Secular Student Alliance: Atheists, Humanists, Agnostics & Others - Articles

Secular Alliance at Indiana University Makes a Statement

19-September-2008

This was Sarah Kaiser's statement for the Secular Alliance of IU (at Indiana University Bloomington) callout meeting on September 11, 2008. The group, of which she is president, decided that it should have a semi-formal callout meeting at which the president stood up and spoke about what the group is and what they want to do, as well as talk about upcoming events and activities.

You might be wondering: what is the Secular Alliance and what does it mean to be "secular"? Secular is a word that encompasses many nonreligious philosophies, which include atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, freethought, and humanism, among others. It can mean many different things, but in the context of our group, secularism is simple—it focuses on the assertion that one can lead an ethical, fulfilling, and complete life without religion or supernatural belief. It is also a social ideology in which religion and supernatural beliefs are not seen as the key to understanding the world and are instead segregated from matters of governance and reasoning. Thus, secularism can be involved in the promotion of science, reason, and naturalistic thinking.

Fringe Religion Creates Opportunity for Secularists

11-August-2008

Who would have thought that a lawsuit brought by Summum, a fringe religious group founded by an ex-Mormon who claimed to have had contact with extraterrestrials, could be an opportunity for the secular community?

The Supreme Court case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum is one of those anomalous cases which, despite involving no secular advocacy organization directly, could have significant repercussions for the secular movement. The case lies at the intersection of a number of controversial legal issues commonly faced by secularist organizations, including the protection of free speech under the First Amendment, government violation of the Establishment Clause, control of government speech, and the legal doctrine of “public forum.”

The case began in September 2003, when the little-known religious organization Summum asked the mayor of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, to accept its donation of a monument to Pioneer Park, a public space maintained by the city. The monument would commemorate a key text of the religion’s beliefs, the “Seven Aphorisms,” which members of Summum believe were given to Moses by God prior to the Ten Commandments. Perhaps contrary to Summum’s theology, a monument to the Ten Commandments already stood in Pioneer Park, donated nearly thirty years earlier by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Summum’s request was denied by the city, citing their criteria that permanent displays in the park must “directly relate to the history of Pleasant Grove” or be “donated by groups with long-standing ties to the Pleasant Grove community.”

In August 2004, the city passed a resolution formally establishing their set of criteria for authorizing permanent displays in the park. In May 2005, Summum re-submitted their request, but they received no word back from the mayor or the city. In response, Summum filed for a preliminary injunction against the city to permit the group to erect its monument in the park, contending that the city violated its free speech rights by excluding its monument while allowing another religious monument, that of the Ten Commandments, to remain.

The District Court issued an oral ruling denying Summum’s request on the basis that the organization failed to provide sufficient evidence to warrant the issuance of an injunction. Summum appealed the decision, arguing that the actions of the city and the District Court amounted to viewpoint discrimination, thereby violating its free speech rights. The Tenth Circuit of the Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling, finding that the city’s denial of Summum’s monument in light of the presence of the Eagles’ Ten Commandments monument constituted a violation of private free speech in a public forum. This ruling left the city with the choice of accepting Summum’s monument or removing the Eagles’ monument. Rather than making an apparently unacceptable choice, the city decided to take its case to the Supreme Court.

Recognizing the importance of this case to our movement, the American Humanist Association (AHA), in cooperation with several other organizations such as the Secular Student Alliance and the Institute for Humanist Studies, recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of neither party. While the brief expresses sympathy for Summum’s assertion that the government should remain belief-neutral in its acceptance of monuments into the park, “the primary aim of our brief is to inform the Court that all religious monuments in a public park are unconstitutional,” said Bob Ritter, attorney for the secular groups.

While this case has been argued as a question of free speech versus the government’s right to control what is placed on its property, AHA’s brief argues that the real issue in this case is the government’s longstanding violation of the Establishment Clause. Whereas the Tenth Circuit Court assumed that city parks are “public forums” wherein all expressions of religious viewpoint are protected under the First Amendment, the AHA brief asserts that this is a mischaracterization of the legal access sought by Summum. AHA argues that, while parks and sidewalks are public forums for assembly and debate, this status does not extend to the realm of donated permanent monuments in city parks. Therefore, the forum to which Summum is seeking access is not simply “a city park,” but rather “permanent monuments in a city park,” which does not fall under the legal protections of the public forum.

