This is an edited version of the speech given by R. Laurence Moore at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18, 2019. He and Isaac Kramnick shared the stage to talk about their book, Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic. (Kramnick’s speech is reprinted on pages 12-13.) Moore was introduced by FFRF Senior Counsel Patrick Elliott:

One of the classic works in our specialized field at FFRF of defending the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is a book called The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness. It came out in 1997 and was co-written by our next speakers, the distinguished scholars Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. Although The Godless Constitution is hard to obtain these days, the pair followed it up in 2018 with a new classic: Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in Public Life. And, by the way, the Freedom From Religion Foundation gets a wonderful shout-out in the chapter “The Atheist Awakening.”

R. Laurence Moore is the Howard A. Newman Professor of History and American Studies, Emeritus, at Cornell University, where he taught from 1972 until his retirement. He was born in Houston and was educated at Stanford, Rice and Yale. Moore has lived abroad with fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, from Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford. He has also been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has taught and written in the field of American culture and intellectual history. Please join me in welcoming Larry Moore.

By R. Laurence Moore

I want to begin by taking back something that Isaac and I once wrote — the first lines of a book we published in 1996: The Godless Constitution. “Americans seem to fight about many silly things: whether a copy of the Ten Commandments can be posted in a city courthouse, whether a holiday display that puts an image of the baby Jesus next to a Frosty the Snowman violates the Constitution, whether grade-schoolers may stand for a moment in silent spiritual meditation before class begins. Common sense might suggest that these are harmless practices whose actual damage is to trivialize religion. Otherwise they threaten no one.”

We were trying to establish some priorities to highlight what was our main target — the intrusion of religion into American politics. But 20-plus years observing the behavior of leading American evangelicals has changed our minds. In fact, everything that privileges belief over nonbelief in our public culture matters. Every intrusion of religion into American public life works to create a culture where rhetoric that makes no sense passes for normal. That’s a position we take in Godless Citizens.

The number of people in this country who say they have no affiliation with any religion — who pollsters call the Nones — are as numerous as the number of conservative evangelicals — around 26 percent of the population. Yet, evangelicals make cowards out of politicians. Even the nonbelieving ones duck if asked about their religion. “Yes, God blesses this country,” they all chime in, regardless of party.

And that’s because polls clearly show that a declaration of nonbelief is a poor way to begin a political campaign. Around 50 percent of people in both political parties say they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate nominated by their party who didn’t believe in God. A woman, yes. An African-American, yes. A Muslim, yes. An atheist, no.

A belief that predated the founding of the United States, one championed by an early advocate of religious liberty, John Locke, held that anyone who would not take an oath before God could not be trusted. This outdated prejudice nonetheless has persisted into the 21st century. One of the things we try to do in our book is praise organizations like FFRF for doing something about it.

Early in the 1800s and continuing through the 19th century, small groups of urban freethinkers began a tradition of meeting on Jan. 29 to celebrate Thomas Paine’s birthday. Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, published early in 1776, did as much as any written document to spark the American Revolution. He was a lionized patriot for 10 years, but, when he died in 1809, his days as a popular hero were over. His reputation had plummeted. What happened?

He went to France, got behind a very different revolution that was stridently anti-clerical, and wrote The Age of Reason, the treatise that celebrated reason over the claims of the revealed religion laid down in the bible. Paine now used the same common sense that he had employed in 1776 to show the worthlessness of the crowned despots of Europe to unmask the tyranny of biblical scripture.

Paine believed in a designer god who gave human beings the reason necessary to understand creation, but he was a sort of absentee landlord god who didn’t demand worship or prayer or much attention at all. Not atheism — just militantly anti-Christian and the tenets of any revealed religion. Religious leaders, as soon as the book was published, equated Paine’s deism with atheism.

Their campaign to make Paine a “filthy little atheist” (Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase 100 years later) was long and determined and successful. Atheism became in the 19th century a blanket term for any sort of religious freethought. It was a term of opprobrium.

I’ll mention one 19th-century example to show how quickly this bias became rooted in our politics. Robert Ingersoll demonstrates how, in a short time, you can go from being a household name in the United States — and Ingersoll was during his lifetime — to a forgotten man, which he became almost instantly after his death. As a young man, he emerged as an extremely talented political aspirant who many thought was headed for high office.

When he died, a eulogy in the Washington Post in 1899, said, “With his splendid gifts of oratory, his magnetic manners, his genial humor . . . there was no position of honor to which he might have aspired with an almost certainly of success but for his agnosticism.”

Ingersoll developed his doubts about God at almost the same time he set out after the Civil War (served with distinction) to win a political office in Illinois. He could have done what many other politicians have done and doubtlessly still do, and followed the advice of his close friends, who told him to shut up and go to church. Instead, he publicly embraced the label “agnostic,” a word just coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s English champion, and began to publish articles attacking theistic faith in sarcastic terms that Paine would have relished. Paine was one of his heroes.

At first, the political fallout wasn’t clear. At the 1876 Republican convention, he was picked to nominate for the presidency the senior senator from Maine, James G. Blaine. In a fiery speech widely regarded as the best at the convention, he dubbed Blaine the “Plumed Knight” — still a useful detail for high school students taking an AP test in American history. Despite the speech, the nomination went to Rutherford B. Hayes and Ingersoll ended up campaigning for him. Hayes prevailed in a contested general election, and a grateful Hayes tried to make Ingersoll the American ambassador to Germany. The nomination went nowhere. This was from The New York Times: “The suggestion that a declared and boasting unbeliever should be chosen to represent a Christian country brought a storm of indignation.” The political consequences were now clear.

Ingersoll never thereafter ran for office, but he had a successful and controversial career as a lecturer, appearing in almost every state and filling the biggest auditoriums to attack Christianity, the bible and clerics. Public oratory was a form of entertainment and no one did it better than Ingersoll — humorous and good natured, but he did not mince words: “What is real blasphemy? It is to prevent the growth of the human mind, to pollute children’s minds with the dogma of eternal punishment, to excite the prejudice of ignorance and superstition.”

