There is no such thing as a godless family?

John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal requirement.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”

Wow.

This is so revealing. I’ve mentioned that religious indoctrination is a kind of child abuse, as has Richard Dawkins even more notably, yet when you press us we are both are at a loss to what we can do about it; parents have rights, and this is a situation where there there are all kinds of conflicting interests. Neither of us have advocated taking children from parents, or punishing people for mentioning god to kids, or any other penalties, not even mild ones — all we’ve ever said is that this is a real problem, one with no clear solutions, but we shouldn’t hide away from it.

Of course, the typical reaction from Christians and creationists and wingnuts has been pure hysteria — the atheists want to snatch your children away if you take them to Sunday school! Now we can understand it all as a perfect example of projection: if you don’t take your children to Sunday school, the Christians will try to take your children away.

I hope all those good theists who rebuked Dawkins and other atheists for a false perception that they were out to dismantle their families or deny them the privilege of instructing their children in their religion are howling about this attack on the family right now. Perhaps some of them, especially the New Jersey residents, are writing their representatives right now and demanding that this intrusion on the rights of parents be removed from the New Jersey constitution immediately…and perhaps they should be suggesting that Judga Camarata’s high-handed personal bigotry warrants official censure.

And hey, all you conservatives out there, with all your lip service to “family” — what are you doing about this? James Dobson and Tony Perkins must be furious. I’ll be looking forward to their denunciations, and their cooperation with the ACLU to correct this injustice.

Yeesh — now I discover this is old news, from 1970. Why did so many people suddenly send this in to me, anyway?

Anyway, it’s still relevant — I hadn’t known that theists had in the past tried to remove children from atheists. No wonder some freaked out at Dawkins’ description of religious indoctrination as child abuse…again, it’s projection.

“I don’t think anything predated Christians”

Sherri “the earth is flat” Shepherd advances the atheist cause for us once again by demonstrating just how stupid going to church can make you. This time, it was about history: Jesus came before the Romans and the Greeks, the Greeks threw Christians to the lions, and nothing could have preceded Jesus.

It just goes to show, though, that there is no intelligence minimum for the chattering pundit class.

Don’t worry, kids, Curry is just making it all up

Lots of people have been sending me this bad article from the Daily Mail, “Human race will ‘split into two different species'”. I don’t quite get it. This is the very same utter nonsense from Oliver Curry that came out at this same time last year.

Is this to be a yearly occurrence now? Every Halloween some newspaper will dredge up this bilge from the London School of Economics and try to horrify us with abominable pseudoscience masquerading as evolutionary biology?

Breasts of all kinds are beautiful

Facebook has done a stupid thing: they’ve started deleting photos and accounts of breastfeeding women. Tara is leading the charge here on scienceblogs — this is a ridiculous and demeaning decision, reflecting a mindless prudery on the part of the facebook administrators. Give them hell.

Alas, Tara succumbs to her own biases and cites my breast as an example of offensive photography. Nay, I say, we must regard every expanse of torso as equally lovely. I think I have a few more shots of the masculine mammary in question; to prove my point, if Facebook can’t come to their senses, I may have to post them to my facebook page. If they had to start deleting every bare-chested college man’s photoset to justify scouring those pictures from their servers and their nightmares, it would serve them right.

Also, I’ve got too many friends anyway. That would clear that problem right up.

You people are sick, sick, sick. Rather than scaring you away, putting that picture on my facebook account means I’ve gotten a flood of friend requests.

This bodes well for my future career in porn when the theocrats shut down the universities.

Throw away your TVs

The Great Wasteland is done. It’s hit bottom. I suspect everyone has heard about
Sherri Shepherd, a new co-host on a talk show for stupid women, who doesn’t accept the theory of evolution and, by the way, isn’t so sure about the shape of the earth, either.

Way to go. Way to reinforce the idea that women are incurious airheads. Way to inform and educate and encourage thinking — hire an idiot to help anchor your program in idiocy.