Mulcair's Beard Is Not The Point

There are days that I am positive that the "image consultants" who hover around our political leaders don't have a clue what they are talking about.  Today, we find the discussion of the week is whether or not Mulcair should shave off his beard.

But media consultant Barry McLoughlin told HuffPost that if Mulcair was his client, he'd recommend he take two weeks off in the summer and shave it.

McLouglin said that although Mulcair's beard is well-styled, trimmed and looks good on him, it creates a barrier between him and the voter. Hiding some of his face makes it harder for people to connect with him, McLoughlin said — and it shouldn't come as a surprise that people may feel they don't know him personally if a third of his face is hidden.

Frankly, I actually like Mulcair's beard - he keeps it neat and it suits him.  I may not want to kiss it, but when I'm looking at a politician, that isn't what I think about anyhow - on that score, that's a discussion between Mulcair and his wife.

Mulcair's real problem isn't his beard.  It never has been.

Frankly, the issue that he is facing isn't his beard, it's his politics.  His job, as leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, is to hold Harper and his gang of thugs accountable.  I'm sorry to say it, but frankly he's been failing miserably at it.

It seems as though every time that Harper does something abusive to this country, Mulcair barks at the Liberals.

Okay, I get it.  Mulcair sees the Liberals as a threat.  However, falling into the Stephen Harper pattern of trying to discredit the Liberals at every turn distracts him from doing his job - which should be taking Harper to task for absolutely everything that he does.

If Mulcair wants to reside at this nation's most coveted address, 24 Sussex Drive, he has to show Canadians that he is capable of far better than Harper has provided.  Instead, he more often than not seems to be in cahoots with Harper - attacking the Liberals instead of the Conservative government.

In the midst of the Senate Expenses Scandal, we haven't heard Mulcair make changes to his party's accountability in the House.  All we've heard is a glib, simplistic bunch of nonsense about abolishing the Senate, without actually addressing the far more central issue of accountability in Parliament.

The problem isn't that Mulcair doesn't attack the Conservatives - he certainly does - but rather that he doesn't focus his attacks.  Instead of holding the government to account for its actions and abuses of power, he dilutes the effectiveness of his comments by always seeming to add "the Liberals do it too".

The effect is like watching a cat being taunted by magpies - the cat simply cannot decide which magpie to go after, and fails to go after either effectively.  Mulcair has relatively little excuse for his performance, either.  There is no shortage of things that he could be calling Harper and his minions to task for.

First and foremost, Mulcair has to step forth and show himself to be capable of holding the current government to account.  He hasn't done that very well to date.  If he wishes to be the man sitting in 24 Sussex in a couple of years' time, Mulcair needs to get his focus sorted out.  At the rate things are going, even his ability to hang on to Stornaway is becoming questionable.  

Watch As Our Prison Costs Go Up

Travis Baumgartner was sentenced today.  He was sentenced to the equivalent of "40 years to life" for a bloody robbery that left three dead.

Previously, the standard sentence that Baumgartner would have received was "25 to life".  That was until the Harper Government passed a law which changed the sentencing rules for multiple murders.  Once a prisoner had served 25 years of their sentence in prison, they became eligible to apply for parole.  Baumgartner will be in his late sixties before he is eligible to apply for parole.

It seems to me that this more than a little bit pointless.  All it does is ensure that Baumgartner will be incarcerated for longer - at taxpayer expense.

This is somewhat pointless in my view.  If, after 25 years, Baumgartner is no threat to society, what is to be gained by incarcerating him for another fifteen years?  Precious little.  If he is a murderer as appalling as Clifford Olson or Paul Bernardo, then the parole evaluation should identify that and deny parole.

The notion of justice is complex and subtle.  It is a balance between rehabilitation and punishment.  Incarceration is, in our legal system, a legitimate form of punishment.  To make incarceration so severe that a prisoner has very little chance of being released before they are truly aged serves little real purpose.  What incentive is there for Baumgartner to put in the work to rehabilitate himself?  Precious little at this point.

Victim's rights groups bleat incessantly when an offender applies for parole - especially when that offender has been as high profile as Clifford Olson was.  They complain that even having a parole hearing is some kind of violation of the victim.  Perhaps it is, but I don't think that's really the case.  These people more often than not have confused justice with punishment.  Nothing can undo what has been done.  The world doesn't work that way.  But there is little to be gained by locking someone up indefinitely.

