As both a libertarian and an atheist, I rarely find myself in agreement with Pope Benedict XVI, who tends to be socially conservative and economically statist. Benedict also suffers by comparison with his predecessor John Paul II, who played a key role in the fall of Communism and did much to combat anti-Semitism and improve Catholic-Jewish relations. As John Allen shows, however, Benedict seems to have gotten at least one important issue right that John Paul did not. An excerpt:

There is, however, one intriguing area of contrast [between Benedict and John Paul]: Islam. To put it bluntly, Benedict is more of a hawk, pursuing a kind of interaction with Muslims one might call "tough love." ......

In his March 23 session with cardinals, much conversation turned on Islam, and there was general agreement with Benedict's policy of a more muscular challenge on what Catholics call "reciprocity." In essence, it means that if Muslim immigrants can claim the benefit of religious liberty in the West, then Christian minorities ought to get the same treatment in majority Muslim nations.

To take the most notorious example, if the Saudis can spend $65 million to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome, in the shadows of the Vatican, then Christians ought to be able to build churches in Saudi Arabia. Or, if that's not possible, Christians should at least be able to import Bibles, and the Capuchin priests who serve the Arabian peninsula ought to be able to set foot off the oil industry compounds or embassy grounds in Saudi Arabia without fear of harassment by the mutawa, the religious police. The bishop in charge of the Catholic church in that part of the world recently described the situation in Saudi Arabia as "reminiscent of the catacombs."

It's the kind of imbalance that has long stuck in the craw of many senior figures in the Catholic Church, but these complaints were largely suppressed in the John Paul years as part of the pope's Islamic Ostpolitik. John Paul, who met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his papacy, and who during a 2001 trip to Damascus became the first pope to enter a mosque, believed in reaching out to Islamic moderates and avoiding confrontational talk.

Benedict XVI clearly wants good relations with Islam, and chose to meet with a group of Muslim leaders during his August trip to Cologne, Germany. Yet he will not purse that relationship at the expense of what he considers to be the truth.

The rest of the Allen article contains a lot of interesting information about Benedict's policies and a critique of the conventional wisdom that he is a heavy-handed conservative. I don't know enough about the issues involved to know if Allen is right or not, but it's certainly an interesting take on the Pope.

UPDATE: I think that some commenters have been confused by the article's reference to "reciprocity," which they interpret as implying that the Pope believes that Muslims in Europe should only have freedom of religion contingent on the granting of similar rights to Christian minorities in the Muslim world. I highly doubt that this is Benedict's position. At least since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has consistently taken the view that adherents of all religions should have freedom of conscience (even if it has often failed to speak up actively against religious repression in the Muslim world). I am not aware that Benedict has done anything to change the Church's position on this, though I admit that I haven't followed his policies closely.

This is a post I sent to a con-law e-mail list about Eugene's analysis of the Miami school's decision to exclude a pro-Castro book from the school library. I thought it might be of interest to some VC readers as well:

It seems to me that running a public school necessarily involves choosing between different ideas on the merits, and excluding at least some of them. We cannot teach all conceivable viewpoints in, say, a public school history class. Therefore, schools will probably teach the Holocaust without much (if any) consideration of the views of Holocaust deniers. Similarly, they will teach science courses without including the views of the Flat Earth Society. To say that this is unconstitutional is to say that public schooling itself is unconstitutional.

The same goes for school libraries. They cannot stock copies of every book ever published. Therefore, they have to make choices based in part on the quality of the book's content and how it fits in with the school's curriculum. The perceived accuracy of the ideas in the book is going to be a part of any evaluation of quality. Holocaust denial books, pro-flat earth books, and others will inevitably get short shrift.

Although I agree with the Miami school's decision in this particular case, I do not like the general idea of giving government such power. Obviously, they will sometimes use it to indoctrinate children in ideas that are wrong and exclude ideas I think are right; and even the exclusion of mistaken ideas can also cause harm for Millean reasons. Worse, the indoctrination - if adopted as policy by a state or federal government - could spread to millions of children across a wide area, not just to those who attend any one school.

