Category: First Amendment

The U. S. moves toward theocracy: Congress aims to repeal the Johnson Amendment barring nonprofits (like churches) from endorsing candidates

July 7, 2017 • 1:00 pm

The Johnson Amendment, in effect since 1954, is in fact named after Lyndon Johnson, who introduced it as a congressman. It’s part of the U.S. Tax Code, and specifies behavior prohibited for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (the amendment itself is the part in bold below):

26 U.S. Tax Code §501 Section C

(3) Corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals, no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual, no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation (except as otherwise provided in subsection (h)), and which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.

These organizations, the most important of which are churches, are thus prohibited from siding with one candidate or party, or criticizing others. They are, however, allowed to engage in nonpartisan activities like voter-registration drives.

There are two reasons why this amendment is necessary in a secular country. First, churches are already subsidized by taxpayers with respect to property taxes, other taxes, and ministerial housing allowances, and if churches became partisan it would be partly at the taxpayers’ expense. Further, if you made a political donation to a church that endorsed a candidate or party, that donation would be tax-deductible (unlike other political contributions) and also by law would not be “disclosable” like other donations are. This would produce an invidious inconsistency in how political donations are made. Polls have shown that the public, most clergy, and nonprofit umbrella organizations favor this amendment and frown on churches being able to endorse candidates.

Trump has been against this amendment since he began running as a candidate; as Wikipedia notes:

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump called for the repeal of the amendment. On February 2, 2017, President Trump vowed at the National Prayer Breakfast to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment,  White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced to the press that the President “committed to get rid of the Johnson Amendment”, “allowing our representatives of faith to speak freely and without retribution”, and Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would allow all 501(c)(3) organizations to support political candidates, as long as any associated spending was minimal.

On May 4, 2017, Trump signed the “Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.” The executive order does not (nor can it) repeal the Johnson Amendment, nor does it allow preachers to endorse from the pulpit, but it does direct the Department of Treasury that “churches should not be found guilty of implied endorsements where secular organizations would not be.” Douglas Laycock, speaking to The Washington Post, indicated that he was not aware of any cases where such implied endorsements have caused problems in the past.

As the Washington Post reports, Congress is trying to do an end run around the tax code by gutting the government’s ability to investigate transgressions of this amendment:

Many pastors already ignore the so-called Johnson Amendment, and the IRS rarely investigates churches that violate a law that many clergy feel provides a chilling effect on their free speech. But some observers fear the language proposed in a new spending bill released this week would make it difficult for the IRS to investigate any claims of pulpit politicking or money flowing between houses of worship and political campaigns.

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump targeted the Johnson Amendment as a big part of his pitch to religious conservatives, but because the amendment is law, repealing it would take an act of Congress.

Instead of trying to repeal the amendment, legislators appear to be targeting it through a spending bill that says the IRS can’t use funds to investigate a church for breach of the Johnson Amendment without the sign-off of the IRS commissioner, who must report to Congress on the investigation.

Why is this happening? Because, of course, it’s Trump and the Republicans catering to their conservative Christian base—a base that wants churches to endorse conservative candidates (those who are, for instance, anti-gay and anti-abortion). The Post also points out that if churches were allowed to engage in political endorsements, politicians could pressure churches by various means to direct their endorsements in a particular direction.

I’ll follow this measure over time to see if it passes. If it does, it’s just another breach in the real wall the U.S. needs: the one between church and state. It may not get the attention of the Great Mexican Wall, or  of the dismantling of Obamacare, but it’s part of the metastasizing theocracy that is part of Trump’s plan—though he’s probably an atheist—to appeal to his supporters.

h/t: Heather Hastie

The saga of NASA’s grant to theologians continues, with NASA violating the Constitution and its employees apparently behaving illegally

March 30, 2017 • 1:44 pm

If this doesn’t get me another Discovery Institute “Censor of the Year” award, I don’t know what will, for, as far as I remember, I discovered this bit of information. But the Freedom from Religion Foundation should be the real recipient, as it’s done every bit of the legwork and heavy lifting. The issue involves an illegal and unethical entanglement of the US government with Christian theology.

