The Central Arkansas Transit Authority (CATA) declined to allow the above advert on their buses, if you look at the Dawkins website – The Atheist Billboard That Was Banned in Central Arkansas – . Howls about freedom of speech will duly follow with this report by the Friendly Atheist blog.

However, as I say quoting on my blog Einstein do not condemn without investigating unless you are ignorant. The Transit Authority says that they approved the art work in March; the sticking point is that though the adverts would cost $5,000 approximately the advertising subsidiary of the CATA asked for $30,000 insurance for vandalism. CATA is public but the advertising arm is a profit venture. [Source]

The issue seems to be the price of free speech and whether this deposit insurance amounted to discrimination compared to what would be required of other groups wanting to advertise. The courts will no doubt decide as the United Coalition for reason (UCR) has filled a lawsuit. Their press release is here.

The lawsuit will generate more publicity than $5,000 ever could. CATA may have a point there about publicity but should advertising charge or make financial demands based on supposed public reaction of criminality? The other issue is would not existing insurance for the buses cover vandalism – and the above advert cannot be considered a potential incitement to criminality not least because many believers would agree you can be good without god.

Perhaps not saved without, or even able to exist without god, but that is another argument.

Let us be clear that it was the financial obligations being imposed on the atheist coalition for advertising which is the contention, and not an outright ban by the Transit Authority. The advert was not banned and we need to be clear on this because the argument is essentially whether price discrimination (assuming this is the first time they have made this demand) was used to hinder free speech or whether it was a legitimate requirement for the public company to make.

You would hope that before banning anyone from an Internet video account due to user comments, they would investigate first. Justin TV did not and when Ashley (better known on the web as healthyaddict) tried to find out why, a challenge even for a time lord to find out, it was to do with a video of some Dr Who memorabilia:

Please watch Dr Who if only that you do not get the wrong idea of British popular culture! It’s also a family fun show.

After ten years vengeance comes to the man behind 9/11.

Hopefully not so long for Qaddafi.

BBC News

Christopher Hitchens’ take

President Obama’s speech – the dig at Trump spot on.

There is an issue about assisted suicide. Being able to see what that entails for loved ones is one thing that needs to kick start a debate in the UK. Which makes assisted suicide illegal here but will allow travel to Switzerland as long as there is no public interest in prosecuting travelling companions. Such a journey, and moment of death, was televised last night.

How long the House of Commons will duck the issue, time will tell. Gordon Brown, when not saving the world, announced that biased pressure from others means he is against. I would suggest maybe increasing hospice care would be one consideration – and that going to a foreign land to die, in unfamilar terroritary is the pressure of suffering with death the only release.

Right now the “not in our back yard” approach is the symptom of a government that needs an election to help it on it’s way. They are not prepared to tackle these issues or have a debate. Leadership has to go beyond the one financial dimension of the Prime Minister.

Yet we need to see what the process is like, both in the travel and the reality of assisted suicide. I would welcome comments on whether the program succeeded in that.

The Pregnant Man

This is a program I am currently watching. The narrator is the same guy for “Make Me A Christian” on Channel 4. As my review of that show suggests I have not high hopes for this.

A woman (Tracy) that has hormone treatment to become more mascaline (legally a man named Thomas), and a double masectomy, decides to concieve when their female partner cannot.

Granted most couples cannot resort to the husband as a way of bearing children. However, I find it very difficult to get wound up about this. Given the situation it seems one way round it.

With easy money from the media, that insist it is the first man giving birth, to set the family up – good for them. As far as I can see they are not hurting anyone.

As to the environment the daughter will grow up in – well the fact that they want the child is actually a rather good indication. Two devoted loving parents I can settle for. The documentary will not answer that, as I doubt it would on any couple, as we see YouTube videos dennouncing Thomas and the couple hiding out from a German documentary crew.

I would be more impressed by the science if someone born a man became a woman and then pregnant.