To my mind, the best solution would be to get government out of the business of supplying education (though it could still fund it through vouchers or tax credits). That would reduce, if not eliminate, the state's ability to engage in large-scale indoctrination of children. Individual private schools might still make bad decisions on these issues, but there would be no centralized authority capable of enforcing a dangerous orthodoxy throughout the whole of the nation or an entire state. But I do not think that this approach is required by the Constitution. So long as we have public schools, we must also give the state the power to determine which ideas will be represented in the curriculum and which will not.

UPDATE: This is not essential to the more general argument I am making in the post. But it may interest readers to know that my parents (like nearly all children in the Soviet Union) were members of the Soviet Pioneers, the youth organization group on which the Cuban Young Pioneers were explicity modeled (even the name is virtually identical). The main purpose of both organizations was to indoctrinate children in communist ideology and teach them to hate the regime's enemies (both domestic dissidents and foreign opponents, especially the US). Most if not all the children were well aware of this for the good reason that it was constantly drummed into them. An elementary school textbook that discusses the Pioneers without mentioning their main function is inexcusably misleading. It would be like a textbook that portrayed the Hitler Youth (which had many similarities to the Pioneers) as an organization focused on sports and camping without mentioning that its main purpose was indoctrinating German children in loyalty to the Nazis.

I still remember watching a documentary on the Hitler Youth with my father when I was 9 or 10, and him commenting on how the rituals and indoctrination methods portrayed in the film were so similar to those he experienced in the Pioneers.

Inspired by the interest generated by my post on "The Law of Star Trek," I thought I would devote a post to the intersection between science fiction and fantasy literature and one of my major academic research interests - federalism and decentralization. Despite the quip in the previous post, I think there is some value to exploring political themes in SF, although that value is easily overestimated. And even if there isn't any value it's still fun!

In sharp contrast to legal scholars and other academics, the majority of whom tend to favor relatively centralized government, major science fiction and fantasy writers tend to support decentralized political systems or even anarchy. I am not arguing that decentralization is the main theme of these works and in some cases it isn't even conscious. But it does seem to be there.

A few examples:

1. J.R.R. Tolkien

Sauron and Saruman's efforts to unify Middle Earth under centralized rule are portrayed negatively. When the "good guys" win at the end, King Elessar (Aragorn) establishes a highly decentralized state, with regions such as the Shire and Rohan enjoying near-total autonomy. This was actually a conscious theme of Tolkien's work, as he hated what he considered the excessive, homogenizing centralization of modern industrial society, and also despised the centralizing policies of Britain's post-WWII Labor government.

2. Ursula LeGuin

LeGuin is, of course, an anarchist, and many of her books explicitly promote anarchy and denounce government, particularly The Dispossessed.

3. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

The Harry Potter series portrays government so negatively that even the "most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait." The state is portrayed as both venal and incompetent throughout the series and virtually every positive achievement is the result of decentralized private initiative.

4. Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

A centralized galactic empire breaks down as a result of bureaucratic sclerosis (symbolized by the literally labyrinthine bureaucracy on the capital planet of Trantor). Only decentralization combined with the private initiative of the shadowy Foundation saves the day. The work is somewhat ambiguous because the Foundation's goal is to eventually establish a new and better empire. Nonetheless, the evils of centralization are powerful portrayed, while its benefits receive short shrift.

5. Marion Zimmer Bradley.

In The Mists of Avalon, Bradley is very hostile to the efforts of the Church and the central government to curb the autonomy of local communities (including Avalon itself) and impose a unified state and religion. Centralization is also viewed skeptically in her Darkover series.

6. Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein attacked centralization in many of his books. Not surprising, given that he was a libertarian.

7. Vernor Vinge.

Same as Heinlein above.

8. David Brin.

Defends decentralization in several of his novels.

9. Frank Herbert

In his famous Dune series, a horrendous war arises from the efforts of the galactic Emperor to extend his power over a what had been a relatively decentralized political system (Dune). Even more carnage arises from the hero's efforts to consolidate his own imperial authority after he overthrows the previous emperor (Dune Messiah). Eventually, only the destruction of the empire enables humanity to be saved and renewed (God Emperor of Dune).

10. Orson Scott Card.

This is a partial exception. Card's Ender series portrays sympatheticallyPeter the Hegemon's efforts to unify Earth under a single (and increasingly powerful) government. However, the effort succeeds only because dissenters are given the chance to establish colonies on other worlds that will be highly autonomous.

