March 31, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
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| As of filming this video, about 250,000 of you have watched my recent hour-long | ||
| sit down with Colin Moriarty from Rubin Report YouTube Week. | ||
| Colin is best known as a gaming journalist, and as one of the founders and hosts of Kinda Funny, a popular gaming talk show. | ||
| I actually didn't know much about Colin before our YouTube Week chat, beyond just a couple interactions we had on Twitter. | ||
| My intention with the interview was to get away from politics for a change and focus on my long lost love of video games, but within about a minute I could tell how passionate Colin was about current events and the political world. | ||
| Sometimes in an interview you expect one thing, but you get something totally different, and in Colin's case this was the best route that this thing could have gone. | ||
| Right after the interview I told Colin that he could be a major conservative political star if he ever wanted to go that route in life. | ||
| A few days after our initial interview, Colin's world went completely bonkers. | ||
| Colin posted a rather benign joke on Twitter on International Women's Day. | ||
| Let's take a look. | ||
| Ah, peace and quiet. | ||
| Hashtag, a day without a woman. | ||
| The tweet got thousands of retweets and favorites, but of course also caused backlash by the bigoteers always looking for something new to be outraged by. | ||
| By the way, the joke itself, as Colin has said, isn't the smartest or funniest thing ever. | ||
| It's actually a really simple line that every sitcom, from I Love Lucy to Married with Children to Everybody Loves Raymond, has been based on. | ||
| Regardless of whether it was funny or not, a firestorm of outrage began and within a couple days Collins stepped down from Kinda Funny, the company he co-owned and the show he co-created with his friends. | ||
| Regardless of whether the joke was funny or sexist or just stupid, which were all subjective feelings, the point is that the out of control firestorm was once again on the attack. | ||
| The online gaming media jumped all over Colin, and in one case, claiming he had gone on a right wing talk show known as the Rubin Report to discuss the tweet. | ||
| Of course, in reality, we had taped and aired the show about a week before he even posted the tweet in the first place. | ||
| The worst case of this journalistic dishonesty came not from a gaming site though, but from a mainstream outlet, the International Business Times. | ||
| Let's look at this headline. | ||
| KindaFunny's Colin Moriarty resigns after targeting women in a racist joke. | ||
| Insists it's his personal decision. | ||
| To say this is beyond the pale doesn't even begin to describe it. | ||
| This social justice warrior disease, combined with a pinch of intersectionality and a sprinkling of misguided outrage, has a mainstream publication accusing Colin of racism where there literally was not a word of racism in the tweet. | ||
| Eventually I was able to track down an editor of IB Times who I passed along to Colin and they changed the headline about 24 hours later. | ||
| Too little too late though, and the damage was done. | ||
| Just imagine if that had been you for a moment. | ||
| This is what I mean when I say that this regressive movement will come for all of us one day. | ||
| I suspect that it's coming for private citizens for wrong think next. | ||
| We'll just have to wait and see. | ||
| After all of this nonsense, I did a second interview with Colin which we live streamed out to you guys with no editing to clean up the mess. | ||
| Colin respectfully and honestly told his side of the story without throwing his friends and former co-workers under the bus. | ||
| We also took a ton of questions from you directly and shared a really intimate moment of friendship on camera. | ||
| When the interview finished, I truly felt that we had done something relevant and important. | ||
| Together, we stood up against the outrage machine, against the misguided social justice movement, and more importantly, we stood up for something. | ||
| For ourselves. | ||
| And if we won't stand for ourselves, then why would anyone else stand for us? | ||
| Now this is where this really gets good. | ||
| Last week Colin launched his own Patreon to fund his new show aptly titled Colin's Last Stand. | ||
| As of this taping he has over $30,000 a month in pledges. | ||
| That's more than we have and I am completely ok with that. | ||
| I'm beyond thrilled for him as a creator, but more so as a friend. | ||
| It was only about 10 days ago that he had dinner here at my house and thought that his career might be over. | ||
| I've been in that same boat myself. | ||
| Not only did Colin launch an incredibly successful Patreon, but he's also made some stellar appearances on Glenn Beck's radio show and last week on Joe Rogan's podcast. | ||
| I mention all of this because I view this whole instance as a massive win for the free speech anti-regressive movement. | ||
| We can no longer give these hysterical people an inch because they won't stop taking until we've all silenced ourselves. | ||
| Obviously many of you see this and agree with it, which is not only why our interviews did so well, but why so many of you put your money where your mouth is and joined Colin on Patreon. | ||
| And by the way, I should welcome our new patrons as well, because we got a bump in the midst of all this craziness too. | ||
| This isn't about money though, it's about taking back the narrative from people who use buzzwords and outrage to silence the rest of us who are trying to have meaningful conversations. | ||
| Allies are popping up all over the place in this space, and it's only together that we can fully fight back the bad ideas which have led us here. | ||
| From Colin to Joe Rogan to Phil DeFranco and many others, I see a new alliance forming of content creators who aren't political per se, but who will no longer be held hostage by the same outrage machine that's crushing dissent not through conversation, but by public shaming. | ||
| We must now destroy the politics of destruction if we're going to move forward. | ||
| I think we just got our first major win and I look forward to you joining us for many | ||
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more. | |
| Joining me today is a civil rights and constitutional lawyer with the Freedom From Religion Foundation | ||
| and a man who according to his twitter bio believes that life is too good to waste on | ||
| bad ideas. | ||
| Andrew Seidel, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| I'm very excited to be here. | ||
| Well, I'm excited to have you. | ||
| We've met once in real life, not on camera, as citizens out there in the world. | ||
| We had a couple drinks, and... And then we went to a Reason Rally. | ||
| And then we went to the Reason Rally, and I spoke at the Reason Rally, and it was a weekend full of free thinking. | ||
| It was. | ||
| It was a lovely time. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| In the nation's capital, no less. | ||
| Right in front of the Lincoln Memorial. | ||
| Yeah, it was hot as hell that weekend. | ||
| I don't know how those people do it. | ||
| Well, a bunch of atheists get together, you know. | ||
| And God was not kind when it came to the humidity. | ||
| That line, though, I want to get it right. | ||
| Just right. | ||
| Life is too good to waste on bad ideas. | ||
| That is in your Twitter bio and it's on your website. | ||
| And I just love it. | ||
| It's simple and pleasant and it's right. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Why are we so bad at this? | ||
| That we waste so much time on bad ideas? | ||
| Because we're irrational. | ||
| We're emotional beings. | ||
| We would love to be these fully rational creatures that weigh the evidence perfectly and don't have a problem making decisions on weighing that evidence, but we don't do that. | ||
| We think we do it, oftentimes, but we're actually really, really bad at it. | ||
| And one of the things that I really try to do is to examine the ideas that I hold and the beliefs that I hold and make sure they're supported by evidence. | ||
| It's one of the reasons I'm not religious. | ||
| It's one of the reasons I help people who aren't religious. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons that I chose that kind of as my personal motto. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When did you kind of wake up to all of this stuff? | ||
| I mean, I was never really religious. | ||
| I didn't start getting active in atheism and secularism until I started learning about the First Amendment, really in law school. | ||
| Actually, I was reading The God Delusion in Iceland, traveling around Iceland after I had studied abroad in Amsterdam. | ||
| I was doing international law in Amsterdam. | ||
| Studying in Amsterdam. | ||
| Studying international law in Amsterdam. | ||
| Really studying Amsterdam, yeah. | ||
| Six weeks, we went to The Hague and everything. | ||
| I have decent grades to show for it. | ||
| Did you make it to the red light district? | ||
| You can just not according to the way the planet-- | ||
| I walked through it just about every day on the way to class. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| And I was awakened to this kind of whole world of how religion is infusing itself in the law. | ||
| And religion is so irrational and so non-evidence based. | ||
| And it was guiding so much of the decisions that were governing our everyday lives. | ||
| And I was learning about this as I was learning about constitutional law and learning about the First Amendment and just sort of the coincidence of those two things. | ||
| Just kind of changed my career. | ||
| You know, I originally went to law school to be an environmental lawyer I was gonna save the world. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, and now I am I'm just doing it In a slightly different way. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| All right So let's talk about the First Amendment because everyone watching this knows I like to think of myself as some sort of free speech warrior I'm a free speech absolutist that you cannot call for direct violence. | ||
| That would be a criminal offense and I do believe that in libel laws, and maybe we can get into that. | ||
| I'm not sure what your stance is on that. | ||
| But what do you make of the general, well, first off, what is the First Amendment? | ||
| For people that don't, people get very confused about what just, the idea of free speech | ||
| versus the First Amendment. | ||
| So let's just do 101 first. | ||
| So, I mean, the First Amendment is the first amendment to the Constitution | ||
| that Congress passed. | ||
| It was proposed in 1789, ratified in 1791. | ||