At work all people could talk about was this program; not the issue of assisted suicide. One issue is more important to society than another.

Till then we wait for the first Sea Horse carrying Homo sapien, let alone an artifically inserted reproductive system. And for a debate by Parliament on how we can choose to die.

Finally OJ Simpson ends up behind bars for up to 15 years. The former Buffalo Bills player was, with others, attempting an armed robber to take property associated with his football career. From, in his own words, “friends”.

Judge Glass refused bail; no doubt the car chase so many years ago uppermost in his mind. The man, forced to pay compensation for a double homicide he was aquited of in court, has finally had justice served as he cried for mercy while not taking responsibility for his actions.

Small beer for the Goldman and Brown family that a person’s sporting past finally leads them to a crime they can be held to account.

The ghosts of the past though may rest a little easier, 13 years to the day he walked free from their murder.

Author Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and his family of slaves in the video below:

By Allan Little BBC News, Monticello, Virginia

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and third US President

Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello is a place of pilgrimage for Americans of every political stripe.

Thousands come every day.

They stand on the terrace and look down on the forested green plains of Virginia.

They gaze in awe at Jefferson’s little chess set, where he sat, two hundred years ago, with his friend and apostle James Madison.

 

Between them, these two men in effect dreamed a new nation into existence.

Jefferson designed Monticello himself.

JEFFERSON AND HIS SLAVES PICTURE GALLERY

It is true to the man – the elegant proportions, the white domed roof above pillared porticoes, the bricks so brown they are almost ebony – the colour of the Virginia soil from which they were hewn and baked.

Huge sash windows bring light flooding in. This is the aesthetic of the rational eighteenth century mind – the Enlightenment in architectural form.

 

But slave hands baked those bricks and stacked them, and throughout his life time more than two hundred slaves – Jefferson’s personal property – worked the fields of his estate.

Slavery and equality

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.

The words of the American Declaration of Independence are Jefferson’s own.

In the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson’s election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants Michael Lind, New America Foundation

All men, he goes on, “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

How did the author of that ringing declaration of universal human rights reconcile himself to the ownership of slaves?

It is one of the great contradictions of Jefferson’s life, of his age, and of the America that he and the founding generations conjured into being.

Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died in the tenth year of their marriage.

Present in the room at the moment of her death, with Jefferson himself, was Martha’s half sister, a young slave girl called Sally Hemings. She was the daughter of Martha’s own father and a slave called Elizabeth.

Slave Mistress

Years later, in Paris, Jefferson began a relationship with Sally. Together, they had six children.

Jefferson’s enemies accused him of misconduct and tried to use the scandal against him when he ran for president. It didn’t work. Jefferson said nothing, neither confirming nor denying it.

For two hundred years, Jefferson scholars for the most part dismissed what came to be known as the “Sally Question” as implausible.

The Jefferson that Americans had written into their national mythology – the Jefferson who is carved into Mount Rushmore – could not have had such a relationship.

It could not be allowed to stand.

New evidence

Recently, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed rescued Sally and the entire slave population of Monticello from the shadows and gave them flesh and blood, names, characters, personalities, and life stories.

 

DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that Jefferson fathered Sally’s children.

Her remarkable research challenges a certain conception of America, an idea of the Republic that has prevailed for two hundred years.

Why, I asked her, do so many Americans continue to resist the idea that Sally was so intimately involved in the life of the greatest of all the founding fathers?

“I think it points to contemporary racial attitudes,” she told me.

“They are very much like past racial attitudes. Jefferson is seen as the embodiment of the American spirit. It is absolutely about ownership of the story of the Republic, of the Republic itself.

“If you founded something, you own it. And the founding story is of a group of white men who come together with high ideals and found this new nation”.

Jeffersonian Democracy

Jefferson is so identified with the founding ideals of the Republic that he gave his name to great American experiment itself.

