Author: Adam Lee

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter V America loves rags-to-riches stories. The idea of the U.S.A. as a land of opportunity is deeply ingrained in our national self-image – we want to believe those Horatio Alger fairytales about how any poor-but-honest young boy with pluck, grit and spunk can start out by sweeping floors and rise…

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane announced she wouldn’t defend the state in an ACLU lawsuit challenging a ban on same-sex marriage. She’s following the same trail blazed by California, where state officials refused to appeal a district court ruling against the discriminatory Proposition 8. It cheers me enormously to see that more…

If you’re in New York City this weekend, there are two great atheist events going down! First, on Saturday the 27th, the Blackout Secular Rally is happening in Flushing Meadows – Corona Park from 1:30 to 6:00. (I’ve seen different webpages say it starts either at 12:00 or at 1:30, but the official Facebook event…

I was cheered by a story I saw last week about about heroic activist groups working to end the barbaric custom of female “circumcision”, aka female genital mutilation, that’s practiced in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. FGM isn’t unique to Christianity or to Islam, but is found across a range of traditional…

New York has been sweltering under an unrelenting heat wave this entire week, so to keep comfortable, we should all be trying to think cold thoughts. And I’ve got something that might help: hailing from godless Iceland, a video by Of Monsters and Men, an oddly named band whose musical genre is best described as…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter V When Dagny gets back to the office, Eddie shows her a newspaper saying that after seizing the San Sebastian mines, the Mexican government has discovered that they’re worthless: there are no copper deposits there and there never were. D’Anconia Copper spent millions of dollars to cut empty mine shafts,…

My latest column is now up on AlterNet, There’s Nothing About Abortion in the Bible — So How Do Right-Wing Christians Justify Their Crusade Against Women? In it, I discuss the biblical verses that touch on abortion – or more accurately, the lack of such verses – as well as the passages which strongly suggest…

I can’t write about every story that crosses my radar, as much as I’d like to. But so much that’s noteworthy has been happening in the world lately, I’m overdue for a catch-up post. First, there’s a glimmer of good news: the Dáil, the lower house of Ireland’s Parliament, easily passed a bill that (slightly)…

This November, a film adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game is hitting theaters. Normally, that’s the kind of movie I’d be first in line to see. The problem in this case is that the novel was written by Orson Scott Card, who’s a more than merely run-of-the-mill religious bigot. Card has said that…

There was a great disgrace in this country today. Backed by the laws of the state of Florida, a jury decided that it was reasonable for an armed white man to provoke a confrontation with an unarmed black teenager, shoot him dead, and then claim he was acting in self-defense. I’m too heavy-hearted to write…