Posted on behalf of Mike Gillis, Board member of Seattle Atheists. “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” was an idea conceived by Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris who jokingly floated the idea in reaction to South Park’s debacle with portraying Mohammed in an episode of the animated series.

I support “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Why? Because I support free speech. Even speech I don’t like. Especially speech I don’t like.

Just the same way I’d support “Everybody Eat a Hamburger Day,” if it were Hindus using threats of violence against people who ate beef.

In a free society, free speech means having the right to say exactly what someone doesn’t want to hear. If you don’t like what someone has to say, you need to answer with your own free speech. Violence and the threat of it is not free speech. It is the admission that you have a losing argument in favor of your position. Nothing justifies violence to chill free speech, not one having their religious sensibilities offended. Nothing.

If some religious person drew an offensive cartoon or wrote an offensive op-ed about atheists, it would be insane and morally reprehensible for me to kill the person who wrote or drew it. It would be wrong for me to cut off their head, shoot them eight times and stab them through the heart. It would be wrong for me to set embassies on fire and beat people up.

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It would be wrong for me to chant for their deaths and call upon other atheists to kill them for being offensive. It would be wrong for me to imply a death threat to the writer or cartoonist and then post pictures of the above beheaded murder victim on my website. It would be wrong for me to break into the writer or cartoonist’s house with an axe and try to kill them in front of their grandchild. Ever. No matter how much I was offended. No matter how bad the cartoons or op-ed was.

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And it would be insane for anyone on the outside of this–especially liberal-minded people who claim to support the right to free speech–to be more offended by the cartoons than by my threats of violence, or the actual execution of said violence. It would be insane for well-meaning liberal folks to take the side of militant fundamentalists’ violence enforcement of their blasphemy laws against people who aren’t even a part of their religion. Yet, this is exactly what we’ve done with Islam.

We wouldn’t tolerate this violence or the threats if the Catholics or Mormons or Scientologists were doing it in response to having their religion mocked in a cartoon. In fact, they all have been. Part of living in our society means that your culture will have to integrate into a few ways. We want your language, your sense of humor, your food, your clothing, your historical narrative, and your music. We want all of the things that other immigrant groups have brought to add to and enrich American culture.

But there are some basic principles we won’t compromise on, freedom of speech and expression being the big one. The proper answer to speech you don’t like is more speech. Not violence. Not because you’re offended. I’m offended to the core by what various religious people say all the time. That doesn’t give me the right to use law or violence to silence them. It burdens me with the responsibility of responding with words, not fists, blades, bullets, or threats.

You will occasionally be offended by what you hear people say here. And things you say will inevitably offend someone else. That’s the price of admission. We’re not allowed to kill or threaten people because we don’t like what they say. Period.

We don’t let Pat Robertson do it. And we won’t let you.

And to my well-meaning liberal friends that seem to believe that blasphemy is a worse crime than murder, battery, arson, or inciting violence: Ask yourself if you’d feel the same way if the Pope had called upon Catholics to kill cartoonists for depicting Jesus in an offensive way.

I support “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” not to be pointlessly provocative or to single anyone out for being mocked. In fact, I believe the very opposite. Islam, like every other religion, isn’t immune to mockery or criticism. And no one should try to make themselves immune through death threats.

I’m participating because the point still needs to be made that religious sensibilities don’t give someone license to use violence or the threat of it.

Rush hour on a Downtown-bound Metro bus. Traffic heavy, weather bad, everyone a little grumpy.

A bulky middle-aged woman in a white t-shirt gets on and drops into the open seat nearest the bus driver. She addresses the back of his head in a loud, quavering voice.

“Is it true they’re thinking about getting rid of the ride free zone?”

“There’s been talk about it,” the driver replies listlessly.

“That’s horrible.”

A long pause commences while the bus driver considers. “Might keep out some of the riffraff,” he offers.

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“Well some of us are homeless, and don’t have any way to get around except in the ride free zone!”

Now a pause that’s far longer and very uncomfortable. The driver breaks the silence.

“Trust me, there’s a lo-o-o-ot of riffraff.”

The woman harumphs.

“I’m the one who has to deal with them,” says the driver.

“Well, you’ve never been homeless.”

“Oh, yes, I have, ma’am,” the driver says, his voice suddenly loud and indignant. “Don’t tell me what I’ve been.”

“Then you should know what it’s like,” says the woman, collecting her stuff and moving toward the exit.

“I got myself out of it,” says the driver. The woman begins to walk down the stairs.

“Well, good for you,” she says, sarcastically, as she climbs off.

