This weekend, I attended the fourth annual Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin. The Festival is a free conference of speakers and participants focused on secular issues, organized by the AHA student group at UW-Madison.
After the prerequisite registrations and introductions were over, the weekend kicked off with a powerful speech by James Croft on the impact of the racial killings and resultant protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Croft is an English-born Harvard alumnus and "ethical culture leader" in the Ethical Society of St. Louis, a secular humanist organization that can be thought of as a church-like social construct minus the religion...and located a short distance from the epicenter of activity, which he witnessed firsthand.
The protests were peaceful, well-organized, and well-managed in spite of their depiction in mainstream media. The police donned military garb, physically abused protesters, colluded with a Catholic church to thwart and break up a vigil, and doled out fraudulent charges such as "manner of walking in roadway" with routine aplomb. It's an uncomfortable truth that the cultural narrative deems people of color to be subhuman...and the dogma that we're in a "post-racist meritocracy" is as insidious as the dogma of religion. His takeaway suggestion of what freethinkers could do was simple and urgent: Drop everything else you're doing, listen, and get involved in righting the wrong. His advice couldn't have been more timely, and it isn't limited to Ferguson alone: The sad saga of Tony Robinson provides a cold reminder that race-motivated police brutality exists everywhere, including our own backyards.
Lindsey Doe was the second speaker of the evening, and provided a shift in mood from the hard-hitting to the intimate. Doe is a self-described "sexologist" and Montanan with a YouTube channel.
The bulk of her hour consisted of lessons on consent and female anatomy. She shared a tale about Havelock Ellis—a nineteenth-century figure who battled notions that masturbation was deadly and wet dreams were a symptom of people starting to die—and concluded with a question and answer session where topics like routine non-consensual circumcision bubbled to the surface. (She's against it, of course.)
Altogether, it was informative and entertaining. Her talk was the talk that ought to have been given at my high school...where for fear of offending the fucked-up Christian sensibilities of fundamentalist West Virginia, there was an "abstinence only" curriculum that consisted of absolutely nothing at all.
Vegan comedian and Citizen Radio cohost Jamie Kilstein is getting to be a frequent visitor. This year's appearance at Freethought Festival was his second in two years in a row.
This time around, he brought a guitar and provided instrumental backing for several of his anecdotal stories and routines. Among the fodder at hand was a take-off on his own deconversion (The sight of Niagara Falls filled him with the awe of God, then his wife guided him to the sign explaining how it was made over millions of years), and an extremely pertinent song that he dubbed "Fuck the NRA" where he tackled the perpetrators of school shootings at their core: "'You can kill a kid with a stick. Are you gonna ban sticks?' Now I don't trust you with a stick, either!" "Arm teachers? You don't trust them to unionize, and they can't afford bullets!"
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