Dr Edward Presswood discusses whether it is wise for the NHS to pander to triskaidekaphobia and other irrational beliefs. The practice of supporting such beliefs in the NHS is well intentioned but Edward suggests that doing so undermines the foundations upon which medicine stands. Edward will present a witty lecture that will amaze you as to how far superstitions influence our public life.
The evening will start at the usual time of 6.30 p.m. in the Bloomsbury Room, and after Edward’s lecture there will be a short question and answer session before we retire to a local pub for further debate around 8.00 p.m.
A suggested donation of £2 will be requested on the night towards the cost of room hire.
Once again they will gather in their thousands on the Washington Mall.
Once again the time has come to stand up and be counted.
Once again good people will come together to proclaim loud and clear: enough of faith-based bigotry and prejudice, of ignorance and foolishness, of cruelty and hate.
Many religious people can and do support reason and science and want a politics based on evidence and rationality.
The world needs reason now more than ever.
This major event is being organised by a coalition of many US secular organisations. They will come from all over the States and from all over the world.
There are many people around the world and in the USA who are critical of the US government but the USA has been, since its independence, a beacon of hope for many.
The US Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights remain shining examples of the enlightenment even if it isn’t always respected or interpreted as well as it might be.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. This guarantee of freedom of expression and assembly is something which many people around the world can barely imagine. The USA has shown us examples of the best and the worst of human nature.
The Reason Rally is an event sponsored by many of the country’s largest and most influential secular organizations. It will be free to attend and will take place in Washington, D.C. on March 24th, 2012 from 10:00AM – 6:00PM at the National Mall. There will be music, comedy, speakers, and so much more. We hope you can join us! Please poke around this site for more information, stay tuned for frequent updates, and let us know if you have any questions! Speakers include:
Author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, and more; Founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
A highly regarded international leader in cosmology and astrophysics and author, most recently of the New York Times bestseller A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing
The United Nations will hold a panel this Wednesday, 7 March, to discuss discrimination and violence against LGBT people.
From the US to Japan, LGBT rights advocates urge the world to tune into the UN Human Rights Council’s panel discussion on LGBT discrimination on Wednesday
The first openly gay man to be elected in Japan, a Nigerian exile and human rights defender in London, a Chilean gay rights activist, an Australian local politician, an organiser of Athens Pride and Poland’s first gay elected official have all added their names to a letter congratulating the UN for holding a panel this Wednesday, 7 March, to discuss discrimination and violence against LGBT people.
The panel will be the first time the UN Human Rights Council has focused on human rights, gender identity and sexual orientation.
The letter, started by the San Francisco chapter of Gays Without Borders, an informal global network of grassroots LGBT rights activists, urges those supporting LGBT human rights to organise ‘viewing parties’ for the panel, which can be watched live on Wednesday, midday to 3pm central European time, here.
The panellists leading the discussion include Irina Karla Bacci, vice-president National Council for LGBT Persons in Brazil; Laurence Helfer, co-director, Center for International and Comparative Law at Duke University in the US; Hina Jilani, chair, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and Hans Ytterberg, chair of the Council of Europe Expert Committee on Discrimination on Grounds of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
Spokesperson for Gays Without Borders San Francisco, Michael Petrelis said they wanted to use ‘the UN debate to bring expanded visibility to the maiming and killing of LGBT persons, and calling for further UN action’.
LGBT representatives in the US, UK, Australia, Poland, Turkey, Chile, Italy, Greece, Kenya and Japan signed the letter, which concludes:
‘As the UN Human Rights Council prepares for the historic March 7 discussion, we vow to use this important development to urge the UN to do even more: to respond with policies that decrease violence perpetrated against persons based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.’
From All Continents,LGBTI Activists Promote March 7 UN Debate
Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, Executed Gay Iranians
Priscila Brandao, Murdered Transgender Brazilian
David Kato, Murdered Ugandan Gay
Zoliswa Nkonyana (right, in red cap), Murdered South African Lesbian
Allen Schindler, Murdered Gay American
Walter Trochez, Assassinated Gay Honduran
Ahmet Yildiz, Gay Turkish “Honor Killing” Victim
[These photographs illustrate just a handful of LGBTI people murdered around the world in recent years.]
Sign-on Letter Promoting UN’s March 7 LGBT Debate
Dear Friends and Allies,
We are a diverse coalition of global lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex activists coming together to promote an important United Nation Human Rights Council panel meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 7th.