Two prominent examples from TV sci fi:

1. Star Trek.

The Federation is a very loose federal system with each planet enjoying a high degree of autonomy. This is portrayed favorably, while centralized empires such as the Romulans, the Dominion, and the Borg are viewed negatively.

2. Babylon 5.

There is a sympathetic portrayal of the efforts of Mars and other colonies to secede from Earth. Centralized empires (the Vorlons, the Shadows) are criticized for their efforts to destroy local autonomy. Even the efforts of "the good guys" to establish a UN-like Interstellar Alliance are portrayed as a failure that ends up making the situation worse.

Conclusion:

What is interesting about the strong support for decentralization in sci fi and fantasy works is that it cuts across ideological lines. It is not just libertarian (Heinlein, Vinge) and conservative (Tolkien) writers who favor it. So too do liberal (Rowling, Herbert, the creators of B5 and Star Trek), and radical ones (LeGuin, and also Samuel Delaney, whose work I probably should have included in the list). In several cases, particularly LeGuin, Tolkien and Vinge, the critique of centralized authority and advocacy of decentralization is a consciously intended theme.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive analysis and I'm sure I've missed some counterexamples as well as inevitably oversimplified the work of the writers I've covered. Nonetheless, this is an interesting trend, especially given the contrast between the sci fi and fantasy writers and the views of most other intellectuals, particularly those on the political left.

UPDATE: I thought it was reasonably clear in the original post that decentralization does NOT = libertarianism. Although most libertarians support political decentralization, so too do some nonlibertarians. Thus, I tried to point out that the support of LeGuin, Rowling, etc. for decentralization is interesting - in part - precisely because they are NOT libertarian or conservative. However, it seems that I was not as clear about this as I thought, so I have tried to restate the point here.

Legal Affairs has an interesting review of a new volume of articles by legal scholars on the role of law in Star Trek. Although I like science fiction (despite not being a "Trekkie"), I wonder if this is the most productive possible use of academic research effort. It certainly won't help law professors overcome the invidious stereotype that we are a bunch of nerds who have no life!

Finally, at the risk of being inundated with angry e-mails by Star Trek fans, I have to say that, in my view, the treatment of law and politics in Star Trek is not as interesting and sophisticated as that in other sci-fi series such as Babylon 5 and the new Battlestar Galactica. But for fear of really reinforcing the invidious stereotype noted above, I'm not going to write an essay justifying this conclusion!

Barrels of ink have already been spilled over the Supreme Court's narrow 5-4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, including some by yours truly. In "The Green Costs of Kelo: Economic Development Takings and Environmental Protection," environmental law professor Jonathan Adler and I have now put together the first article to systematically examine Kelo's implications for environmental policy. It is available here, and currently under review by journals.

We argue that the Supreme Court's decision to allow government to condemn property for transfer to other private parties in order to promote "economic development" may well harm the environment. In particular, private conservation land (an increasingly important tool for protecting environmental amenities and wildlife) is likely to be targeted for condemnation by developers and their allies in local government because conservation property contributes little to development and is usually not subject to property taxes. Allowing economic development condemnations also harms the environment in several indirect ways that we detail in the paper.

Some environmentalists fear that forbidding economic development takings would undermine the use of eminent domain for environmental purposes. Jonathan and I show that these fears are probably groundless. Not even the hint of such a trend has arisen in the nine states where economic development condemnations are banned by state constitutional law. And nearly all environmental takings can easily be justified under one of several legal rationales that would remain intact even if economic development takings are banned.

I won't go into the legal nitty-gritty here. But constitutional law, property, and environmental policy buffs are welcome to read about it in the paper and give us your thoughts.

Others are, of course welcome to comment as well. Though if you want to address the technical legal issues, I hope you will at least skim the paper first.

UPDATE: To avoid confusion, it is important to note that the paper discusses the consequences of the Kelo majority's decision to permit economic development takings as opposed to banning them. We argue that the latter approach is, overall, superior from an environmental point of view. Accordingly, it makes no difference to our thesis that the Supreme Court's pre-Kelo jurisprudence also did not ban economic development takings, a point that is acknowledged in the paper itself. It is still the case, or so we argue, that banning economic development takings, as several states have done, would be preferable from an environmental point of view (as well as for other reasons).