I'm not arguing that Baumgartner doesn't deserve a stiff sentence.  Nor am I arguing that at 25 years he should be paroled automatically.  I simply do not believe that some kind of injustice has been done because he can apply for parole at 25 years.  Even if he is paroled at 25 years, he remains under supervision for the rest of his life.  That's a pretty short leash, in my opinion.  Does that mean that Baumgartner will commit no further crimes once released?  No guarantees there, but justice isn't about guarantees.  It is about appropriately balancing punishment with rehabilitation.  People are not something that you can just "throw away".

Along with mandatory minimum sentences, this is another piece of the Conservative "tough on crime" nonsense which does nothing for society except increasing the taxpayer bill for prisons.

Ask yourself this - would you rather spend money on incarcerating criminals or would you prefer to see those funds used for public education or health care?  The United States has already tried this experiment.  It is now a country with the greatest percentage of its population either incarcerated or under "supervised release" (aka Parole or probation).  States like California have been driven to the brink of bankruptcy by these laws and the heavy handed approach to sentencing that they demand.

Think I'm Joking About Corporate Feudalism?

Perhaps you think that I'm being somewhat Pollyanna about the issue of corporate feudalism and its rise in both Canada and the US.

I'm not kidding.  This is possibly the most serious issue facing Canadian workers in the last 100 years.

Just as the Temporary Foreign Worker program has served to undermine Canadian workers by supplanting them with people willing to work for much less money, the Unpaid Internship undermines students, educational institutions and workers even further.

University student Samantha Bokma said she was surprised when her job with Tory MPP Rod Jackson ended suddenly in August — she had expected to stay on part-time as his constituency assistant as she had during the last school year 

It was a good front-line job for a political science major: answering phones and doing intake interviews with constituents looking for help. The 22-year-old said she helped write some of Jackson’s monthly newspaper articles. 

“But then they told me they weren’t going to renew my contract because they didn’t have enough in the budget,” said the fourth-year student at Laurentian University’s Barrie campus. She resigned the next day to start looking for new part-time work. 

So she was alarmed a week later to see an ad for what looked like her replacement — without pay. 

“The duties described in the posting are pretty much what I did for pay — answering phones, greeting constituents, preparing correspondence,” said Bokma, 22, who filed a complaint Tuesday with Ontario’s labor ministry, arguing it is illegal for an employer to replace a paid worker with an unpaid intern.

The argument has been made more than a few times that graduates from various educational institutions don't have the "skills" that businesses need.  Therefore, businesses have turned to "Internships" as a way for students to build directly relevant skills up before they graduate.  In my experience, the notion of an Internship (back in the day, we used to call them summer students) is a bad joke in terms of providing practical knowledge and skills.  Frankly, except in the rarest of cases, interns find themselves doing all of the tasks that the rest of the department can't stand doing.  In IT, managing the backups does nothing to develop critical skills.

More recently, we have seen the paid internship turn into the Unpaid Internship.  Same nonsense as before, except the student doesn't get compensated for their efforts.  The claim that companies make is that they have to spend all this money on training the intern, so why should the intern be paid?

It's simple, actually.  The business is training the intern for whatever specific tools they will be using to carry out their duties.  No employee should be held responsible for the training on specific tools.  This is ridiculous.  Ultimately, the unpaid internship model reflects the growing mentality in business that people are an expense rather than an asset.

The expectation that someone who has just graduated from a program has "immediately applicable" skills is farcical.  A university graduate is someone who knows how to learn.  Even in highly focused programs such as Engineering, new graduates have limited skills - they have knowledge and a framework within which to develop further skills.

When a business hires an employee, the employee is making a commitment to that employee to apply their skills and knowledge to that company's business objectives.  Pretty basic, and fairly obvious.  The company is responsible for providing appropriate training for any specific skills that they are demanding.

Ultimately, this is creating an environment where the "haves" in society will be wealthy enough to put themselves forward, and the "have-nots" will find their lot in life pushed further and further down.

[Update 14/9/13]
As if they couldn't sink any lower, a high end hotel is trying make a busboy job an unpaid internship:

http://o.canada.com/2013/09/13/fairmont-unpaid-busperson-vancouver/http://o.canada.com/2013/09/13/fairmont-unpaid-busperson-vancouver/

Seriously?  Bussing tables is a bottom floor job in restaurants.  The person who takes this job as an intern is going to learn what about the business?
[/Update]

The PQ's "Charter of Quebec Values"

Lately, there has been much of an uproar made over the PQ's "Charter of Quebec Values" in the news.

