Hemant Mehta is the founder and editor of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, and podcast co-host. He is a former National Board Certified math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He has appeared on CNN and FOX News and served on the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief and the Secular Student Alliance. He has written multiple books, including I Sold My Soul on eBay and The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. He also edited the book Queer Disbelief.
There are some violations of church/state separation in public schools that are ambiguous or accidental. And then there are the instances when an administrator thinks he’s being paid to be a priest. In Texas, Prosper High School Principal Greg Wright has not only preached at a See You at the Pole event, he’s also single-handedly forming a Christian club. Neither is legal and both show a complete disregard for students to handle their own religious activities. Teachers at the school have also led religious clubs and at least one staffer has religious iconography hanging in her office. The Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter to the Prosper Independent School District listing Wright’s repeated constitutional violations: Read more
A couple of weeks ago at Ohio’s Wright State University, a traveling Christian preacher named John Williams was yelling at students about the love of Christ… which isn’t all that unusual. What made his visit notable was that Williams, who’s part of a group called the “Quad Gods,” held up a Qur’an, said it was evil, and then tore it up. Angry students chanting “God is love” tried to stop him from doing it. It didn’t work. After he ripped pages out of the holy book, one student tried physically attacking Williams, only to be stopped by campus police. Read more
Earlier this year, when Indiana was facing all sorts of backlash for its new law legalizing anti-gay discrimination, one of the companies making headlines was Memories Pizza in the city of Walkerton. The owners made clear they would not cater a gay wedding because it violated their Christian beliefs. Supporters raised nearly $850,000 in defense of their faith-based bigotry. I bring that up because the company just catered a gay wedding (without their knowledge). Robin Trevino and his husband had a wedding ceremony in Illinois in 2008, before their marriage was technically legal in the state. (They got an official license in Iowa the following year, though they didn’t get a chance to celebrate the occasion with friends and family.) Because a comedy troupe Robin works with was going to do a show focused on Indiana, he figured it might be a good time to renew his vows. And you can’t do that without some food… Read more
If you were going to write an article or make a YouTube video about the Kim Davis controversy, there are going to be several parts we’ve all heard before. You would probably mention her four husbands and the hypocrisy of denying people a marriage license because they’re in an unbiblical relationship. You would mention how she’s not really being persecuted for her faith. You would mention Mike Huckabee’s involvement in her case. It’s not a problem to mention all those things, even if everyone else has already said it before you. They’re relevant details. But when you say all that the same way as someone else, using the same phrases and even the same mannerisms, you’re not offering your own take on the story. You’re not creating content. You’re copying someone else and taking credit for their ideas. Could it be an innocent mistake? Perhaps. But when it happens more than once (and you’ve been called out on it before), we have a serious problem. That’s what disappointed me about this video featuring Scott Clifton (who is known on YouTube as “Theoretical Bullshit”) and Jaclyn Glenn. All you really need to know is that Clifton made his video four days before Glenn made hers: Read more