I'm very grateful to Eugene for clearing up my gender identity crisis.

And like some of the commenters, I certainly wish we had more female libertarians - for both ideological and, ahem, nonideological reasons:).

Within the legal academy, I think it's clear that Lochner is slowly losing its status as an anti-canonical case, in part for precisely the reasons David suggests. That is not to say that most law professors agree with it - they do not. But far fewer than before regard it as unquestionably wrong and as a symbol of judicial evil.

In addition to the excellent historical research by Siegan, David, and others, Lochner's reputation has also benefited from the return of free market economics to intellectual respectability over the last 30 years. In order for a decision to enter the anti-canon, it usually has to be regarded not only as unquestionably wrong from a legal point of view, but also as an endorsement of what is seen as an obviously evil policy result. That's why Plessy and Dred Scott are so widely reviled, while numerous other decisions with equally bad or worse legal reasoning have not suffered the same fate.

Obviously, most law professors (though a smaller percentage than before) still don't like the policy impact of Lochner. But since the rise of law and economics it's much tougher for them to claim that that impact was obviously negative. For example, even the con law textbook from which I teach, coauthored by four prominent liberal academics, seems to endorse the now conventional view that the maximum hours statute invalidated by Lochner was enacted for the purpose of driving small bakeries that employed poor immigrant bakers out of business in order to benefit their competitors - larger bakeries that primarily employed somewhat wealthier native-born workers. In other words, far from benefiting "the workers" at the expense of "the capitalists," this law was benefiting relatively wealthier capitalists and workers at the expense of poorer, less-established members of both classes. And that's not even to mention the impact of higher food prices on consumers, which also disproportionately harmed the poor; this part, I think, is not given sufficient attention even in the revisionist scholarship. None of this proves that the law was unconstitutional (many harmful laws are not). But it does throw a wrench into the standard class warfare morality tale that used to be the unchallenged conventional wisdom on Lochner.

That said, Lochner's reputation has changed much less (if at all) among lawyers outside the academy than within the ivy walls. That may begin to change as more attorneys educated within the last 10-15 years enter the top echelons of the profession.

I just wanted to second (or rather "third") the tributes to Bernard Siegan. Unfortunately, I never met Prof. Siegan, but I well remember the exciting experience of reading his book Economic Liberties and the Constitution as a college sophomore. It certainly opened my eyes to many aspects of constitutional history that I had never even heard of before (and, as I later learned, neither had mainstream legal scholars at the time the book was written and for some time thereafter).

Sadly, Prof. Siegan never got the full credit he deserved for his pioneering efforts. And he also suffered the indignity of being "Borked" by the Senate.

But if you read almost any recent article or book on constitutional economic liberties, Siegan's influence shines through, even if the authors themselves often fail to recognize it.

Although I am an atheist myself, I have never, until this series of posts, commented on atheist issues publicly. I didn't do so because I thought that, ultimately, hostility towards atheists was a relatively unimportant issue. After all, American atheists are, by and large, an affluent, successful group that has not in recent decades suffered much from systematic discrimination. Although I oppose government endorsement of religion and think many instances of it are unconstitutional, ultimately I don't believe that "In God We Trust" on coins and the like are major issues worth going to the barricades over.

I do not believe that atheists in this country are an "oppressed" group, and I would not support affirmative action for atheists or reparations for atheists. And I certainly don't want people to feel sorry for us and commiserate with our status as "victims." However, there are several ways in which widespread anti-atheist prejudice causes real harm.

I. Discrimination in Child Custody Cases.

In a recent article, co-blogger Eugene Volokh has documented numerous instances where atheist and agnostic parents lose out in child custody disputes because of judicial bias against their religious views. The cases Eugene cites are not situations where there is a "disparate impact" against atheists or cases where some atheist had a subjective feeling that the judge was biased against him. These are cases where the judges themselves state in published opinions that a principal reason for awarding custody to one parent is the atheism of the other. Obviously, for every case where a judge was willing state such a thing in public, it is likely that there are other cases where such considerations influenced judicial decisionmaking without being documented. Many of the cases cited in Eugene's paper are recent, and they are by no means confined to the Bible Belt.