Jodi O’Brien

It must have looked good on paper. Marquette University wanted to hire Seattle University’s sociology professor Jodi O’Brien, chair of the sociology department, to be dean of arts and sciences.  They extended her a job offer, O’Brien accepted. The signed contract was in the mail, the Seattle University Spectator says, when she got the take-backsies phone call.

AP reports that: “The archdiocese acknowledges [Milwaukee] Archbishop Jerome Listecki called Marquette President Father Robert Wild about the university’s offer to Seattle University professor Jodi O’Brien,” though the university stoutly insists its unprofessional behavior is its own doing. Citing worries that the openly gay O’Brien’s hiring would “create dichotomies and cause tensions,” Marquette’s administration managed to vault itself–dichotomous, tension-filled–into the national spotlight. 

Wayback Machine: That’s MvB on the left and John Drabinski on the right. Center guy is from Portland, which you can totally tell.

I was curious what a (mostly) unaffiliated academic would think of this story so I trundled off to Facebook to look up a Xavier Hall dormmate from my own Seattle U years, John Drabinski, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at Amherst. 

First, is this an embarrassing kerfluffle or a major issue? Good for Seattle U, bad for Marquette?

Well, Catholic schools are at a crossroads, I think: Either you continue along with mainstream higher-education, which really does value diverse forms of critical inquiry, or you throw your lot in with the fundamentalists and the religious right.

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For Seattle U, I think this is good. And Seattle U is also good for Catholic universities generally, because this goes against the growing narrative about Catholics and Catholic schools as indifferent to child abuse, backwards, out of touch, equivalent to the religious right. Bad for Marquette because now, no matter what the school does, it is branded a right-wing outpost. Sadly, because Marquette is a perfectly fine school with solid academic standards.

I feel terrible for the MU students. Seriously. They must be incredibly embarrassed. For quite awhile, they’ll have to explain how they are not like Marquette, even though they went to Marquette.

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Is this purely a Catholic (or more broadly, religious) college issue, or something that speaks to a growing social conservatism?

Like I said, Catholic schools are at a crossroads. MU and SU go different routes. The social conservatism, in society in general, seems more like one big, last reactionary moment to me–not a real shift. Younger people don’t get the heaving, moralizing breath about LGBT issues. But when you embed these sorts of things in a Catholic institution, creating habits and policies, it tends to outlive generational change. That’s part of being a tradition, not just a handful of people making a decision at a particular time.

So I really do think these are key moments for Catholic schools. It ends up saying something about the tradition as it will develop. Since the Jesuits are at the very foundation of the idea of liberal arts education, I’m glad to see at least SOME Jesuits take a stand against bigotry and top-down administration of ideas. Better to let the best ideas win in the arena of debate and dispute than decide it all ahead of time–as per the liberal arts tradition (!).

It seems to me that a gay chemistry professor isn’t going to get the same treatment as a teacher whose job is to inspect and criticize social mores. But is that even relevant for a dean position? 

I think that’s true, that a chemistry professor will get less, if any, scrutiny. At the same time, given the flexibility and open-endedness of social theory debates, it is all the more crucial to expand the world of ideas in the social sciences, rather than close them off. Otherwise, you’re not doing education. You’re doing passive-aggressive indoctrination, which is not just anti-intellectual, but also very boring.

Mostly, though, she was to be a dean. The job of a dean is to administer, and to endure the scorn of, faculty at key moments. (Yes, division of labor and resentment are in academia too….) So the intervention at MU seems all the more mean-spirited and authoritarian. Did I mention that being authoritarian is contrary to liberal education, where the best ideas win out in the arena of debate and dispute? I did? Great, because that’s the real point here.

Free-write!

Hooray for Seattle U in making it clear that MU’s judgment is mean-spirited, authoritarian, and backwards. And hooray for the MU students who took a stand against this whole thing, because, really, they are the ones who have to answer for the bigotry. Look, I’m from Idaho. I get this. Everyone asks me, when I say I’m from the Gem State, about the neo-Nazis. I’m not a Nazi. Promise. I just grew up in a state where some neo-Nazis were particularly loud.

MU is now the academic manifestation of the same sort of thing. All MU faculty and students have to answer the weird, wandering query…are you an anti-gay bigot or authoritarian about the discussion of ideas? Unfair. But while the administrators sit back and hope to watch the endowment grow (Insert a twss joke here) via gifts conservative donors, the rest of the school has to slink around and hope nobody asks and everybody forgets. For what, really? To ensure that the new dean writes the right sorts of things, falls in love the right way, and bumps uglies with the right kinds of people? I wonder, really, if it is all worth it for MU.