Republicans or Democrats, northerners or southerners, black, white Hispanic, recent immigrant or settled for generations, Americans are all children of “Jeffersonian democracy”.

It is a democracy in which the citizen is free to live a life without interference or instruction from government; a democracy of small, weak, unobtrusive government.

Jefferson’s great rival, his near contemporary Alexander Hamilton, dreamed a different America into being, an America that sat alongside Jefferson’s ideal in a relationship of dynamic tension.

Hamilton’s America needed a strong federal government, a standing army, a national currency and a central bank.

Jefferson thought all that smacked of the European – and specifically British – monarchism and imperialism he despised.

Jeffersonian America was conceived as the alternative to all that.

Jefferson’s United States is spoken in the plural – “the United States are…” he thought of, and referred to, Virginia as his “country”.

Hamiltonian America is emphatically singular.

Defender of states’ rights

Jefferson the Virginian, the Southerner, the defender of the rights of the slave holding states believed in an agrarian America of free and independent gentlemen farmers, living their lives unmolested by government.

He believed the likes of Hamilton, the New Yorker, and the Northern states in general had been lured away from that ideal by urbanisation, industry, commerce, banks, finance and the accumulation of money.

Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, believes the fault line that opened up between Jefferson and Hamilton two hundred years ago still operates in America’s two-party system:

“You can make the case that in the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson’s election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants”.

Look at America today – its powerful federal government, its enormous army, its commitments overseas, the still-mighty US dollar.

America may be a Hamiltonian country.

But its heart, both nostalgic and aspiring, still belongs to Thomas Jefferson.

Allan Little’s programme on Thomas Jefferson will be broadcast on BBC World Service radio on Sunday 26 October.

OTHER BLOGS:

Christopher Hitchens: “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America”

A new radio series, America, Empire of Liberty has started on Radio 4, past episodes you can listen to on the web – with an introductory debate on what events shaped America today, chaired by by Justin Webb. This is a regular Monday to Friday starting from 15th September lasting six weeks. Plenty of stuff going into detail, with the first week covering lost civilisations to English Planters.

The title is inspired by Jefferson:

“We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends.”

The Radio 4 programme is hosted by David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ’s College.  In three series it will charts the development of the United States, exploring three key themes: Empire, Liberty and Faith.

Which has come at the right time as I am halfway through reading Matt Frie’s (Webb’s fellow man from the BBC in the States) Only In America. Walking through the Washington Mall in DC made me  fall in love with the Capitol so reading about Frei’s experience living there and reporting has been enjoyable. His injection of humor and turn of phrase makes the book a page turner while covering such events as Katrina, the White House, and trying to get a driving license and living on Tilden Street.

The more well known John Sergeant (who survived the first cull in Strictly Come Dancing on TV, with the 64 former BBC political editor being described as a warm Uncle on the dance floor)  said of Frei’s work:

If you are searching for a book to describe the current mood in America, look no further… He moves from high politics to daily life with an engaging confidence

Is America a world guarantee of liberty or an evil empire? The debate programme covers in part religion giving a false moral rationale to justify actions (rather than a cause of) – such as Palin describing US troops being deployed in Iraq as “a task that is from God” being routed in the Puritan past. I agree with Biden’s (remember him?) comment that Bush did not ask god if he should go into Iraq – rather he prayed that it was the right thing to do having made the decision. Religion in American politics is a cover, rather like sheep’s clothing, that allows you to do things that would be considered questionable if not outright wrong.

However, if people really think they are instruments of god and that inexperience is therefore not a problem, may want to give us pause. That a well formed world view is seeing Russia from your bedroom window, rather than having a battered passport, give us a concern that they should get out more. Like a fire bell in the night the question of how Palin is considered Presidential material alarms, as the bell weather states warm to McCain over his running mate.

All I know is that I audaciously hope John McCain has a long life well into his 80s. I wonder if we can get a mantra going on that?

OTHER BLOGS:

Christopher Hitchens: “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America”