Constitution Center and presidential inaugural SHMG

On January 10 the Constitution Center published their 10 fascinating facts presidential inauguration.  The Constitution Center is a secular, non-partisan, federal government sponsored, organization that relies on an advisory panel of expert historians and scholars.  Therefore we have reason to take them seriously as a reliable source of information about American history.  They originally said this: 

We don’t really know who added “Under God” to the oath. Author Washington Irving claimed George Washington started the tradition of adding “So help me God” at the oath’s end. There is no direct evidence of that. Others believe Chester Alan Arthur used the words when he took the oath in private after James Garfield died.

President Arthur took his presidential oath of office twice, the first time in his apartment in New York.  A short but detailed account of that first, unplanned, oath recitation that names six participants was published the next day in the Omaha Daily Bee. That report quotes the oath and clearly states that there was no SHMG, see http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99021999/1881-09-21/ed-1/seq-3.

After traveling to Washington D.C., Arthur was inaugurated again two days later by Chief Justice of the United States Morrison R. Waite in a larger ceremony held in the Vice President's office with invited guests. It was widely reported in newspapers, starting early the next day, that he added the phrase "so help me god" to his oath of office during that second oath of office recitation.  The published description of what happened included the who, when, where, and what details that require an eyewitness to reveal.  Participants in the second ceremony as described in the newspaper article, several dozen of whom were identified by name, included two associate justices of the Supreme Court, two former presidents, cabinet members, some Senators, and some Representatives.

I do not know who wrote the article or if subsequent accounts claiming Chester Arthur said SHMG rely on this initial report or independently confirm it. Nevertheless, the publish article is credible enough to be accepted absent any eyewitness subsequently contradicting it.  Sometimes the evidence favors a conclusion that so and so said such and such and it is misleading to suggest otherwise, even though technically it is true that we lack certainty.  

In contrast, Washington Irving's biography of George Washington fails to qualify as an eyewitness account of the inauguration.  Irving did not identify an eyewitness, he himself was too far away in the crowd from the president elect to be the eyewitness, he was six years old at the time and he published his biography over 6 decades after the fact, and his account of the inauguration was copied from an earlier account written by someone else who was an eyewitness without acknowledgement or permission [Memoir of Eliza S. M. Quincy, no SHMG in that eyewitness account].  Also, that SHMG story is counter-evidenced by a contemporaneous eyewitness account of the oath recitation written by someone who stood near the president elect on the balcony [letter of the French consul, Comte de Moustier, April 30, 1789].  If George Washington appended SHMG then not only did no one notice, but for the next ninety two years, starting with George Washington's second inauguration, no one else did that again, even though the other presidents repeated the first inauguration's public ceremony with hand on the bible followed by kissing the bible that was required by New York state law for the first inauguration held in NY.

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CNN's Katie Glaeser promotes misinformation

CNN published an article on January 18 by their employee Katie Glaeser, an Off Programming Producer, fun facts about past inaugurals that features a drawing of George Washington's face with a speech bubble connected to his open mouth containing the words "so help me God".  The article says that "Yes, this stuff really happened." The fifth fact is titled "The 'So help me God' line was ad-libbed." It says:

During his first inauguration in 1789 in New York, it is said that George Washington added the phrase, "So help me God," and so the precedent was set that presidents follow to this day. There isn't any hard evidence of this, but even the National Archives credits him with doing it.

I contacted Katie Glaeser to inform her that the National Archive Records Administration (NARA) does not credit George Washington with "doing it".  It would be irresponsible for NARA to credit anyone with doing anything without evidence.  I would have thought that a professional journalist at CNN would respect the need for evidence and notice this inconsistency.  Journalism is not worth the paper it inks, or the screen it populates with words, without evidence to back its "this stuff really happened" presumption.  I believe that my initial two emails about this reached her but my third attempt bounced.  

The National Archives abandoned their claim that George Washington added the words "so help me God" some years ago (seven years ago?) after they determined it could not be supported.  I know this because I witnessed the conversation with NARA about it and witnessed when NARA finally revised their web site to remove it (they were one of the last federal government websites to stop misrepresenting this ahistorical claim as historical).

Katie Glaeser and CNN should publicly acknowledge that NARA does not claim that GW said SHMG.  If they are unsure they can contact NARA and ask them.  It is easy to ask NARA, they have an online form for questions and usually respond promptly.  This was NARA's response on 01-20, two days after CNN published their article claiming NARA asserts that George Washington said 'so help me god': "We do not address whether Washington added the line because there isn't an official account of the ceremony and scholarly sources about whether he said "so help me god" are inconsistent."