Ingersoll was basically a conservative who loved his country. Atheism has often in American history been equated with political radicalism, especially during the era of the Cold War, when the linkage commanded bipartisan political support. Ingersoll was a great orator who could make complex issues seem simple and clear. He had an abiding love of his wife and daughters who were often in his audience. A family man with family values. He might have become president and even a good one — except he didn’t believe in God and that fact disqualified him. At the end of his life, he didn’t record any regrets and went to his grave committed to Thomas Paine’s statement “that any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true.”

Still, Ingersoll presented a clear lesson. If you want a high political office in the United States, don’t mix your work with an insistence that Christianity is a foolish set of superstitions that cripple the progress of reason and science. The political exclusion of nonbelievers continues to plague our politics and poison our public culture.

Textbooks of American history are filled with examples of how religion shaped our country. Puritans did what they did because they were religious. Slave religion proved an essential way for African-Americans in the antebellum South to define their humanity and free blacks in the North relied on black churches to build resistance to discrimination. That’s true and ought to be told.

But what we need to challenge is the habit of saying nothing about the importance of nonbelief to many people who also helped to build this country: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell. Contributions noted, but not with any suggestion that their break from religion had anything to do with their creativity. It did.

Our book seeks to give nontheists a reason to be angry and not just shrug their shoulders when religious symbols exclude them. A cross erected on public land to memorialize war dead is not a case of inoffensive ceremonial deism, whatever the Supreme Court says.

Inspired by Ingersoll, the botanist Luther Burbank, when he was 77, wrote an article that declared “I Am an Infidel.” His decision to announce publicly views he had long held was prompted by the dismay he felt over the so-called Scopes-Darwin trial in 1925 that pitted the religious fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan against the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow. When John Scopes was convicted for illegally teaching evolution to the children of Dayton, Tenn., Burbank wrote in exasperation, “And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture.” Burbank was ashamed that he had been afraid to speak out earlier. Speaking out is important.

In the Parc Montsouris in Paris, there is a full-size statute of Thomas Paine. There is no memorial to him of any kind in Washington. The Age of Reason kept him out of the pantheon of American heroes. There ought to be a statue because no one better represented the boldness, the rudeness if you like, of the American experiment than Paine. It should be inscribed with the words he penned in 1775 that were not controversial to our revolutionary forebears and should not be controversial now, “When we yield up the exclusive privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

This is the speech, edited for space, given by Isaac Kramnick at FFRF’s national convention in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 18, 2019. (Sadly, Kramnick died at age 81, on Dec. 21, just two months after giving this talk.) He was introduced by FFRF Senior Counsel Patrick Elliott:

Isaac Kramnick is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Cornell, where he has taught since 1972. Prior to coming to Cornell, he had taught at Harvard, Brandeis and Yale. He is from rural Massachusetts and was educated at Harvard and Cambridge University. He has taught and written principally an area of English and American political thought and history. He has written or edited some 20 books.

By Isaac Kramnick

Every morning at most American public schools, the day begins with students participating in a teacher-led Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. That pledge, of course, involves God: “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The pledge was written in 1892 as part of a public relations campaign, run by a respected and popular Boston-based magazine, Youth’s Companion. The magazine had launched a national initiative in the late 1880s to “have a flag fly over every schoolhouse in America.” Offering sales of flags with a printed order form, the periodical campaigned in 1892 to have 13 million schoolchildren participate in that October’s national celebration of the 400th anniversary of the so-called discovery of America in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. How better to sell flags to schools than to have the Youth’s Companion invent a pledge to the flag that could be recited in every schoolhouse?

The author of this pledge was Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous socialist writer and activist Edward Bellamy, who had written the bestselling utopian novel Looking Backward in 1889. The pledge that Francis Bellamy wrote to help sell flags in 1892 made no reference to God, nor even to the United States. His pledge, published in the Youth’s Companion on Sept. 4, 1892, was: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Washington state in 1919 became the first state to require the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. By the 1950s, reciting Bellamy’s pledge had become a morning ritual in most American public schools, with the pledge to “my flag” replaced officially by Congress in 1942 to the “flag of the United States of America.” But for that tiny change, Bellamy’s pledge remained as he wrote it until the 1950s, when “God” was added.

Religion, God embraced

As the Cold War developed, religion and God were publicly embraced. President Eisenhower initiated a prayer breakfast in the White House, and Congress created a prayer room in the Capitol. “In God We Trust” was made the nation’s official motto, replacing “E pluribus unum,” — one out of many — which, despite the civil war, had done fairly well for nearly 200 years.

“In God We Trust,” which had been placed on some currency during the Civil War, was placed on all American money in the 1950s. In such a Cold War political environment, the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus, well aware of the historical linkage of Bellamy’s pledge of allegiance to Columbus Day, proposed in 1951 during the Korean War to add the words “under God” between the words “nation” and “indivisible” in the pledge. In part because it was being pushed mainly by the Catholic organization, such a bill introduced in Congress in 1953 had little public support and was even publicly opposed by Bellamy’s son.

But in February 1954, one sermon, delivered before one important parishioner, married American patriotism to godliness. That month, George McPherson Docherty, the pastor of The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., which Eisenhower attended, delivered a sermon with the president sitting in front of him.

Docherty lamented that the Pledge of Allegiance could be the pledge of any country and that it needed “under God” added to it. He said, “I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer and sickle flag. The Soviets claim to be an individual republic, too.” The Cold War, Docherty insisted, was not about political beliefs, between Thomas Jefferson’s political democracy and Lenin’s communistic state, or about economic systems between Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Rather, he said, it is a theological war. It is a Judeo-Christian civilization in mortal combat against modern secularized godless society. Docherty’s sermon ended with his ringing call for Eisenhower to help pass legislation adding “under God” to the pledge.