II. Exclusion From Public Office.

As I noted in my previous post, open atheists are almost completely excluded from the highest elected and appointed positions, and there are extremely few even in low-level ones. To be sure, this does not mean that atheists are wholly without political influence. They can still use their votes and campaign contributions to try to influence theist politicians. Nevertheless, there is at least some benefit to having members of one's own group in positions of political power. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain why virtually all other groups - from evangelical Christians to homosexuals - consider it important to have at least some such representation. Moreover, symbolism matters too, even if its importance is often overstated. Most would agree that there is something wrong with a political system if no Jew or black or Catholic were ever able to attain high public office - even if Jewish, black, and Catholic voters were effectively represented by political leaders from other groups.

Nor should we completely discount the harm to those atheists would like to pursue careers in public service. By writing this series of posts, I have probably signed away whatever chance I might have had of becoming a federal judge. While this has never been an important objective for me, it certainly could be for other ambitious atheist lawyers.

III. Social Exclusion.

While the extent to which this is a problem varies greatly from place to place and is very difficult to measure, it probably is a significant issue in some areas. As some of the atheist commenters to my first post noted, atheists often have to hide their views in order to avoid opprobrium in situations where believers feel perfectly free to express theirs. For many, this is a minor problem that rarely occurs, but for others it can be a more serious one. I am willing to bet that there is a considerable number of "closet atheists" out there, though of course there are no firm statistics. While closeted atheists probably don't suffer as much as closeted gays do (because atheism is, for most, a less fundamental element of identity than sexual orientation), neither is the suffering completely trivial. Certainly, few theists would be willing to tolerate a situation where they had to keep their own religious beliefs secret.

Except for the first, none of the above problems can or should be remedied through government coercion. But that does not mean that we should just ignore them.

UPDATE: Many of the child custody cases cited in Eugene's article deal not with disputes between atheists and theists but disputes where one parent was more observant than the other and/or provided more religious training (often in the form of church attendance) to the child. See footnote 4 of Eugene's paper (linked above). In some ways, this actually makes things even worse for atheists, since a judge who favors a more-observant theist over a less-observant one is likely to disfavor atheists even more than less-observant theists. As Eugene observes (pp. 1-2), "presumably an outright atheist would be at even more of a disadvantage" in such a jurisdiction than the less observant of two theist parents. Theoretically, instruction in atheistic thought could also perhaps be considered "religious" teaching, but the decisions cited by Eugene make it clear that they have in mind theistic training and/or church attendance only. Nonetheless, I regret my failure to make this distinction in the original post, and I hope this update remedies the mistake.

In my previous post on hostility to atheism, I did not address the causes of anti-atheist prejudice. Here, I consider the common claim that the hostility is really the fault of atheists themselves.

I. Atheist "Attacks" on Religion.

Backlash against "atheist attacks on religion is perhaps the most common explanation for hostility to atheists offered by many social conservatives. They claim that public hostility to atheists is the product of such atheist actions against religion as lawsuits against religious displays on public property and the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The first major problem with this theory is that widespread hostility to atheism long predates these types of lawsuits. Indeed, surveys show that the public has actually gotten somewhat less hostile to atheists in recent years, even as these types of lawsuits have become more common (see,e.g., here).

A second shortcoming of the argument is that the lawsuits in question are mostly generated not by atheists but by organizations such as the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, both of which are predominantly run by liberal religious believers (the latter is actually headed by Barry Lynn, a Protestant minister). True, many conservative pundits portray these groups as "atheist" and no doubt much of the public believes them. However, the deliberately inaccurate portrayal of these organizations is itself driven by a political calculation to the effect that portraying an adversary as atheist is likely to arouse public hostility against it. Social conservatives would get far less traction by trumpeting a liberal Protestant or Jewish "War on Christmas" than they do by pinning it all on the atheists.

Much more fundamentally, however, there is an anti-atheist double standard built into the claim that these lawsuits are "attacks on religion" in the first place. Whatever their legal merits (in my view some are defensible, while others are not), the cases in question target not religion, but merely government endorsement thereof.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. How would religious believers react if local governments routinely displayed atheist parapharnelia on public property, if our coins had inscriptions proclaiming "In Atheism we Trust," and if every Congressional session began with a paean to atheism by a "secular humanist" leader? Surely, believers would not take this lying down. They would use every legal and political lever they could to put an end to it. And they would be right to do so! Atheists cannot be accused of "attacking" religion merely because some of us try to curtail governmental behavior that believers would never tolerate if the same thing was done to them. But if atheists are nonetheless hated by many for doing so, that is more a consequence of anti-atheist bias than a cause.