Indeed, scholarly sources are inconsistent.  This is because too many historians in the past mistakenly accepted the story that George Washington did it without going through the trouble of verifying the claim from primary sources.  This mistake has since been corrected and historians today are no longer repeating this false story.  But it appears that Katie Gleaser prefers the false history so much that she relied on an old, isolated, inactive backup file with ".bak." in the file name on the NARA web server that asserted GW said SHMG while ignoring the corresponding active, current web page.  NARA has now replaced their backup file so that it no longer claims George Washington said "so help me God" to protect our planet from unreliable journalists like CNN's Katie Glaeser.

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Jeff Session's absolutism

By Mathew Goldstein

Senator Jeff Session, speaking to a Faith and Freedom Coalition event last year about the importance of the Supreme Court, claimed that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had what he called “a postmodern, relativistic, secular mindset” that is “directly contrary to the founding of our republic.”  He complained that Sotomayor had endorsed legal scholar Martha Minow’s observation that in the law “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives — no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging”.  He has also identified Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan as a judge with this mindset.

Mr. Sessions then said this: “So I really think this whole court system is really important and the real value and battle that we’re engaged in here is one to reaffirm that there is objective truth, it’s not all relative. And that means some things are right and some things are wrong, and we’re getting too far away from that in my opinion and it’s not healthy for any country and it’s really not healthy for a democracy like ours that’s built on the rule of law.”  If he was talking about his boss, president elect Donald Trump, instead of the whole court system then there would be lots of false statements he could quote that support his complaint.

Mr. Sessions unambiguously links a "there is no right and wrong" attitude to secularism, saying in his recent Senate hearings for Attorney General that he is "not sure" if secular attorneys are as capable of discerning the truth as religious attorneys.  Sonia Sotomayor self-identifies as a Catholic but it appears that she, like the majority of Americans, does not go to church every Sunday.  For Mr. Sessions, a failure to visibly worship every weekend appears to suffice to characterize that person as secularist.  Ms. Sotomayor, you are welcome to join WASH, we will not reject your membership if you continue to call yourself Catholic.

Mr. Session's battle in the court system between those who think "that there is objective truth" versus those who think "it's all relative" is imaginary.  Mr. Session is engaging in the hyperbole that characterizes partisan stereotyping.  Nothing in Sonia Sotomayor's or Elena Kagan's professional history supports the notion that they believe there is no right and wrong.  Saying that there are multiple perspectives, that there is no neutrality, that choice is inherent to judging, that there is no single objective stance, is not a denial that the outcome will be qualitatively better or worse as a consequence of which decision is made.  It is more likely an acknowledgement that the future consequences of today's decisions can sometimes be difficult to predict reliably, that decisions can require trade-offs between similarly weighted positive and negative elements contained in the alternative outcomes, that different types of positive and negative elements within the outcomes can be difficult to evaluate against each other.  Because of the complexities there may not be a single best choice.  For many judges the real world decisions that they are expected to make may often have complexity.

I cannot speak for Martha Minow and Sonia Sotomayor.  I am inclined to think that there sometimes is a single, most objective stance, and sometimes there is no single, most objective stance.  The details of the context matters.  It is easy to talk in generalities and abstractions.  Reasonable people recognize that generalities are rarely all inclusive and complete characterizations of every possible context, but are instead statements of tendencies that are intended to identify what is deemed to be usually true but not necessarily always true.  

If I thought our judges have a postmodern, relativistic, mindset of the sort that Jeff Session complains about then I would find that to be objectionable.  But Jeff Session fails to demonstrate that there is such a problem and I see no evidence for it.  When we look at Jeff Sessions record as a prosecutor we see a rigid, mechanical, check a couple of boxes and render the verdict, inflexibility that appears to pay little, if any, attention to the possibility that a perpetrator of a crime can also be a victim of circumstances.  The result appears to me to be overly simplistic and excessively harsh.  The extent to which justice requires accounting for extenuating circumstances when implementing a punishment is a controversial topic.  However uncomfortable this may make some people, there is some room for disagreement on the best answer to such questions and the right answer is unlikely to be found in the pages of the bible.

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Biased wedding officiant laws

By Mathew Goldstein

Maryland law grants a clerk of court, a deputy clerk of court designated by the county administrative judge for the county circuit court, or a judge, the authority to perform state recognized weddings.  Like most other states, Maryland law also gives religious institutions the same authority as the aforementioned judicial staff to perform weddings.  Maryland law says that "any religious official of a body or order authorized by the rules and customs of that body or order to perform a marriage ceremony" has this civic authority.  