And Eisenhower did. By June 1954, four months later, the law had passed Congress and was signed by the president. On June 14, 1954, Flag Day, the president signed the legislation. For nearly 50 years after 1954, “God” sat comfortably in the Pledge of Allegiance — until the year 2000 and the historical intervention of one man named Michael Newdow.

Newdow’s court battle

Newdow was a graduate of Brown University, UCLA Medical School and the University of Michigan Law School. Newdow, who practiced law and also worked as an emergency room physician in Sacramento, Calif., filed a federal lawsuit in March 2000, claiming that the teacher-led daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “one nation, under God” harmed his daughter, a student at Elk Grove Elementary School in California. He argued that the state-run ritual proclaimed the existence of God and was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition of an establishment of religion, which courts have regularly interpreted to mean “a prohibition of state sponsorship or endorsement of religion.”

Newdow and the mother of his daughter had never married and were not living together. The girl’s mother described herself as a born-again Christian. Newdow was himself a Jewish atheist. At the time of the suit, the child’s mother had sole custody of the daughter. The district court dismissed Newdow’s case in 2001. He then appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The 9th Circuit Court is, as some of you may know, the nation’s most liberal circuit court. In June 2002, to the nation’s amazement, a panel of the appeals court ruled two to one that it was indeed an unconstitutional sponsorship of religion, a violation of the First Amendment for public schools and Elk Grove to ask students to recite “under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

As soon as the ruling was publicized, every politician in America raced to appear on television to denounce it. President Bush called the decision “ridiculous” and that it reinforced his resolve to appoint “common-sense judges who understand that our rights are derived from God.”

Sen. John Kerry, soon to be the Democratic candidate for president, said that holding “‘under God’ in the pledge unconstitutional was half-assed justice, the most absurd thing. That’s not an establishment of religion.”

Almost immediately, the Elk Grove School Board, supported by the Bush administration, took the case to the United States Supreme Court. Judge Alfred Goodwin, a Republican appointed to the 9th Circuit Court in 1971 by President Nixon, and known to his friends as Tex, the very next day postponed any implementation of his ruling until the Supreme Court heard the case. The U.S. Senate quickly passed legislation reaffirming the words “under God” by a vote of 99 to 0. And the House of Representatives did the same by a vote of 416 to 3.

Political firestorm

Judge Goodwin’s ruling, joined by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, was eclipsed by the ensuing political firestorm. Goodwin strongly sided with Newdow, who had argued his own case that the words “under God” had a religious, not a secular purpose. “To say the United States,” Goodwin writes, “is a nation ‘under God’ is a profession of a religious belief, namely a belief in monotheism, and therefore was an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.” The dissenting judge, Ferdinand Fernandez, appointed to the court by George H.W. Bush, offered what he described as judicial good sense, a worrisome warning that “to rule against ‘God’ in the pledge allows atheists like Newdow to put America on the slippery slope that would end by evicting religion from the American way of life and the triumph of religion itself.” Those are his words.

When the appeal reached the Supreme Court on March 21, 2004, Newdow, a lawyer, again argued his own case. However, the justices never ruled on Newdow’s claim that “under God” was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. On June 14, 2004, Flag Day again, exactly 50 years to the day after President Eisenhower had signed the legislation putting God into the pledge, the Supreme Court preserved God’s place in it with a unanimous decision, which held that Newdow had no standing. The court made no elaborate argument. It made a procedural distinction, saying that it would not decide the case.

Newdow had no standing. He was not married to his daughter’s mother, who had custody of the child and, who, according to her lawyer, was giving her daughter a religious upbringing and wants her to say the pledge with “under God.”

“God” was safe in the pledge and is to this day. But there is yet another chapter with Newdow’s crusade. The indefatigable Newdow was not silenced. In September 2005, he brought a new case on behalf of himself and three other unnamed parents and their children in the nearby Rio Linda Union School District, which is in the same California district court he had tried in 2000. The district court judge in January 2006 again ruled in Newdow’s favor, holding that the pledge’s “under God” violated the First Amendment. He stayed the carrying out of his ruling pending an appeal by the Rio Linda School Board.

The case was indeed appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals again, with arguments heard on Dec. 4, 2007. It took more than two years, until March 2010, for the 9th Circuit Court panel to make a decision. Exactly 10 years after Newdow brought the first and the ill-fated suit on behalf of his daughter, the 9th Circuit Court panel finally and definitively resolved the legal status of the phrase “under God” in the pledge. It decided that the two words were not state sponsorship of religion, thus overturning the 2006 ruling of the district court judge.

‘Patriotic, not religious’

The court’s 58-page ruling was written by Justice Carlos T. Bea, a 2003 George Bush appointee. He was joined in the majority by Justice Dorothy Nelson, who was appointed to the appeals court by President Carter. The pledge Bea wrote was “of allegiance to our republic, not of allegiance to God or to any religion. Congress’s purpose in 1954 in adding ‘God’ to the pledge was patriotic, not religious.” Bea held that adding the words had a secular, political purpose and did not endorse, favor or promote religion, did not endorse one religion over another, nor did it coerce students into participating in a religious exercise. Bea held quite absurdly that “under God” in the pledge had no religious significance, but was merely a secular political statement. “It is not a prayer, but patriotism.”

It was added to the pledge in 1954, he wrote quite erroneously, to make the political point that America has a limited government, unlike the Soviets all-powerful government division of the Cold War that provided for and dominated the people. It represented the American political belief that government was not supreme, but that a power greater than government, God, gave the American people their rights. Students reciting “one nation, under God” are thus referring to the historical traditions of America, not making a personal affirmation through prayer or invocation that the speaker believes in God or that God even exists. The court went on to insist that citing God in the pledge is merely rhetorical, stylistic and ceremonial. “Under God” in the pledge, as the court concluded in 2010, “is unrelated to religious belief.” That’s a quote from the decision.

