Added the ninety-third Freethinker Podcast YouTube sixth Interview with Edward Tabash on the Equal Rights of Nonbelievers (2024) to the Freethinker Podcast page under Resources on the Secular Web.
Tune in for about an hour for a return interview with Los Angeles constitutional lawyer Edward Tabash by Freethinker Podcast host Edouard Tahmizian about the future of equal rights for nonbelievers and adjacent threats to the US Constitution. Ahead of general election, Tabash argues, we stand on the threshold of two possible futures. One is an expansion of the Enlightenment values of the equality of believers and nonbelievers before the law and of the passage or upholding of evidence-based laws and regulations unhindered by ideological hostility to modernity and commitment to theocracy. The other is an onslaught of oppressive laws passed by the US Congress, various state legislatures, and other local branches of government that overtly favor religious belief over nonbelief and ignore science to appease special interest groups. Back in 1987 (in Edwards v. Aguillard) a Louisiana law requiring that creationism be taught in the public schools alongside evolution was overturned by the US Supreme Court in a 7-2 vote. Now we have a 6-3 supermajority on the Court and a quarter of all federal judges sympathetic to the aims of the Religious Right. Anti-science decisions, like Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020) and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2021), have seen the Court strike down health regulations designed to limit the spread of COVID. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the Court ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. And contrary to the promise of limited government intervention into the personal lives of citizens, the Court has made a number of decisions undermining abortions rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. That year the Heritage Foundation also took up restructuring the executive branch to undermine the federal government’s authority over public education and allow more religious proselytization in the K-12 classroom. The Project 2025 plan to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal existing LGBTQ protections centering around marriage equality and workplace anti-discrimination laws is just the tip of the iceberg. Quiet efforts to replace the US Constitution by invoking Article 5, such that two-thirds of States can call for a Constitutional Convention, have continued unabated. To date 19 state legislatures have fully passed a resolution calling for such a convention, and in 7 other states at least one state house has passed it; if successful, such a convention could easily establish a new Constitution that declares the United States a Christian nation and revokes the civil rights of atheists, among other things. Tabash urges every American citizen to treat every presidential and US Senate election as a referendum on the Court: whether future justices to the Court will uphold the separation of church and state and advocate for science depends on who the US president is and who is in the Senate when a Court vacancy arises.