This is not to deny that there are some atheists who make unjustified or even bigoted criticisms of religion. However, such people are no more common in the atheist community than are religious leaders who make equally or more bigoted statements about atheism. And the latter often have considerably higher public profiles than the former. I highly doubt that very many religious believers have ever so much as seen an atheist spokesman on TV (I don't think I ever have myself!). By contrast, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others appear in the media all the time and what they have to say about atheists is far from complimentary.

II. Communism.

There is no doubt that Communist regimes were atheistic and that they committed horrendous crimes. However, it is difficult to show that reaction to communism accounts for any significant part of the hostility to atheism observed in the US today. As in the case of the ACLU lawsuits, hostility to atheists long predated the rise of communism and has outlasted its fall. Moreover, surveys show that hostility to atheists in the US actually declined somewhat during the years of the Cold War.

Finally, many religious regimes have also been severely oppressive, in some cases almost as much so as communist governments were. Some religious groups, such as the "liberation theologians" actually endorsed communism itself. Yet few claim that liberation theology, the Taliban, Iran, and the Inquisition prove that all religion is by nature oppressive, and those who do are rejected by the vast majority of Americans. Mainstream public opinion readily recognizes that these regimes do not represent religion in general but only a subset thereof. Similarly, communism is just one of many political ideologies compatible with denial of the existence of God. Indeed, atheism is not intrinsically connected to any particular views on moral and political issues other than, perhaps, the separation of church and state.

The double standard in judging oppressive religious regimes as compared to oppressive atheistic ones is - like that regarding atheist "attacks" on religion - is more likely to be a consequence of anti-atheist prejudice than a cause.

NOTE: Some cite Nazi Germany as an atheistic regime (and therefore a possible cause of hostility to atheists). But although Hitler did show contempt for Christianity, he also repeatedly reiterated his belief in God and claimed to be doing His work. The Nazis were anti-Christian and certainly anti-Semitic, but they were not atheists.

UPDATE: A slight variation on the argument that the Establishment Clause cases caused hostility to atheists is the claim that the anger is due to the fact that atheists are supposedly using judicial power to overrule the will of the majority. However, this claim ignores the fact that nearly all the major Establishment and Free Exercise Clause cases were brought not by atheist litigants but by liberal Protestants, Jews, or members of small Christian denominations such as the Amish and the Jehovah's Witnesses. This was true of the school prayer cases, most of the display cases, and others. Moreover, conservative Christians have been no slouches in the field of using religion clause litigation to overturn the policies of elected officials. For example, conservative Christian litigants brought the recent Good News Club (conservative Christian student seeking to overturn a ban on religious meetings on school property), and Locke v. Davey (Christian student studying to be a minister seeking to force the state to let him be eligible for a scholarship competition) Supreme Court cases. I happen to think that the conservative Christian litigants were right both times. But if believers can use judicial review to their advantage without attracting hostility, the same should go for atheists.

A new study by University of Minnesota sociologists Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerties and Douglas Hartmann confirms the longstanding research finding that public hostility towards atheists is considerably more widespread than that towards any other ethnic or religious minority group. Edgell, et al. conducted a survey of American public opinion on attitudes towards different groups and found that prejudice against atheists topped the scale. For example, almost 40% of respondents characterized atheists as a group that "does not at all agree with my vision of American society." Note that the question did not ask whether the respondent disagrees with atheists on some issues (which would be a perfectly understandable and noninvidious view), but asks if they are a group that does not at all share his views.

The figures for other groups on this question (with rounding to whole numbers):

Muslims: 26%

Homosexuals: 23

Conservative Christians: 14

Recent immigrants: 13

Jews: 8

Scholars have long recognized that a key indication of tolerance for a group is willingness to accept intermarriage with its members. Here too, intolerance for atheists leads the pack. Below are the percentages of respondents stating, with respect to particular groups, that "I would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group" (rounded to whole numbers):

Atheists: 48

Muslims: 34

African-Americans: 27

Asian-Americans: 19

Hispanic-Americans: 19

Jews: 12

Conservative Christians: 7

Obviously, some people simply oppose intermarriage with any religious group other than their own. However, this cannot explain the high opposition to intermarriage with atheists, as it is clear from the results that numerous non-Jewish and non-Muslim respondents are willing to accept intermarriage with Jews and in some cases with Muslims, but unwilling to do so in the case of atheists. A particularly interesting point is that hostility towards Muslims on both this question and the previous one lags well behind hostility to atheists - even despite 9/11.