To all of this, the single dissenting circuit court justice responded: “Pure poppycock.” Stephen Reinhardt, who had sided with Goodwin in the original Newdow case, was the sole dissenter, the one vote against the two. (He died about six months ago.) He had been appointed to the court by President Carter. Reinhardt argued that the two words were, in fact, “for the purpose of indoctrinating public school children with a religious belief that God exists.”

The 9th Circuit majority ruling saw it otherwise. “Under God” in the pledge was not an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because the reference to God is understood to be religiously meaningless, stripped of spiritual significance. God is secularized and performs political patriotic and ceremonial purpose. Citing God has nothing to do with religion.

‘God’ a nonreligious term?

No surprise then that many religious figures, while approving of the panel’s majority ruling, were critical of Bea’s argument about the pledge’s lack of religious content, his relegation of God to be a nonreligious term. Father Richard John Newhouse, the respected founder of the religious journal First Things, announced “Most Americans agree with Mr. Newdow that a reference to God is a reference to God, the government’s brief notwithstanding. Have we come to the point when references to God in public are permissible because nobody really believes what they say?” He, of course, approved of the decision of the court, he just disagreed with its argument.

Similarly, in the recent court case with a 40-foot cross in Maryland, Larry [Moore] and I just had an article in The Hill, which pointed out that to say that a 40-foot cross is not really a cross, but a symbol of war dead, is, of course, to be a gross insult to religious people for whom a cross is a cross and a central issue in the Christian faith. Those like Bea, for whom the post-1954 pledge has a predominantly patriotic purpose, and those like Newdow, Reinhardt and Father Newhouse, for whom it has an indisputably religious purpose, are all correct.

What the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did in 2010 was codify and legitimize the intimate linkage of Americanism and religiosity, which had been a drumbeat since the Cold War. Changing the pledge in 1954 was an establishment and sponsorship of religion because it marries religion to citizenship. Being religious, believing in God, is declared in the pledge to be central to what it means to be an American, and becomes a litmus test for citizenship. It is the core of an American civil religion, a merging of the political and the spiritual. The court is saying to be an American, one must be a believer, affirming a religious identity is here taken as a sign of being a good American.

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is, as many of you know, the last ritualized act in the naturalization ceremony for new citizens, which makes it clear that affirming loyalty to America requires asserting a belief in God, even if God is so allied with the United States that the courts could see God as a secular figure. I repeat, it signifies that what defines an American is being a believer and that nonbelievers are unwelcome in the American political community.

Newdow’s decade-long atheist crusade against “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance had produced an unintended consequence: The judicial doctrine of civil religion, the assumption that one has to be religious, i.e., believing in God, to be a good American. This linkage is assumed in the courts even as, paradoxically, they insist that they are not affirming or establishing a religion. And even more paradoxically, as the number of self-proclaimed nonbelieving Americans grows dramatically.

Now, I have to end this rather sad story of where the Pledge of Allegiance is today, with a bit of comic relief. The late iconoclastic comedian Robin Williams, like millions of nonbelievers and like many in this room, remained unpersuaded about America’s dependence on divine guidance. If he could, he would tell audiences that he would yet again rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance, this time with less attention to religion, and more to geography. And so, he would, often in his appearances, offer a new pledge of allegiance.

“I pledge allegiance, to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under Canada and above Mexico, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” Thank you.

It is alarming that the U.S. Supreme Court today announced it will hear a case involving a Catholic charity suing the city of Philadelphia for ending its contract, after it refused to allow same-sex parents to provide foster care. The case could upend decades of precedent protecting our secular legal system.

Fulton v. City of Philadelphia involves Catholic Social Services, one of 30 agencies that Philadelphia contracted with to place abused and neglected children in new homes. The city of Philadelphia properly ended its contract with the Catholic group in 2018, after learning it would not place children with LGBTQ individuals as foster parents.

The 3rd U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the city of Philadelphia, noting that “religious belief will not excuse compliance with general civil rights laws.” Therefore it’s a bad sign that the Supreme Court granted review. The case will be briefed and argued later this year.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation plans to weigh in on this case with a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of the city of Philadelphia and the two groups that have intervened in the case, Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia Family Pride. The consequences of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia for the country’s secular principles are too potentially calamitous for the state/church watchdog to just stand by.

“It is more than troubling that the Supreme Court would take this case, given the expansive issues involved,” says FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. “This could lead to a disastrous decision allowing religious individuals or groups to be exempt from almost any law.”

The city of Philadelphia pays millions in taxpayer dollars to agencies that help with foster placements. Its contract with such agencies specifies that contractors may not discriminate against prospective foster families on the basis of characteristics enumerated in the Philadelphia Fair Practices Ordinance, including sexual orientation.

Catholic Social Services has asked the Supreme Court to overturn Employment Division v. Smith, which provides that generally applicable laws do not violate the Free Exercise Clause if they have a rational basis. In his majority decision in Smith, even Justice Antonin Scalia recognized the inherent problem in allowing religious individuals to be exempt from laws simply because of their religious beliefs. He quoted an earlier case: “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

Catholic Social Services also claims that the nondiscrimination rule violates its “free speech” rights. The 3rd Circuit correctly rejected this argument, finding that the group would be performing a public service based on a contract with the government. Thus, the city was not restricting speech, but was choosing to only fund programs complying with its nondiscrimination rules.

“Religious individuals do not get to rewrite all laws and exempt themselves from those laws if they disagree with them,” says FFRF Senior Counsel Patrick Elliott.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is placing an ad featuring John F. Kennedy during the Democratic debate on Tuesday, Feb. 25, to remind candidates and voters of dire threats to the constitutional principle of separation between religion and government.

