Marie Alena Castle is the communications director for Atheists for Human Rights. Raised Roman Catholic she became an atheist later in life. She has since been an important figure in the atheistmovement through her involvement with Minnesota Atheists, The Moral Atheist,National Organization for Women, andwrote Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013). She has a lifetime of knowledge and activist experience, explored and crystallized in an educational series. The first part of this series can be found here Session 1and Session 2.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even with groups such as NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, the onslaught against womens rights, reproductive rights and so on, continue to take place. The most vulnerable poor and minority women tend to be the main victims, and so their children and the associated families and so communities. In a sequence, I see attacks on womens reproductive rights as attacks on women, children, so families, and so communities, and therefore ordinary American citizens. What can be some buffers, or defenses, against these direct attacks on the new media and communications technologies, e.g. to educate and inoculate new generations?

Marie Alena Castle:

Jacobsen: Who are the unknown womens rights heroes, men and women, that people should more into to self-educate?

Castle:They are the people who work at abortion clinics. They all have stories to tell. One of my friends managed a clinic and she was constantly threatened with violence and pickets at her house. I went there a few times to help in case the picketers got violent. One August I suggested she hook up her garden hose to a bottle of sugar water and set it to spray on the picketers and attract hordes of hornets. She wouldnt do it but I would have. The leader of the picketers was the local fire department chief (with expert knowledge of how to set her house on fire). She wanted to move but dared not for fear the fire chief would send a potential buyer to case the house for fire-setting purposes. She needed some carpentry done but feared getting someone she didnt know who would have a violent anti-abortion agenda. I got an atheist carpenter friend for her who was reliably safe.

Jacobsen: Once the shoe bites, people then become active, politically and socially, typically. These people can rise and protest in an organized and constructive way. Do you think this era of yes, alternative facts, but at the same time mass accessibility of information can hasten people realizing their shoe is being bitten, even when they werent aware before?

Castle:Lotsa luck on this. Most people really do assume that, as child bearers, women really are something of a public utility and in need of regulation. Why else would there be any discussion about how Roe v. Wade should be interpreted? What we need are new court challenges to Roe v. Wade that say it should be repealed and replaced with a ruling that says abortion is a medical matter to be handled by a woman and her doctor and is not the governments business. Lets have a major public discussion about womens bodily autonomy and why their bodies need government oversight.

(While Im at it, let me note that I am also opposed to men being drafted into the military. The government does not own their bodies any more than it owns womens bodies. You get men to voluntarily agree to kill people and you get women to voluntarily agree to give birth or you do without.)

Jacobsen: For centuries, and now with mild pushback over decades, the religiously-based, often, bigotry and chauvinism against women, and ethnic and sexual minorities is more in the open, and so more possible to change. Because people know about it, and cant deny it. And when and if they do, the reasons seem paper thin and comical, at times. What expedites this process of everyone, finally, earning that coveted equality?

Castle:The mild pushback has come because more people are losing interest in religion, and religion has always been the driver of bigotry and prejudice. The loss of interest has come from Internet sources that expose the absurdities and failings of religion.

To expedite the process you change the laws. You change the laws by organizing for and electing legislators who support civil rights. Then you elect a President who will appoint judges who support those rights. Nothing changes if the laws dont change. The laws helped bring civil rights to the South because it gave pro-civil rights citizens the protection they needed to treat people with respect. We started getting civil rights by public agitation that led to legislation that led to court review and rulings that did or did not affirm those rights. One exception: We got women covered by the Civil Rights Act when sex was introduced into the language in the expectation that it would be seen as such a joke that the Act would be voted down, but it passed.

To get women out of the public utility category, we need to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. That failed the first time precisely because opponents said it would give women the right to have abortions. What isabout abortion that sets some people off so violently? None of them show any real practical interest in born babies. Why this obsession with controlling women? Something about species survival? So many men with so many zillions of sperm and frustrated by womens limited ability to accommodate all that paternal potential? Who knows?

The only thing holding up equal rights for all is the Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist religions (and maybe also misogynistic Islam but we have to see how that immigrant population votes after being exposed to the relatively civilizing effect of living here). Its always those religions that protest against womens rights, gay rights, and that so ferociously supported slavery.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Marie.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. He works as an Associate Editor and Contributor for Conatus News, Editor and Contributor to The Good Men Project, a Board Member, Executive International Committee (International Research and Project Management) Member, and as the Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Executive Administrator and Writer for Trusted Clothes, and Councillor in the Athabasca University Students Union. He contributes to the Basic Income Earth Network, The Beam, Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Check Your Head, Conatus News, Humanist Voices, The Voice Magazine, and Trusted Clothes. If you want to contact Scott: [emailprotected]; website: http://www.in-sightjournal.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/InSight_Journal.

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Modern Women's Rights, Atheism, and Ideological Warfare - The Good Men Project (blog)