The Minnesota results are consistent with other survey evidence going back for years. For example, atheists consistently score at the bottom when respondents are asked whether they would be willing support a "qualified" presidential candidate nominated by their party who was a member of a particular group (even homosexual candidates, the next most unpopular, are less widely rejected).

Other, more qualitative, indicators of prejudice also point to widespread hostility towards atheists, even as compared to other relatively unpopular groups. For example, despite considerable antagonism towards homosexuals in many quarters, there have been quite a few openly gay members of Congress, including even some conservative Republican ones such as Rep. Jim Kolbe and Rep. Steve Gunderson. By contrast, there has never been, to my knowledge, even one openly unbelieving congressman or senator, despite the fact that atheists and agnostics are roughly 3% of the population (about the same as the percentage of gays, and a bit larger than the percentage of Jews). Nor has there ever been an openly atheist president, vice-president, governor, Supreme Court Justice, or member of the Cabinet. While I certainly would not argue that justice requires proportional representation of atheists in these bodies, the absence of even one open atheist in high political office is still striking.

Similarly, organizations such as the Boy Scouts have taken considerable flak for their refusal to accept gays. But the Scouts have gotten far less criticism for their equally categorical rejection of atheists. As in the case of intermarriage, I have no principled objection to groups limited to people who share their particular religion (e.g. - an all-Catholic or all-Jewish group). The Scouts however, accept members of any and all religions - no matter how odious their beliefs on various issues may be - but reject all avowed atheists and agnostics. I am not arguing that the government should force the Boy Scouts and other similar groups to accept atheists. In my view, it shouldn't. However, that should not stop us from criticizing their bigotry.

A common argument for various forms of discrimination against atheists is the claim that atheism is a belief system, not an involuntary identity like race or homosexuality. It is indeed sometimes appropriate to show hostility towards people because of their reprehensible beliefs (e.g. - in the case of KKK members). But we generally reject such categorical hostility towards members of most religious groups such as Jews or Catholics. The same principle should apply to atheists - especially since atheism, unlike some religions, is actually compatible with a very wide range of views on moral and political issues. For example, there have been prominent socialist atheists (e.g. - Marx), prominent libertarian ones (e.g. - Ayn Rand), and even notable conservative atheists such as Whittaker Chambers. The only common belief that all atheists share is denial of the existence of God, and that should not be a sufficient reason to hate them or discriminate against them as a group.

To avoid misunderstanding, I am NOT suggesting that the position of atheists in the United States is worse than that of homosexuals or African-Americans. In fact, I believe the opposite is actually closer to the truth. However, the data do strongly suggest that hostility towards atheists is more widespread (even if perhaps less intensely felt) and considered more socially acceptable than racism and homophobia. Even if the survey results are biased by the unwillingness of some respondents to admit racist views, it is still noteworthy that fewer people seem to have such inhibitions about admitting hostility towards atheists.

NOTE: the link to the Minnesota data above is to a summary on an atheist website because this is the most thorough description I was able to find on the internet. However, the study itself was not conducted or funded by any atheist organization.

CORRECTION: After checking, it turns out that I was wrong to say that Whittaker Chambers was an atheist even after becoming a conservative. However, I stand by the broader point that atheism is compatible with a wide range of moral and political views, including conservatism. Thus, hostility towards atheism on the grounds of its alleged political and/or moral implications is unjustified.

As this article explains, the upcoming New Orleans mayoral election involves extensive efforts by candidates to woo the numerous residents of the city who have not returned since Hurrican Katrina. By some estimates (see above link), about half the population, including a disproportionate percentage of the city's poor African-American population, has not come back since the hurricane.

Lost in the debate over the election is the possibility that things might be better for both the evacuees themselves and our political system if many of them choose NOT to come back. Others have extensively detailed the extent to which the damage done by Katrina was exacerbated by the incompetence of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and other state and local officials (see, e.g., here and here).