I discovered (and can’t remember where) that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, along with the John Templeton Foundation, awarded a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) to study the social (read: theological) implications of extraterrestrial life. Of course we haven’t yet found any such life, but theologians need work to justify their existence, and what better way to keep them off the streets than to let them ponder the issue of what aliens would do if they encountered Jesus?

I reported what I found to the FFRF, adding on this site that I considered it unconstitutional for the US government to spend taxpayers’ money to fund an essentially Christian endeavor (the grant’s theologian recipients were nearly all Christians).

The FFRF then went to town, filing many requests under the Freedom of Information Act, with NASA stonewalling them all the way—refusing to give out information about how the grant was awarded or to divulge internal emails.  This raised suspicions that NASA had something to hide. It turns out (see below) that that seems to be the case.

More and more information eventually emerged. I reported on the continuing efforts on this site: you can get the background  here, here, here, and here

In June of last year, the FFRF asked NASA to withdraw its grant from the CTI, and renewed that request in August. No dice, of course.

Today the FFRF issued a press release about what it found, “FFRF protests large NASA grant used for religious purposes.” Looking through hundreds of pages of documents, FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel found two things. First, NASA Technical Officer Mary Voytek, the official managing the grant application, appear to have had a questionable and likely unethical relationship with CTI director William Storrer, with Voytek accepting trips and gifts from CTI while the grant was being considered—before it was even given!   Second, the grant, as all of us suspected, violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against government promoting a particular religion, in this case Christianity.

Here’s the summary emailed to me by Andrew Seidel, much of which is in the FFRF announcment. I quote his email with permission:

After combing through the NASA records we discovered two things that are laid out in the two attached letters.
First, the grant was definitely unconstitutional. They hired eleven theologians with the money and one actual scientist. That wouldn’t be problematic if they were doing secular work, but they weren’t. The work proposed for the grant included:

·      formulating a “Christian response” to scientific studies on morality,
·      developing a new model of biblical interpretation,
·      relating themes from First Corinthians, a book in the Christian bible, to astrobiology,
·      the author of Christian Ethics applying those ethics to astrobiology,
·      reconciling a potential astrobiology discovery with Christian theology,
·      looking at how astrobiology would affect the Christian doctrine of redemption,
·      examining Christian ethics and Christian doctrines of human obligation,
·      looking at societal implications of astrobiology with “theological ethics,”
·      and writing a monograph on Christian forgiveness.

In short, NASA was paying for Christian apologetics.
Second, Mary Voytek [the NASA official in charge of awarding the grant] has a questionable and likely unethical relationship with William Storrar, the head of CTI. It looks like she was accepting gifts from Storrar and CTI when she was considering and managing their grant request and grant. If so, that violates federal law.
Also, we are doing another FOIA request going back to 2014 to determine the extent of the Voytek-Storrar relationship.

. . . We’re sending two letters. One that renews the state-church issues, which Voytek “investigated” and responded to previously. We’re asking for another investigation done by a competent, uninterested party. The second is to a few people in various offices that oversee ethics issues. They’ll have to investigate the issue once they get the letter.

You can read both of  those letters as links in the FFRF press release, which adds these details:

“We are informing NASA that it cannot constitutionally fund theology,” Seidel writes to NASA Astrobiology Institute Director Penelope Boston 
in his recent letter. “The Supreme Court has explicitly held that refusing to fund scholarships for theology is not religious discrimination under the First Amendment.”

Then there is the questionable relationship between Voytek and Storrar. While administering the first grant but prior to approving the supplemental grant to the Center, Voytek participated in a panel at a 2015 Center of Theological Inquiry conference in the United Kingdom. Emails reveal that the Center arranged for Voytek’s travel to and from this event. In another email sent during the same period, Voytek talks about a 2014 invitation for a trip to Florida to meet the Center’s board members and thanks Storrar for his “thoughtful gifts.” The records do not reveal the nature of these “thoughtful gifts.”