In December 2011, the UN published its first report on human rights in the context of sexual orientation and gender identity, “Discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity”.
We applaud the UN for releasing this document, promising to follow up on the disturbing findings and conclusions, and calling on governments to honor their commitments under international treaties to protect the human rights of LGBTI persons.
This UN report is to be presented to the Human Rights Council on March 7 with a panel discussion to address the findings in a respectful and transparent manner, and an emphasis placed on appropriate implementation of protections for LGBTI persons everywhere. The panel represents the first time the Council offers focused attention on understanding human rights, gender identity and sexual orientation.
According to Gay Star News, the debate starts at 12pm and runs to 3pm central European time. That means it can be watched live beginning at 5am in Tegucigalpa, 6am in New York, 11am in London, 1 pm in Johannesburg and Istanbul, 8pm in Tokyo, and 10pm in Sydney. The debate will also be archived.
We urge all of our friends, neighbors, social networks, families, lawmakers, non-governmental organizations, mainstream press, LGBTI bloggers and activists to spread the word about the March 7 panel and to organize “viewing parties”.
As the UN Human Rights Council prepares for the historic March 7 discussion, we vow to use this important development to urge the UN to do even more: to respond with policies that decrease violence perpetrated against persons based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Signed,
Robert Biedron
Member of Parliament
Warsaw, POLAND
George Duvoisin
LGBTQI Activist and Educator
Istanbul, TURKEY
David Goncalves
President of Rainbow Labor WA
Perth, AUSTRALIA
Thomas K. Duane
New York State Senator
Manhattan, NY, USA
Clinton Fein
Chairman, First Amendment Project, Gays Without Borders
San Francisco, CA, USA
Veronika Cauley Fimbres
Transgender Advocate, License Vocational Nurse
San Francisco, CA, USA
Steed Gamero
Human Rights Photographic Documentarian
Milan, ITALY
Andrea Gilbert
Athens Pride
Athens, GREECE
Loraine Hutchins
Co-founder, BiNet USA, Educator and Writer
Washington, DC, USA
Ian Hunter MLC
Minister for Communities and Social Inclusion
Adelaide, AUSTRALIA
Taiga Ishikawa
Member of Toshima City Assembly
Toshima-Ward, Tokyo, JAPAN
Rolando Jimenez,
President Movilh, Movimiento de Integración y Liberación Homosexual
Santiago, CHILE
Jan Kauffman
Chairman, Rainbow Liberty Foundation
Copenhagen, DENMARK
Suzanne Kidman
Lesbian Senior and Community Activist
Brisbane, AUSTRALIA
James Kirchick
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Washington, DC, USA
Davis Mac-Iyalla
Nigerian Exile and Human Rights Defender
London, UK
Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association
To call Britain a ‘Christian country’ is only marginally more sensible than calling Italy a ‘Roman country’ and it was appropriate that Baroness Warsi made her most recent rallying cry against secularism amongst all the archaic pomp of the Vatican state. As a simple factual statement the ‘Christian country’ line is of course demonstrably false (the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey published at the end of last year put the proportion of Christians at 40% and falling) and as a historical claim it omits as much of our cultural past as it includes. But on this occasion it was not so much Christianity the Baroness had come to praise but secularism she had come to attack.
But it is not overweening secularism that is the UK’s problem -- it is continuing and entrenched privilege for Christianity and Christian churches, and the consequent efforts by other religious groups for privileges of their own.
It was especially surreal of the Baroness to accuse secularism of being ‘intolerant’ and ‘illiberal’. It is not secular schools in England that are allowed by law to discriminate against children on the basis of their parents’ religious beliefs: it’s the thousands of state-funded Christian schools and the handful of those run by other religions. It is not secular agencies that reserve employment opportunities for staff according to their beliefs, but the many Christian and other religious agencies who are increasingly having public services contracted to them by the state. It is not non-religious organisations which lobby for and have received special exemptions from laws -- like equality laws -- that should affect everyone equally. It’s not the British Humanist Association that has unelected representatives as of right in our national legislature -- it’s the 26 bishops of the Church of England who are there.
Baroness Warsi and the Pope.