Our stranded-in-Berlin correspondent, Charles Redell (who writes on sustainability and hangs out at Office Nomads) was supposed to fly home to Seattle on Saturday, but an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano put an end to that. Here is his first, second, and third reports on dealing with his unexpected stayover.

My time here in Germany is starting to turn into some semblance of a normal life, if you can believe it.

What does normal mean in completely abnormal circumstances?

It means spending the morning working in the hotel lobby surrounded by ten or so newly-expat compatriots while the U.S. sleeps. Talk about a great way to get through backlogged emails.

It means taking a break around noon and biking to a new neighborhood that may promise new adventures, new food, or at least new scenery. This in turn means finding a small cafe in an up-and-coming part of town and parking oneself on the balcony above the fray watching and analyzing the comings and goings of young, hip, beautiful Berlin.

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“There’s one that’s in love with the barista.”

“Look, Americans.”

And also finding ways to tune out the constant drone of German techno.

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It means spending a lot of time each day obsessively checking the news of flights and learning what news outlet tells you what you need to know:

•    The New York Times: Was good at first because it was a known quantity that we could navigate with ease, but as the story has dropped below the fold, updates have slowed and dwindled (as a side note: How is this story below the fold? Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands all over the world are affected and billions of dollars are being lost.)

•    bbc.co.uk: Good but as with the Times, increasingly slow to update about anything besides what’s happening on the British Isles.

•    bbc.com/volcano: A new discovery today! This is awesome. What it lacks in constant, useful updates, it makes up for in sheer quantity of information and distraction potential.

•    Euronews.net: Haven’t actually looked at this much online but it’s the best news to watch on TV when you’re in the room. Best feature here is the No Comment segment that comes up every ten minutes or so. During this, the station shows only imagery from some huge news event. The entire weekend was images of the Polish state funeral (remember that?) which was, admittedly, frustrating but beautiful. Now it’s just airport scenes or shots of the volcano eruption.

•    Flight Stats: Just found this today but it seems much more useful than the airport’s site, the airline’s site and any of the news sites. Track your flights by airport, flight number, airline…and it seems to be more up to date than anything else. As I write this, Lauren’s morning flight to Frankfurt reads canceled while Lufthansa’s site has yet to be updated. (Another side note: Google uses this site’s data to define its flight status information.)

It’s having an inane meeting at which members of the group tell the coordinator of our trip that it’s time for our hosts to really get to work getting us out there. The main idea consists of getting us bus or train tickets to Madrid and then booking us on some magical flight to the States with 22 seats available. Really, it was a meeting that did nothing more than to let the people you don’t like blow off steam. In that way, it’s just like being at home!

Finally, if you’re me, it means coping by remaining calm and being helpful to others who are feeling the stress much more so than I am. It means offering to buy drinks for people’s whose planes have just been canceled, pulling those who are obviously missing home into the group drinking in the lobby, and getting answers to logistical questions for friends who are so distraught in the moment that any bit of factual information eases the pain.

To re-cap: A group of twenty journalists traveled to Germany for a week to explore green building in Germany thanks to the German Foreign Ministry and The Eco-Logic Institute. Near the end of the trip, a volcano in Iceland erupted and European airspace was shut down.   

Our stranded-in-Berlin correspondent, Charles Redell (who writes on sustainability and hangs out at Office Nomads) was supposed to fly out on Saturday, but instead he spent it traveling to the airport to rebook tickets, then being a tourist for a few hours. By the end of the day, Charles’ re-booked flight on Sunday was canceled and he was told that next Sunday was the soonest he could get on a flight. Here is his first dispatch and his second dispatch.

Things in Berlin are looking up, for our group anyway.

Today dawned sunny and warm, prompting a few of us to explore the possibility of renting bikes for our stay here. We found an awesome program, run by the German rail system. Simply put, you register with Call A Bike and then pick up a bike at the train station. A computer lock tracks your time with it and you’re charged .08Eur per minute (9Eur for a day and 36Eur for a week). When you’re done, lock the bike, call the system and number and tell them where in the downtown core it is, and they pick it up. Could not be more simple.

We took a nice slow ride out to the airport, six kilometers away. The entire trip was on dedicated bike infrastructure, much of it grade separated and with bike signal lights. There were no lines at the airport and I got a ticket booked for Thursday, which is currently everyone’s best guess for the second day travel will be allowed.

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On our ride, we found a trail along the river that ended up winding through a collection of small cottages that seem to be weekend homes for Berliners, within an easy bike ride of the city. In the summer, when the city is stultifying, they seemed to the perfect solution for a population addicted to true sustainable urban living.