Employees of the executive branch of the United States of America “may not . . . accept a gift from a prohibited source,” according to federal law. A prohibited source includes any person who:

  • “does business or seeks to business with the employee’s agency.”

  • “is seeking official action by the employee’s agency,” or

  • “has interests that may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance 
of the employee’s official duties.”

The Center of Theological Inquiry is or was a prohibited source under each of these definitions. None of these gifts or the travel was disclosed, as required by law.

FFRF requests an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between Mary Voytek and William Storrar and a complete review of the grants awarded to the Center, including a determination as to whether the awards violated the Constitution by providing funds to a religious institution for research with a religious purpose and effect.

Remember, this is the pre-Trump NASA; and what it did, according to the FFRF and my own review of the documents, was to simply funnel taxpayer money into a dumb religious project, violating the Constitution. Voytek’s behavior, apparently schmoozing with the grant requestor and taking gifts from them before the grant was awarded, and then failing to report these gifts and trips to the government, seems to be blatantly illegal. She should resign.

Well, it’s a new administration now, and we’ll see what happens, but NASA should be ashamed of itself. Their money should be used for space exploration and the like, not theology! What an embarrassment!

BBC discusses historic court case on church-state separation

November 30, 2016 • 10:00 am

In 1956, a 16 year old Pennsylvania high school student named Ellery Schempp finally had enough of his school’s practice—shared by schools in other states (see below)—of reading ten verses from the Bible each morning, followed by a mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Schempp, who became a physicist as well as a mountaineer (he was part of the first expedition to climb Nanga Parbat), knew that this enforced religious exercise violated the First Amendment, as it was slanted towards a particular religion: Christianity. Even though Schempp was nominally religious (well, a Unitarian Universalist, a hairsbreadth from atheism), he decided to act.  He brought a Qur’an to class and refused to participate in the recitations. He was a brave young man.

Later Schempp, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, brought suit against the school district in a landmark case that wound up seven years later in the Supreme Court: Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). He and the ACLU won.

The BBC has just interviewed Schempp as part of a 15-minute Radio 4 documentary  about the case that you can hear by clicking on the screenshot below. (The BBC program is available in the US and should be elsewhere). It was one of the first cases to challenge the pervasive religiosity of the 1950s in America. And the show is well worth hearing.

screen-shot-2016-11-30-at-7-50-17-am

Here’s Wikpedia‘s summary of the court case:

Pennsylvania law, like that of four other states, included a statute compelling school districts to perform Bible readings in the mornings before class. Twenty-five states had laws allowing “optional” Bible reading, with the remainder having no laws supporting or rejecting Bible reading. In eleven of those states with laws supportive of Bible reading or state-sponsored prayer, the state courts had declared them unconstitutional.

The district court ruled in Schempp’s favor, and struck down the Pennsylvania statute. The school district appealed the ruling, and while that appeal was pending, the Pennsylvania legislature amended the statute to allow children to be excused from the exercises upon the written request of their parents. This change did not satisfy Schempp, however, and he continued his action against the school district, charging that the amendment of the law did not change its nature as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Because of the change in the law, the Supreme Court had responded to the school district’s appeal by vacating the first ruling and remanding the case to the district court. The district court again found for Schempp. The school district appealed to the Supreme Court again, and, on appeal, the case was consolidated with a similar Maryland case launched by Madalyn Murray.