Frankly, the entire thing strikes me as a ridiculous bit of pot-stirring on the part of the Marois-led PQ government.  The proposed Charter imposes a set of arbitrary limitations on religious expression that make no sense in the bigger picture.

Restricting religious symbols has been tested repeatedly under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Quebec's so-called Charter is guaranteed to fly in the face of the Charter, and Marois is no doubt planning to invoke the "Not withstanding" clause that has enabled Quebec to support their equally unconstitutional language laws should she actually manage to get this passed in the National Assembly.

What makes Quebec's situation interesting is that they are adopting a stance that is almost as hard-line here as existed when the Catholic Church held sway with the Duplessis government.   The Quiet Revolution which followed turned the province away from overt religious controls.  In light of the Quiet Revolution and the intervening decades, this legislation makes absolutely no sense.

The PQ is playing a game.  I don't think that Marois, or anybody else in the PQ, actually believes what this legislation represents.  The more I think about it, Marois is playing for something different - she is trying to find a way to fan the flames of the separatist fires that she believes won her the last election.  In reality, I suspect that the Charest government had simply run its course and much of the vote for the PQ was a vote against the Charest government rather than a vote for separatism.

The PQ is trying to set up a debate which they can play on in the next provincial election - more or less taking a page from Harper's playbook in 2008.

Canada's Far Right Next Attack On Nenshi

It's no big secret that the Conservative power base in Calgary was profoundly pissed off when Naheed Nenshi won the Mayoral race in 2010.  The amount of vitriol seen in the Sun's pages after election day was astonishing, and since then, they have taken every opportunity to snipe at Nenshi.

This is no surprise.  They were also suspiciously silent when it came out that Cal Wenzel and a bunch of his pals had ponied up over a million dollars to the Manning Centre to build a slate of candidates that would be "friendly" to their interests in the next city council.

Their most recent attack on Nenshi began this week, with the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation publishing an "exposé" of how the City of Calgary had spent money with the Pembina Institute.  According to the CTF, the City spent somewhere on the order of $113,552  (which, frankly, is barely one professional consultant salary) annually with the Pembina Institute.  Apparently, this is a big bad thing.  I will note that CTF says nothing of whether the city has spent money with other "think tank" consultancy organizations or not, but they are certainly vocal about complaining that money was spent with the Pembina Institute.

The funny part about the whole thing is that CTF tips their hand in their interview with the CBC:

But Fildebrandt said it’s hard to imagine the city hiring the right-leaning Fraser Institute to consult on something such as property tax reform.

In short, whether Fildebrandt admits it or not, he's really complaining because he doesn't like the political stripe of the Pembina Institute's positions.

A closer look at the documents that the CTF recovered from the city reveals something much more significant about the spending with Pembina that calls into question the CTF's complaint:

1)  The documents retrieved show spending with the Pembina Institute starting in 2007 through 2012.

2)  Over half of the spending took place before the October 2010 civic election put Nenshi into the Mayor's chair ... which means that the process started under developer darling Dave Bronconnier's tenure as Mayor.

Take a close look at the following summary of invoices from CTF's FOIP documents:

Year	Total Invoices
2007	$10,504.64
2008	$25,196.58
2009	$13,701.92
2010	$178,446.55
2011	$131,384.32
2012	$787.50

If we take a raw average across the full five years, the annual average spend with Pembina was $60,003.59; If we chop off 2007 and 2012 as the outlier times the average spend jumps to $87,182.34.

Going a step or two further, prior to Mayor Nenshi being elected in 2010, the city spent $212,998.53 with the Pembina Institute, and $147,022.98 since.  

While Ezra Levant and the rest of the Sun Media crowd has dutifully jumped all over this faux issue, the reality is that very little, if any, of the spending was initiated under Nenshi.  More to the point, there is no evidence presented that there is any wrongdoing taking place.  

The CTF is busy trying to politicize a non-issue that they likely wouldn't be complaining about if the recipient of this spend was the Fraser Institute or other group that they found to be "ideologically acceptable".  

One can just imagine the outcry if the City of Calgary paid the Fraser Institute to write a report on building a competitive business environment or property tax reform. The contents of the report might contain excellent data and recommendations, but that is to miss the point. Groups engaged in political debate – even the non-partisan – should never receive a penny of taxpayer’s cash.

