, “[h]undreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family ‘honor,’” and while this practice “goes across cultures and across religions,” some of the perpetrators of honor killings are motivated by their religious faith. Under Sasse’s formulation of religious liberty, a person who killed his own sister because he believed he was under a religious obligation to do so would be immune from prosecution for murder.

Similarly, religious beliefs have been used to justify discrimination against racial minorities, women, and LGBT Americans at different points in American history. In an opinion upholding Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, a state judge wrote that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Former Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett offered a similar view in 1960, claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” The conservative Bob Jones University drew a similar connection between religion and racism to justify excluding African Americans entirely until the early 1970s, and then to justify a ban on interracial dating and marriage among its students.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/05/14/3437587/nebraska-sasse-absolute-religious-liberty/

Lots of people lose their religious faith and just keep quiet about it. They have great reasons for doing so. Entire communities and family relationships are built on agreement that God is real. Publicly express doubt and you risk becoming an outcast in both social and family circles. Thus, many people go through the motions. What’s the harm in believing a beautiful lie?

The problem for me was that the lie’s not harmless. Scratch the surface and you quickly expose a dark underbelly of rules designed to keep people in bondage: Women are to be submissive to men. Gay relationships are abominations. Natural sexual urges are sinful. This life is relatively meaningless compared to the afterlife. Suffering is purposeful and justified. And so on. This system of beliefs is not only harmful but, pushed to extremes, can result in devastation on a societal scale. Truth matters after all.

When I walked away from my faith and decided to go public, doing it through social media was a natural way for me to do it. For me, Facebook is a kind of “truth serum”—a place where people air all kinds of things, from trivial (what they just prepared for lunch) to intense (political and religious debates). I had used it a great deal over the years to air my challenges to skeptics in a public forum, so I thought it was only fair to use it as the platform for my admission that I was now convinced I’d been wrong.

I began by publicly announcing I was separating myself from religion and letting people know that in the days that followed, I would be outlining the high points as to why I no longer believed in the supernatural. I tried to be painfully honest about my fears in going public.

http://thehumanist.com/commentary/losing-my-religion-and-going-public-on-facebook

Veteran Catholic teacher Molly Shumate stared at the Cincinnati Archdiocese contract for next school year and thought of her son. She remembered when a nervous Zachery Shumate, a teenager at the time, approached her and revealed his homosexuality. His revelation prompted the first-grade teacher to give him a hug, telling her boy she would always love and support him.

So when the new teachers' contract – strictly forbidding public support of homosexuality – was handed to her earlier this year, she was torn.

The employment contract – exclusively obtained and reported by The Enquirer in March – continues to divide huge sections of the region's Catholics. The "morality" clauses – though not unique among Catholic schools nationwide – were a first for the 19-county Archdiocese school system.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2014/05/09/catholic-teacher-backs-gay-son-quitting-protest-controversial-contract/8898181/

As justice William Brennan said in his incisive dissent to the majority ruling in the 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case that ruled that ceremonial prayer to open the legislative sessions was constitutional, the trouble with prayer is that you have no control over what the prayer giver will say even if you prescribe what prayers are acceptable, which you are not allowed to do anyway since that would be tantamount to having an official government prayer.

And we see that Brennan was indeed prophetic because of what happened yesterday at the supposedly ‘nonpolitical, nonpartisan’ National Day of Prayer, one of those occasions that public figures love and pander to, where they can show their piety publicly. It is supposed to be an occasion for bland pious utterances that anyone can get behind such as extolling America’s uniqueness and greatness, which is a surefire crowd pleaser.

But James Dobson, founder of the extremist Christian group Focus on the Family, threw a wrench in the works and took the occasion to attack president Obama on the issue of abortion, saying, “President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president. He didn’t make any bones about it. This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense he is the abortion president.”
This caused one congresswoman Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) to walk out in protest, pointing her finger at Dobson and saying, “This is inappropriate”.

But what is truly inappropriate is having such an occasion at all and Hahn shares the blame because she herself is co-chair of the weekly congressional prayer breakfast and thus an active promoter of this kind of nonsense.
It is probably a good thing that people like Dobson use these occasions as political events. Maybe that will make people realize that you cannot contain extemporaneous prayer within boundaries and the best thing is to avoid having governmental prayer events altogether.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2014/05/02/this-is-the-problem-with-ceremonial-prayer/

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

He then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to “a secular law school,” so he knows that “in the law, [talking about God] just isn’t politically correct.” He claimed that this is why America has “lost its way,” and that he would be publishing a pamphlet “this week, maybe next” that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people “who found this nation — black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths” knew that America was “about God.”

--snip--

He later said that “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law, and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy.”

“It’s all about God,” he continued. “We’ve made ‘life’ a decision taken by man,” he said, and “taken ‘liberty,’ and converted it to ‘licentiousness. We’ve taken ‘pursuit of happiness,’ and reduced it to materialism.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/02/alabamas-chief-justice-buddha-didnt-create-us-so-first-amendment-only-protects-christians/

Polls show that atheists remain the most distrusted and despised minority in America. A University of Minnesota study found that 40 percent of Americans believe atheists “do not agree with my vision of American society.” With such widely held prejudice, there’s little wonder 46 percent of Americans are unwilling to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. It’s also why atheist politicians have, for the most part, kept their atheism a secret until long after leaving office.

Take Barney Frank (D-MA). In 1987, while serving in the U.S. Congress, Frank stepped out of the close to announce he was gay. But he kept his atheism a secret until he had long retired from public life. Pete Stark (D-CA) was one of the longest serving congressional members in U.S. history, representing California’s 13th congressional district from 1973 to 2013. It wasn’t until 2007 before Stark, in an interview with the Secular Coalition of America, acknowledged he was openly atheist, which made him the first congressman in U.S. history to declare his atheism while still in office.

If the U.S. congress proportionately represented the will of the American people, there’d be no less than 50 atheists serving in the federal legislative branch of government. Instead there are none. Not a single open-shirted atheist walks among the 535 members on Capitol Hill today.

James Woods is hoping to change that scorecard as he fights to become not only the representative of Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, but also the first elected member of Congress running unabashedly as an atheist.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/watershed-moment-atheism-america-first-major-party-candidate-congress-campaign-atheist