Furthermore, the brief argues that, from a common-sense perspective, one can reasonably assume that a man on a soapbox does not speak for the government since he has not been endorsed by the government. At best, a rally or public speaker can only be assumed to have received a permit from the government, and nothing more. A monument, on the other hand, is accepted, installed, and maintained by the government. Despite its origin as a privately-donated item, a donated monument becomes, as far as the reasonable observer can distinguish, the property of the government. This further undermines Summum’s argument that such monuments remain solely the private speech of the donors, as the monuments have the effect of sponsored government speech, regardless of the givers’ intentions.

Under the AHA’s view, both the proposed monument from Summum and the pre-existing monument from the Fraternal Order of Eagles would be considered to be government endorsement of religion in violation of the Establishment Clause and therefore illegal. AHA hopes that, through its brief, the focus of this case will return to the issue of the city’s violation of the Establishment Clause. The AHA concluded its brief by asking the Supreme Court to reverse the 10th Circuit’s rulings in favor of Summum and refer the case back to the lower courts to consider whether the Ten Commandments monument violates the Establishment Clause.

The Supreme Court’s decision in this matter, no matter which side it holds for, is likely to have a major impact on the secular movement’s legal proceedings in the future. If the Court finds in favor of Summum, then privately donated monuments in public parks would be granted First Amendment protections, and the government would lose its authority to turn away religious monuments that meet its general criteria. If the Court finds in favor of Pleasant Grove City, however, then cities will continue to be able to select what message they wish to convey to the public. Particularly relevant here is Pleasant Grove’s argument that the Ten Commandments is a permissible secular display honoring the city’s “pioneering heritage,” and this is where the AHA takes issue with the city’s position, arguing instead that the “secular heritage” label is a sham description that the city devised in order to endorse the Christian religion.

“Given the Court’s bogus reasoning in its 2005 Van Orden decision,” Ritter said, “removing the Ten Commandments monument in Pioneer Park will be a long and difficult road even should Pleasant Grove prevail in the current case.”

This article was written by Brendan Dieffenbach. Brendan Dieffenbach is a student intern at the Secular Student Alliance in Albany, NY. He is double-majoring in English and sociology at Kenyon College in Ohio, and will be spending the '08-'09 school year studying at the University of Exeter, England, where he will be harassing his fellow ex-pats to cast their absentee ballots in a timely fashion. He is passionate about politics, and hopes to make a lifetime career out of activism.

Secular Student Alliance 2008 Best Awards

2-July-2008

At the 2008 SSA Conference in Washington, D.C., we were happy to award the 2008 SSA Best Awards. Field Director Alison Bates presented the awards with these remarks.

In the past year the Secular Student Alliance has gone from 80 campus groups to 137 active affiliate groups! That's a growth of 71%. We've had more impressive groups doing impressive work on campus around the world this past year than we've had in any year before. It certainly wasn't easy picking only five groups to be awarded a Best Award!

This year, in an effort to provide more support to our most outstanding groups, we’ve increased the amount of money that the winners of the awards receive. Winners for best Service Project, Best Website, Best Media Appearance, and Best New Affiliate will receive $300, up from $100 in previous years. The Best Overall Affiliate will receive $500 from the SSA. This money is to recognize your group for their success this past year, and also to help you carry out further impressive projects throughout the next academic year.

Best Service Project
Congratulations to the Atheists, Agnostics and Freethinkers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a great service project!

This group’s project was to send eleven members of their group along with nineteen members of the school’s Campus Crusade for Christ group to New Orleans to carry out relief work.

Chris Calvey, a member of the group who went to New Orleans on behalf of AAF, had this to say:

We were able to spend a lot of time interacting with Christian students from all over the country. Many were happy, impressed, or even shocked to find out that we were atheists. After getting to know one another, it became apparent to both sides that it’s possible to put aside our philosophical differences and work together for a greater good. If we want to improve the images of atheism in this country, I can think of no better way to do it than by volunteering alongside those who might disagree with us. Complaining about the misconceptions, stereotyping, and discrimination of nonbelievers is one thing we do very well… Actually working to dispel these is another story. I am confident that our service project will have the effect of positively shaping their opinion about atheism for the rest of their lives.

Members of UIUC's award-winning group: Aaron Aves, Franklin Kramer, Peter Ho, Ryan James, Heather Hanks, Ashley Carter, and Claire Wright.

Best Website
We’re pleased to give the award of Best Website to the UCLA Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists! Check out their award-winning work at BruinSkeptics.org.

