It's True - Honest Atheists Cannot Hold State Office In Pennsylvania

You see a lot of graphic memes online.  Often, they are not true.  But...sometimes they are.

A graphic showed up on Facebook today, showing the seven states where atheists could not legally hold state office.  One of the states was Pennsylvania.  I thought it might have been a phony meme, bud I did a quick scan of the Pennsylvania Constitution and saw this (ignoring the obvious sexism that it still uses "man" and "men" instead of "person" and "people"):

  § 3.  Religious freedom.
        All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship
     Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences;
     no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect or support any
     place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his
     consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, control
     or interfere with the rights of conscience, and no preference
     shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or
     modes of worship.

  § 4.  Religion.
        No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future
     state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his
     religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or
     place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.

Anyone else note the collision of these two sections, which are at the very beginning of the Pensylvania Constitution? 

So, I did what any other voting/tax-paying Pennsylvanian would do - I wrote to the governor:

Dear Gov. Wolf,

I have just read that the Pennsylvania Constitution says I cannot hold state office.

We'll ignore the fact that the Constitution still uses "man" instead of "person" everywhere.

It says this:

  § 4.  Religion.
        No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future
     state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his
     religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or
     place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth.

I am an atheist.  Therefore, I do not believe in God, Heaven, the Devil or Hell..  So, according to the state Constitution, I cannot run for office, despite being a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen of the state for about half of my life.

Wouldn't the federal Constitution which says that there can be no religious tests to run for or hold public office supersede this?

I realize the state legislature is owned by Republicans, but can anything be done to amend this?


Laurie Mann
McDonald, PA


I encourage other Pennsylvanians who sees that this is in direct conflict with the "no religious tests" part of the federal Constitution to drop the governor a line.

I have been an atheist for most of my life.  I am polite when I am in a religious establishment and I do like to sing so I might look like I'm a believer but as I am a guest there I don't make an issue of my atheism.  But secular life is a wholly different issue.  It is obscene for a state to have its Constitution state that I would not be eligible for public office because I don't share in ancient beliefs.  

My Tale of Two Messiahs

I performed The Messiah with the Calvary United Methodist Church Festival Choir on Saturday afternoon (https://www.facebook.com/events/1825036400948324/), then attended the Pittsburgh Symphony/Mendelssohn Choir performance Saturday night (https://pittsburghsymphony.org/production/56154/handels-messiah).  That was many hours of The Messiah for one day, though we only sang the first half of it (plus the "Hallelujah Chorus," of course). 

We were good, but, realistically, the PSO/Mendelssohn performance was better. They were all professionals and had a much bigger orchestra and many more singers.   We were mostly amatuers.

But...

I think our tenor soloist (George Milosh) was better than their tenor soloist (Paul Appleby), and our soprano (Anna Singer) was more understandable than their soprano soloist (Rachele Gilmore, who had great tone quality but her diction was lost). I was a little concerned about the PSO hiring a countertenor to sing the alto solos, but Andrey Nemzer was very good, though had a little trouble with a few high notes. 

Much as I like Manfred Honeck as the conductor the PSO, many of the choral pieces, except for "Worthy Is the Lamb," were just too fast. Our conductor, Brian Burns, had a much better sense of how the music should be paced.

It was an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday.  I hadn't been singing with choirs very much the last few years, due to severe insomnia and some throat problems.  It was great to find the Calvary group. 

Contact Congress NOW

On July 16, 2018, Donald Trump committed treason by denying Russian influence over the 2016 election and refusing to believe the findings of his own FBI and Department of Justice (and even British Intelligence) about Russian involvement in it. Those of us who believed in Trump-Russia-Collusion spent a lot of time venting on Twitter because it should be really clear to anyone that it happened. Impeach him! Convict him of treason! Maybe even execute him!

But, today, take a deep breath...and fight on but a little more calmly (and this is a reminder to myself as much as anyone else).

I will call my senators and my representatives today, and my message will be:

1. We need Congressional hearings now on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
2. We need Congressional hearings now on the Emoluments Clause and the way Donald Trump is enriching himself and his family by being president.
3. Congress must prevent Mueller and Rosenstein from being fired or their investigation being defunded prematurely.

We are very used to the Republican "witch-hunty" hearings of recent times, where Hillary Clinton spent 11 hours answering many questions over and over again. But while she was accused of many things, the committee could never charge her with anything.

I know Congressional hearings can be meaningful and relevant. Because, when I was 16, I spent part of the summer of 1973 watching the Watergate Hearings on TV.