As we all know, these organizations can structure themselves in such a way that it never appears that the "lobbying part of things" intersects directly with the "consulting" division.  It is no secret that the "Manning Centre for Building Democracy" is built up of at least two divisions:

The Manning Centre is a non-profit corporation that focuses on political, conservative-oriented activities. As such, it is not a registered charity and donations are not eligible for tax receipts. Activities such as research and education, which are classified as charitable, are undertaken by the Manning Foundation – a registered charity.

Note the division of responsibilities?  So, if the City was to hire the Manning Centre for some kind of consultancy would ultimately be hiring what is obviously a partisan organization.  They could create a division called "Manning Competitive Institute" to engage in economic competitive consultation.  On the surface, it would appear to be independent of the other parts of the Manning Centre, but it still ends up as a division of the same organization.

The CTF moaning about the Pembina institute and trying to cover their partisan bias by saying that "no think tank" should get public funds is a very flimsy fig leaf cover.

I might have more respect for the CTF if they had done a survey of how much money is being spent on think tanks in general, instead of attempting to go on a partisan muck-raking expedition and then lying and distorting the results.  

Creating Hierarchies of Rights

Recently, we have had a series of stories where there have been arguments put forth that there should be "exemptions" in non-discrimination laws for religious beliefs.

Yesterday's column by Licia Corbella in the Calgary Herald positively oozed with a smug sense of religious entitlement, and attempted to hold atheists responsible for the acts of some truly vile members of humanity's past.  The column ended with a claim that Christianity has been discriminated against.

Then, on Huffington Post, we find the owners of a bakery in Oregon shutting their doors in the wake of refusing to provide a cake to a lesbian wedding.

"I think [the state labor commissioner] is going to have decide what's more important: The Oregon State Constitution, or the statute that was passed in 2007," he said at the time. "They dropped the ball by not putting in any exemption for religious beliefs."

Which leads very nicely into the issue that I want to address.  Non-discrimination statutes usually end up existing because identifiable groups are being marginalized routinely by overt discrimination.

When someone makes a call for "religious beliefs exemption", what they are actually calling for is the right to continue imposing their religious beliefs on everybody around them.  This creates a false hierarchy of rights.

The point of civil rights is that they are equal across the board.  In order for this to be true, we must acknowledge them as clearly individual rights.  The notion of "Freedom of Religion" grants every person the free right to believe and worship as they see fit.  No problem.  What it does not grant anyone is the right to impose their religious beliefs on others who do not share them.

Similarly, non-discrimination laws, which often are based on gender or race but more recently have been written to include members of the LGBT community as well, essentially put into the language of law explicit protections for those who are often treated as second class citizens or have historically been denied full rights under law.

The problem that arises here is obvious.  The minute that there is an explicit exemption for one particular kind of right over another right, the law has created a hierarchy of rights where the very notion of equality itself precludes a hierarchy.

What is truly unfortunate is that so often religion is used as an excuse by those who engage in blatant discrimination.  Consider the following from the Oregon bakery incident.

In response to the complaint, Melissa Klein argued that turning away the couple was "definitely not discrimination at all." 

"We don't have anything against lesbians or homosexuals," she said in August. "It has to do with our morals and beliefs. It's so frustrating because we went through all of this in January, when it all came out."

Let me be utterly clear about this:  refusing service to someone based on a grounds such as the other person's sexuality is discriminatory.  Period.  It doesn't matter one iota that the refusal has its roots in that person's religion - especially when that person is running a business that serves the general public.  A bakery serves the general public, as does a florist.  The only way that I can see such a business getting away with such discrimination is if they structured themselves as some kind of "society" with restricted membership.  (How they would do that _and_ be a sustainable business is beyond me, but I suppose they could try)

The minute that laws are written which give "exemptions" based on other rights, we create an environment where Orwell's "Animal Farm comes to life, and some are more equal than others.

Ms. Corbella Argues That Atheists Are Bad People

In her column in today's Calgary Herald, Licia Corbella gets on her high horse about atheists.

The title of her column is ridiculous enough:  "Will Atheism Be Held To Account Like Other Creeds?"

Well, hallelujah, praise the Lord! At long last, atheism is being declared a creed and is endowed with the same religious protections as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other faiths in Ontario schools, anyway. 

So, what’s a good Protestant girl like me doing celebrating such a ruling by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal? This may be a leap of faith, but here’s hoping that maybe now, atheists — many of whom have proven themselves to be a highly motivated evangelistic group accustomed to ramming their minority religion down the throats of the majority — will face the same scrutiny of their beliefs as traditional faiths have been undergoing for decades in Canada at their behest.
On Aug. 13, a tribunal ruling called R.C. versus District School Board of Niagara, declared that not believing in a deity must be a protected belief under the Human Rights Code. 

