Author: Adam Lee

New York City’s mayoral election is approaching, and as the race heats up, more attention is being paid to the increasing political influence of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish sects of Brooklyn. Like their counterparts in Israel, New York’s Hasidim have rebounded from the decimation of World War II. They were nearly wiped out by the…

I’ve been writing about Russia’s brutally violent crackdown on LGBT people and whether the international community ought to respond by boycotting the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi. Incredibly, that situation got even worse last week with the news that Vladimir Putin has decreed a “forbidden zone” around the Olympics where all forms of public demonstration…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter VI The next chapter brings us back to Hank Rearden, who’s putting on his tuxedo to attend the party thrown by his wife that he’s been dreading: This was his wedding anniversary and he had known for three months that the party would take place tonight, as Lillian wished… Then,…

More times than I can count, I’ve heard the argument that atheists can’t be trusted to act ethically, that human beings need to believe in a supernatural source of morality to coerce us to behave. (The most recent time I remember hearing this was in my debate with Peter Hitchens last year.) The argument usually…

Back in March, I wrote a post about how the Catholic church isn’t a democracy and therefore has no obligation to change its teachings in line with popular opinion. One theist commenter enthusiastically chimed in to agree and to insist that this was exactly the point: From my own perspective, the constancy (and internal consistency)…

In 1889, a literary magazine called the North American Review solicited essays on the question of whether divorce was ever morally justifiable. Although all the other answers were from clergy (who, for no apparent reason, are always deemed to be the experts on these kinds of questions), they also printed a response by the great…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter V The last section of this chapter skims over a few years in flashback. We’re told that Dagny was twenty-four the last time she saw Francisco, in New York. That night, while they’re in bed together, he seems wracked by some inner struggle and makes a strange request – “Help…

This post will have to be my last word on this for the time being, because all this ugliness and nastiness takes an emotional toll, and I really want to get back to writing about happier things. But the events of the last few days have convinced me that our secular community, the one I…

So, yesterday I wrote a post about the issue of sexual harassment in the secular community boiling over. I cited a post written by Dr. Karen Stollznow, at Scientific American’s Mind blog, detailing her experiences with an employer which she says badly mishandled her complaint of harassment, and which was later reported to be the…

I’ve been writing about sexism and feminism in the secular community for several years now, and if you’d asked me this question even a few days ago, I would’ve said that I thought things were getting better. There’s certainly evidence I could point to to support that: in just a short time, anti-harassment policies have…