I felt like was part of the only Republican family in Massachusetts. I did support Nixon, I supported the war in Viet Nam and so on. I even believed he was innocent of knowing anything about Watergate and it was all on his underlings. But, remember, back then, many Republicans were pro-ERA and pro-choice, so you could be a Republican and support women's rights. The party was definitely turning racist, but, sadly, I just didn't notice that as much as I should have.

But watching the Watergate Hearings, it became clear to me that Nixon did know what was going on, and I believed Nixon was guilty-guilty-guilty as Gary Trudeau used to say in Doonesbury.

I told Mom I thought Nixon was guilty, she called me a Communist, I cried about that and didn't talk politics with her again until the '90s. In fairness to Mom, she didn't vote for Goldwater and she wasn't planning to vote for Trump (but died before the election).

The problem is, while millions of us know that Trump is guilty of multiple impeachable crimes, millions are in complete denial, aided and abetted by the lapdog Republican Congress and Faux News reinforcing their fantasy that the Trump Regime is somehow good for the country and the world when it is anything but.

If the Republicans refuse to hold hearings on the 2016 election or on the Emoluments Clause, the Democrats should rent a hotel ballroom and hold mock hearings on Trump. Invite the TV networks to film them. Bring forward witnesses. Show the American people what a functional, Congressional hearing can look like.

If you don't have your representatives phone numbers & E-mails on your phone (and you should!), here's how you can find them.

PS: While it was exciting for the DOJ to have arrested Russian agent and NRA photo-girl Maria Butina, she's a small fish in a big school. She was too young to be anything but a minor player. I hope the DOJ is focusing on her handler(s).

All Gone to Look for America (Part

Simon and Garfunkel's "America" came out in April, 1968. I always heard the chorus as "All gone to look for America." The Internet tells me I've heard that line wrong for nearly 50 years - it's really "All come to look for America." But, I think my mishearing is a better title for this series of blog posts on a trip back in 1968.

In 1968, our parents took our family plus Grandma on a major trip - a cross country trip mostly by train, returning eastward across Canada. It was an amazing few weeks and fueled my lifelong love of travel. It was also challenging at times for my folks who were traveling with 4 children under the age of 12 - I was 11, Carrie was 10, Jeff was 8 (had his 9th birthday on a train in Canada) and Terry was 3 (turned 4 not long after we got home). This was not the kind of trip middle class families made in the '60s but my grandfather had died in late '66 leaving some money for extras like this trip.

The main argument I had with Mom over this trip was her refusal to fly. She was phobic about flying, and this phobia extended to Dad (who occasionally had to fly on business) and her kids. Her stepmother would fly, but she traveled with us for most of the trip. She left us in Canada for a separate trip to Banff; don't remember if she flew home from there or not.

This story of our trip will be mostly lacking something important - photographs. I know Dad took a fair number of photos as he stored them in photo envelopes in his office drawer for decades. Over the last few years, both of my parents have died. One thing we have yet to find after two years of combing over their stuff - most of the photos from that trip. The one family picture I have from early that summer just before the trip is the single most ugly shot of the four of us, so horrifying in its utter dorkiness that one brother has begged me to never put it online and I agreed. How bad is that photo? Well, here's the picture of me from that photo, and, I agree, it is one of the worst photos of me ever.

Here's a travel shot of us taken in Canada in 1967 (we were all bigger by '68, me especially).

And our youngest brother looked roughly like this in 1968 (though smaller in this case)

And, finally, here's a photo of my parents, taken around the time of the big trip.

While most of the photos of that summer are probably still buried in a box somewhere, one thing we did unearth last fall was the itinerary.  My folks used a local travel agent who arranged the hotels and the like.  So I can tell you that we left Union Station, Worcester, MA on Friday August 2, 5:10pm and took the train to Chicago.  We had sleeper bunks in the train and got to Chicago the next morning.  We stayed at the Harrison Hotel (now the Travelodge on East Harrison St.).  I never had many memories of Chicago, other than it was the first huge city I'd ever been to.  I think we went to one of the museums and walked around. I think we took a sightseeing trip on Lake Michigan.  But the reason I have so few memories of Chicago from that trip is we were only there for about a day and a half.  By early Sunday evening, we were on a train, heading west for Flagstaff, Arizona.