The ruling stems from a complaint by Rene Chouinard, a Grimsby, Ont., father of three children, who describes himself as an atheist. 

In November 2009, when his youngest daughter was in Grade 5, a note was sent home informing parents that Gideons International was offering free New Testaments to all Grade 5 students. If parents wanted their children to receive the free mini Bible, they had to sign a permission form and the book would then be distributed only to those children after school hours. 

Chouinard was “offended.” He contacted the school principal and asked that he be permitted to distribute a book called, Just Pretend, which promotes atheism and compares God to Santa Claus.
“He believed that other parents might be upset about being asked to consent to their children receiving such materials in the same way he felt offended in being asked to consent to his children receiving the Gideons’ materials, and it would encourage a change in policy to eliminate the distribution of religious texts,” states the ruling. 

And that’s exactly what ended up happening. At a school council meeting of parents on Nov. 30, 2009, it was decided that neither the Gideon Bible nor Just Pretend would be distributed.
But that wasn’t enough for Chouinard. He pushed to have the rules changed. Already the rules allowed any other religious group to do what the Gideons have been doing for decades. But no others had applied, except for this persistent father. However, his request was declined for two reasons: First, because “atheism is not a religion” pursuant to the criteria being followed at the time and second, because Just Pretend is “a secondary publication as opposed to a globally recognized sacred text or authoritative source of any religion (or even any belief).” 

Which brings us to the Aug. 13 decision. “Protection against discrimination because of religion, in my view, must include protection of the applicants’ belief that there is no deity,” wrote David A. Wright, associate chairman of the tribunal. 

While it appears Wright’s decision is flawed, in that the Bible is a sacred text and Just Pretend is not, the ruling is a relief, nonetheless. 

Atheism is indeed a belief system that holds mighty power. Let me explain. Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, are fond of claiming that religion “ruins everything” and is to blame for promoting conflict and violence. However, they rarely study the role atheism has played in creating wars and killing.
As Dinesh D’Souza writes in his New York Times bestselling book, What’s so Great About Christianity, “five hundred years after the Inquisition, we are still talking about it, but less than two decades after the collapse of ‘godless Communism,’ there is an eerie silence about the mass graves of the Soviet Gulag. Why the absence of accountability? Does atheism mean never having to say you are sorry?” 

Let’s look at the Inquisition, as an example. According to Henry Kamen’s book, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, over a 350-year period only about 2,000 people were killed. That’s just 5.7 people per year. In communist China in 2009 alone, however, it is estimated that 5,000 people were executed by the state, many for adhering to beliefs other than atheism, such as Falun Gong. 

“In the past hundred years or so,” writes D’Souza, “the most powerful atheist regimes — Communist Russia, Communist China and Nazi Germany — have wiped out people in astronomical numbers.” Stalin wiped out 20 million, Mao Zedong’s atheist regime killed 70 million of its own citizens and “Hitler comes in a distant third with around 10 million murders, six million of them Jews,” states D’Souza. 

Add to that the killing regimes of other atheist poster boys like Lenin, Khrushchev, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il, to name just a few. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, murdered 1.5 to two million citizens — or one-fifth of its population. 

As D’Souza writes, in just a few decades atheism has killed more people than all religions combined since time immemorial. So, yes, atheism is a powerful creed. But it’s powerful in another way, too. Think about this. Since these atheists have been successful in wiping out virtually any mention of the true meaning behind the national holidays of Christmas and Easter in our schools, for instance, doesn’t that mean that their minority religion is the one being adhered to in our schools to the exclusion of all others? Doesn’t that mean, then, that the creed of atheism is more equal than all other religions and that it is Christianity, primarily, which as the founding and majority ethic and creed of this country that has been discriminated against? 

Those are questions worth pondering. 

Licia Corbella is a columnist and editorial page editor.

If Ms. Corbella's thesis wasn't ludicrous enough, what she proceeds to derive is almost laughable.

First, let's be clear about something.  Atheism is in no respect a "religion" per se.  It lacks all of the key features that typically are embodied in a religion.  There is no belief in a higher power, there are no "sacred texts", no rituals.  In the most classical of understandings, atheism literally means "without god" - in other words, an atheist simply does not accept the notion that there is a god - or any other supernatural being - and certainly would question the validity of claiming that some text is the word of some god or another.  However, more so than Christianity, being an atheist is a highly individual thing - there are not exactly sects of atheism per se.