These and many many other examples of religious privilege and continued official discrimination on grounds of religion or belief give the lie to Lady Warsi’s oft-repeated smears.
by would be good if we could dismiss her as just a minority of one but -- at least in her views on this issue -- she is far from isolated. Eric Pickles just last week jumped into the row about local councils not being able to include prayer on their formal agendas with the same anti-secularist gusto he has displayed on previous occasions. At the end of last year, David Cameron made his own extraordinary speech on Britain’s status as a Christian country, a speech which provoked more astonished bemusement than outrage, with its self-evidently ahistorical and bizarre statements, and its improbable calls on us all to be confident in our Christian nature.
When they are so palpably out of kilter with reality, why do present day politicians keep saying these things?
The most hopeful political reading is that they don’t really mean it and are just attempting to pacify the small but increasingly strident minority of Christian lobby groups who are seeking yet great influence in our public life and greater privilege for those with Christian beliefs. It would be a shame that politicians had bought into the crazy narrative of ‘christianophobia’ that these lobby groups promote, but at least we could rest assured that it would just be political rhetoric and no practical harm would come of it.
More alarming is if Warsi, Pickles and Cameron are serious in their message. A government that tried to make Christianity and Christian beliefs the foundation of British values or a social morality would be building on seriously unstable and unshared foundations. Secularism is essentially a political strategy that says, in the context of a diverse society, the state should not discriminate in favour of or against any person because of their religious or non-religious beliefs. For a government to set itself against that principle is concerning, and the expansion of state-funded religious schools, contracting out of public services to religious groups, and official guarantees of Christian privilege in public life give increasing plausibility to this second interpretation of the politicians’ words.
If the latter interpretation is the correct one, then politicians should remember that their approach is far from popular. In a 2006 IpsosMori poll, ‘religious groups and leaders’ actually topped the list of domestic groups that people said had too much influence on government. In the research released yesterday by the Richard Dawkins foundation, over 90% of self-described Christians said they did not think religion should have special place in public policy. A majority of the public surveyed -- including a majority of Christians -- repeatedly say they are against new religious schools. Policies that pursue religious exceptionalism in defiance of demographic reality and public opinion can only cause division and dissent.
I am the Campaigns Organiser of the Central London Humanist Group. I am here to convey to this gathering our group’s wholehearted support for the noble cause of freedom of expression.
Freedom of expression is a non-negotiable prerequisite for all other human rights.
While incitement to violence is unacceptable because it would be a danger to the safety and rights of others, all of us must make clear and unambiguous our commitment to your right to express yourself as you wish no matter what we may personally think of the quality of what it is you wish to say.
Accepting your right to say something with which we agree is not all that difficult. What is more challenging is to defend your right to say something of which we don’t approve.
This is important. For one thing with freedom of expression comes respect for you as an individual as someone with dignity and autonomy. And for another, true progress, which in the end will benefit us all, is almost always made by those who swim against the tide of current opinion.
Having things said which we find shocking, or boring, or upsetting or in poor taste is a small price to pay for freedom and progress.
Together we will express our determination to protect freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.
To achieve women’s equality and reproductive rights and equal rights for LGBT people.
To secure a Secular Europe – democratic, peaceful, open and just, immune to the clandestine influence of privileged religious (or other) organisations. One law for all, no religious exemptions from the law. And State neutrality in matters of religion and belief.
Save the date: Saturday 15th of September, here in Central London, starting from Storey’s Gate, close to Parliament Square. You will find all the details on the website of the Secular Europe Campaign: http://secular-europe-campaign.org
Please bring your support and bring your friends: it will be another important day to exercise our freedom to fight for the rights of all.
Thank you!
Marco Tranchino
Audio recording of all the speeches from the POD Delusion:
Filleted bodies proclaim
terror’s consanguinity
ignoring the artist’s doubt.
Suffer the censor’s curse
strike, cut, slash and burn.
Obeying ancient mystic rites
sacrifice our modern rights
blenching to dull consistency
the brightest bloom of brains.
British Humanist Association (BHA) Trustee and President of the European Humanist Federation (EHF) David Pollock is celebrating his 70th Birthday this week.
David has over fifty active years in the humanist movement, since he first became involved with the Oxford University Humanist Group in 1961. Since that time he has made an enormous contribution to Humanism both in Britain and internationally. He has been President of the EHF since 2006 and in those five years has been relentless in pursuing the humanist agenda of secularism, human rights and equality within European and international institutions: the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, the OSCE in Vienna, the EU institutions in Brussels. He has been a director of New Humanist magazine for over 30 years and a trustee of the BHA for 24 years, serving as its chair in the 1970s.