FFRF is running a 30-second commercial showcasing the face and famous words of John F. Kennedy vowing as a presidential candidate: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” The ad will air during the 10th debate, which takes place in Charleston, S.C., and is co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus. The debate starts at 8 p.m. Eastern.

FFRF's ad opens with footage of the speech by JFK in his historic 1960 appearance before the Protestant ministers in Houston. The full text is:

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . where no ecclesiastical body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly on the general populace." Let's restore respect for America's secular roots. Help the Freedom From Religion Foundation defend the wall of separation between state and church. Join us at FFRF.org. Freedom depends on freethinkers.

The ad concludes with the strains, “Let freedom ring,” as FFRF's emblematic image appears of a Lincoln penny with the words “In Reason We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”

This ad was first created in response to a comment by then-GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum in 2012, who averred that JFK's speech "makes me want to throw up."

“We're running this ad again because there has been almost no discussion during the debates about this constitutional principle that has never been under greater assault, and upon which so many of our other rights rest,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president.

Gaylor cites the nearly 200 judges appointed by President Trump, including two on the U.S. Supreme Court, who have been virtually handpicked by the Religious Right, the claim by then-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry that the president was “chosen” by God, the vilification by Attorney General William Barr of “militant secularists” while lauding “Judeo-Christian standards,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo billing himself as a “Christian leader” in speeches and on the State Department website. The president himself routinely calls America a “nation of believers,” thereby appearing to disenfranchise the 26 percent of nonreligious U.S. citizens.

Other threats to secular government include the so-called Religious Liberty Task Force launched by the Justice Department in 2018, a new federal voucher scheme to divert up to $5 billion in tax revenue each year toward private school vouchers, and the promotion of evangelist Paula White to a paid position within the White House's Faith & Opportunity initiative. White recently raised eyebrows by appealing to Jesus to “command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.”

The theocratic influence on the Trump administration can be seen by the sway of Ralph Kim Drollinger, who runs the White House Bible Study (which is sponsored by 10 cabinet members weekly). Drollinger has been called a “shadow diplomat” by the New York Times. During one White House bible study, Drollinger infamously cited scripture to “to protect citizens from invaders,” inspiring then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to cite Romans 13 to justify separating children from their parents at the southern border.

Most recently, the administration released proposed rules to implement a May 2018 executive order to “remove regulatory burdens” on religious organizations contracting with the federal government to provide social services. The rights of non-Christians and LGBTQ citizens are imperiled by many of these rules. Women's reproductive rights are also under serious threat by those motivated by religious opposition.

“JFK was absolutely right that the best hope for the world is secular government,” says FFRF Co-President Dan Barker.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation will be highlighting secular issues — and their importance regardless of party affiliation — throughout the presidential election.

A leading African freethinker is interviewed on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethought Matters” television interview show this Sunday. 

Roslyn Mould, a pioneer of freethought in Africa, is the former president of the Humanist Association of Ghana and coordinates the West African Humanist Network. Mould has degrees in linguistics and modern languages and speaks several languages.

“We are hoping to be the beacon of nonreligion, the face of nonreligion, and we want to show that there is a friendly, moral, ethical face of nonreligion in Africa,” she says in the interview. “And that we can still make it without the religion, without the dogma, and without the enforcing of people's beliefs or imposition of beliefs on people.”

As an antidote to religion on the airwaves and Sunday morning sermonizing, the half-hour show airs Sunday mornings in 11 cities and Sunday evening in FFRF’s hometown of Madison, Wis. And this week’s show is already available on FFRF’s YouTube channel. (Look for the Freethought Matters playlist to watch previous shows.) 

The first guest in the new season was U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus. Huffman’s appearance on the show made media waves due to his remarks about his colleague Rep. Liz Cheney’s dogmatic stance on the religious oath. World-renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, acting legend Ed Asner and U.S. Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mark Pocan have recently appeared on the show. 

The cities where “Freethought Matters” broadcasts, along with the channels and timings, are listed below:

• Chicago, WPWR-CW (Ch. 50), Sundays at 9 a.m.
• Denver, KWGN-CW (Ch. 2), Sundays at 7 a.m.
• Houston, KUBE-IND (Ch. 57), Sundays at 9 a.m.
• Los Angeles, KCOP-MY (Ch. 13), Sundays at 8:30 a.m.
• Madison, Wis., WISC-TV (Ch. 3), Sundays at 11 p.m.
• Minneapolis, KSTC-IND (Ch. 45), Sundays at 9:30 a.m.
• New York City, WPIX-IND (Ch. 11), Sundays at 8:30 a.m.
• Phoenix, KASW-CW (Ch. 61, or 6 or 1006 for HD), Sundays at 8:30 a.m.
• Portland, Ore., KRCW-CW (Ch. 32), Sundays at 9 a.m. Comcast channel 703 for High Def, or Channel 3.
• Sacramento, KQCA-MY (Ch. 58), Sundays at 8:30 a.m.
• Seattle, KONG-IND (Ch. 16 or Ch. 106 on Comcast). Sundays at 8 a.m.
• Washington, D.C., WDCW-CW (Ch. 50), Sundays at 8 a.m.

FFRF Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and her husband, Dan Barker, a former evangelical minister and well-known atheist author, are creators and co-hosts of the show.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics), with more than 30,000 members nationwide. FFRF also works as a watchdog guarding the constitutional separation between religion and government.

The show is produced in the Stephen Uhl Friendly Atheist Studio at Freethought Hall in Madison, Wis., by FFRF’s videographer Bruce Johnson, a public television veteran. Crew includes staff members Bailey Nachreiner-Mackesey, Kristina Daleiden, Lauryn Seering and Chris Line, plus various floor managers, with sound production provided by Audio for the Arts.

Please tune in to “Freethought Matters” . . . because freethought matters.

