NEW BOOK ON
BLACK ATHEISTS
AND THE VALUES WARS
Press Release For Immediate Release
Infidel Books Announces:
AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE THE POOREST AND THE MOST RELIGIOUS GROUP IN THE NATION
87% OF BLACK WOMEN ARE REGULAR CHURCHGOERS
THE BIBLE IS THE MOST READ BOOK IN BLACK AMERICA
IS THE BLACK CHURCH MORALLY CORRUPT?
DOES ORGANIZED RELIGION BETRAY BLACK WOMEN?
DOES BLACK AMERICA'S BIBLE OBSESSION HURT BLACK ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT?
MORAL COMBAT: BLACK ATHEISTS, GENDER POLITICS, AND THE VALUES WARS
By Sikivu Hutchinson
The word atheism elicits shock, dread, anger, and revulsion among most African Americans. They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies.
Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examinesthe hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice.
In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. As the first African American woman to publish a book on atheism, she places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism.
RELIGION DISPATCHES INTERVIEW WITH SIKIVU HUTCHINSON
About the Author
Sikivu Hutchinson is a writer and senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women's studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, Free Inquiry and American Atheist Magazine. She is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.
NOW AVAILABLE AT CREATESPACE.COM
Sikivu Hutchinson is available for interviews and speaking engagements, contact: shutch2396@aol.com
SPRING BOOKSIGNINGS & APPEARANCES: MARCH 3, INTERFAITH VOICES; MARCH 20, CENTER FOR INQUIRY, LOS ANGELES & COSTA MESA; MARCH 23, USC, LIFESTYLE & DESIGN CENTER; APRIL 3, REVOLUTION BOOKS, L.A.; APRIL 16, IHS, NYC; APRIL 28, UNIV. OF S. ALABAMA; MAY 13, ESO WON BOOKS, L.A.;
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Planned Parenthood and the Rape of American Women
By Sikivu Hutchinson
Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.
Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?
It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.
In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s telegram...
MORE@ http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2011/02/planned-parenthood-and-rape-of-american.html
Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books).
Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.
Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?
It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.
In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s telegram...
MORE@ http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2011/02/planned-parenthood-and-rape-of-american.html
Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books).
Obama: An American Magician Extraordinaire!
If Obama didn't exist, would there be a Tea Party?
If we didn't have a President hell bent on spending money with a guarantee that the money spent would instantly or almost instantly, disappear because it would be devoured by the wealthy who already have more than they know what to do with and thus do nothing, or to a war/national security/spying effort that produces bullets which, when used, disappear, or tear gas or other armaments so dangerous that their intended use is unconscionable and counter productive, and a spy network that couldn't see a full blown Egyptian Revolution in progress even though it was inaugurated with the recent textile strike by thousands( wasn't it the Iron building fire that started the U.S. on Labor Unions?)
Obama gives Federal money, the people's money, to the banks without charging interest; the very crooks who know better than anyone how to make money disappear, how to "go bankrupt" along with corporations too big to fail and we, the workers watch that money disappear, no longer in circulation. Like magic, it disappears before our very eyes.
The next Obama magical feat will be to disappear the
targeted social security money( that is probably already eaten up by the ever-hungry, clandestinely,)
the middle class,
the workers.
We'll all become slaves of the State
the poor, that pathetic segment of the American population that is in need; always hungry enough to become whatever the Magician wants us to be.
With Obama at the helm,
(the American/corporate driven, owned manipulated Supreme King anointed by God, be He/She Christian, Muslin or Jewish supported, financed by those who make money while they sleep and reap restful anxiety free life styles marred only with the occasion ripple the slightly ahead of their time Tea Party engenders as they capitalizing on the alleged poverty of Government and when they insist on bringing to the fore their "creative" solutions-- the only contradiction being their mandate to keep Government out of everything except, of course, a woman's body)
WE Will Win!!!!!
Are you ready?
Have you hidden your Gold in your backyard, bought your own generator, created a secure cache of guns, ammunition? Have you bought into a religion of your choice and talked to your children to prepare them for better days here on Earth and in Heaven; mostly the latter? Have you?
And what about the bomb shelter your late relatives built? Is it up to date, ready for use?
Be assured. It can't be long now. Obama will get the Job done.
We are on the brink of the second. a Real American Revolution!
Only the young can stop us now.
Or can they?
Linda Zises
reporter at large
If we didn't have a President hell bent on spending money with a guarantee that the money spent would instantly or almost instantly, disappear because it would be devoured by the wealthy who already have more than they know what to do with and thus do nothing, or to a war/national security/spying effort that produces bullets which, when used, disappear, or tear gas or other armaments so dangerous that their intended use is unconscionable and counter productive, and a spy network that couldn't see a full blown Egyptian Revolution in progress even though it was inaugurated with the recent textile strike by thousands( wasn't it the Iron building fire that started the U.S. on Labor Unions?)
Obama gives Federal money, the people's money, to the banks without charging interest; the very crooks who know better than anyone how to make money disappear, how to "go bankrupt" along with corporations too big to fail and we, the workers watch that money disappear, no longer in circulation. Like magic, it disappears before our very eyes.
The next Obama magical feat will be to disappear the
targeted social security money( that is probably already eaten up by the ever-hungry, clandestinely,)
the middle class,
the workers.
We'll all become slaves of the State
the poor, that pathetic segment of the American population that is in need; always hungry enough to become whatever the Magician wants us to be.
With Obama at the helm,
(the American/corporate driven, owned manipulated Supreme King anointed by God, be He/She Christian, Muslin or Jewish supported, financed by those who make money while they sleep and reap restful anxiety free life styles marred only with the occasion ripple the slightly ahead of their time Tea Party engenders as they capitalizing on the alleged poverty of Government and when they insist on bringing to the fore their "creative" solutions-- the only contradiction being their mandate to keep Government out of everything except, of course, a woman's body)
WE Will Win!!!!!
Are you ready?
Have you hidden your Gold in your backyard, bought your own generator, created a secure cache of guns, ammunition? Have you bought into a religion of your choice and talked to your children to prepare them for better days here on Earth and in Heaven; mostly the latter? Have you?
And what about the bomb shelter your late relatives built? Is it up to date, ready for use?
Be assured. It can't be long now. Obama will get the Job done.
We are on the brink of the second. a Real American Revolution!
Only the young can stop us now.
Or can they?
Linda Zises
reporter at large
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