In more recent years he has chaired the BHA’s Parliamentary Working Group and has worked tirelessly on its public policy and campaigning agenda and in 2011 received the Distinguished Service to Humanism Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) at the World Humanist Congress in Oslo. He has contributed original thought to the movement as well as personal dynamism.
Speaking to The Times from Strasbourg, where he was meeting NGOs, ministers, and European humanists, he said: ‘I absolutely ignore birthdays; life is a continuum, and I don’t get any older.’
Nonetheless, the Central London Humanists join the British Humanist Association in wishing David a Happy Birthday.
Alain de Botton has been accused of many things – of being superficial, self-absorbed and most recently (by Terry Eagleton) “banal” – but no one would call him stupid. The PR campaign for his latest book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, is a case in point. To accompany the book’s publication he has launched a campaign to build a “£1 million atheist temple” in the City of London, dedicated to the wonders of the evolution. It sounds rather nice – a 46 metre narrowing tower (De Botton himself refers to it as “A Temple to Perspective”) with a roof open to the sky, with layers of fossil-studded rock representing the different eras of the earth’s life, ending at the ground with a wafer-thin strip of gold depicting the infinitesimally short span of human life on the planet.
De Botton, who has some previous motivating property developers to invest, claims he has already raised half the money, but, more importantly for the sale of his new book, he has raised the ire of Richard Dawkins and the interest of the media. According to today’s Guardian, Dawkins is appalled at the idea, and would prefer to see the money sunk into his (not entirely uncontroversial) idea of secular schooling. It was also dismissed by Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association, who said humanists can get their sense of awe and wonder from art, theatre and long walks in the country, thanks very much.
Some on the other side are not happy either: Rev Katharine Rumens, rector of St Giles’ Cripplegate church, in Barbican, near where the temple is likely to be located, suggested that it would lack the sense of community of a church and wouldn’t really speak to the human condition. However, media vicar George Pitcher welcomed the move as offering a more positive form of atheism than that represented by Dawkins.
All in all a perfect strategy. Reject God and piss of Dawkins? Check. Have a groovy picture and a slick website? Check. A million quid to chuck in the headline? Check. Stoking the embers of the debate over modern architecture, and available for comment at short notice? Check and check. Which is probably why every newspaper appears to have run with the story, no doubt the TV news shows will follow suit, and Hamish Hamilton will be licking their chops.
I interviewed De Botton at length last week for the next issue of new Humanist (out Feb 16). No spoilers, but I’ll say this: he’s a smart guy.
Peter Tatchell at his home in south London. Photograph: Richard Saker
It looks as if Robert Mugabe will die in his bed rather than in the prison cell where he so richly deserves to eke out his days. During his time as dictator of Zimbabwe, he has had just one intimation of the fear he has inspired in so many others.
On 30 October 1999, while Mugabe was visiting London, two men jumped in front of his car. A third stood behind, so the driver could not reverse away. A thin, neatly dressed Australian opened the passenger door. He held up his left hand, palm forward, to show that he was not carrying a gun. He laid his right hand on the tyrant’s shoulder and said: “Robert Mugabe, you are under arrest on charges of torture. I am now summoning the police.” Mugabe’s eyes popped, his jaw dropped and the blood drained from his face.
The police came, sure enough. But they showed their pinched priorities by arresting Peter Tatchell and his fellow gay activists. The moment is worth savouring, nevertheless. For a few seconds, Tatchell had succeeded in giving Mugabe a taste of how a just world would treat him.
Tatchell turns 60 this week. January 2012 also marks the 45th anniversary of his career as a human rights and gay rights activist. These labels have been so devalued I need to elaborate. Every respectable person claims to support human rights. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding’s Mr Darcy was no longer the wealthy landowner of Jane Austen’s imagination but a wealthy human rights lawyer.
Tatchell is no one’s idea of a good catch or reliable provider. He lives in some poverty and suffers for his beliefs. As for gay rights, when even the leader of the Conservative party finds it politic to legislate for gay marriage, homosexual liberation appears the most mainstream of causes. Yet Tatchell wants nothing to do with the British political class and the feeling is reciprocated. Rather than showing how yesterday’s rebels become today’s conformists, Tatchell’s life illustrates a rarer and nobler theme: how a commitment to freedom for some can meld seamlessly into a commitment to freedom for all.
If he were not an atheist, who receives death threats from Islamists, I would say that there is something of the saint about him.