Our Trip to Italy: Lessons Learned and Great Restaurants

[[Originally published on 11/12/2017 in Alien Cheese]]
We had a wonderful 2 1/2 weeks in Italy this fall. It's a trip we'd been planning for ages, and it was postponed from last spring after my father became terminally ill, so it was bittersweet in some ways.
While I do plan to share some of my 1,600 photos of familiar tourist sites online, I want to talk a little about the things the tourist guides and Websites manage to overlook.
Printed Maps Matter. Most of the traveling we've done over the last 20 years has been in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia. Online maps work well in those areas. However, Italy chews up and spits out online maps, especially when you're walking. We wasted a lot of time (and probably more money than we think on international roaming fees) because we thought the online map software would work fine in places like Venice and Rome. Nope. And what you don't realize until you're there is that street names change frequently. What we thought of as "Via Croce" in Naples had a different name about every 50 yards. Complicating things even more was that street signs on buildings are very erratic - non-existent, really faded and hard to read and sometimes the streets were inconsistently named. So we did a lot of walking while lost in Italy, particularly in Venice and Bologna. It was fun at times, but also very, very frustrating.
What we should have done, once we used online sources and books to figure out where we wanted to stay, was to buy some of the excellent detailed local maps, study them, make notes about places we planned to go and rely more on traditional printed maps than online maps. We found the Rick Steves pocket guides to the cities helpful, but studying detailed maps in advance would have saved us time, money and frustration. Before you go, pre-print all mass transit maps for your city. We never used mass transit in Florence as it was so walkable, but having more familiarity with mass transit for Rome and Naples would have been invaluable.
The hard lesson we especially learned in Bologna - never enter the name of a site in an online map site in Italy, only enter a street address. We were looking for a particular museum, entered the name into AppleMaps, and wound up walking miles away from where we'd intended.
Signs Matter. Signage in Italy is wildly, wildly erratic. Sometimes, signs were very helpful. You'll find many signs in Rome that will help you get to the Pantheon and the Collesium. But signs that should exist don't always. I'd thought there was a train between Rome's Termini train station and the FCO Airport. At Termini, we couldn't find any info on the train to the FCO airport. There isn't a central info booth in many places, like train stations. There were signs about the bus to the airport, but the signs often led to dead ends. It took over a half hour to find the bus to the airport. The next day, at the airport, we saw signs there about the train between the airport and Termini! Sigh.
Another place where signage was dreadful was for the Circumvesuviana line train from Naples to Pompeii. The Metro in Naples is clean, well-signed and inexpensive. However, the Circumvesuviana is a privately-run train system to the Naples suburbs and while it's inexpensive, it's a mess. We missed the one sign that partially explained what we needed to know. There are at least five lines on this train system and the right one for old Pompeii isn't obvious. Some local people helped us out - but we wound up on the "slightly wrong" train, the one the went to "new Pompeii" instead of "old Pompeii." And it was pouring rain when we reached new Pompeii. So we paid 15E to take a cab 3 km from the new station to the old station. Pompeii is still very much worth it - a highlight despite the pouring rain - but getting there was quite frustrating.
City Cards. Many cities have cards you can buy that might give you free admission to some places, discounts and some public transportation. The cost of these cards vary wildly from city to city. We bought a card for Venice and maybe lost a couple of Euros on the deal. But the Venice card included bus transit from the airport to the train station, though not the more direct Alilaguna from the airport to just outside of San Marco. The Florence card was particularly expensive so we didn't buy it. The Roma card wasn't too expensive, but we just didn't buy it. We wanted to buy the Naples card as it was a great deal, but when we went up to the National Archeological Museum, they were no longer selling it (even though official Naples Website said they were!).
"Skip the Line". In general, "skip the line" for attractions is not necessary, at least in late October/early November. We got into everything we wanted to except for climbing Il Duomo in Florence where the reservations fill up, especially on the weekends (it turns out I could not have done this anyway, and Jim probably wouldn't have). We did get a reservation for the Vatican Museum on a weekday which was necessary. The extra fee for dealing directly with the museum/attraction is 4E; you do not need to go through any tour company to skip the line (and you'll save lots of money if you make your own reservation). The longest lines we had anywhere were for St. Peters (in the rain) and for Pitti Palace in Florence - both about 45 minutes long. As we tended to go to places early, we had either no wait at all or about 10 minutes. Our main failure was to not go to the Vatican Museum in the morning - the crowds there in the afternoon are massive. The crowds in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence are large but not as large as for the Vatican Museum. There were almost no crowds at all in Ostia (ruins of an ancient trading down outside of Rome) or in the National Archeological Museum in Naples. After you do something that's hugely crowded, you'll do yourself a favor to then go to something quieter or just go back to your room for a siesta.
Rain Gear. The first 11 days of the trip were rain-free, but the last few days...no. Was reminded my jacket, while water-resistant, was not waterproof. Jim gloated as he did have a waterproof jacket. We should have brought our small umbrella (wound up buying a 5E umbrella while standing in line for St. Peter's Basilica) and baseball caps with the long front brims to keep the rain off our faces.
Restaurants. Most restaurants are pretty good and will treat you well. The only time we felt cheated was at a little restaurant just off of San Marco in Venice. We were jet-lagged and starved our first day in Venice, and the food was pretty good there. But this place said it didn't sell wine by the glass, so Jim bought a half-bottle of wine. And that bottle cost about 25E, an insane price we later learned. The vast majority of restaurants sell glasses of house wine for about 3-7E. Unlike at most American restaurants, house wine at Italian restaurants is usually pretty good.
We failed to make any restaurant reservations for dinner in advance, but that only bit us once - in Bologna. Always wanted to try a place with a Michelin star and there was one in Bologna with an intriguing menu wasn't terribly expensive. But when we checked with the restaurant, their only open spot was at 9:30 which was too late. But we had three fabulous meals in Venice, Florence and Rome in excellent restaurants by making reservations the same day for 7pm. We highly recommend these three restaurants for special meals in Italy:

• Venice: Ristorante Antica Sacrestia - this is not very far from San Marco. Brick walls, very warm and inviting, lovely traditional food.
• Florence: Ristorante Cibreo, Via dei Macci - hands down the best meal of the trip. Fixed price for each course (you don't need to have every course), extensive and interesting wine list. They don't have a menu, but they have about six choices for each course which they explain to you. They also gave you little dishes of kind of an experimental antipasto which was excellent. Cibreo also has a few less-expensive, related variants in the same area, but for the full experience, go to Ristorante Cibreo.
• Rome: Taverna Trilussa, in the Trastavere neighborhood near Ponte Sisto (their Website is flakey so I'm linking to the TripAdvisor page instead) A fascinating restaurant with amazing cheese (and meat) plates, excellent pasta dishes.

Other recommendations: We had the full Tuscan steak experience in Florence at 4 Leoni, not far from Ponte Vecchio across the river from "downtown Florence." This does not need to be an expensive dinner and they have plenty of pasta dishes if you're not a carnivore. You can get great pizza and Italian craft been in Rome at Roma Beer Company, Campo Fiori. We had some of the best pizza in Naples at Pizzeria Trianon which is in an older part of the city not far from the train station. Jim had a seven cheese pizza which was fantastic. Had an interesting dinner our first night in Naples at Trattoria del Golfo, a fish/Genoese-style restaurant near Umberto Galleria. The Genoese pasta is a little like eating long-simmered onion soup with a little beef over pasta - YUM!
When you want to try out a restaurant in a city you don't know (and you don't want to use cabs to get there), scope out the restaurant by day to make sure you know how to get there. We generally stuck to restaurants that were within about a mile of our hotel or apartment.

Why Massacres Are ALWAYS Terrorist Act

[[Originally published on 10/2/2017 in Alien Cheese]]

Many people have a very narrow definition of terrorism -- it's always related to a political stance. So 9/11 was a terrorist act, as were the car attacks in France and Germany and the shooting massacres in Mumbai and Paris.

And it's interesting that all of those were related to Islamic terrorists. Because, in America, there is the common belief that terrorists have to be brown male Muslims to be "real terrorists."

I don't believe that.

I believe the act of a mass shooting, mass bombing or car attack by a disaffected person of any gender, race, religion, or ethnic background is a terrorist attack. Those random attacks on people they don't know are meant to inspire terror and fear. Anyone called a lone wolf, which which American mass murderers are typically called, is really a terrorist.

Yes, the Las Vegas massacre was a terrorist act, as was Pulse, as was Sandy Hook, as was Virginia Tech, as was Oklahoma City, as were the Unibomber bombings well, the list goes on.

So long as our government is only looking at the danger of Muslim terrorists, they will continue to ignore the murders enabled by our government's lenient view on the danger of guns, particularly the danger of semi-automatic and automatic weapons that some nutjobs are able to get and use.

Why do you think, in most terrorist acts in Europe in recent years, terrorists used knives and trucks and not guns? Guns are restricted in much of Europe, meaning gun deaths are not nearly as common there as they are here, whether by terrorists or everyday criminals. http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/06/visualizing-gun-deaths-comparing-u-s-rest-world/.

How many more massacres will we have in this country before the Congress and our state legislators stand up to the NRA and say enough is enough!

When you write about these massacres, never use the murderer's name and never care about their "rationale" for murder. Don't give them additional publicity. Only talk about the location of the murders, and what we must do to fight these terrorists - pass better gun and ammunition laws. And elect legislators with the guts to stand up to the NRA.

#LasVegasMassacre #ActForVegas #PassSaneGunLaws

Some folks on Twitter have done a good job in reminding us that, in some state law, there is no connection between the political/religions/ethnic beliefs of a person and terrorist murders like those committed in Las Vegas on 10/2/2017. Here is the definition of terrorism for in the laws of the state of Nevada:

More details on Nevada laws about terrorism.

US law definition of domestic terrorism:

More details on US laws about domestic terrorism.

The CIA view of terrorism is slightly different.