The district court ruling in the second trial, in striking down the practices and the statute requiring them, made specific findings of fact that the children’s attendance at Abington Senior High School was compulsory and that the practice of reading 10 verses from the Bible was also compelled by law. It also found that:

“The reading of the verses, even without comment, possesses a devotional and religious character and constitutes in effect a religious observance. The devotional and religious nature of the morning exercises is made all the more apparent by the fact that the Bible reading is followed immediately by a recital in unison by the pupils of the Lord’s Prayer. The fact that some pupils, or theoretically all pupils, might be excused from attendance at the exercises does not mitigate the obligatory nature of the ceremony for … Section 1516 … unequivocally requires the exercises to be held every school day in every school in the Commonwealth. The exercises are held in the school buildings and perforce are conducted by and under the authority of the local school authorities and during school sessions. Since the statute requires the reading of the ‘Holy Bible,’ a Christian document, the practice … prefers the Christian religion. The record demonstrates that it was the intention of … the Commonwealth … to introduce a religious ceremony into the public schools of the Commonwealth. (201 F. Supp., at 819; quoted in 374 U.S. 203 (1963))”

What’s up with the NASA grant to study theology?

August 17, 2016 • 1:30 pm

This post is to bring you up to date on the the battle over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) giving over $1 million dollars to a theological organization to study the implications of extraterrestrial life for theology. The Freedom from Religion Foundation is trying to get NASA to rescind the grant on First Amendment grounds, but NASA is fighting back, avoiding disclosing what the grant actually said. I’ve posted three times about this.

First, NASA gave a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center for Theological Inquiry, an organization at Princeton that emphasizes Christian theology. The CTI’s director crowed about it, but revealed a seemingly illegal entanglement of religion with government (NASA is a government organization):

Announcing the NASA grant, CTI’s director William Storrar said, “The aim of this inquiry is to foster theology’s dialogue with astrobiology on its societal implications, enriched by the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. We are grateful to the NASA Astrobiology Program for making this pioneering conversation possible.”

I brought this to the FFRF’s attention, and they wrote to NASA, also filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all materials related to the grant. (See the FFRF’s letter at the link.)

Then NASA largely stonewalled, refusing to provide much information unless the FFRF specified authors, dates, and so on—things that the FFRF couldn’t possibly know. It was at this point that I began to suspect that NASA had something to hide.

Now I suspect that even more. Here are the latest developments:

  • NASA did cough up some information: the notice of the grant award and the contract between NASA and the CTI about the grant. The grant itself was not provided, nor were any emails about it. They also provided an uninformative evaluation of the grant, only two pages long and given it an “E” for excellent.
  • NASA also provided a five-page discussion of how the proposal was evaluated, emphasizing its social aspects and downplaying its religious aspects. (All these documents are publicly available and I can send them, but please don’t ask unless you intend to do something with them.)
  • NASA provided CTI’s ongoing “progress report” of the grant’s accomplishments, which, to me at least, are not impressive. (How could they be? It’s theology, Jake!) The “fellows” arrived at CTI and had some seminars, and now are supposed to disseminate their results. Here’s an excerpt of what has been done so far (my emphasis)

The writing projects undertaken by the CTI fellows this year are book-length projects that will be completed in the coming year or two. Also Lucas Mix has published an article in the June 2016 edition of the journal Zygon; the article is titled “Life-Value Narratives and the Impact of Astrobiology on Christian Ethics.” Zygon, vol. 51, no. 2 (June 2016): 520- 535.

Many of the fellows are planning to incorporate their immersion in astrobiology into their teaching at their home institutions. For example, Ulrike Auga will run a seminar on astrobiology and visual culture at the Humboldt University, Berlin, summer 2016. Others have proposed panels on astrobiology and society at various scholarly conferences.

The results of this project have already been disseminated through the CTI Blog (blog.ctinquiry.org) and through CTI’s Fresh Thinking Podcast, which has featured conversations with Mary Voytek, Edwin Turner, Frank Rosenzweig, and Caleb Sharf, along with the CTI fellows. The podcast was created in October 2015 and since that time it has been listened to more than 1,300 times. 12 episodes have already been published and 4 more episodes will be released this summer. A link to the CTI podcast with Frank Rozensweig and Robin Lovin was also posted on the NASA Astrobiology Program website. The Kluge Center, Library of Congress, webpage also referenced CTI’s Inquiry.