Now, we sit, satisfied with our day, in love with our adopted city, and relatively content with the idea of spending more time living and working here, even if when it may end is unclear. [Photos after the jump.]

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Walking to the train station on Saturday night to refund my Frankfurt train ticket–which, at 118 euros, had become worthless to me when it was obvious I would not be flying out of anywhere–I came across a queue of taxis a quarter mile away from the station. Obviously, with no flights and all of Europe turning to train travel, all the cabbies on the continent are descending on train stations now.

 

 

Traveling and being stranded does weird things to your brain. With no habits and rituals to keep the mundane straight, papers get lost, numbers misplaced, and pepper gets put in your cappuccino. Luckily foam here is firm enough to hold the pepper for quick scooping.

 

I was thinking that seeing “Alf” on TV last night was a fluke. Apparently not. Even German counter-culture loves the little Alien Life Form.

Biking in German is fully supported. Here, a row of bike share bikes stand ready in the Berlin train station for anyone who wants to rent them by the week, day, hour or even minute. All you have to do is provide a passport, credit card and you’re good to go. Ride as you like, it comes with a lock. When you’re done, leave it on a corner, call a central number with the intersection and they will pick it up.

 

 

Everyone bikes in Germany. You can’t see it here, but this woman was also carrying her crutch. A few blocks later, in a less-populated stretch, she let her dogs out to have a wander of their own.

 

Strangely, there were no lines at the ticket counter today. Yesterday was only a 30-minute wait or so. Oh, I re-booked for Thursday, not Sunday! Now, if only the skies clear in time.

 

Along the trail on the way back into town, we happened across some awesome little cottages. Kind of dense, but with enough room for a comfortable lawn, gardens and eating/grilling, these little homes on the river seem to be the perfect weekend/summer get away, without the hassle of leaving the city.

 

 

At the end of a day as great as this one, it’s obvious why Christine and Lauren (http://www.greenbuildingcommunity.com)are so happy.

 

Hang tight little (actually kind of big and heavy) bikes. We’ll take you to dinner later.

Our stranded-in-Berlin correspondent is Charles Redell, who writes on sustainability, hangs out at Office Nomads (oh, the irony!), and was in Berlin for a international green conference. He’s still very much there, thanks to Iceland’s ash-spewing Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which has disrupted flights worldwide. Here is his first dispatch. This one includes a photo gallery after the letter portion:

I’ve been trying to sort out how to explain what’s been happening while stuck here in Germany for an indeterminate amount of time because of a volcano (a volcano!) and finding it terribly difficult. One thing about this experience is that things have been happening very fast, and very slowly at the same time.

Last night as I sat down to write about my day of bureaucracy, I realized that events I thought took place Friday actually happened earlier that same morning. But by the time I was writing, I’d been through two re-bookings, bought and returned a train ticket to Frankfurt, and done some touristy stuff.

Keeping up with things in anything like real time is impractical, if not impossible, since my smart phone is not compatible with European cell networks (I am forced to find a hotspot to use it or my laptop), and compiling all my thoughts at the end of the day just turns into a long ramble of events, experiences and thoughts, none of which can be sorted until this is all over.

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So in the place of dispatches from an isolated Europe, I offer you images of the effects as I see them. In only some will the direct relationship to this unprecedented event be obvious, but over the coming days, the shots I send back will be things I’ve experienced only because of the Icelandic volcanic eruption and images of Berlin and Europeans dealing with it.

In the meantime, wish me luck as I look to rent a bike and ride it first to the airport, and then wherever the wonderful bike infrastructure takes me. Oh, and if you can work on helping me manifest clear skies and a seat on an airplane before next Sunday, that’d be great too. [Photos after the jump.]

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On our return to town, it was time to stop thinking and start playing. Lunch on a boat on the river was our first stop. This beer saved my life.

One last piece of business was to get a refund for the train ticket to Berlin I bought online Friday night thinking I’d be able to get out of Frankfurt on Sunday morning. We decided to try the train station later on Saturday night in hopes of shorter lines. Your guess is as good as mine if this line is from the afternoon or 10 p.m. (As a side note, the office closed at 10 PM sharp. After waiting in line for 30 minutes, police sent away everyone in line, starting three people behind me.)

German television for me means the Euronews channel and BBC news (both in English).

A glimpse of “Alf,” in German. What is it with Germans and ’80s U.S. pop culture? (Yes, the Hoff really is big here.)

At the parking lot that was Hitler’s bunker.

The Holocaust memorial, a perfect place to visit during this adventure because the effect of walking through it is a feeling of loneliness, isolation, and confusion. It also offers sharp perspective. In other words, no matter what’s happening right now, I’ve got it pretty damn good.