Atheism is indeed a belief system that holds mighty power. Let me explain. Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, are fond of claiming that religion “ruins everything” and is to blame for promoting conflict and violence. However, they rarely study the role atheism has played in creating wars and killing.As Dinesh D’Souza writes in his New York Times bestselling book, What’s so Great About Christianity, “five hundred years after the Inquisition, we are still talking about it, but less than two decades after the collapse of ‘godless Communism,’ there is an eerie silence about the mass graves of the Soviet Gulag. Why the absence of accountability? Does atheism mean never having to say you are sorry?” 

Turning to Dinesh D'Souza for a critique of atheism is, to put it mildly, laughable.  I'm not even sure that the last Pope (Benedict XVI) would agree with D'Souza on much.

D'Souza's attempt to pin the deeds of Stalin, Pol Pot and others on atheists has become quite the fashionable thing to repeat among religious apologists.  However, it falls flat for a few very good reasons:

1.  The Crusades, or the Inquisition were done very much "In the name of Christ".  In fact, the Inquisition was guided by a mysterious little tome written by a couple of monks called "The Malleus Maleficarum".  A book which when read through modern eyes is filled with circular logic and poor reasoning.  The Crusades were very specifically backed by various Popes.

2.  While Stalin, Pol Pot and others certainly carried out atrocities, they did not declare their actions as being done in the name of atheism.  In other words, like despots throughout history, their actions were largely guided and driven by their own lust for power and control.  No more, no less.  In short, Stalin is culpable for his actions, Pol Pot for his.  Pretty simple.

Let’s look at the Inquisition, as an example. According to Henry Kamen’s book, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, over a 350-year period only about 2,000 people were killed. That’s just 5.7 people per year. In communist China in 2009 alone, however, it is estimated that 5,000 people were executed by the state, many for adhering to beliefs other than atheism, such as Falun Gong. 

Wow.  So you want to play the "magnitude" game?  Five people per year, that's no so bad, right?  Wrong.  When the reasons for it are nothing less than challenging the official religion's dogma, five is five too many.

When we talk about China, guess what?  It is another case not unlike Stalin.  It is a country that does not have Freedom of Religion in its legal canon.  Further, it has made practicing religion illegal in a number of circumstances.  China also executes thousands of people for lots of other reasons besides religion.  This is a totalitarian state which sees threats in many corners, and moves drastically to eradicate them.

Is this because China is officially atheist?  No.  It is because China's government is paranoid like other totalitarian governments before it.  The desire to retain power has led them to enacting laws which are appalling to any objective observer.

Ironically, the very fact of the Inquisition demonstrates the religious flip side of this.  To the Medieval Church, heresy was every bit as big a threat to the power of the Church - a very real, political power at the time.  The church itself moved very harshly to eliminate this "threat" in the form of the Inquisition.  (Notably, the Inquisition has not really been disbanded, but rather renamed in the Catholic Church)  Ultimately, this is an example of power corrupting, and doing so absolutely.

Should the Chinese be held accountable for this?  No question about it.  That said, trying to pin it on "atheism" in general is ridiculous.

Since these atheists have been successful in wiping out virtually any mention of the true meaning behind the national holidays of Christmas and Easter in our schools, for instance, doesn’t that mean that their minority religion is the one being adhered to in our schools to the exclusion of all others?

Really?  It hasn't been the greed and avarice of commercialization that has erased the religious meaning of Christmas and Easter?  Last I checked, that has very little to do with atheists - Christianity has been gradually shedding its hold on the meaning of those holidays for decades.  That has been going on ever since the beginning of the Baby Boom era, and was well underway when I was born.

What has really happened here is that Christian religion has lots its grip on the collective mindshare.  While atheism has been growing, and has become more vocal about things, that has more to do with a clarified understanding of what "Freedom of Religion" means:  It means that religion is a fundamentally personal matter.  The official arms of state have gradually shed the various artifacts of religion gradually - schools have been the last to truly do so.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that the creed of atheism is more equal than all other religions and that it is Christianity, primarily, which as the founding and majority ethic and creed of this country that has been discriminated against? 

Oh yes, the argument that the majority is the only rule that matters.  Sorry, but the minute that we granted protection to all religions in the form of enshrining "Freedom of Religion" in the constitution, the "majority" religion lost any special status.  Yes, I'm sure the majority of the original colonists in North America were Christian.  That was some 300 years ago now.  Time to move on.

Freedom of Religion includes Freedom _FROM_ Religion