 I read the one tangible result: the Zygon article, which I’ll make available if you want it. The interesting thing about it is that although it’s said to be the fruit of this NASA/CTI collaboration, it neither mentions nor cites the grant or NASA for its support. And its explicit Christian nature can be seen in its abstract:

Abstract. “Pale Blue Dot” and “Anthropocene” are common tropes in astrobiology and often appear in ethical arguments. Both support a decentering of human life relative to biological life in terms of value. This article introduces a typology of life-value narratives: hierarchical narratives with human life above other life and holistic narratives with human life among other life. Astrobiology, through the two tropes, supports holistic narratives, but this should not be viewed as opposed to Christianity. Rather, Christian scriptures provide seeds of both hierarchical and holistic narratives, each of which may flourish in different environments. By attending to which aspects of human life are valued—or disvalued—relative to biological life, we can better understand how life-concepts do work in ethics, anthropology, and soteriology in secular as well as theological contexts.

I’ve never seen any paper that didn’t acknowledge the organization that provided financial support.

Finally, NASA simply refused to provide two important things: the internal and external email communications about the grant, and, most important, the CTI grant proposal (my emphasis). Here’s NASA’s reason for refusal:

A total of 25 pages are being released in full while Center of Theological Inquiry proposal, totaling 14 pages, is being withheld in full pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3), “. . . specifically exempted from disclosure by statute, (other than section 552b of this title), provided that such statute (A) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue, or (B) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types matters to be withheld.” Statute 10 U.S.C. § 2305(g), “Prohibition on the Release of Contractor Proposals – (1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), a proposal in the possession or control of an agency named in section 2303 of this title may not be made available to any person under section 552 of title 5. (2) Section (1) does not apply to any proposal that is set forth or incorporated by reference in a contract entered into between the Department and the contractor that submitted the proposal. (3) In this subsection, the term “proposal” means any proposal, including a technical, management, or cost proposal, submitted by a contractor in response to the requirements of a solicitation for a competitive proposal.”

Their excuse is that the CTI is in effect a “contractor”, and contractor proposals can by law be kept secret. For proposals to the Departments of Defense, and the four armed forces, that makes some sense as a matter of national security, and these departments are specified. So is NASA, and in some cases that’s justifiable too. But, as Andrew Seidel, the FFRF lawyer handling this case, wrote me, “The problem is that the government was trying to protect defense contractors from certain FOIA provisions, which makes a certain amount of sense given what they do, but lumped NASA in because of some of its sensitive work. CTI’s proposal clearly doesn’t fall within the ambit of that original purpose, it could not be less sensitive either technologically or militarily, but it got swept in anyway.”

Now NASA is arguing that the phrase “may not” means it lacks discretion in releasing the CTI proposal; that it’s prohibited by law from doing so.  The FFRF disagrees, and has appealed NASA’s refusal to release the grant in a letter to NASA that’s highlighted in this press release (the letter is too long to put here).

This is a big chunk of change, and I don’t want money earmarked for space research to be involved in furthering theology. Have a look at Lucas Mix’s paper if you want to see the enormous and ludicrous waste of time and effort involved in pondering the effects of astrobiology on Jesus. What can we do?

It’s not clear if NASA will release the theology grant, as they have some legal standing to withhold it.

But even if NASA won’t release that grant proposal, there’s no reason why the Center for Theological Inquiry can’t. In fact, if they want to be transparent about things, and think they’re doing a public service, they SHOULD release it. I for one will be writing the CTI asking them to release the grant, and perhaps some public pressure will help with this.  If you want the Center for Theological Inquiry to make its grant from NASA public, you can write to Dr. William Storrar, head of the Center for Theological Inquiry. You can send it to him via the address cti@ctinquiry.org

Shenanigans in Illinois: 1. Unique panel set up to give Muslims a voice in state government

August 4, 2016 • 8:30 am

Unless I don’t know the U.S. Constitution, what my own state of Illinois is poised to do is a palpable violation of the First Amendment, designed to avoid, among other things, excessive government entanglement with religion.