| It says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances. | ||
| So that's actually not just one right. | ||
| That's six different rights. | ||
| That's a secular government, the free exercise of religion, the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition. | ||
| Yeah, it's beautiful, right? | ||
| It's all in there. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's the gold standard of freedom. | ||
| And it's amazingly condensed, too. | ||
| And if you had to sum it up, really, really what it does, what all those six rights do, is they protect the freedom of thought. | ||
| That's what they're all meant to do. | ||
| All the rights we have, actually, are limited to a certain extent, with the exception of the freedom of thought. | ||
| So you mentioned freedom of speech, you mentioned libel laws, and that you can't call for direct violence and incite violence. | ||
| Those are limits on your freedom of speech. | ||
| There are limits on just about every other right you have, except the freedom of thought, and that's really what we are seeking to protect. | ||
| That's what the First Amendment protects. | ||
| It is the one absolute right that we have, and it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| Yeah, it is a beautiful thing. | ||
| Do you think people get confused when they talk about free speech versus the First Amendment? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because all the time I see this, you know. | ||
| That somebody will say something, people will get outraged by it, or someone will lose their job at a private company. | ||
| I'm not for people, generally speaking, I'm not for people being fired for sharing their thoughts, obviously, but I also believe in the right of a private company to do what they want to do. | ||
| I don't want the government telling them what they want to do, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So people get this all kind of crossed up. | ||
| They absolutely do. | ||
| I mean, the first word of the First Amendment is Congress. | ||
| And that's been interpreted to apply to the entire government, right? | ||
| So it means that the government can't infringe on your free speech. | ||
| It means that the government can't tell you how to worship or endorse a particular religion or prohibit your ability to assemble. | ||
| That's what the First Amendment does. | ||
| Free speech is more general. | ||
| It's the ethos that underlies it. | ||
| We shouldn't A company shouldn't want to fire somebody just for speaking their mind. | ||
| That's kind of free speech, and people definitely get them conflated, and I've gotten into several exciting Twitter battles over this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know fully what your political beliefs are, but are you with me on that general concept that although you wouldn't like it if a company fired someone over something, maybe a joke they tweeted or that kind of thing, but you would allow the company Sure, and it's certainly not a constitutional right that the person has, unless they're working for the government. | ||
| And even then, you know, in certain limited circumstances. | ||
| So another place that this gets confused a lot is in my work. | ||
| So we handle, at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, 5,000 state church complaints every year, and half of those are in public schools. | ||
| And one of the things that we get all the time is teachers who are imposing their religion on their students. | ||
| And we often hear, even from opposing counsel, well, the teachers have a free speech right and a right to their religious freedom, so they're allowed to impose their religion on students. | ||
| And that's just, that's not true. | ||
| They are, for all intents and purposes, the government. | ||
| The teachers are employed by the government. | ||
| They are the government. | ||
| They don't get to exercise their free speech or freedom of religion in a way that imposes on other people's children. | ||
| Yeah, so to be clear, you're making an obvious distinction between a public school and a private school, right? | ||
| A private school, they can do what they want. | ||
| What kind of case would that be where a teacher's imposing something? | ||
| Generally, what is the teacher doing? | ||
| Saying, well, you should be following the teachings of Jesus? | ||
| Yeah, so last week, I got a call from a mom down south, and this is a fairly typical case that we get. | ||
| Her third grade student, her son's third grade teacher, was having all the kids, before they went down to lunch for the day, line up to go sanitize their hands, and before they did that, they had to say the Lord's Prayer. | ||
| I mean, that's completely banal. | ||
| I'm not a lawyer. | ||
| This seems kind of cut and dry. | ||
| You would think so. | ||
| Except that we get 2,500 complaints in the public schools every single year. | ||
| And they're all relatively like this. | ||
| A lot of times it's teaching creationism. | ||
| It's teachers taking this public position that they have and using it to promote their personal religion. | ||
| It's an abuse of power. | ||
| And you'd think everybody would be against that, but we have a hard time correcting these things. | ||
| So when you get a call like that, in something that seems like a very clear cut case, I think probably, well certainly for my audience, but I think 90% of I think... | ||
| Thinking people would realize that there's an issue with that, having students that could be of any religion or not religious at all, or even if they're of the Catholic faith and they're Christian, you shouldn't have to do that, obviously. | ||
| What is your action there? | ||
| Do you guys first call the school and say, you shouldn't be doing this, and we're not trying to get into a legal battle here, or do you immediately have to send something out and be like, you guys are in some legal trouble? | ||
| We always want to work with a public school district rather than against them. | ||
| Especially public schools. | ||
| Like, I don't want to be suing a public school and taking money out of the public school and time out of the public school. | ||
| They're already burdened enough. | ||
| We want them to be focusing on educating students. | ||
| So our first step is always to educate. | ||
| And oftentimes, it's enough. | ||
| So in this case, I wrote a letter, and that's usually the first step we do. | ||
| We just rewrite a letter, we explain this is what the law says, this is why what the teacher's doing is wrong, and usually that's enough to make the change. | ||
| But sometimes it's not. | ||
| And in this case, actually, the mom had already went down to the principal's office and talked to the principal and said, you know, what's going on? | ||
| You can't be doing this. | ||
| And the principal didn't do anything. | ||
| So we went straight to the superintendent and pointed out the problems. | ||
| It's a very frustrating situation when the law is so clear and the opponents, the government, is so unwilling to uphold it. | ||
| And it does happen. | ||
| And that's when we start looking at, okay, now we're gonna have to sue you. | ||
| And we are certainly willing to do that, but again, our preference is to solve these things with education. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How often do you find that people don't want to just speak up about this? | ||
| So you're saying in this case, the mother went to the principal and it didn't get resolved and then you guys had to take over. | ||
| But I suspect that there are a lot of cases, not just when it comes to religion, but all kinds of things, That people's rights are being infringed on and they don't even take the first step of trying to address it, they would then go the legal route. | ||
| That may be ultimately okay for you guys, but that chill factor, that's what I talk a lot about here, that people are just afraid of speaking up for things even when it is their right to do so. | ||
| That's a huge issue in what I do. | ||
| It happens in just about every case. | ||
| Most of the people who contact us have never taken any steps on their own, and they are afraid to. | ||
| And that's actually one of the functions that FFRF has, is to serve as a buffer between that person and their school. | ||
| I mean, these people have to be in the school, you know, that kid's got to be in the school for another nine years. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And he's going to have to live with having protested that, and it could be very difficult for him. | ||
| So one of the things that we try to do is to protect the identity of these people. | ||
| And historically, it's incredibly important because if you speak out against religion in a small community, the backlash can be pretty severe. | ||
| There are cases where we've actually seen mothers of plaintiffs, so when you've actually taken this to court, where the mother was assaulted by a lunch lady after she was dropping her kid off at school. | ||
| Physically assaulted. | ||
| Her house was firebombed later. | ||
| Now that was in the 80s and it was in Oklahoma. | ||
| But, you know, a couple years ago in Rhode Island, a young girl named Jessica Alquist challenged a prayer banner that was hanging in her public school. | ||
| And she had to go to school with a police escort for a number of years. | ||
| She was vilified on social media. | ||
| Hundreds of death threats. | ||
| And her state representative got on the radio and called her an evil little thing, being manipulated by evil people. | ||
| You know, just before the show, we were talking about when some public figures are very kind of proud, proudly anti-gay, LGBT rights, or maybe anti-atheist, that you can set your watch. | ||
| A couple years later, just a couple months ago, he was found to have been embezzling from his campaigns. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| The chill factor when it comes to this stuff, I see that as a bigger threat to the idea of free speech than any threat that I see directly to the First Amendment. | ||
| At the moment, at the moment at least. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Like I see us silencing ourselves now. | ||
| I see that in just creeping into everything right now. | ||
| The direct threat from the government Although there's obviously cases like this, individual schools and things of that nature is a problem. | ||
| I don't see that sort of systemically reaching out. | ||
| Am I wrong on that? | ||
| Well, I think one of the things that people need to realize, and this is actually in a Supreme Court case, the court does a great job of explaining this, the case on fighting words. | ||
| When does that free speech right kind of start to get curtailed? | ||
| Are these actual fighting words, in which case you don't have a free speech right to say them? | ||