Non-religious couples who prefer to have a single wedding ceremony, but do not want that ceremony to be held at their local court building, have several options.  Secularist groups can nevertheless arrange to have themselves designated as a religious organization with the state of Maryland to obtain for their members the authority to perform a state recognized wedding.  There are also several organizations that grant divinity degrees for a fee.  The divinity degree confers on the degree holder the authority to perform an official wedding on behalf of the church issuing the degree and they probably also confer a good income for the people issuing the dubious degrees.

Some of the people who are inconvenienced by the biased wedding laws make an effort to change them.  Some years ago a bill was submitted in the Maryland General Assembly to give non-religious organizations the authority to designate people to perform weddings.  The bill was quickly defeated before it had a chance to get out of committee after a group of lawyers and judges that advises the legislature criticized the bill.  They complained that allowing non-religious groups to nominate people to officiate weddings on similar terms as religious groups would result in too many wedding officiants failing to follow through and submit the completed forms.

Nevertheless, slowly, states are loosening their marriage laws to allow people who are not government employees and not religiously affiliated to officiate weddings.  The elected lawmakers of the District of Columbia enacted a law in 2013 granting non-religious individuals "civic celebrant" authority to officiate weddings.  Apparently, the non-religious folks across the Maryland D.C. line can be trusted to promptly submit the completed forms after the wedding ceremony is completed.  

The Center for Inquiry, following failures to challenge the restriction on who can officiate weddings in the Illinois legislature, went to court.  On January 4, a U.S. District Judge ruled that “marriages solemnized by Center for Inquiry secular celebrants are valid” and ruled out any efforts to preclude secular celebrants from solemnizing marriages.  In 2014 the Center for Inquiry won a similar battle in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit over the failure of Indiana law to grant non-religious individuals the same privilege to officiate weddings as religious individuals.  At a rate of one state every year or two there could be wedding officiant equality in all of the states before the start of the twenty second century.  

Maryland should be one of the early states.  We should not have to wait for a judge's order, or fifty more years, for the General Assembly to change this law.

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Open letter to The Public Editor of the NY Times

Mark Oppenheimer's popular recent magazine article on an atheist preacher “The evangelical scion who stopped believing,” contains gratuitous atheist-bashing.  The article is larded with the usual attacks against atheism and atheists, including a few swipes at Richard Dawkins.  The NY Times is allowing Mark Oppenheimer to utilize the newspaper as a vehicle to promote selectively negative, exaggerated, over-generalizations that play into popular stereotypes against a disliked minority group.  Accusations like those made against atheists in this article are not well justified and should have been omitted.

It is a pejorative canard to characterize atheism as representing an "uncompromising scientism".  How about the more accurate, less nasty, "uncompromising empiricism"?  The efforts of this article's author to instruct NY Times readers to self-identify as humanists instead of as atheists because the former is more acceptable to him is misplaced personal editorializing.  

Mark Oppenheimer overlooks that Sam Harris wrote a book on morality without God, that Dan Dennett has never said that religion should be mocked or its adherents pitied, and that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has a positive message about how one can be moral and fulfilled without relying on a God. A main message of these books was a rejection of theism, but why is the NY Times publishing content about atheism that assumes a rejection of theism is negative? If theism is false then why is it bad for people to focus on rejecting it?  Does Mark Oppenheimer make the same complaint against theists when they opt to make adopting theism a main message in their books?  And why is the NY Times publishing content that is predicated on denying and rejecting the arguments from those same writers, and many other writers, about the advantages of living a life without gods, without requiring the effort of a point by point rebuttal of those arguments?

As for “rampant misogyny” in atheism, unfortunately some atheists, like our president-elect, express sexist attitudes or behaviors.  But an objective account of atheist gatherings will not comport with Mark Oppenheimer's depiction of atheism as rotten with misogyny.   As a group they favored Hillary Clinton to be president.  Atheists as a group are not purveyors of, advocates for, or instantiations of, a rape culture. Positive attitudes about civic equality and ethical behavior may even be more prevalent among atheists than among other groups.  

As for “exalting Darwin,” wasn’t it Darwin who weakened the hold of theistic religion over society by showing that phenomena commonly considered explainable only by God had a purely naturalistic basis?  Mark Oppenheimer apparantly dislikes the implications of modern biology, but that is his personal bias that should not be imported into NY Times journalism covering atheism.

Instead of relying on Mark Oppenheimer for articles about atheism, how about publishing someone who will not try to define atheists as people with negative character flaws?  How about publishing someone who can write about atheists and atheism similar to the way journalists are expected to write about theists and theism, without the snarky anti-atheist editorializing?  Or at least do more redacting before publishing.  This article is mostly very good. With some modifications it would have been an excellent article.

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