October 14th 2008
Allan Spear
On Oct. 11, former state Senator, Allan Spear, died. The Star Tribune recounted at length all the good he had done for civil rights, civil liberties, every good thing a liberal would want, and how he was the first state politician to come out as gay and how he championed gay rights, etc. All in all a very good man. But as the scientist and Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg, famously said, “You will always have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
So here’s what the paper didn’t say about Spear, clearly one of those good people:
Several years ago I was lobbying on behalf of CHILD (Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty) to repeal Minnesota’s statute that says faith healing IS health care and therefore parents who let a child die by using prayer as the sole “treatment” could not be prosecuted. An 11-year-old boy, Ian Lundmann, had died of diabetes when his Christian Science mother and stepfather relied solely on the incantations of a CS practitioner for medical care. I had Senate and House sponsors of the bill, but it had to get through the Senate judiciary committee to have a chance of passage. Spear was the chair of that committee.
We had hearings involving victims of faith healing that were wrenching and unbearably heartbreaking. The biological father of the boy (who was working in another state) came to testify bringing his son’s baseball glove. He told me he spent all his time dealing with the urge to commit either murder or suicide. A retarded girl whose condition was the result of CS medical neglect testified about watching her much-loved brother die on the bathroom floor of untreated (meaning CS only) asthma. Rita Swan, president of CHILD, told of how she and her husband Doug, when they were Christian Scientists, had let their 16-month-old son die of meningitis for lack of real medical care. (That jolted them into reality and their decades-long campaign to repeal faith healing statutes.) She gave a straightforward, unemotional, textbook account of CS beliefs.
Spear and other religion-deluded legislators accused her of religion-bashing. We heard over and over how CS members were such loving parents and how their deeply held beliefs had to be respected. The CS members were always at the hearings, looking educated, well dressed, middle class and respectable. Yet their worldview was right out of the Dark Ages. One of them actually testified that if the statute was repealed she “would not be allowed to fail” in her healing “treatment” – that is, she would not be allowed to let her child die.
Christian Science teaches that disease is not real and can only become real if one allows oneself to recognize it. CS prayer amounts to a ritualistic refusal to acknowledge the presence of disease. I saw the medical examiner’s pictures of Ian’s body. Truly horribly, extremely emaciated. Yet his grandmother in her testimony said, “I was with Ian the day before he died, and he looked just fine to me.” And indeed, no doubt he did. The power of CS is such that this grandmother really could see only what her religion told her she must see.
During all this I talked with Spear about our bill and the suffering the faith healing statute caused. He lashed out at me in anger. “Oh YOU! I know you! You’re an ATHEIST! All you want to do is bash religion!” As though atheists are incapable of feeling compassion. As though our commitment to atheism gives us the same immunity to suffering as Spear showed in sacrificing his humanity on the altar of religion. Our bill failed because of Spear’s opposition.
So, yes, Spear was a good man who always did good things. For him to do this horrendously evil thing, that took religion.