| And what the court was talking about is they say that The whole point of free speech is to create friction. | ||
| It's to invite dispute. | ||
| It's to get people arguing and to make you uncomfortable. | ||
| That is what it is designed to do because we don't want complacency when complacency is wrong. | ||
| So I think that the chilling of speech is certainly a concern and it's a concern that the courts have when they're analyzing this. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the things they look at when Does a law burden speech by by chilling it and by having people and that's actually the language that the court uses by having them not Just having that law in place makes people less likely to speak up for instance So I think it's it's certainly a concern and the the self-censorship Which religion happens to be very good at yeah is is definitely problematic | ||
| Yeah, we're gonna get some more relations. | ||
| I can see you're itching to get there. | ||
| I am, I love it. | ||
| It's so fun to talk about. | ||
| What are the other direct threats from the government that you see right now? | ||
| Because I see a lot of people will say, well, Trump is a direct threat to the First Amendment. | ||
| Now, I see he says things about reporters, which I haven't seen him silence a reporter, but I do think that also is a chill effect because you're a reporter. | ||
| You don't want then, it's not fun if you're a reporter and the President of the United States is saying, That is the same chill effect. | ||
| But is there something else maybe related directly to the First Amendment that's coming from the government right now that the average person isn't seeing or maybe that's? | ||
| Well, I think there are actually some direct examples of what you're talking about already. | ||
| I mean, Trump is calling on news organizations that are friendly to him and keeping out news organizations that are critical of him. | ||
| Yeah, but is that new? | ||
| I mean, I think everybody's done that, right? | ||
| I mean, Obama did that. | ||
| Maybe it's a little more obvious. | ||
| I think it's a little more obvious, and I think it's a little more deliberate. | ||
| And I think the bigger problem, really, for Trump, the bigger problem that I have with Trump is just his complacency. | ||
| I don't think we've ever had a president that has so little understanding or respect for the way government works. | ||
| I don't think he knows that there is a separation of powers in the government. | ||
| I kept saying during the election that if you want to stop this guy somebody just has to ask him flat out what are the three branches of government and what are they supposed to do. | ||
| Like if you want to just really get him in a, in just a, you know, ninth grade social studies class, what you should know kind of moment, that that would have done some damage. | ||
| I mean, I cataloged this a while ago, before the election also, and there are a number of things he said. | ||
| You know, he talked about he was going to protect all 27 articles of the Constitution. | ||
| There aren't quite that many. | ||
| You know, I mean, he just is genuinely ignorant, and that's scary in a personality like his, that is at heart a bully and that sees any type of compromise or forgiveness as weakness or apology as | ||
| weakness. That is a scary combination. | ||
| So is there a piece of that though that if we are governed the way we're supposed to be | ||
| with the proper checks and balances and separation of powers, | ||
| that no matter how crazy he went it wouldn't matter? | ||
| If we were really governed the way we were supposed to be, in that beautiful way that the founders set up, that if he went completely bananas and did a lot of stuff that was illegal and all that, well actually, there are many processes in place to stop that. | ||
| I don't know that we're governed that way anymore, which is a problem. | ||
| I think that is the test that we are going to see. | ||
| Is our Constitution and is this form of government strong enough to withstand a totalitarian, at least a totalitarian mindset? | ||
| And so far it looks like it is. | ||
| You know, the Muslim travel ban, Travel Ban 2.0, it looks like things are functioning as they are supposed to. | ||
| George Orwell wrote this great letter before he had actually written in 1984, and in it he was talking about how The UK, how England and how America had never been tested the way a lot of these other countries have been tested with totalitarian regimes. | ||
| And I think we are coming up to that point here. | ||
| I think You know, it's hard to say that he is, but I think he's definitely got that mindset, for sure. | ||
| Where does the media fall into this equation? | ||
| Because I am no fan of the mainstream media. | ||
| I mean, I get when Trump talks about fake news, now again, I know, I don't know what his moral center is. | ||
| The guy obviously lies left and right. | ||
| So I put that out there. | ||
| At the same time, I do get the fake news thing. | ||
| I see the way all of the news spins everything constantly, that almost everyone now is a partisan hack. | ||
| It's almost impossible to get anything else. | ||
| Where does the media fall in the free speech? | ||
| Conversation, because it's like we need some mainstream media that we trust, because it can't all be reliant on online media, because there's a lot of garbage here too. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| You know, and people can say whatever they want about me, that's fine. | ||
| I'll defend their right to say it. | ||
| But where does that fall into the conversation, having a strong media at a fourth estate? | ||
| I mean, I think it is an absolute must-have. | ||
| I don't think you can have a functioning democracy without it. | ||
| And I think that there is enough diversity. | ||
| I think that the danger right now is what people are calling the siloing of it. | ||
| And you are able now just to get the media that reinforces your already held beliefs and your preconceived notions. | ||
| There is no requirement in any of these other these outlets to hear a genuine opposing point of view. | ||
| You get to hear talking points and you know kind of lip service often times. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I like your show and like listening to it. | ||
| You get to hear opposing points of view without without the shouting and the quick... I could turn on you at any moment. | ||
| You could, bring it on. | ||
| To me it's it's a little and it's also actually I think I have a little bit of a different perspective on this too because The work that we do at FFRF is historically very, very unpopular. | ||
| And so I interact with the media. | ||
| I mean, I do probably maybe three or four hundred interviews every year. | ||
| The legal team, not myself. | ||
| What you say to the media and what is actually happening, the genuine facts on the ground versus what gets reported, the distance between them can be so great. | ||
| And it can even be really great when you're talking about the non-partisan groups, not just Fox News. | ||
| Fox News is just insane when you're looking at what is actually happening in an FFRF case and what is reported on Fox News. | ||
| It's night and day. | ||
| But even some of the local stations... Do they bring some of your guys? | ||
| They've actually kind of stopped doing that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I think because we've been effective. | ||
| My first interview ever on any TV was Bill O'Reilly. | ||
| I sat down with him to talk about Obama's second inauguration and whether or not taking an oath on the Bible and saying, so help me God, after the oath of office should be, he should do that. | ||
| My stance was, he shouldn't do that because the Constitution lays out the presidential oath very clearly and it doesn't include the words, so help me God. | ||
| Yeah, how about put your hand on the Constitution, the thing that we're actually governed by, that we all agree is the thing we're governed by? | ||
| Precisely, and that's what I was arguing for. | ||
| It was a completely bizarre experience, too, because I had an earbud in, and Bill O'Reilly's just talking into my brain, and I'm just looking into a camera, trying to fight with him. | ||
| Very disconcerting. | ||
| Even that little thing, for people that don't know, this is a little insider baseball, when you do those satellite shows, sometimes there's a little delay on the video, so it's even hard to match that up, and that's why those conversations are very stilted at times, and obviously he's a seasoned pro who's gonna get his points across, and they've done a pre-interview with you and all that. | ||
| We don't do a pre-interview here. | ||
| I talk to you for 30 seconds before we... | ||
| And it's nice to be able to see you. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| And that was how it went down with Bill O'Reilly. | ||
| And his whole shtick is to interrupt you anyway before you can get your point out. | ||
| And with that little bit of a delay it made it even worse. | ||
| He did tell me that I was going to be going to heaven and that I could have a conversation with George Washington and Martin Luther King when I got there. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I'll probably get some shit for saying this, but I think generally he's one of the more moderate people at this point on cable news. | ||
| I think he actually does try to talk to people from both sides. | ||
| Now he may not be perfect, and I've been on there, and he compared something I said to Hitler, so. | ||
| You know, it's all relative. | ||
| Okay, so when you said that to him, the idea of why wouldn't you put your hand on the Constitution, the thing we're governed by, what's the comeback to that? | ||
| Like, I genuinely have never understood a cogent comeback to that. | ||
| I mean, I don't think there is one, right? | ||
| I mean, the argument always goes to tradition. | ||
| And it's the idea, well, George Washington, he put his hand on a Bible, and he said, so help me God. | ||
| He didn't say, so help me God. | ||
| I actually got Bill O'Reilly to admit that on the air. | ||
| I felt like that was... There you go. | ||
| And any argument from tradition is just, to me, is immediately suspect. | ||
| And I think it should be thrown, if you can't come up with a good reason now to be doing something, Other than it's been done for 200 years. | ||
| I don't wanna hear that. | ||
| I think that's a terrible argument, and it's especially terrible when you're talking about courts deciding cases. | ||
| But it's something that comes up in my line of work all the time. | ||
| It's very, very frustrating. | ||