Roy Natian, the group’s founder, had this to say about his site:

Function, Function, Function! The site has to be easy to use and to update. In planning ahead for BASS’s future, I wanted to make sure that we had a solid infrastructure. By making the site require minimal maintenance, I’m allowing future BASSiers to focus on the more important facets of running BASS, such as planning educational events. An added benefit of having the site be easily updateable is that the site actually gets updated!

Rational Response Squad: Kelly's Blog

18-May-2008

Kelly of the Rational Response Squad is writing a year-long series to address theist talking heads in the media. Kelly is a Psychology major, co-host of the RRS Radio show, and has been featured on ABC debating Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Here, we reprint select articles with permission.

May 17 - If Sex Is a Drug, What Isn't?

Internship Opportunity with the Society for Humanistic Judaism

18-May-2008

Summer Intern for University Programs

The Society for Humanistic Judaism is looking for a summer intern to fill a project-based contract position.

The project entails compiling a manual for university Humanistic havurot programs explaining Humanistic Judaism and including at minimum the following components:

In Reason We Trust?

17-May-2008

This story originally appeared in The Daily Cardinal (the campus newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Madison) on 04/03/08, and is used by permission.
Article by Sajia Hall of The Daily Cardinal.

Between the religious right and violence in the name of religion, do atheists on campus have a prayer?

As an organizing member of AHA, the UW-Madison organization for Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics, Nick Jikomes hears arguments against atheism all the time. One of the most common is that atheism requires belief and is therefore a religion.

Jikomes, however, has an answer.

The Blogging of a Secular Lobbyist

4-April-2008

Lori Lipman Brown is Director of the Secular Coalition for America, where she serves as the first Congressional lobbyist representing atheists. She is also a speaker on the SSA's Speaker's Bureau. She writes a weekly blog for The Humanist; we reprint select articles with permission.

Rational Response Squad: Kelly's Blog

3-April-2008

March 12 - Vox Day - "There is no god. Because I'm an asshole."

Richard Dawkins in Madison, WI

29-March-2008

Phil Ferguson is one of the newest members of the Secular Student Alliance's Board of Directors. On March 11, he saw Richard Dawkins speak in Madison, Wisconsin.

Richard Dawkins is on a speaking tour to promote the paperback release of The God Delusion, sponsored in part by the Secular Student Alliance. On March 11th, Mr. Dawkins was in Madison, WI and I only had to drive five hours to see him. I arrived in Madison early to take Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Debbie Goddard from the Center for Inquiry to lunch. Upon my arrival, I was informed that Mr. Dawkins would also be joining us.

Darwin Day Celebrations at UTA

28-March-2008

Secular Student Alliance Board Secretary Becky Robinson leads the Freethinkers of the University of Texas at Arlington. Here, she writes about her group's exciting and successful events on Darwin Day this year.

As we did last year, the Freethinkers of the University of Texas at Arlington planned an all-day Darwin Day event on February 12th, the 199th birthday of Charles Darwin. We hoped to spread awareness of science and education, mixed in with some political activism and good old celebration with birthday cake!

Campus Organizer Update: Neil Polzin, Southern California

28-February-2008

Every month, our Southern California Campus Organizer Neil Polzin writes an update describing what he and the groups in his area have been up to.

February 25, 2008 – Charging Onward

We are charging at the new year, along with it's new challenges. Now, going into March, even the last of the community colleges have returned from break, meaning school is back into full swing here in Southern California.

Humanists Promote Science-based Legislation on Darwin's Birthday

27-February-2008

On Feb. 12, 2008, the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS), hosted the first ever Humanist Legislative Advocacy Day.

Humanist activists in New York state came to Albany to persuade their elected representatives to support such issues as: access to emergency contraceptives; same sex marriage legislation; comprehensive sex education in the schools; and expanding therapeutic embryonic stem cell research.

"Today, you've made history, the largest minority group never to be counted was heard," said Matt Cherry, at an afternoon press conference in the Legislative Office Building.

Discovery Institute on Darwin Day

22-February-2008

Don't you just love it when other people tell you what you're doing?

John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, claims that "evolution proponents have launched a movement" with the plans of elevating Charles Darwin and demoting President Abraham Lincoln. Yes, that's Darwin Day he's talking about. No, we didn't know anything about Lincoln-bashing, either.

The Blogging of a Secular Lobbyist

22-February-2008

Rational Response Squad: Kelly's Blog

17-February-2008

February 7 - How to Respond to a Supercilious Christian