AHA President Sunil Panikkath
Most of us started out 2021 hoping for a new beginning, for our families from the end of the pandemic, for our republic after the 2020 election, and for the AHA which was starting a search for a new leader.
Our nationwide search ended in great success when our new Executive Director, Nadya Dutchin, joined us in December. With impressive experience in nonprofit leadership and being a humanist dedicated to a more just and equitable world, she will be an asset to the humanist community. Her experience working with young people and BIPOC communities on the overwhelmingly important issue of our time, the climate crisis, will be of great value in executing on two of the strategic goals of the AHA: to accelerate participation by young humanists and to expand humanist involvement in social justice.
While we were in a leadership transition, our excellent staff team continued to work tirelessly under the interim leadership of Deputy Director Nicole Carr. We had another very successful virtual conference, and our Education Center hosted more than ninety virtual events on topics of concern to humanists, ranging widely from climate equity to children’s mental health during the pandemic. During the largest grassroots lobby day in our history, humanists nationwide met with more than fifty congressional offices to advocate for the Do No Harm Act, intended to ensure that no one can use their religious beliefs to sidestep long-established civil rights protections. Our legal efforts continued strongly, with our Legal Center filing a lawsuit on behalf of a student and her parents against an Oklahoma school system that hosted a “missionaries” assembly every month for decades for students as young as prekindergarten, during which students were coerced into participating in talks about Jesus and were given copies of the New Testament. A clear violation of the Establishment Clause.
While the hopes for a great new beginning at the AHA came to fruition, the hopes we had across the planet for moving beyond the pandemic in 2021, did not. I wish you and your family the very best as we all work our way through some very challenging times for our physical and mental health.
Hopes of a new beginning for our republic also did not pan out. As a community that takes seriously our tagline about being good, the continued degradation of ethical behavior in our public life is of deep concern. A society in which a large fraction of politicians and other public officials consider it the norm to continuously lie about something as fundamental as the results of a presidential election, is a society with a very worrisome future. Organizations such as ours which represent a minority viewpoint need the highest standards of democracy and the rule of law to be maintained in our republic if we are to have any hope of a level playing field on which we can pursue our mission.
As the truth continues to be a casualty, we will be called on to make choices again in the 2022 elections. Registering and voting is the least we can all do to preserve our democracy, but you could go further by impressing on all around you, especially young people, the critical importance of the nation’s choices this year. Even as many leaders of the godly work in favor of voter suppression, doing whatever you can to make sure that every eligible voter who wants to vote is able to vote, would be a great way of being good and showing that you would rather be good than godly any day.
—Sunil Panikkath