| I mean, the tradition argument, not only just doesn't it make sense, because it's not what we're governed by, but a lot of the people that would argue for that are the same people who were annoyed when Keith Ellison, who converted to Islam, when he put, you know, he swore in on a Quran, Well, that's his religion thing, so if it's the idea of tradition, well, then you should respect other people's traditions, too, but... They went bonkers over that. | ||
| I mean, the best example of this, and the best example of it actually... I think it's all nonsense! | ||
| The best example of it playing out in law is a 1983 decision that the Supreme Court made, Marsh v. Chambers. | ||
| Ernie Chambers is this great Nebraska state senator, just a firebrand. | ||
| Hose's own row, he's just an amazing guy, sued the Nebraska legislature for having a chaplain that gave Christian prayers before every session. | ||
| Quick side note, we've paid, you and I as U.S. | ||
| taxpayers, have paid $10 million to chaplains for the House and the Senate to give prayers every single day before sessions. | ||
| So it's a nice use of our money. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| It seems particularly odd now because you know Trump is not religious in any way. | ||
| He got the evangelicals behind him, but when he went to Liberty University and he had that sweaty speech where he has two Corinthians and he's fumbling and fumbling over the whole thing. | ||
| And you can see when he goes to these things, these religious related things, He's a business man. | ||
| He is secular, I believe. | ||
| You may not like his secular beliefs. | ||
| So it all seems all the more ridiculous now. | ||
| Trump's religion, first of all, he won 81% of white evangelicals, which is more than W, more than McCain, more than Romney. | ||
| I mean, that's amazing. | ||
| And it shows something about, I think, their willingness to elect somebody with these authoritarian tendencies. | ||
| I think it's kind of, actually, I think it's sort of this substitution proxy. | ||
| Like, this is the God of our Bible is this authoritarian, if you don't love me, I'm going to murder you. | ||
| And, you know, he paid back immediately and viciously. | ||
| I think there's a little bit of substitution going on between those two. | ||
| Anyway, that's kind of beside the point. | ||
| We were talking about tradition in this case, right? | ||
| And the Supreme Court said that prayers can be opened at any legislative meeting because we've been doing it since before there was a Constitution. | ||
| Which, it blows the mind because, so before there was a separation of state and church in the Constitution, then before we amended the Constitution with the First Amendment, there were prayers. | ||
| So we're gonna go ahead and let you continue to have prayers now. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| I mean, and the dissents in the case said, you know, any first year law student could look at this and say that yes, having a Christian prayer before a legislative meeting is an endorsement of religion and it violates the separation of state and church and it's struck down. | ||
| But, because it's been going on for so long, Right, not only does that make no sense, and I'm not a constitutional lawyer obviously, but even if you were to throw in five other religions and a secular prayer or a secular statement, it would still be ridiculous. | ||
| So it's not just, for me at least, it wouldn't be just about the exclusivity of all the other religions and just giving a Christian prayer. | ||
| It just makes no sense altogether. | ||
| Agreed completely. | ||
| But it is, and it always ends up being exclusively Christian. | ||
| From 2000 to 2015, Congress gave 2,085 Christian prayers. | ||
| In 2015, Congress gave 2,085 Christian prayers. | ||
| Something like 62 prayers were given by a Jewish invocant. | ||
| And then I think eight Islam and then three others. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's it. | ||
| So, I mean, you're talking 99.7% or something like that to Judeo-Christian gods. | ||
| By the way, to be completely fair and show people we're not picking on Christianity somehow, when the rabbi gave the speech, was it right before Trump took the office or right after? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| It was within five minutes on either side. | ||
| I mean, whether it's a rabbi or a Christian, I think all of it. | ||
| Yes, it has nothing to do with the government. | ||
| Absolutely, and it shouldn't have anything to do with the government. | ||
| So what do you say to people, and I've had people that I really like and admire and respect sit in that very chair and say to me that you can't fully separate religion and government because we're based in Judeo-Christian values. | ||
| I get that from Dennis Prager, who I really like and admire. | ||
| Yes, I've actually, this is the topic of my book that is hopefully coming out soon. | ||
| I'm talking with a couple of publishers. | ||
| The idea, so I think first of all, if you back up, the idea that we're a Christian nation, I think most people, most thinking people, can reject that idea. | ||
| Some of them can even refute it. | ||
| But the fallback position is what you're talking about. | ||
| Well, we're founded on Judeo-Christian principles. | ||
| And this is just, it's fundamentally not true. | ||
| First of all, nobody ever tells you what a Judeo-Christian principle is. | ||
| They're hiding in the vagueness of that term, right? | ||
| And second of all, it is just not true. | ||
| If you look, and this is what I do in my book, if you look at Judeo-Christian principles, if you look at the Ten Commandments, each of the Ten Commandments and break them down, if you look at the principles that are central to the Bible and break them down, and compare them to America's founding principles, they are in such disagreement, so fundamentally opposed to one another, that it's fair to say that Christianity is un-American. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, for example, I think they would both, our Constitution and the Ten Commandments, would agree on the murder thing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We'll give them one to start. | ||
| We would agree no murder? | ||
| I would agree no murder. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But believe in one God. | ||
| That's in the Ten Commandments. | ||
| I don't think that has anything to do with our Constitution. | ||
| We actually have the reverse. | ||
| Yeah, the Ten Commandments begin... First of all, whenever you get into an argument with somebody about the Ten Commandments, you have to ask them, which Ten Commandments are they talking about? | ||
| There's four sets of Ten Commandments in any given Bible. | ||
| Are there four different sets? | ||
| Four sets. | ||
| Exodus 20, Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 5, and Deuteronomy 27. | ||
| The whole thing's so preachy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so preachy. | |
| And most people don't realize, you know, one of those is just a list of people that are cursed. | ||
| And the first set, which is what everybody thinks of as the Ten Commandments, you know, Moses comes down off the mountain, they're not even called the Ten Commandments in the Bible. | ||
| It's the second set that is actually called the Ten Commandments that he has to go make. | ||
| Moses comes down off the mountain with the Ten Commandments, the only thing, the only artifact that God has ever inscribed and proven his existence on, and smashes them. | ||
| He's angry that his people, yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| And in a Mel Brooks movie, he had 20 commandments, but then broke 10. | ||
|
unidentified
|
15. | |
| Or was it 15? | ||
| Wait, what movie was that? | ||
| I'm blanking. | ||
| That's History of the World? | ||
| History of the World. | ||
| Yeah, History of the World. | ||
| Part one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, leaving aside the Brooksian recklessness, the 10 commandments themselves are, even when you get into the rules like murder and things like that, Those aren't Judeo-Christian. | ||
| These are universal human principles that every society we know of has come up with on their own. | ||
| And to call them Judeo-Christian and say that specifically Judeo-Christianity influenced them rather than our innate humanity, I think is arrogant. | ||
| It's the kind of arrogance that I, as an atheist, am often accused of. | ||
| And furthermore, if you actually look at the way the Ten Commandments are written, and I'll make this argument in the book, The don't murder, don't lie, don't steal commandments really only applied to other believers. | ||
| So it's not equal justice under the law, what we have in our system. | ||
| It was don't kill your fellow believers, otherwise go for it. | ||
| And if you look at the Bible, what does God do in the books right after the Ten Commandments? | ||
| He orders them to go slaughter. | ||
| They commit something like 70 genocides in the book of Joshua. | ||
| So killing is perfectly fine, as long as you're not killing your friends, your brothers, and your neighbors. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned arrogance, and I think that this is one of the words that gets prescribed to atheists a lot. | ||
| And I see this with Bill Maher, particularly, and I think he's been the most outspoken American atheist, probably. | ||
| That people, well, he's just too, I like what he says, but he's too arrogant, he's too whatever. | ||
| And my defense of him, obviously I really like and admire him, is that he's put himself out on a ledge here. | ||
| That is not a popular ledge to be on, and he takes hits now. | ||
| Now he gets more hate, I think, from the left, but he gets hit from everybody, and he's a little arrogant about it. | ||
| He's a little smug about it. | ||
| He is, and I don't think he would deny that, and I'll ask him that one day, I hope. | ||
| But what do you do with that? | ||
| For someone that is in your position, this idea that atheists are somehow, they're holier than thou, and they're smarts, or that kind of thing. | ||
| To me, it's... I don't get that from you, by the way, but I think you appreciate that. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that. | ||
| I mean, to me, I think it's kind of amazing, because if you look at the claims, my claim for atheism is, I don't see any evidence that a god exists, so I don't believe in one. | ||
| I mean, it's a pretty minimal claim, really. | ||
| Do you make a distinction between that and agnosticism? | ||
| I don't like going down the rabbit hole too much. | ||
| Sure, I do. | ||
| Atheism is a statement of belief. | ||
| Agnosticism is a statement of knowledge. | ||
| And there's no way we can ever know a negative. | ||
| So I'm also an agnostic. | ||
| I'm also a humanist. | ||
| I'm also a skeptic. | ||
| I'm a secularist. | ||
| The only label that I choose to give myself, even politically, is atheist. | ||
