Worth Noting

Humanist, Nov, 1999 by Marian Hetherly

* Marches and candlelight vigils will be held across the United States on Human Rights Day, December 10, to help end child labor and sweatshop abuses. The National Labor Committee says this year's Holiday Season of Conscience will focus on requiring schools, hospitals, governments, and other tax-funded entities to condition their purchasing upon full public disclosure of factory names, locations, and wage rates.

* The American Civil Liberties Union is urging corporate America to drop work-place urine testing, citing ten years of evidence that the tests neither decrease accidents and absenteeism nor increase efficiency and productivity. The ACLU's special report, "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," says the drug testing is "junk science" based on unsubstantiated claims and phantom research and there is no legitimate business reason for sacrificing a person's right to privacy.

* President Clinton in September vetoed an appropriations bill approved by Congress that sought to block a Washington, D.C., voter initiative permitting the use of medical marijuana. The veto came less than two weeks after a federal court ruled that Congress acted improperly in attempting to block D.C. from tallying the results of the 1998 initiative.

* Reproductive rights advocates are urging members of Congress to vote against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would recognize separate and equal rights for a fetus and punish those who injure or cause death to one while committing certain federal crimes or while in the armed forces. Also opposed is Oklahoma Representative Ernest Istook's expected spending bill amendment that would require teens to obtain parental consent to receive services from federally funded family planning clinics and eliminate confidential screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

* A Maryland appeals court ruled in August that a law making the Friday before Easter a school holiday doesn't violate church-state separation. The court held that the holiday could be justified on secular grounds--for example, the possibility of high absenteeism--but failed to deal with the opinion supported by the American Humanist Association that the law put the state in the position of favoring the Catholic and Protestant date for Easter over the Eastern Orthodox date.

* Religious freedom groups have asked a Texas appeals court judge to reverse his decision barring a divorced mother from taking her five-year-old daughter to a predominantly gay Protestant church. Acting on a complaint by the mother's Jewish ex-husband, Judge Keith Nelson ruled that only "main line churches" could be used for the daughter's religious training and the Metropolitan Community Church in Wichita Falls did not meet his definition of main line.

* If the faithful are too busy to pray in person, for a small fee a computer will do it for them. Prayerwheel advertises that its computers will say your Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, or Protestant prayers daily for one year--three Catholic prayers said each day, for example, is $19.97--but the service makes "no warranties or guarantees, or implied guarantees, that the prayers will be heard or granted by God."

* Humans may have almost twice as many genes as previously thought, according to the biotechnology company Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc., based in Palo Alto, California. Incyte, one of several private and public efforts competing to map all human genes, says its data confirms some 140,000 genes, as compared to earlier estimates of about 80,000.

* Congratulations to former Humanist columnist Shawn Carlson for being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a five-year stipend of between $200,000 and $375,000 given annually to a select number of individuals judged "extraordinarily creative and promising." An adjunct physics professor at San Diego State University and founder of the Society of Amateur Scientists, Carlson made the scientific process less mystifying in his "Science and Society" columns in the early 1990s in the Humanist and today continues that work in his "Amateur Scientists" column for Scientific American and in interviews for major publications and radio and television shows.

Marian Hetherly is an editor at the Humanist.