Atheists and Agnostics in the White House!

Representatives from the Center for Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism participated today in a conference at the White House. As the Center for Inquiry reports, the topics that were discussed with White House officials included preventing religiously motivated abuse of children and ending the preaching of evangelical Christianity in the military, including discrimination against non-Evangelicals.

My Take: It's about frakking time!

Analysis: For too long, secular humanists of all stripes have been denied a prominent place in the American public sphere. Even though some of the Founding Fathers were deists rather than Christians, Christians of various stripes have tried to assume a monopoly on American public discourse. Christians have portrayed arguments and lines of thinking that challenge or reject the commonly held Christian views as a threat to American society.

Luckily, under the Obama administration, there seems to be at least a willingness to listen to explicitly secular viewpoints. Although President Obama has continued some policies that secularists disapprove of, such as the funding of church organizations by the government, there is a greater openness to secularism on the whole. Progess comes in slow steps.

The Future of Republicanism

Andrew Sullivan has a post about a particularly comic young Republican named Ryan Sorba. Sorba's specialty is mixing psuedo-intellectual blather with threats of physical violence against those who disagree with him. He apparently made a big splash at CPAC. Read more here.