| And the reason that I do that is because You know, I think when we label ourselves, JFK has a great quote, and he says that too often we enjoy the discomfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. | ||
| And I think that labels are just the quintessential example of that. | ||
| I don't know what you think about something, but I'm listening to you talk. | ||
| And then you say, oh, I'm a conservative. | ||
| Okay, I don't have to listen to anything you say anymore. | ||
| I know what your views are. | ||
| I can ignore the words coming out of your mouth, or I filter those words through the prism of that label. | ||
| So to me, labeling something is a way that we can enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. | ||
| So I try to avoid that. | ||
| But atheism is the exception that I make to this, because I want people to put me in that atheist box in their brain, and then I'm going to break out of there. | ||
| I want them to think that I am this arrogant, this awful person who hates life, doesn't enjoy their family, and is just miserable. | ||
| Because I'm not. | ||
| I'm a happy guy. | ||
| I love life. | ||
| I try to get the most out of it. | ||
| I'm probably a little bit arrogant. | ||
| I'm a lawyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So really you're a terrible person. | |
| That's a legal thing, not really a human thing. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| But the point being, that is the one label that I will adopt for myself, even though I am all those other things, and I do it for the reasons that I want to. | ||
| I want to shatter people's misconceptions about what it is to be an atheist. | ||
| But getting back to the whole idea about atheists being arrogant, to me it's a very simple question. | ||
| My statement is, there's no evidence to believe in a God, so I don't. | ||
| The religious point of view is, I have no evidence but complete faith. | ||
| I have absolute unshakable certainty, without any evidence whatsoever, that this is true. | ||
| And to me that's a far more arrogant belief than what I'm saying. | ||
| Can those things ever really be reconciled in a society? | ||
| Let's say everything you do for the rest of your career goes exactly how you would want it to, right? | ||
| And you're able to maybe bring some people along and wake some people up, so to speak, and all that. | ||
| There's always going to be religious people. | ||
| And many religious people, by the way, are perfectly good people who give a lot to charity and include home lives and do all sorts of great things. | ||
| And I think they've done studies where actually religious people give more money to things and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Right, and the church is tax exempt, oh, we can get into that too. | ||
| But do you think that in a functioning Western democratic society, | ||
| that those things really can be reconciled or that we're always gonna sort of have this battle? | ||
| I think there will always be religion. | ||
| And I think as long as you're living in a democratic republic, | ||
| people are always going to, those who are in government are always going to try | ||
| to use their positions in a certain amount of way to promote their personal beliefs. | ||
| And when their personal beliefs are religion, then it becomes a big problem. | ||
| You know, when their personal beliefs are based in science, it becomes less of an issue. | ||
| But I think there's always going to be a conflict between At least an intellectual conflict between religion and non-religion. | ||
| I think religion, demographically, is in a tailspin in this country. | ||
| I think it's on its way out. | ||
| And one of the really weird things about working for a non-profit, you know, you said if I'm completely successful. | ||
| If I'm completely successful, I'm out of a job. | ||
| I don't know what I'm going to do. | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| Oh, so this is like the cops need a certain amount of crime thing, right? | ||
| Well, and this is the only good thing about Trump. | ||
| The only silver lining for me is I haven't got job security. | ||
| Like, there's no problem for me for four years. | ||
| Like, I mean, and especially if you look at his cabinet and his vice president, I mean, and who are probably pushing a lot of the policy. | ||
| I mean, it's very scary from a state church standpoint. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very, very scary time. | ||
| For a guy like you, I suspect you probably fear a Mike Pence in a way more than you would fear a Trump, right? | ||
| Sure, in a certain way, yes, in a certain way, absolutely. | ||
| Mike Pence is very scary, as is the cabinet. | ||
| I mean, Rick Perry is a guy who, when his state had a drought, he held a prayer rally. | ||
| Which we sued him over. | ||
| The state caught fire after his prayer rally, instead of it raining. | ||
| Were they facing the wrong way? | ||
| Which way were you supposed to pray? | ||
| They were dancing, they were praying to the wrong God. | ||
| Sonny Perdue, Secretary of Agriculture, same thing. | ||
| His state was going through a drought, he counseled prayer. | ||
| Scott Pruitt, head of the EPA, I've tangled with him. | ||
| He thinks that it's okay for public schools to distribute Bibles to students. | ||
| So these people are very scary for me. | ||
| I'm curious, do you find that there's a little bit of a point that you can't reconcile here where you obviously believe in the Constitution, and our government has gotten much bigger than the Constitution ever really wanted, I think, maybe you disagree, that all of the regulations that the government has put on are not things that were really supposed to happen, yet you don't want them to, you know what I mean? | ||
| You're trying to fight things that maybe aren't constitutional But you want some regulation, too. | ||
| Did that make sense? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| In other words, the government got much bigger than the framers intended, and now you like some of those regulations, because they keep some of this stuff out of the public square, but it's still a problem. | ||
| Really, it's kind of two questions. | ||
| my state church work, really all we rely on is the Constitution itself and some state | ||
| constitutions. And there are some peripheral laws that allow us to bring lawsuits and statutes | ||
| that allow us to bring lawsuits and things like that. But really, if you look at the | ||
| original Constitution without the amendments, it mentions religion once in Article 6, which | ||
| is to prohibit religious tests for public office. The only mention of religion is exclusionary. | ||
| Then you have a couple of amendments. Again, the First Amendment mentioning religion twice, | ||
| again excluding government from religion and vice versa. So the only mentions of religion | ||
| in the entire Constitution, which is godless, doesn't mention God at all, are completely | ||
| exclusionary. | ||
| So really, the center and the core of my work is based on that. | ||
| I think what you're talking about more broadly, and I can bring in some of my environmental background here, is kind of the idea of the administrative state. | ||
| Right, so that's where I'm going. | ||
| So I get it on the religious front. | ||
| So then on this front where you want, as an environmentalist, you want some regulation, and yet at the same time that's not exactly what the Constitution prescribes the federal government to be able to do. | ||
| Sure, and it is, I think, different than what the Founders intended. | ||
| But the Constitution is also different than what the Founders passed. | ||
| You know, we have a lot more, it's been amended many times since Since the founders and the administrative state it's a little weird and you know you take whole classes on this in law school Because there are there are some genuine | ||
| Simple reasons for having it. | ||
| So, Congress... Diane Feinstein was actually talking about this earlier in the Gorsuch confirmation hearing. | ||
| She's talking about, well, we can set fuel standards for, say, the next 10 years. | ||
| We're able to. | ||
| We have that information now. | ||
| But we need experts at the EPA, say, to do it for the 15, 20, 30 years after that. | ||
| We don't have that kind of scientific expertise. | ||
| So what we're doing is we're delegating our authority to the EPA on that. | ||
| And, I mean, the courts are pretty good about Coming in and saying when you can and when you can't do that. | ||
| The whole of this Chevron deference that you're hearing about in the news is all intertwined with this. | ||
| So I think it's different than what the founders intended, but I don't think that necessarily means that it's unconstitutional. | ||
| It's certainly becoming unwieldy, but that also doesn't mean that it's unconstitutional. | ||
| That's a policy issue. | ||
| Yeah, and I see this as a very gray area. | ||
| I'm not saying that they're not doing anything, that they're doing something unconstitutional, but just that the power and the reach of the federal government and the way the states have given up so many rights, I view that as a... So you're talking about federalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And federalism is the balance of power between the states and the federal government. | ||
| It's in the Constitution. | ||
| It's in the 10th Amendment. | ||
| It says that the powers that the federal government doesn't have are reserved to the states. | ||
| But again, that's changed a lot over the years, especially with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. | ||
| And because the federal government is spending so much money now, which they're perfectly allowed to do, they're allowed to put strings on that money. | ||
| And that's one of the ways they're able to do a lot of these things that you don't hear about very often. | ||
| So isn't that an inherent problem, because it's sort of like a hostage situation? | ||
| Like, if you want money for this, you better start doing this. | ||
| And that may not exactly be what our jurisdiction says. | ||
| Well, but courts are willing to strike that down. | ||
| The Violence Against Women Act was kind of this famous, where the courts struck down the Violence Against Women Act. | ||
| I'm not saying that it was an overreach of the Congress under the Commerce Clause. | ||
| They weren't allowed to do this. | ||
| So I think courts are willing to defend that. | ||
| But the power of the purse belongs exclusively to Congress. | ||
| They are allowed to spend in whatever way they want. | ||
| And they can attach strings to that money if they want to. | ||
| So it is difficult. | ||
| I see your point. | ||
| You have to figure out a different way around that. | ||
