Freethought of the Day

February 13

Henry Rollins



On this date in 1961, Henry Rollins (né Henry Lawrence Garfield) was born in Washington, D.C. After high school, Rollins worked on the crew of several D.C. punk bands including Teen Idles. He sometimes filled in for absent lead singers. By 1980, talk of his vocal ability had spread around the D.C. punk rock scene. Rollins became the lead vocalist and lyricist of a band called State of Alert. He was promoted to manager of an ice cream store in Georgetown, which he used to fund his musical hobby.

Rollins became a huge fan of the punk band Black Flag, exchanging letters with its bassist and attending as many concerts as he could and even putting the band up in his parents’ home during an East Coast tour. The band was won over by Rollins’ vocal talent and stage presence. He joined Black Flag as its new frontman and lead singer, quit his manager position, changed his name from Garfield to Rollins and moved to Los Angeles.

Black Flag disbanded in 1986, but Rollins was already touring successfully as a solo artist. He released three solo albums in 1987: Hot Animal Machine, with guitarist Chris Haskett, Drive by Shooting and Big Ugly Mouth. In that same year, Rollins assembled an alternative hard rock group called Rollins Band, active until 2003. Their first chart-topping album was The End of Silence (1992). In 2000, Rollins Band was 47 on VH1’s list of 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. Rollins won a Grammy Award in 1995 for Best Spoken Word Album for Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag, a recording of Rollins reading his memoir of the same title.

Rollins has appeared on numerous television series, including MTV’s “Oddville,” (1997), “Batman Beyond” (2001), “The Henry Rollins Show” (2006-2007) and “Sons of Anarchy” (2009). He has authored several books, including a trilogy based on his travels called Black Coffee Blues (1992). He has also appeared in over a dozen films, including “Heat” (1995) with Al Pacino, “Lost Highway” (1997) with Bill Pullman, “Jackass The Movie” (2002) and “Jackass The Movie Two” (2006). Rollins is an activist for gay and human rights. An outspoken war critic, he is strongly supportive of troops.

Rollins said on SIRIUS XM radio: “I’m sure there’s gay people who are Catholics. How do they reconcile that? How do they reconcile that somewhere in the paperwork their religion doesn’t like them?” (“Ron & Fez on The Virus,” video, date unknown). On the same show, Rollins reacted to the expulsion of the child of two lesbians from a Catholic preschool: “When you encounter that kind of hatred, leave. … I was happy that the kid got expelled because maybe the kid has a chance now. They can be put into a place without discrimination, that doesn’t eventually make part of the curriculum to exclude people, like homosexuals.”

Rollins occasionally used “The Henry Rollins Show” to passionately critique religion: “Christian fundamentalists see their fingers being pulled off the steering wheel as their oppressive shackles are more and more being seen as fear-based nonsense” (video, date unknown). Friends with actor William Shatner, he contributed to the mostly secular “Shatner Claus: The Christmas Album” in 2018.

PHOTO: Rollins signing an airman’s guitar during a 2003 USO tour in Iraq.

“In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God and no Bibles are used. They’re not looking for higher powers, extraterrestrials, or anything else that could be found in the science fiction section, because they are not dealing with fiction.” 

— Henry Rollins, on an episode of "The Henry Rollins Show” (date unknown)

Compiled by Bonnie Gutsch

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

Robert Green Ingersoll and Eva Parker (Marriage)



On this date, the day before Valentine’s Day in 1862, Robert Green Ingersoll and Eva Amelia Parker were married. Ingersoll, a Civil War officer, attorney and spell-binding orator, became the leading advocate of freethought in 19th-century America. The son of a minister credited his freethinking wife with his rejection of religion. Eva was the granddaughter of Sarah Buckman Parker, a noted infidel, and the daughter of firm rationalists. Robert was 29 and Eva was 21. “She is a good, natural, sweet woman. One that loves me and one that I love — that is enough,” he wrote at the time. In dedicating his first book, Some Mistakes of Moses, to her, he called Eva “a woman without superstition.”