P.S. Please tune in or record according to the times given above regardless of what is listed in your TV guide (it may be listed simply as “paid programming” or even be misidentified). To set up an automatic weekly recording, try taping manually by time or channel. And spread the word to freethinking friends, family or colleagues about a TV show, finally, that is dedicated to providing programming for freethinkers!

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today issued a ruling upholding the constitutionality of a massive Latin cross on city property in Pensacola, Fla.

Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, writing for the unanimous three-judge panel, wrote that the 34-foot-call Christian cross in Bayview Park “has evolved into a neutral” symbol.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, the American Humanist Association and their plaintiffs won at the district level and before the 11th Circuit. However, the case was remanded back for reconsideration following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2019 American Legion v. American Humanist Association cross decision. In the Bladensburg case, the high court shamefully ruled that the government-owned, government-maintained, 40-foot-tall Christian cross war memorial dominating the landscape in Bladensburg, Md., did not violate the First Amendment.

Taking its cue from the Supreme Court, the 11th Circuit ignored the religious significance of the Bayview Park cross, holding that because it’s been there a long time, and secular community events have been held in the park nearby, it is constitutional.

Newsom wrote: "American Legion itself demonstrates that an 'undoubtedly . . . Christian symbol' — in particular, a Latin cross — may nevertheless pose no Establishment Clause concerns.”

The Pensacola cross stands in popular Bayview Park, serving solely as the centerpiece of annual Easter Sunrise Christian worship services. It was first challenged in a 2016 lawsuit filed by FFRF and AHA.

The district court sided with the national secular organizations in a June 2017 decision. In September 2018, the 11th Circuit upheld the decision, agreeing that the government-funded, freestanding cross unconstitutionally entangled the government with the Christian faith. However, what was remarkable was that both the district judge and the appeals court panel begrudgingly ruled in FFRF’s favor — urging the Supreme Court to overturn precedent that bound the judges to rule that the city-owned and maintained cross was unconstitutional. The city petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. The Supreme Court waited until after ruling in Bladensburg to remand it to the 11th Circuit for reconsideration in light of that ruling.

Today’s ruling said: "Removal of the Bayview Park cross at this point—more than 75 years after its original erection and more than 50 years after its replacement with the current concrete version — could well, in the Supreme Court’s words, 'strike many as aggressively hostile to religion.’”

“It is not ‘hostile to religion’ to uphold government neutrality over religion. Bayview Park is not a Christian park, Pensacola is not a Christian city and the United States is not a Christian nation,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Tax-exempt church property abounds where this cross belongs. Its presence in a city park sends a message that Christian citizens are insiders, and the rest of us are outsiders — and that’s an alarming message.”

FFRF warmly thanks the four Pensacola plaintiffs, without whom the legal challenge would not have been possible: Amanda Kondrat’yev, Andreiy Kondrat’yev, Andre Ryland and David Suhor.

Further details about the case can be accessed here.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wis., is the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics), and has been working since 1978 to keep religion and government separate. With more than 31,000 members and several chapters all over the country, including 1,500-plus members and a chapter in Florida, the organization also educates the public about nontheism.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) works to protect the rights of humanists, atheists, and other nontheistic Americans, including over 2,800 members in Florida. The AHA advances the ethical and life-affirming worldview of humanism, which — without beliefs in gods or other supernatural forces — encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good of humanity. Special thanks to the Louis J. Appignani Foundation for their support of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center.

A New York school district needs to ensure that a teacher ceases spewing religious anti-evolution propaganda at a local high school, says the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

A concerned parent whose child attends Holland Patent High School in the Holland Patent Central School District has informed FFRF, a national state/church watchdog, that a biology teacher there recently began a lesson on evolution by undermining the theory. He told students that “evolution only goes so far” and advised students that evolution is “contrary to genetics.” He went on to deride “true evolutionists” and told students to ask them “where has the proof ever been shown and where does it say in science that it can become something else. There’s nothing.” He concluded his rant against evolution by suggesting several alternative explanations, including that “God created us and everything else, whatever god that might be, that you subscribe to.”

The science teacher’s attempt to undercut scientific fact is both unconstitutional and pedagogically deplorable, FFRF emphasizes in a letter to the school district.

“Teaching creationism or any of its offshoots, such as intelligent design, in a public school is unlawful, because creationism is not based in fact,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes to district Superintendent Jason P. Evangelist. “Courts have routinely found that such teachings are religious, despite many new and imaginative labels given to the alternatives.”

Any attempt to teach that there is a controversy about evolution is fraught with legal peril, FFRF underlines. Evolution, like gravity, is a scientific fact. Teaching as part of a science class that there is a scientific controversy about the validity of evolution is akin to teaching astrology along with astronomy or alchemy along with chemistry. Representing unconstitutional discarded misconceptions as scientific facts does a great disservice to the scientific literacy of Holland Patent High School students.

The Holland Patent Central School District has a constitutional obligation to ensure that “teachers do not inculcate religion” and are not “injecting religious advocacy into the classroom,” to quote the U.S. Supreme Court.

FFRF is urging the school district to conduct an immediate investigation and take appropriate disciplinary and corrective action regarding the biology teacher’s unconstitutional conduct. He must be directed to refrain from promoting creationism or attacking evolution in his classes.

“The public school biology teacher deserves an ‘F,’” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Religious fantasy can’t be foisted on a captive audience of public school students in the place of scientific fact.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 30,000 members across the country, including over 1,600 members in New York. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

La religión organizada siempre ha sido y continúa sien-do el mayor enemigo de los derechos de las mujeres. En el mundo occidental dominado por cristianos, dos ver-sículos de la Biblia en particular resumen la posición de las mujeres:

“Multiplicaré tus sufrimientos en los embarazos y darás a luz a tus hijos con dolor. Siempre te hará falta un hom-bre, y él te dominará”. En este tercer capítulo de Géne-sis, la mujer perdió sus derechos, su posición, incluso su identidad, y la maternidad se convirtió en una maldición infligida por Dios que degrada su estatus en el mundo.