| Yeah, so for an example, it would be like the trans bathroom law in North Carolina, where Obama started, first off, trans people have been going to the bathroom for a long time. | ||
| I've never seen a study saying that it's a problem where they're going to the bathroom. | ||
| So it became an issue, then of course the media firestorm about it, and then, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Obama basically said, if you don't allow them to do this, What was it, he was either gonna cut funding for certain state things, and we saw places, you know, the NBA said we're not gonna have our all-star game there, that's a separate thing from the government, of course. | ||
| But that general idea, I didn't like, because I don't want, for a basic non-issue, Something that I don't think is a major issue. | ||
| I'm not talking about trans rights, their right to equality. | ||
| They've been going to the bathroom wherever they want and it wasn't an issue. | ||
| But then we just, we all get hysterical about it and then what's the answer? | ||
| Ah, the federal government should now tell us what to do. | ||
| And I think I see your point there. | ||
| But I also think there's two. | ||
| The idea that it's not really about bathrooms in the way that it wasn't You know, a lot of these fights are symbolic. | ||
| Lunch counters, water fountains, those weren't the most pressing problems facing the civil rights movement, but they can be powerful symbols when you're trying to change the way people view a certain minority, and trying to assert the rights. | ||
| So I think it's important to look at it both, and we run into this problem all the time. | ||
| In the Freedom From Religion Foundation, what we do. | ||
| You know, we're fighting symbols constantly. | ||
| Ten Commandments on public land, crosses on public land, and those are important fights to have for that very reason. | ||
| So I think it's not necessarily just about the bathroom, and it's not necessarily about a non-issue. | ||
| Kind of in the way that it's not necessarily about baking a cake or, you know, giving flowers to a gay wedding in that arena. | ||
| Which I think you and I disagree on that. | ||
| Yeah, all right, let's go there. | ||
| So my, I feel that if this person has a religious belief and they don't wanna bake a gay wedding cake, we now live in a time where either you can get a cake at another baker, perhaps in your town or one town over, but people said to me, well, what if you don't live in, there's no bakers near you anywhere. | ||
| We also live in a time where Amazon can pretty much deliver you anything, anywhere. | ||
| And I just don't like the federal government coming in And demanding that they do something that's against their belief. | ||
| That's just my belief. | ||
| That's a little more libertarian. | ||
| What about the state governments doing it? | ||
| So in the Oregon case, the Oregon Baker case, it's all state government that's happening. | ||
| So lay that out just so we're on the same page and everyone knows exactly what's going on. | ||
| So this is a gay couple who went into a bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa I think is the name. | ||
| And wanted them to bake a cake for their gay wedding. | ||
| They said, no, we love Jesus more than you. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| And the state civil rights body actually, the couple made a complaint to the state civil rights body and they said, yes, you have to do this because our law doesn't allow you to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. | ||
| And that's been the case that's making its way up to the Oregon Supreme Court. | ||
| So I mean, are you kind of more in the market-based solution type? | ||
| My gut feeling on this is more of a market-based solution. | ||
| So I get what you're saying. | ||
| In this case, it's specifically the state, not the federal government. | ||
| So I do make that distinction for sure. | ||
| Unfortunately, I would say, you know, I had Randy Barnett, who's a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, I had him on the show. | ||
| And he mentioned a phrase that I really love, which is the foot vote. | ||
| That then if you don't like what your local area, if it's your local town that the baker is bad in, or if you don't like the, State government of Oregon, in this case, you're allowed to move, and that's the beauty of our system. | ||
| I know it kind of sucks, like it doesn't feel right, believe me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| A lot of people, I got people, gay people that were emailing me saying, you know, I'm not happy with you on this. | ||
| I know it doesn't feel right, but every excuse for just more government control I don't like, and because we live in a time where you can get a cake a jillion other ways, and you can move and take your money and the worth that you bring to your community and all of those things, that's just where I would fall on this. | ||
| Well, let me make the case. | ||
| And I think there's two things. | ||
| So, for all these, all the kind of the market-based ideas, the market-based solutions to these issues, they all are premised on the idea that people, producers and consumers, and first of all, I'm not an economist. | ||
| Let me lay that out right now. | ||
| They're all premised on the idea that producers... We'll put that big under your name. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| I'm not an economist. | ||
| They behave logically, and they make decisions, most importantly, logically. | ||
| And we just know that's not true. | ||
| Exhibit A is religion. | ||
| Exhibit B is Trump. | ||
| People vote against their interests all the time. | ||
| And Exhibit C is the case itself, right? | ||
| The baker is turning away perfectly good money, right? | ||
| So they're not behaving rationally or logically in terms of economics. | ||
| Wait, let me pause you there for a second. | ||
| 'Cause I think in a way that also strengthens my argument, which is I think that 99% of people in business | ||
| are in business to make money. | ||
| And 99% of people would not let their religious view override their view to be successful. | ||
| So in other words, if you opened up a coffee shop and said, well, first off, not serving people | ||
| is different than not doing a specific action that they want you to do. | ||
| But most people are in business because they wanna make money. | ||
| And I think that we're making such an issue out of a tiny little thing there. | ||
| So, continue. | ||
| All right, well, it dovetails nicely with my second point. | ||
| So, one of the things that I do at FFRF is I go all around the country and I talk about these kind of issues. | ||
| And right now there's an attempt to redefine religious liberty. | ||
| It kind of is the biggest example that people might be familiar with is the Hobby Lobby decision that the Supreme Court made a couple years ago. | ||
| It's weaponizing religious liberty instead of being this right For you to behave a certain way and to do a certain thing, it allows you to impose your religion on others. | ||
| That's the change that we're seeing in the law that we're fighting against. | ||
| And one of the clips that I show when I give this talk is a CNN report. | ||
| They went to a small town in Georgia. | ||
| Georgia was considering passing a religious freedom law that would have helped with this redefinition. | ||
| You may remember it. | ||
| There was a big backlash against it. | ||
| The NFL said, we're not going to come there. | ||
| All these companies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I showed this video and CNN went to a small town, they interviewed florists in that town. | ||
| And would you serve a gay couple? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And they went, every single one of the florists in town said that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, so it's... I'm in a lot of florists, gay. | |
| That's a whole other issue, but how many florists? | ||
| Like, now I'm not gonna do it. | ||
| And actually, one of the florists' son was going into the seminary, and I'll post the video somewhere. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It's worth watching. | ||
| It's online, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's online somewhere. | ||
| Okay, so we'll link to it below. | ||
| Okay, so... I mean, and now it's not a big deal, right, if you can't get flowers for your wedding. | ||
| It's not the end of the world. | ||
| But if that's food, Or gas, or formula for your baby, then that becomes a real issue. | ||
| And maybe it's not being gay, maybe it's being black, or maybe it's being Jewish. | ||
| And maybe it's not just this town, maybe it's the town next over, and the town that's next over. | ||
| And you're right, the times have changed, but if that sounds absurd to people, they have to remember that that's the whole reason that we have the Civil Rights Act in the first place. | ||
| You know, in King's letter from the Birmingham Jail, he wrote it in, I think, April of 63. | ||
| He even talks in there about having to spend nights in his car on a cross-country road trip in the uncomfortable corners of his car because no hotel would let him stay there. | ||
| And when Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act, when he made his speech, I think it was in the Oval Office, in June of 63, and one of the first things he says is that everybody has to have equal access to places of public accommodation. | ||
| It was the whole purpose of this because we were effectively creating an entire second class of citizens by not allowing them to purchase gas or to get a motel room. | ||
| And it's incredibly problematic. | ||
| I think it's appropriate for government regulation. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting because, look, if there was a gas station that said, we're not serving gas to black people, or Jews, or Muslims, or whatever else it is, or white people, even though they're not a minority at the moment, but they were just picking something based on discrimination, just for the service that they offer everybody, I think there's an exceptional argument to be made there, absolutely. | ||
| The case with the cake, I think, is a little bit different, because they didn't say, we won't sell you a cake. | ||
| We won't sell you a cake customized to this specific thing That is against our religious belief. | ||
| And in this case, even though I'm against their religious belief, I just think, even in the case of the florists, okay, you go to all the florists, and every, I mean, all these florists saying no to a gay wedding cake is kind of hilarious. | ||
| I feel like somebody needs to do a spoof of that. | ||
| But then ultimately, it would be on you to order something from 1-800-Flowers or to just move. | ||
| But I see what you're saying is perfectly principled. | ||
| And again, this is where I'm not gonna force my beliefs on you in any way. | ||
