So the news is engaged in a full court press today, bound and determined to prove that their horserace really is a race and they really aren’t blowing smoke up our collective asses. I’m doing my best to avoid this mess today, not listening to the news in a complete reversal of my normal patterns for daily life.
It is Monday though and Monday is Freethought Radio day (as well as Point of Inquiry day lately) so I have been listening to my regular podcasts (and BBC news) and Freethought Radio had an interesting interview with Justin Scott who has been doing some brave work in Iowa, going around asking questions of presidential candidates at various meetings attempting to call attention to the slights being offered to minority groups in the US when it comes to the subject of faith.
I wanted to highlight the bigotry by omission of candidates for government office; candidates who go around touting their religion prominently. This importance placed on their beliefs in the supernatural leaves me wondering openly if they understand how those who believe differently feel when they stress how important their religion is to them. How important they think their religion is to good governance in the US.
The problem for me is, neither Justin Scott nor FFRF seem to be interested in producing content to be consumed directly on the internet and only on the internet. FFRF’s near cluelessness when it comes to web programming is what lead me to attempt to catalog all their episodes several years ago, a project that I finally had to give up when I realized that I wasn’t willing to volunteer my effort on the project indefinitely.
First off, the videos of his interviews are not where he said they were; they are on his personal youtube channel which I finally located here. This is a playlist of all the interviews to date;
FFRF’s link resolves on Facebook to look like this,
The youtube link conveys about the same level of information. Therefore it falls to me to write something that I can share even though, as the title of the piece says, I really couldn’t care less about Iowa. Or New Hampshire, for that matter.
Why? Because they aren’t representative of America. They just agreed that they would go first, and they are determined as small Midwestern states to make themselves out to be more important than they are by being first to caucus and first to primary in the US, because they are utterly forgettable by almost any other measure unless you like snow.
So the presidential candidates run around in these little isolated areas of the US for months at a time, far longer than the voting block that they represent merits if you were looking at national influence, percentage of voting Americans. The idea that these two races mean anything would be laughable if only the media could be convinced to laugh. Instead they insist on portraying the primaries as horse races and build up the competition as if what we are witnessing was a sporting event and not the future leaders of our country vying for attention.
Which is why the subject of Justin Scott’s videos interests me, even though his location in Iowa galls me ever so slightly. Iowa is one of those regions where religion figures prominently; and when I say religion, I mean evangelical christians, the omnipotent WASP’s who have run the country since its beginning. The people who are most threatened by the presidency of Barack Obama and the likely potential that he will be succeeded by Hillary Clinton, if we are lucky. If we aren’t lucky we’ll have any one of the current GOP candidates currently doing their best to out-conservative each other.
Being brave enough to go out in public and film, to identify oneself as an atheist and ask how the candidates plan on protecting your right to not believe. That takes real courage. I wanted to let Justin know that I appreciated his work, even though I have to spend several quality minutes (hours actually) writing a post highlighting the important work that he is doing. I wish that more members of the media had the balls to ask the really hard questions.