According to both The Humanist and The Chicago Tribune, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is poised to sign a bill, passed by both state legislatures, to create an “Illinois Muslim-American Advisory Council”. Although under Rauner’s predecessor there was such a council, as well as other minority advisory councils, they were all dissolved. And although it’s not clear whether any of these earlier councils—whose existence I didn’t know of—were created by state law, this one will be.

While the motives for creating such a council may be admirable (Muslim leaders say it will provide a corrective for anti-Muslim bigotry), it surely entangles state government with religion in a formal way. The Tribune gives details:

The 21-member council, whose volunteer members would be appointed by the governor as well as leaders in the House and Senate, would advise the governor and General Assembly on issues affecting Muslim Americans and immigrants, including relations between Illinois and Muslim-majority countries. Through monthly meetings and two public hearings per year, members also would serve as liaisons between state agencies and communities across Illinois.

The act specifies that members would serve two-year terms and should bring expertise in a variety of areas including higher education, business, international trade, law, immigration and health care. Staff from certain state agencies would serve as ex-officio members.

You can see the bill, SB 0574, here. The relevant bit:

Screen Shot 2016-08-04 at 5.12.16 AM

There is, of course, no Jewish advisory council (although, on a per capita basis, Jews are subject to twice as many hate crimes as are Muslims), nor is there an atheist advisory council (although atheists are neck-and-neck with Muslims as the most demonized “belief” group in the U.S.). In fact, nonbelievers far outnumber Muslims in Illinois! In fact, I’d oppose all such groups. Let private lobbying organizations do their best to influence government, as is their right, but not as official bodies set up by the government. That gives those groups an unfair advantage. There is no other such council in any state in the U.S., and Humanist writer Luis Granados is unaware of any state council for any  religion. If any exist, they should be abolished.

You might say, “Well, at least it’s not going to cost the taxpayer anything.” According to the Humanist, you’re wrong:

Members of the council will serve without pay. However, it will be far from free from a taxpayer standpoint. The bill itself provides that the council will receive staff support from the office of the governor, and you can bet that the meeting rooms, printed materials, and halal coffee and donuts will be paid for by Illinois taxpayers as well.

They add:

Alabama doesn’t have a Baptist Advisory Council. Rhode Island doesn’t have a Catholic Advisory Council. New York doesn’t have a Jewish Advisory Council. Utah doesn’t have a Mormon Advisory Council (though, on reflection, it doesn’t really need one). Unless someone can produce evidence otherwise, it looks like Illinois is about to set a horrible precedent for official religious entanglement with government.

Granados agrees with me that this bill violates the First Amendment, and notes as well that besides the “entanglement of state and church” provision, it violates the Constitution itself (the First Amendment is an “amendment” to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights:

But there’s another clause in the Constitution—Article VI, paragraph 3: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.”

Are they planning to appoint non-Muslims to this “office”? That would seem to be utterly contrary to the council’s raison d’etre. But if they don’t, there would seem to be a slam-dunk violation of Article VI. The bill itself says that the council must be “diverse with respect to race, ethnicity, age, gender, and geography”—but says nothing about being diverse with respect to religion, which would be silly.

I have, of course, already called this bill to the attention of those who can contest it. The odious Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been accused of having ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and whitewashes Islam at every turn (think of it as a body of Reza Aslans), is calling on its members to have this bill signed. Of course it would do that! But we cannot let any religion become part of our government. Let all religionists lobby as they are entitled to in a democracy, but we cannot give one religion precedence over another, or over nonbelief, in either national or state government.

h/t: Rodney J.

Update: On NASA, theology, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation

June 30, 2016 • 2:00 pm

On June 6 I reported that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gave a $1 million grant to the Center for Theological Inquiry to study the societal (read “theological”) implications of looking for extraterrestrial life. In other words, U.S. taxpayer money was going to finance people to figure out how Jesus would save aliens.  To me, this seemed like a violation of the First Amendment: an unconscionable entanglement of church and state.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) thought so too. Only three days after I reported this, and sent it to the FFRF, they sent a letter to NASA laying out the problematic legal issues and asking that NASA rescind the grant. They also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with NASA to get all the details about how the grant was submitted and approved, and who was involved.  Since then there have been three developments, which I report with permission.