| Like, you know, I like that. | ||
| And you may not know this either. | ||
| You know, ex-Muslims of North America, Sarah Hader. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Sarah Hader, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they actually, they were denied a cake at a bakery in Virginia. | ||
| And she called me, and I wrote a letter to the company, and actually they got a cake out of it. | ||
| Wait, so they wanted a cake for a Muslim way? | ||
| No, to celebrate being ex-Muslims. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right, I did see this. | ||
| One or two years, it was the anniversary of their organization. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess there was a Muslim worker in that bakery. | ||
| I don't remember the name of the chain, and whatever the name of the chain was, they did a great job. | ||
| When I wrote to corporate, they hopped in the ear and said, that shouldn't have happened, we're incredibly sorry, here you go, here's another case. | ||
| So basically it was one worker who happened to be Muslim, he saw them celebrating their anniversary of the ex-Muslim organization, The company then did the right thing. | ||
| You either have to suspend or fire this guy. | ||
| I mean, I'm not, what do you think about these exceptions now that we see private companies doing where, you know, I've seen this several times, like a Muslim flight attendant doesn't have to serve alcohol or, you know, something of that nature. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think that, well, for a private company. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| If that's the way they want to accommodate somebody's religion, they're welcome to. | ||
| I think it's just a terrible accommodation. | ||
| I would be okay with not hiring that person. | ||
| If you're a flight attendant, and your job, in the job description, serve people what they want, that we have on this plane, I would be 100 percent, that's not discrimination. | ||
| You're looking at a breadth of what they can do, and I would be for just not hiring that person. | ||
| The scarier version of this is actually happening right now in The federal law. | ||
| So the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that's what the Hobby Lobby decision was based on. | ||
| And that is saying the same kind of thing, except it's saying that your religion allows you to be exempt from general and neutrally applicable laws because you're a religion. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| The Hobby Lobby case was fundamentally about providing birth control. | ||
| And the Hobby Lobby owners, the owners of that company said, these are abortifacients. | ||
| They cause abortions. | ||
| And therefore they are against our religion. | ||
| That is 100 percent wrong. | ||
| That belief is not accurate. | ||
| It is scientifically inaccurate. | ||
| They are not abortifacients. | ||
| And the Supreme Court got a brief from 60 or 70 medical and scientific organizations | ||
| saying this belief conflicts with fact. | ||
| And the Supreme Court didn't even address it. | ||
| They said they believe that they are abortifacients, therefore they get to be exempt from having to provide them. | ||
| Reality didn't matter. | ||
| So what the Supreme Court did was they elevated A counterfactual, completely unsupported belief above the law just because it's labeled as religious, because it's held with unshakable certainty. | ||
| And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about redefining religious liberty. | ||
| That is the scary, scary fight that we're seeing right now. | ||
| It is taking these unsubstantiated beliefs and allowing people to be exempt from the law because of it. | ||
| And the Supreme Court dealt with this issue back in 1878 from a constitutional standpoint. | ||
| They said that if we do this, if the First Amendment allows you to be exempt from any law you want just because your religion says so, we're going to have chaos. | ||
| It's anarchy. | ||
| I mean, everyone would start their own religion. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Government is pointless. | ||
| Don't even bother. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Have people doing that, it's unworkable. | ||
| But this is all based on a law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the Constitution. | ||
| So that's actually good news because if we repeal the law, it gets rid of the Hobby Lobby decision. | ||
| But instead of doing that, what you're seeing now is more laws being proposed. | ||
| Right now you're seeing the First Amendment Defense Act, which takes RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, | ||
| a step farther and says that, yeah, even discrimination, which is a little unclear under RFRA, go for it. | ||
| You can discriminate in the name of your God. | ||
| It's not a problem at all. | ||
| It's 100% okay. | ||
| So it's, this is a, it's a very scary fight. | ||
| And it's also, it's also short-sighted. | ||
| I think this is one thing that never gets talked about that's a little frustrating to me. | ||
| The religious right is so short-sighted in their strategies. | ||
| And there are plenty of great examples of this. | ||
| The prayer before government meetings that we were talking about. | ||
| The reason they fought for that is because they were all Christian prayers. | ||
| Now the Supreme Court has said that you can't just have Christian prayers. | ||
| They have to be anybody, including an atheist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're actually suing Congress so that our co-president can get up there and give a secular invocation before Congress. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're seeing the Satanic Temple getting up there and giving invocations before town meetings in Florida, and people are going bonkers. | ||
| So that's really the short side of this, because they've been fighting for it when it was to the exclusion of everyone else. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Suddenly the same law, as it gets widened, You're not going to be so thrilled. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you see it everywhere. | ||
| Another great example is the Equal Access Act allows students to form student clubs in school. | ||
| And it was passed specifically because the court said kids can't form a religious club in a public school. | ||
| That's not under the Constitution. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| So they passed the Equal Access Act, which says that if you allow kids to form any club, they also have to be allowed to form a religious club. | ||
| And now that's being used for every atheist club in the country. | ||
| Every LGBT club in the country is using that law to form. | ||
| But the scarier version of the short-sightedness is when it comes to things like Muslims and Sharia law and things like that. | ||
| The exemptions apply to everybody. | ||
| Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony? | ||
| It would be, and if people are genuinely worried about that, there's this big fear, you know, Sharia supremacy, and Frank Gaffney's pushing this idea that Islam is this totalitarian political ideology, it's not a religion, so it's okay to treat Muslims not as we would treat other religious people. | ||
| The point of all this, though, is we already have the solution to all of these issues, and it's called the separation of state and church. | ||
| They should be fighting alongside FFRF, not against FFRF. | ||
| And that is the easiest way to not have any of these problems in the future. | ||
| That's why I would always err on the side of anything that would strengthen the Constitution, | ||
| anything that would strengthen the laws that we live by, which is actually a perfect segue | ||
| to where I wanted to go here, which is, so as a guy that believes in law, that is a lawyer, | ||
| that you've referenced Supreme Court decisions often, you know what you're talking about and all this stuff, | ||
| how scary is it to you that the Supreme Court, the way we appoint justices now, even at the state level, | ||
| that it all is becoming insanely politicized? | ||
| The whole point of separation of powers was to keep this stuff from being overly politicized, | ||
| but now it's like almost everyone in Congress votes on party lines, we know all kinds of shady stuff | ||
| goes on behind the scenes, by the way, on both parties through pressure, | ||
| when Obama wanted to get Obamacare passed, when Trump now wants to get this thing passed, | ||
| that we're politicizing things that are supposed to be apolitical, | ||
| most importantly, the Supreme Court. | ||
| I mean, I think, yeah, the entire federal judiciary, well, not just federal, the entire judiciary throughout the country is That it's a very scary development. | ||
| And the scarier thing is the money that is going into state elections for judges is insane. | ||
| And it's incredibly scary. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, how are you not beholden to a company that's put two or three million dollars into, you know, getting you elected? | ||
| How are you not beholden to that company when they come up In front of you on a case. | ||
| And of course that's the reason they're doing it in the first place. | ||
| Of course they are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's not be... Wait, they're not just giving money away just because they don't really like money? | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. I mean, so I think the politicization of judges and the judiciary is very scary and very problematic. | ||
| I mean, I think to a certain extent it's always been there, but it does seem to be worsening right now. | ||
| And especially at the lower levels. | ||
| I mean, the federal judiciary, the Republicans are really, really good. | ||
| They're really good at holding out, as they've demonstrated with Garland and now Gorsuch. | ||
| They're really good at holding out for what they want. | ||
| They're better at playing the political game than Democrats are, for sure. | ||
| And they're changing the court system and jurisprudence because of it. | ||
| So that's why they're doing it. | ||
| They're effectively winning. | ||
| But it's almost in a way, it's almost scarier at the state level, especially if you're just an average citizen. | ||
| A lot of those decisions are gonna affect you far more than some of the Supreme Court decisions. | ||
| Yeah, is there anything on its way up to the Supreme Court right now | ||
| that people aren't really thinking about that we should be thinking about? | ||
| There's two cases there right now. | ||
| There's one which is an amazing case. | ||
| It's out of Wisconsin, actually, and it's about political gerrymandering. | ||
| So gerrymandering to further the Republican Party. | ||