En el nuevo testamento, la Biblia decreta: “Que la mujer aprenda en silencio, con toda sujeción. Porque no permito a la mujer enseñar, ni ejercer dominio sobre el hombre, sino estar en silencio. Porque Adán se formó primero, y luego Eva. Y Adán no fue engaña-do, sino la mujer, engañada, incurrió en transgresión”, 1 Tim. 2:11-14

Solo un versículo de la Biblia, “No dejarás con vida a la hechicera” (Éxodo 22:18), es responsable de la muerte de decenas de miles, quizá de millones, de mujeres. ¿Acaso las mujeres y quienes se preocupan por ellas necesitan más evidencia del gran daño del cristianismo, predicado como lo ha sido en estas y otras enseñanzas similares so-bre las mujeres?

La escritora de la Iglesia Tertuliana dijo: “Cada una de ustedes, mujeres, es una Eva... Ustedes son la puerta del Infierno, son la tentación del árbol prohibido; son las primeras en desertar la ley divina”.

Martin Lutero decretó: “Si una mujer se cansa y fi-nalmente muere por tener hijos, no importa. Dejen que muera por tener hijos, ella está allí para eso”.

Tales enseñanzas llevaron a la feminista del siglo XIX Elizabeth Cady Stanton a escribir: “La Biblia y la Iglesia han sido los mayores escollos en el camino de la emanci-pación de la mujer”.

Las diversas iglesias cristianas lucharon con uñas y dientes contra el progreso de las mujeres, oponiéndoles todo, desde el derecho de las mujeres a hablar en público, hasta el uso de anestesia en el parto (ya que la biblia dice que las mujeres deben sufrir en el parto) y el sufragio fe-menino. Hoy, el oponente más organizado y formidable de los derechos sociales, económicos y sexuales de las mujeres sigue siendo la religión organizada. Los religio-sos derrotaron la enmienda de igualdad de derechos. Los fanáticos religiosos y los acosadores están actualmente involucrados en una guerra abierta de terrorismo y aco-so contra las mujeres que tienen abortos y el personal médico que los atiende. Aquellos que buscan desafiar las desigualdades y promover el estatus de las mujeres hoy están luchando contra una coalición masiva de igle-sias y grupos religiosos protestantes y católicos funda-mentalistas movilizados para luchar contra los derechos de las mujeres, los derechos de los homosexuales y el go-bierno secular.

¿Por qué las mujeres siguen siendo ciudadanas de se-gunda clase? ¿Por qué hay una guerra promovida por la religión contra los derechos de las mujeres? Porque la Biblia es un manual para la subyugación de las mujeres. La Biblia establece el estado inferior de la mujer, su “im-pureza”, sus transgresiones y la relación de maestro/ser-vidor ordenada por Dios al hombre. Las mujeres Bíblicas son posesiones: los padres las poseen, las venden como esclavas, incluso las sacrifican. La Biblia sanciona la vio-lación durante la guerra y en otros contextos. Las esposas están sujetas a una “inspección nocturna” como novias, sancionadas por la ley mosaica, los celos masculinos y el divorcio de las esposas son aceptados. Las etiquetas bíbli-cas más típicas de las mujeres son “ramera” y “prostituta”.

Se describe que tienen poderes malvados, incluso satáni-cos de atracción. El desprecio por el cuerpo y la capacidad reproductiva de las mujeres es uno de los fundamentos de la Biblia. Los pocos modelos a seguir que se ofrecen son estereotipados, convencionales e inadecuados, con heroí-nas de la Biblia admiradas por su obediencia y espíritu de batalla. Jesús desprecia a su propia madre, negándose a bendecirla, y emite advertencias terribles sobre el destino de las mujeres embarazadas y lactantes.

Hay más de 200 versículos de la Biblia que menospre-cian específicamente a las mujeres. Estos son solo algunos:

• Génesis 2:22 Mujer creada de la costilla de Adán
• 3:16 Mujer maldita: maternidad, pecado, matrimonio, esclavitud
• 19:1–8 Violen vírgenes en lugar de ángeles varones
• Éxodo 20:17 Insultando el décimo mandamiento
• 21:7–11 Reglas injustas para las sirvientas, pueden ser esclavas sexuales
• 22:18 “No dejarás vivir a la hechicera”
• 38:8 Las mujeres no pueden entrar al tabernáculo
• Levítico 12:1–14 Las mujeres que tienen hijos son inmundas 7 días
• 12:4–7 Las mujeres que tienen hijas son inmundas 14 días
• 15:19–23 Los períodos menstruales son impuros
• 19:20–22 Si el maestro tiene sexo con una mujer com-prometida, ella será azotada
• Números 1: 2 La encuesta de personas solo incluye hombres
• 5:13–31 Prueba de adulterio barbárica
• 31:16–35 “Vírgenes” enlistadas como botín de guerra
• Deuteronomio 21:11–14 Manual de violación
• 22:5 Abominación hacia las mujeres que lleven vesti-mentas de hombre y viceversa
• 2:13–21 Prueba de virginidad barbárica
• 22:23–24 Mujer violada en la ciudad, ella y su violador murieron apedreados
• 22:28–29 La mujer debe casarse con su violador
• 24:1 Los hombres pueden divorciarse de la mujer por “impura”, no al revés
• 25:11–12 Si la mujer toca el pene del enemigo, le cor-tarán la mano
• Jueces 11:30–40 La hija de Jefté que no tiene nombre se sacrificó
• 19:22–29 Concubina sacrificada a multitud de viola-dores para salvar al hombre
• 1 Reyes 11:1–4 El Rey Salomón tuvo 700 esposas y 300 concubinas
• Job 14:1–4 “¿Quién puede sacar algo limpio de lo im-puro? Nadie...”
• Proverbios 7:9–27 Las mujeres malvadas seducen a los hombres, los envían al infierno
• 11:22 Una de las numerosas humillaciones proverbiales
• Isaías 3:16–17 Dios azota, viola a mujeres arrogantes
• Ezequiel 16:45 Una de las numerosas denuncias obscenas
• Mateo 24:19 “[Ay] de los que están preñados”
• Lucas 2:22 María impura después del nacimiento de Jesús
• 1 Corintios 11:3–15 El hombre es la cabeza de la mujer; hombre como única imagen de Dios
• 14:34–35 Las mujeres guarden silencio, aprendan solo de los esposos
• Efesios 5:22–33 “Esposas, someteos ...”
• Colosenses 3:18 más “Las esposas se someten”
• 1 Timoteo 2:9 Las mujeres se arreglan con vergüenza
• 2:11–14 Las mujeres aprenden en silencio en toda su-jeción; Eva era pecadora, Adán sin culpa

