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Melody Hensley is the Executive Director of CFI–Washington, DC and organizer of the annual CFI sponsored Women in Secularism national conference. She is also a CFI Certified Secular Celebrant, legally able to officiate weddings without a religious exemption in Washington, DC.

Ms. Hensley has a background in volunteering and community building. She has been involved with church-state separation and secular activism, as well as reproductive rights and progressive issues, in the DC area for over a decade. She also serves on the advisory council for Secular Woman Inc. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Simon, and dogs, Penelope and Princess Peapod.

About the Center For Inquiry

The mission of the Center for Inquiry is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

To oppose and supplant the mythological narratives of the past, and the dogmas of the present, the world needs an institution devoted to promoting science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. The Center for Inquiry is that institution.

At the Center for Inquiry, we believe that evidence-based reasoning, in which humans work together to address common concerns, is critical for modern world civilization. Moreover, unlike many other institutions, we maintain that scientific methods and reasoning should be utilized in examining the claims of both pseudoscience and religion. We reject mysticism and blind faith. No topic should be placed off limits to scrutiny—certainly not fringe science and religion, which have an enormous influence on beliefs and conduct.

We also maintain that values are properly the subject of study and discussion as much as empirical claims. The Center for Inquiry studies and promotes human values based on a naturalistic outlook. Ideological doctrine and religious dogma have no more right to dictate our moral norms than they do to influence scientific research.

The Center for Inquiry supports research, but our mission activities go far beyond sound scholarship. The Center for Inquiry, and its affiliates, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism, also carry out their work through education, publishing, advocacy, and social services. The Center for Inquiry has established dozens of regional centers and communities, which provide a means of delivering educational programs and services on a local level and provide a venue for like-minded individuals to meet and share experiences. In addition, the Center for Inquiry has affiliates and sponsors programs in many different countries. A secular society ultimately should embrace all of humanity, not just selected countries.

In aiming to foster a secular society, we do not seek to abridge the rights of believers. We vigorously object to government support of religion and the use of religious dogma to justify public policy; we do not oppose the free exercise of religion. The secular society we are building is a community of reason and compassion in which the dignity and fundamental rights of all individuals are respected.

Fostering a secular society requires attention to many specific goals, but three goals in particular represent the focus of our activities:

an end to the influence that religion and pseudoscience have on public policy an end to the privileged position that religion and pseudoscience continue to enjoy in many societies an end to the stigma attached to being a nonbeliever, whether the nonbeliever describes her/himself as an atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker or skeptic.

> Melody Hensley is the Executive Director of CFI–Washington, DC and organizer of the annual CFI sponsored Women in Secularism national conference. She is also a CFI Certified Secular Celebrant, legally able to officiate weddings without a religious exemption in Washington, DC.

Ms. Hensley has a background in volunteering and community building. She has been involved with church-state separation and secular activism, as well as reproductive rights and progressive issues, in the DC area for over a decade. She also serves on the advisory council for Secular Woman Inc. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Simon, and dogs, Penelope and Princess Peapod.

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My thoughts:

“She is also a CFI Certified Secular Celebrant, legally able to officiate weddings without a religious exemption in Washington, DC”

Translation: She marries gay people with no pastoral authority because its not recgnized as a real marriage by the vast majority of the people anyway. She gets paid to wave a magic wand and say”presto, you are now married”
Secondly, WTH is CFI Certified Secular Celebrant? Sounds like a made-up, self-important sounding title.

“Ms. Hensley has a background in volunteering and community building”.

Translation: this is just a fancy way of saying she’s unemployed and has a big mouth and likes to use it bullying others when she’s not bullying her own emasculated husband who probably prefer the likes of pajama boys anyway.

“She has been involved with church-state separation and secular activism, as well as reproductive rights and progressive issues, in the DC area for over a decade.”

Translation: she hates Christians, especially Tea Party members, has a major in Gender Studies, loves the Freedom From Religion Foundation and thinks that gays should be able to marry; actually that human beings should be able to have sex with anyone or anything including animals and inanimate objects.

“She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Simon, and dogs, Penelope and Princess Peapod. “

Translation: she has no children because her husband is repulsed by her and confirmed that he is gay after taking a double dose of viagra and it having virtually no effect on him with her in bed. Her dogs are her children and she pays more attention to them than she does her husband. I mean c’mon. The name of her dog, “Princess Peapod” confirms she is truly mental.