Freethought of the Day

Amy Schneider

On this date in 1979, "Jeopardy!" champion Amy Schneider (née Thomas E. Schneider) was born in Dayton, Ohio, to Betty Jo (Sacksteder) and James Schneider. Her mother taught math, including at the college level, and her father was a programmer for the University of Dayton and later a reference librarian.

Schneider, the first transgender contestant in “Jeopardy!” history to make the Tournament of Champions and the highest-winning woman ($1,382,800), grew up watching the show with her devoutly Catholic parents. She participated in theater in high school before majoring in civil engineering and computer science at the University of Dayton on her way to becoming a software engineer.

Schneider, later living in Oakland, Calif., tweeted: "In 2016, my father passed away, Kevin Durant joined the Warriors, my wife and I split up, I realized I was trans, and Trump got elected. It was quite a year!" (Twitter, Dec. 7, 2021) Her father died at age 68 when a vehicle hit him and the bicycle he was riding. He was also undergoing cancer treatment.

She wore a transgender flag pin on the show around Thanksgiving because she wanted to show support for the “disproportionately high number of trans people” who are estranged or cut off from their families. (Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2022) That wasn't the case for her.

She has a tattoo on her left arm of the titular character from L. Frank Baum’s novel “Ozma of Oz.” Schneider, explaining: “When she was an infant, she was kidnapped and enchanted by an evil sorceress and raised as a boy. And then the enchantment was lifted and she was revealed to be the beautiful princess she was all along.” (New York Times, Jan. 26, 2022)

New York Times reporter Shane O'Neill: "Catholicism was very important to her family, and Ms. Schneider struggled with her faith when she was younger. She recounted one moment in 2002 when she had driven with her brother and two cousins to Toronto to see Pope John Paul II for World Youth Day. Ms. Schneider agreed to the trip in part to avoid telling her mother that she no longer considered herself Catholic." (Ibid.)

She was defeated in her 41st appearance by Chicago librarian Rhone Talsma, who correctly answered “What is Bangladesh?” to the clue “The only nation in the world whose name in English ends with an H, it’s also one of the 10 most populous.” Schneider left her response card blank. 

"Ms. Schneider describes herself as an atheist who doesn’t believe in the occult or the supernatural but, as she said, 'It’s not a queer meet cute if there’s not tarot.' ”

—Interviewer Shane O'Neill, explaining "The Star" tarot card on a necklace Schneider was wearing that her girlfriend gave her. (New York Times, Jan. 26, 2022)

Compiled by Bill Dunn

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

John F. Kennedy (Quote)

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference — and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end — where all men and all churches are treated as equal — where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice — where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind — and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.”

—John F. Kennedy, born on May 29, 1917 (D. 1963). Speech as a presidential candidate to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Rice Hotel, Sept. 12, 1960

Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

Peter Higgs

On this date in 1929, Peter Ware Higgs was born to Gertrude (Coghill) and Thomas Higgs, a BBC sound engineer, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. He grew up in Bristol and graduated with honors in physics in 1950 from King’s College, University of London. He earned his master of science the next year and his Ph.D. in 1954, both from King’s. In his early 30s, Higgs began his career as lecturer in mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1974 and chair of theoretical physics in 1980. Higgs was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1991. 

In the 1960s he proposed the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all matter immediately following the Big Bang. (The Guardian, Nov. 16, 2007.) The Higgs boson, the scientific term for the particle, radically altered the field of physics, such that Higgs, according to Time magazine, ranks with physics giants like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Democritus. Based on Higgs’ theory, scientists theorized a quantum field through which initially weightless particles move and acquire their mass. Higgs and François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

For several decades, a multi-billion dollar effort, including the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, sought to find the Higgs boson particle. The LHC , the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, cost $6 billion and took 25 years to plan. “Scientists ... hope the [Large Hadron Collider] will produce clear signs of the boson, dubbed the ‘God particle’ by some, to the displeasure of Higgs, an atheist.” (Reuters, April 7, 2008.) Within two years of the original 2012 results at the LHC, the vast majority of particle physicists agreed that the Higgs particle discovery had been confirmed by multiple experiments and analyses.

In the 1960s, Higgs was active in Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He met linguist Jody Williamson in the latter. After marrying in 1963, they had two sons, Christopher, a computer scientist, and Jonathan, a jazz musician. They divorced in 1972 but remained friends. Higgs died at age 94 of a blood disorder at home in Edinburgh. (D. 2024)

PHOTO: Higgs at the 2013 Nobel Laureates press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; photo by Bengt Nyman under CC 2.0.

"I wish he hadn't done it. I have to explain to people it was a joke. I'm an atheist."

—Higgs, on Leon Lederman, the scientist who nicknamed the Higgs boson the “God particle,” The Guardian (Nov. 16, 2007)

Compiled by Bonnie Gutsch

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.