AA BS

Judge backs Redding Atheist who balked at Religious Anti-drug Program.

Summary: An Atheist serving a drug program was order into drug treatment. Despite asking for a non-religious program, and despite such programs being available, his jackass of a corrections officer told him he had to stay in the program run by Alcoholics Anonymous. After being forced to attend anyway, he was then arrested because he was being “disruptive” in the program.

I’m of course happy that the court saw things the right way, and didn’t force someone to be subjected to religious bullshit in order to complete his sentence. The disturbing part is how hard it was for this man to get justice done. He should not have had to go through the ordeal at all. It doesn’t seem from the article that the parole office in question received any kind of discipline for his actions however. I hope he gets a large settlement. A message has to be sent that violating peoples constitutional right to not have religion shoved down their throat by the government.

On a side note: It’s disturbing that Alcoholics Anonymous gets so many “captive” clients, because they’ve never shown that their programs are at all effective. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that they are less effective than many alternatives. AA was developed using so called “spiritual” values, not with any scientific study. Not surprisingly, when you try to tackle something as complicated as substance abuse using what “feels good” you tend to fail. Proving effectiveness with research is time consuming and difficult after all.

(Please spare me your stories of how AA helped your uncle/dad/mom/whatever. If you don’t understand why anecdotal evidence is of no use, then you need to go do your homework.)