The Secular Right

We often hear about the "religious right".  But, rarely about the "secular right".  It is simply impossible that there are conservatives who are not religious, right?  After all, it simply cannot be the case that all atheists are only lefties.

While far from a conservative myself, I found it simply fascinating a few years ago to read an essay by Heather Mac Donald in which she discussed why she is an atheist.  I had read a few essays by her in the City Journal, and almost always I disagreed with her.  Mac Donald comes to issues with a Reason-like rigid libertarian perspective and, while there is a lot of libertarian in me, well, there are issues where I lean left.

But, it was not that much a surprise because it is easy to imagine libertarians as atheists.

It is, therefore, not an eyebrow raiser by any means to read that Mac Donald is a contributing blogger at the Secular Right.  

I hadn't heard about this blog until earlier today.  Their mission sounds like it was time Conservatives were reminded of this:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims.  Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

I wish these people lots and lots of luck.  A reformed GOP will be far more constructive than the current one held hostage by the "religious right"

Mac Donald will certainly not get any invitations to Rick Warren's Christmas party after writing pieces like this:

Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.  Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday.  

In another post, Mac Donald notes:

The teen birth rate has started climbing again. As usual, it’s highest in red states and states with high black and Hispanic populations and lowest in New England blue states. In 2006, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas topped the list, with 68, 64, and 63 births for every 1000 female teens, respectively, compared to 19 births per 1000 female teens in New Hampshire and 21 in Vermont and Massachusetts.

Will more religion cure this scourge? Not by itself. Mexican-American teens have the highest birth rate—93 births per 1000 girls—compared to 64 births per 1000 black girls and 26 births per 1000 white girls. Decadent secular Europe and non-Christian Asia lag far behind. In 2003, Japan’s teen birthrate was 3.9 births per 1000 girls. Italy’s rate was 6.9 per 1000, and France’s, 10 births per 1000 girls.

You go, girl!