First, NASA said they’d investigate the issue:

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 1.02.11 PM

Then NASA quickly responded to the FOIA request. You can do this by filling in an online form (here it is), and NASA’s response came only two days thereafter, saying they couldn’t process the FOIA request because it wasn’t specific enough. You can see in the indented bits what the FFRF’S lawyer, Andrew Seidel, asked for. NASA’s refusal is problematic to me and to the FFRF because it asks the FFRF to specify names and dates, things that nobody outside NASA could possibly know. What they should be sending is everything related to the grant.  In other words, they’re refusing to comply fully.

Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 1.01.19 PM
Seidel then clarified his request on June 15, asking for all records relating to the application and approval of the grant, including things like emails and phone notes. NASA responded (below) within a day. As you can see below, NASA agreed to send just the “grant file,” which doesn’t include all communications but presumably only the formal application, review, and approval. NASA says they’re “unable to conduct a wide-ranging search for all communications related to this grant.” That, of course, is completely bogus, for they can sweep their servers for emails and the like:
Screen Shot 2016-06-30 at 1.00.52 PM

The question is this: why is NASA being so obstructive in providing the materials that were legally requested? The people at FFRF are being charitable and simply making no assumptions, but I’m not part of this case, so I’ll surmise that NASA is hiding something embarrassing.

Maybe I’m wrong, but we shall see, for the FFRF is going to go after them again when it gets the case file. Their request will presumably include every email and every phone note and communication from every person named in the grant file.

Stay tuned.

 

The Freedom From Religion Foundation goes after NASA for giving a grant to study theology

June 9, 2016 • 11:00 am

On Monday I described how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a U.S. government agency, gave a grant of $1.1 million to the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) for studying the religious implications of finding extraterrestrial life. The other partner who contributed money for this initiative is, of course, the John Templeton Foundation.

The theology aspect is prominent; as the CTI’s announcement noted:

Announcing the NASA grant, CTI’s director William Storrar said, “The aim of this inquiry is to foster theology’s dialogue with astrobiology on its societal implications, enriched by the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. We are grateful to the NASA Astrobiology Program for making this pioneering conversation possible.”

I considered this not only an unconscionable and ludicrous waste of money, but also a potential violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from advancing religion. When the First Amendment alarm bell goes off, my actions are automatic: I call the matter to the attention of the estimable Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which can judge if there’s a real problem.

In this case there seems to be. I have heard now from Andrew Seidel, one of the FFRF’s constitutional lawyers, who saw a problem and wrote the following letter to the director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute and Mary Voytek, a senior scientist at that institute—the agency that gave 5% of their yearly budget to theologians. The letter he sent is below (click to enlarge), or I can send you the pdf if you email me. Feel free to disseminate it; it’s now a public document.

The letter is unusually strong, I think, emphasizing the inability of theology to know anything or resolve any questions, and states clearly the Constitutional law ruling that the government cannot become engaged in matters of theology: “the government cannot fund religion’s pursuit of theological doctrines.” It’s an interesting letter, calling for NASA to take the money back and use it for less wasteful projects. I will of course keep readers informed.

Note also that the FFRF has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out the details of how the grant was given.

I’m pleased to have contributed to the letter a bit about the relationship of science to religion, and perhaps that will be enough to earn me the Discovery Institute’s “Censor of the Year” award, something I dearly want to receive for the second time.

Anyway, congrats to the FFRF, the Official Website Secular Organization™, for being an attentive watchdog as religion tries to creep into our government. (You can join here for only $40 per year, which comes with a great monthly newpaper.) And shame on you, John Templeton Foundation, for wasting money in this way.

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