As I have argued in my academic work (see, e.g., here and here, pp. 63-68), one of the best ways citizens have for holding state and local governments accountable is by "voting with their feet" and moving to jurisdictions with superior policies. Often, this is actually more effective than traditional ballot box voting, because the latter is more prone to collective action and "rational ignorance" issues. Through foot voting, states with incompetent or corrupt governments (and Lousiana has a long history of both) lose some of the taxpayers and businesses they need to fund programs that help get them reelected. In the case of Nagin and Blanco, they might end up losing many of the poor black voters on whom Louisiana Democrats depend for electoral support. If Nagin and Blanco are punished in this way, future state and local officials in Louisiana and elsewhere will have an incentive to do a better job in planning for the next natural disaster.

This point also implies that federal assistance to disaster relief should be channeled as much as possible to the evacuees and other victims themselves, as economist Steven Landsburg recommends, rather than to state and local governments. That way, state and local officials can only benefit from the relief funds if they adopt policies attractive enough to persuade evacuees to return and other residents to stay. They won't be rewarded for their earlier incompetence with grants unrelated to future performance as judged by the flood victims themselves. Instead, they will have to earn the money by persuading residents to spend it in their jurisdictions rather than elsewhere.

It is true, of course, that incompetence by the Bush Administration and FEMA also contributed to the disaster, and this post should not be interpreted to suggest otherwise. Federal government failure, unfortunately, is not easily punishable by foot voting. This, to my mind, is an important consideration in favor of decentralizing government power. In the meantime, however, we can at least hope that foot voting will help to punish the failures of Nagin and Blanco, and deter their would-be future imitators in other states.

UPDATE: Two standard criticisms of "voting with your feet" are 1) that it doesn't work because moving is costly and 2) that it doesn't work for the poor. The latter is empirically false: the poor are actually more likely to make interstate moves than other Americans, as data cited in my two articles cited above shows. Historically, even VERY poor and severely oppressed people, such as the many African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South who moved to northern states (also discussed in my work) have improved their position by leaving for relatively better jurisdictions. The cost point is true in a sense (moving IS costly), but people will still vote with their feet if the benefits of moving out of a poorly governed jurisdiction outweigh those costs (as, empirically, they often do). In the case of New Orleans, the cost issue may not even apply for many of the evacuees because they are already out of the city and many have little or no property left in New Orleans to return to.

Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor will soon go on trial for his many crimes. Amidst many negative political developments over the last few years, one clear improvement over the status quo is the increasing trend towards trying and punishing repressive dictators. Taylor will be third in six years, following Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and, of course, Saddam Hussein.

To be sure, the trials of Saddam and Slobo did not exactly go like clockwork. Milosevic's trial took almost six years and he died in prison before it could be completed. Saddam's trial often seems on the verge of turning into a circus. And we don't yet know whether the UN-supported special tribunal scheduled to try Taylor is going to be any better than the one that bungled Slobo's trial.

Even so, the fact that these people are behind bars and facing punishment is a change from the period between the Nuremberg Trials and 2000, when even the most vicious of dictators rarely had to suffer a fate worse than going into exile to live off the ill-gotten gains they stashed away in their Swiss bank accounts.

Theories of criminal justice hold that the twin purposes of punishment are retribution and deterrence. There is no category of criminals more in need of both than Taylor and his fellow dictators.

Over the last century, repressive dictatorships have been responsible for over 100 million deaths If we can deter even a small percentage of this kind of carnage in the future, it will be more than worth it.

UPDATE: A standard criticism of these trials is that they only target dictators who run afoul of US or Western strategic interests. This is a very hard argument to make in the case of Milosevic, where there were few if any Western strategic interests involved (unless preventing mass murder is itself circularly defined as a "strategic" interest). It is an even tougher argument in the case of Taylor, which involved even fewer Western interests than that of Milosevic (and in any case the Western role in Taylor's overthrow and arrest was fairly modest). The Saddam case is different, of course. It clearly did involve major US interests not directly related to Saddam's record of repression. Even here, however, had Saddam been a relatively benign ruler, he would have been less likely to take many of the actions that led him to run afoul of the US in the first place (invading Kuwait, seeking to acquire WMD, supporting terrorists, etc.).