He lives in the Elephant and Castle in south London, one of Britain’s great planning disasters. His tiny flat is on the first floor of a deck-access block, in a district riven by urban motorways and pockmarked with decaying council estates. Inside, you cannot move without stumbling over piles of books and papers. The only modern appliance is his desktop computer, on which he receives 900 to 1,000 emails a week. With typical courtesy, he replies to them all.
Tatchell reveals in an embarrassed voice that he manages on about £8,000 a year. It’s not the meagre income that worries him. He does not want us to think that he engages in anything so solipsistic as self-pity. “I’m not poor,” he shouts as he turns his life into an argument. “I can wake up every morning and run clean water from my taps. One billion people don’t have that. If the world were to cut defence spending by 10% – just 10% – everyone could have what we have.”
Apart from the clutter, the visitor cannot help but notice the oppressive security. Tatchell lives with CCTV cameras, a reinforced steel front door, fire extinguishers in case arsonists attack and a rope ladder to throw out of his bedroom window if he needs to make an escape. He has been beaten up dozens of times. At first, his enemies were white homophobes. They were egged on by the 1983 Bermondsey byelection, one of the filthiest campaigns of the 20th century, in which Tatchell stood as the Labour candidate. The Liberals and others made sure the voters knew he was a homosexual and were in no way abashed when Simon Hughes, their victorious candidate, turned out years later to be gay too. Then black thugs came for him because he campaigned against homophobic rappers. Then Islamists came for him because he loathed the theocratic superstitions of the religious right and had the courage to say so.
Unlike so many, when Tatchell says he believes in universal human rights he has the scars to prove he means it. When he was a teenager in Australia, he opposed the execution of a man many in authority believed was innocent; he came to Britain in 1971 to avoid the military conscripting him. He found a British left that regarded homosexuality as a “bourgeois deviation” and despite the abuse he received set about trying to change it.
He was the first man to stage a gay rights protest in the old communist bloc and was arrested by the Stasi for his impertinence. Ever since, from Castro’s Cuba to Putin’s Moscow, he’s been prepared to put his body on the line to protest against oppression.
In 1994, Tatchell outed gay bishops. I criticised him at the time for behaving like a tabloid editor. He is too polite to bring up my unduly harsh words but explains that he was not revealing private secrets for the hell of it, but exposing phonies who conformed to society’s prejudices by calling for gay teachers and youth workers to be sacked.
Who now denies that his shock tactics had an effect? That he taught powerful closet cases that if they oppressed homosexuals they could not expect homosexuals to keep quiet about their private lives?
Far from making him a single-issue campaigner, gay rights brought Tatchell a universal understanding of human suffering. Because he knew that the left could be as prejudiced as the right, he never fell into relativist excuse-making for socialist dictatorships. Because he opposed the supremacist attitudes of heterosexual men towards gays, he became a natural supporter of the emancipation of women. Because he saw how religion is everywhere used to justify the persecution of homosexuals, he became an unbending opponent of all God-inspired hatreds.
He warns anyone seeking political change that they must prepare for the long haul. “Savour your victories when they come,” he says, “and don’t be put off by defeat. Above all, never lose your idealism.”
Happy birthday, comrade. If the British are slightly more tolerant than we once were, it is in part because we had the good fortune to have you live among us.
This year, millions of people decided the time had come to claim their rights. They took to the streets and demanded change. Many found their voices using the internet and instant messaging to inform, inspire and mobilize supporters to seek their basic human rights. Social media helped activists organize peaceful protest movements in cities across the globe – from Tunis to Madrid, from Cairo to New York – at times in the face of violent repression.
Human rights belong equally to each of us and bind us together as a global community with the same ideals and values. As a global community we all share a day in common: Human Rights Day on 10 December, when we remember the creation 63 years ago of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
On Human Rights Day 2011, we pay tribute to all human rights defenders and ask you to get involved in the global human rights movement.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights hosted a global conversation on human rights through social media on Friday, 9 December at 9:30 a.m. New York time.
See a sampling of the questions we received on our Storify page.
Help us celebrate human rights!
This year everybody has an opportunity to support human rights by joining our celebration. Invite your family and friends to participate in our social media campaign. Become a human rights campaigner; learn more about your rights and spread the word www.celebratehumanrights.org
It has been a year like no other for human rights. Human rights activism has never been more topical or more vital. And through the transforming power of social media, ordinary people have become human rights activists.