¿Por qué las mujeres, y los hombres que respetan a las mujeres, deben honrar y apoyar las religiones que predi-can la sumisión de las mujeres, que hacen de la subyu-gación de las mujeres un punto angular de su teología?

Cuando se intenta basar las leyes en la Biblia, las mujeres deben tener cuidado. El principio constitucional de sepa-ración entre la Iglesia y el Estado es la única medida se-gura que se interpone entre las mujeres y la Biblia.

Para obtener más información sobre el tratamiento de las mujeres en la Biblia, lea los libros: La Biblia me lo dice y mujeres sin superstición: Sin dioses y sin amos por Annie Laurie Gaylor y Guía de la Biblia para los escépticos de los vueltos a nacer por Ruth Hurmence Green (disponibles en la dirección a continuación).

Únete a Freedom From Religion Foundation para ayudar a educar sobre la raíz de la opresión de las mujeres y lograr la separación absoluta de la Iglesia y el Estado.

Envíe su membresía deducible de impuestos de $40 a Freedom From Religion Foundation, P.O. Box 750, Madison WI 53701.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation proudly announces the winners of its student art contest protesting a Kentucky law requiring the posting of “In God We Trust” in every public school.

Marilyn Buente, 16, and Kate Benton, 17, both high school juniors of Louisville, will split the $500 prize as collaborators on the winning entry in FFRF’s Kentucky “In God We (Don’t) Trust” Student Art Contest.

Eli Moossy of Georgetown, who is 12 and in seventh grade and already identifies as an atheist, earns a $200 honorable mention award. All three will also receive a “clean” (pre-“In God We Trust”) bill, showing that the godly slogan is a Cold War anachronism dating to the 1950s. (The original secular motto is E Pluribus Unum [From many, come one].)

A Kentucky law enacted last year specifically states that “In God We Trust” displays may be in the form of “student artwork,” opening the door for clever student artists to create art displays conforming to the law’s text but not its intent. Any student enrolled in a Kentucky public school (K-12) who disagreed with the new law requiring posting of “In God We Trust” was invited to submit a poster design or other artwork. The artwork was supposed to contain the phrase “In God We Trust,” but with the intent of protesting the motto, subverting the religious intent of the new law or otherwise showing why “In God We Trust” is divisive and not an appropriate motto to place in a public school.

“As a Christian, many people thought I would support the law,” says Benton. “However, it was quite the opposite. As soon as I heard about it, I immediately wondered: What about everyone else?”

Schoolchildren should not have to walk past a sign in school that stigmatizes the growing number of Americans who are not religious (26 percent of adults and 38 percent of young people) and which offensively ties patriotism with piety, FFRF contends. The art contest was FFRF’s way to demonstrate the harm of the law.

“‘The Bluegrass State’s young talents have through their creativity exposed the problem with the law,” observes FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We congratulate them and wish them the best in all their endeavors — artistic and otherwise.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national state/church organization with almost 31,000 nonreligious members and several chapters all over the country, including hundreds of members and a chapter in Kentucky.

Katherine Stewart, a journalist and author of a number of books exposing Christian Nationalists, will be a part of the stellar line-up at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in November. That line-up includes Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem.

The gathering takes place the weekend of Nov. 13-15 at the Hyatt Regency San Antonio on the famed Riverwalk. The convention venue is limited to about 900 attendees, so please plan ahead. For more details and to register for the convention, click here.

Stewart will actually be interviewing literary icon Atwood during “An Evening with Margaret Atwood” that will take place on the opening night of Friday, Nov. 13. On Saturday, Nov. 14, Stewart will talk about her book coming out this March, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and sign copies.

Stewart is also the author of the classic book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. She writes about religion, politics, policy and conflicts over the separation of church and state for The New York Times opinion section, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, American Prospect, The Advocate, The Guardian and others. In 2014, she was named Person of the Year by Americans United for her coverage of religion, politics, policy and state/church conflicts.

“We have grown so used to the idea that collective action is never more than an infringement on individual rights that we easily overlook one of the most successful collective efforts in our history: the public schools,” Stewart said during her speech at FFRF’s 2012 annual convention in Portland, Ore. “We may well find, in a future world, where the rich have their schools, the religious have theirs, the poor don’t get educated at all and everyone is schooled in contempt for those who are different, that we have kept all of our rights, yet lost everything but the pretense of democracy.”

FFRF enthusiastically welcomes Stewart to its November annual convention.

“Katherine has been a good friend of FFRF, and we’re delighted she’ll be spending time with us in San Antonio,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Her new book is a must-read, and her talk about her book will therefore be a must-attend, as will her conversation with Margaret Atwood.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national nonprofit organization based in Madison, Wis., is the largest U.S. association of freethinkers, representing over 30,000 atheists, agnostics and other like-minded folks.