| And if the court strikes... Just real quick, for people that don't know what gerrymandering is, I mean, it's basically redrawing the map, the local maps, so that they favor one candidate or one party. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And it's been done very effectively by the Republicans in the last couple rounds of elections. | ||
| They redraw the maps every 10 years, I think, based on the census. | ||
| And this is challenging it. | ||
| It's been struck down before in terms of race. | ||
| You can't favor whites at the expense of African-Americans, say, to vote. | ||
| The idea is every vote should count. | ||
| You shouldn't have wasted votes. | ||
| And right now they could strike down, there's a case before them, where they could strike down political gerrymandering. | ||
| The second case is out of Minnesota. | ||
| It's Trinity Lutheran. | ||
| And this case actually will do serious, serious damage to the separation of state and church. | ||
| Basically, a church applied for public money. | ||
| They would have been given a grant. | ||
| I don't remember how much. | ||
| It doesn't matter how much. | ||
| We'll just say $10,000. | ||
| It doesn't matter at all. | ||
| It could be a dollar. | ||
| $10,000 to revamp their playground. | ||
| And the government said, no, we can't give you money. | ||
| You're a church. | ||
| You have to do this on your own. | ||
| There's a separation of state and church. | ||
| And they're suing over it. | ||
| And if that decision goes the wrong way, What possible grounds are they suing? | ||
| They're suing on saying you're giving this money to schools and other secular organizations to allow them to revamp their playgrounds. | ||
| You're discriminating against us because we're religious, which the separation of state and church Is discrimination in a way except it's deliberate, right? | ||
| And it's okay because you also get all these benefits from the separation of states. | ||
| They're tax-exempt and they have membership, right? | ||
| I mean they have people that pay into the church. | ||
| It's for the church to do what they want with that money and they're tax-exempt. | ||
| They got a pretty sweet gig! | ||
| There's so much more than that, too. | ||
| Not only are they tax-exempt, and this is amazing to me, they don't have to submit anything to the IRS. | ||
| You want to be a tax-exempt church, you just say, I'm a tax-exempt church. | ||
| And then every single year, so for instance, FFRF, we hire an outside audit company to come in and audit our books every year, and we submit this Form 990 to the IRS. | ||
| It's huge, it's onerous, it takes like a week to complete, and it tracks every penny that goes in and every penny that goes out of the organization. | ||
| Churches don't have to do any of that. | ||
| We have no idea what kind of money comes into these places, no idea what kind of money goes out, they're completely exempt. | ||
| And they also have crazy other benefits under the law. | ||
| Ministers of the gospel, quote, ministers of the gospel, that's the phrase that our law actually uses, can take money that their church pays them, as individuals, that's designated for housing, and they don't have to pay taxes on that. | ||
| Right, it's just completely tax exempt. | ||
| They, as individual employees, get a complete tax exemption, as long as the money's designated as a housing allowance, that's it. | ||
| So there's a hilarious irony, well, it's a depressing irony, I suppose, which is, so they're not paying taxes, and yet they're also bringing a lawsuit that would say, we want tax money to do something, and at the same time, our books are completely closed. | ||
| So for all you know, we've got five million in the bank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They want to have their cake and eat it too. | ||
| And this is the other push that you're seeing in the law. | ||
| And they're actually using a lot of the language of free speech. | ||
| They don't want any of the burdens that come with state church separation. | ||
| But they want all the benefits. | ||
| So they want all the benefits of state church separation and then all the benefits of free speech and all these other things. | ||
| They don't want to take any of the burdens that go along with it. | ||
| And that's another big fight that we're having. | ||
| But that case is genuinely terrifying because if the Supreme Court says, yes, you have to fund this, that opens the floodgates of tax money going to churches. | ||
| It's never been done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, it's simply on its face, forgetting my feelings about religion or anything like that. | ||
| It just simply makes no sense because they're not paying into the system. | ||
| I suppose maybe you could make some argument, if at the very minimum, They were paying taxes into the system, and then they wanted some of that tax money back, or something like that, although that sounds kind of crazy too, but the other part makes no sense. | ||
| Is there anything going on related to that right now in the legal system, related to getting tax-exempt status taken away from these things? | ||
| Because this is one of the things that I think, for atheists or non-believers, or even for some religious people, that view, you know, when they see the Mormon church putting money into fighting gay marriage, a political, The biggest thing with that right now is something called the Johnson Amendment. | ||
| And the Johnson Amendment is a very simple rule. | ||
| It was passed in the 50s. | ||
| And what it says is that churches cannot engage in partisan politics. | ||
| They cannot appear to endorse or oppose a specific political candidate. | ||
| It doesn't prevent them from talking about issues. | ||
| They can still talk about gay marriage. | ||
| They can still talk about abortion. | ||
| They can talk about civil rights if they wanted to. | ||
| Nobody ever wants to. | ||
| So they're perfectly able to do that. | ||
| Right, so they can subtly do it. | ||
| Well, they can talk about issues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| What they can't do is just endorse or come out against a political candidate. | ||
| Or, you know, maybe a specific bill. | ||
| Something like that sometimes. | ||
| So it's partisan politicking that's prohibited. | ||
| Yeah, when I say subtle, I mean you can basically tell people what. | ||
| As soon as you said it, what popped into my head was when Rick Santorum was running, he always used to wear those sweater vests. | ||
| He appeared in church next to a pastor and the pastor was dressed exactly like him with a sweater vest and all that. | ||
| What an odd coincidence. | ||
| A wink wink, nudge nudge kind of thing. | ||
| So the way that That the amendment is structured is it's tied to the tax exemption. | ||
| So it says, if you want to be tax exempt, fine, you're able to. | ||
| But you can't do this. | ||
| And it applies to all 501c3s, all non-profits, and all churches as well. | ||
| And churches are saying, no, no, no, no. | ||
| That's a burden on our free speech. | ||
| And you have to let us endorse people. | ||
| Otherwise, you're violating our free speech. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| They're faced with a choice. | ||
| You can endorse people if you want. | ||
| You just don't get to be tax exempt. | ||
| And I think the thing that people don't realize, I mean the Johnson Amendment is so unsexy and so boring, like how do I get people interested in this? | ||
| But if it is repealed, it's going to be terrifying. | ||
| If you think Citizens United was a bad decision, this is ten times worse, a hundred times worse. | ||
| But again, because we don't know what kind of money is coming into churches and what kind of money is going out. | ||
| They will effectively become completely unregulated, completely dark CPACs. | ||
| They will be these black holes of financial information and power that people can just funnel money into, gobs, millions. | ||
| I don't think it's absurd to say billions of dollars will go into them, and then they can spend it on whatever they want. | ||
| I mean, so it's not about free speech. | ||
| When you hear about the Johnson Amendment and repealing it, it is not free speech. | ||
| It is about money and power, which is something that churches have been after for millennia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We could do this for so much more time, so you're definitely going to have to come back, but is there anything major that I missed here that would put a nice bow on all this, if we're just talking about the state of everything? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I think that... You're like, yes, there's a lot actually. | ||
| People, yeah, I could do this. | ||
| Has it really been an hour? | ||
| It's been an hour. | ||
| So people should join the Freedom From Religion Foundation, first of all. | ||
| I think that is, if you care about these issues and you care about the separation of state and church, we are a membership organization. | ||
| And I certainly want their membership dues, but more than that, I want their voice. | ||
| Well, your books are open, by the way. | ||
| And people can see every Form 990, it's online. | ||
| But I want people's voice to be joined with ours. | ||
| You know, when I write a letter to that school district on behalf of that mom and say, you know, this teacher needs to stop praying, it's great when I can say we have 1,200 members in Florida, or we have 5,000 or 10,000. | ||
| We have 27,000 members right now. | ||
| But the more people that join us, the stronger our voice becomes. | ||
| And again, I keep coming back to the short-sightedness of the religious rights strategy right now. | ||
| Secularism has worked for this country. | ||
| It is not a dirty word. | ||
| We invented the separation of state and church. | ||
| This is a quintessentially American thing. | ||
| It's enshrined in our Constitution. | ||
| Everybody should be supporting this. | ||
| It's your patriotic duty. | ||
| So come join FFRF. | ||
| Help us in this. | ||
| I thought you heathen atheists don't love country. | ||
| No, not how it works. | ||
| We've been accused of it often, yes. | ||
| Yeah, but not how it works. | ||
| Yeah, I only stand up and fight for the First Amendment every day, so, you know. | ||
| Did we get some good ideas out here? | ||
| Because life's too short to waste on bad ideas, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I hope so, yeah. | ||
| I had a lot of fun. | ||
| Well, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I'm glad we finally got to do this in person, and we're gonna do this again, because this stuff, it's just not going anywhere. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| We're gonna be here for a while. | ||
| All right, very good. |
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