Ingersoll was famously devoted to his family. Rumor by critical religionists had it that Ingersoll’s son was a drunkard who frequently had to be carried away from the table. Ingersoll’s famous response was: “It is not true that intoxicating beverages are served at my table. It is not true that my son ever was drunk. It is not true that he had to be carried away from the table. Besides, I have no son!” The loving extended family household included daughters Maud and Eva, Eva’s husband, Ingersoll’s mother-in-law, his wife’s sister and husband, and their child.

PHOTO: The orator with grandchildren Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and Robert G. Ingersoll Brown.

Love is the magician, the enchanter,
That changes worthless things to joy,
And makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
Love is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart;
And without that sacred passion,
That divine swoon, we are less than beasts;
But with love, earth is heaven, and we are gods.

— From Ingersoll's 1884 lecture "Orthodoxy," published in "The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll," Vol. 2 of 12 (the Dresden edition, 1900)

Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.

Robert H. Jackson



On this date in 1892, jurist Robert Houghwout Jackson was born on his family’s farm in Spring Creek Township, Pa., to Angelina (née Houghwout) and William Jackson and was raised in Frewsburg, N.Y., near Jamestown. Both parents came from prominent families. His father owned a stable of racehorses, inspiring Jackson’s lifelong love of horses.

No one in his immediate family was affiliated with any formal religious group despite a history of Scotch-Irish Protestantism. “Not one of them was intellectually or emotionally committed to any denomination or dogma,” he wrote, recalling being “soundly spanked” by his mother for denouncing Catholicism to an Irish “hired girl” and reprimanded by his father for his irreverent behavior that upset attendees at a revival meeting. (“The Faith of My Fathers,” an unpublished essay by Jackson discovered after his death)

He read law after high school at a Jamestown firm where his uncle worked and then enrolled at Albany Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 at age 21 and married Irene Gerhardt in an Episcopalian ceremony when she was 25 and he was 24. They were cousins. Their son William was born in 1919 and was followed by a sister, Mary Margaret, in 1921. William married Nancy Dabney Roosevelt, a granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.

Jackson practiced law for 15 years in Jamestown and was active politically as a Democrat. He held several assistant attorney general positions in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and served as U.S. Solicitor General from 1938-40, winning all but six of the 44 cases on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court.

He served two years as U.S. Attorney General before Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1941, with the Senate approving the nomination by voice vote. Jackson wrote the 6-3 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which overturned a public school regulation making it mandatory to salute the flag and imposing penalties on students who failed to comply. The suit was brought by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Declaring the state law void, Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

He dissented from the 6-3 majority in Zorach v. Clauson (1953) in which the court ruled that New York’s release-time program for religious instruction was constitutional. Such programs let public school students attend regular religious classes off campus. Jackson wrote: “The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion except for the sect that can win political power.” Joining his dissent were Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. All three cited McCollum v. Board of Education (1948).

Jackson had taken a leave of absence from the court in 1945-46 to serve as U.S. Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. Twenty-four Nazis or their sympathizers were indicted for war crimes. By early 1946, staff delegations from the U.S., France, Britain and the Soviet Union numbered over a thousand, about two-thirds from the U.S.

“From the beginning, I was taught that the other man’s relations with the infinite were none of my business. My people detested all meddlesome in affairs of the spirit — and so do I,” Jackson wrote in his “Faith of My Fathers” essay. “Intellectually I am and have always been an agnostic. I don’t know the answers to the mysteries of our existence and I don’t think other humans have any faculties for the search that we do not all have.”

He loved gardening, square dancing and riding horses but suffered from a cardiac condition near the end of his life and died of coronary thrombosis at age 62 in Washington on his way to the court.

His Episcopalian funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral. His wife remained unmarried and died at age 95 in 1986. He was buried less than a mile from his boyhood home. His tombstone, unadorned by religious symbol or quotation, says “He kept the ancient landmarks and built the new.” (D. 1954)

“Jackson did not really believe in God or practice religion, but he was tolerant of others who did and how they chose to do so. He respected and deferred to the sincerity of people whose belief systems were not his, and which indeed seemed to him, on the outside of those beliefs, as at least irrational and even odd.”

— Biographer John Q. Barrett, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (December 2019)

Compiled by Bill Dunn

© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.