Freedom From Religion Foundation2006 - 29th Annual Convention |
The deadline to order meals is Monday, October 2.
(Meal reservations must be received via mail by the FFRF office no later than Friday, Sept. 31. You may phone the FFRF office 9-5 CST weekdays no later than Monday, Oct. 2 to reserve meals at 1-608-256-8900.)
Convention Speakers
Michelle Goldberg is a contributing writer for Salon.com, where she's covered everything from New York's drug laws to Kurdish refugees in the Middle East, reporting from all over the United States and from Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel and the West Bank. One constant in her peripatetic career is a fascination with the role of ideology in politics, leading her to report extensively on both sides of America's ever-seething culture war.
Goldberg's interest in the conservative movement was awakened in her early 20s, when, after finishing her Masters Degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and moving to San Francisco, she wrote a series of freelance articles about the ex-gay movement. She went to a huge ex-gay convention in Los Angeles and later profiled a group of men living in a Northern California "rehab" center that promised to cure them of their homosexuality. It was her initiation into the mainstream, non-violent side of the evangelical movement, a movement that, while almost invisible on the coasts, dominates the culture in much of the country.
In 2002, after a year of traveling and reporting in India and East Asia, Goldberg moved to New York City and took a job as a news and politics reporter with Salon.com. There she covered all aspects of the ascendant political right, from the neocons to the theocrats. She was one of the first to expose how a tiny far-right Catholic sect convinced Bush to cut off support for the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes reproductive health care and safe childbirth in the third world. She wrote about faith-based abstinence-only education and crisis pregnancy centers and about the right-wing attempts to take over the federal judiciary.
In addition to working at Salon, Goldberg has been an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at New York University, teaching a class called "Writing Social Commentary." She's also been a columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and for Shift Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, The UK Guardian, The New Republic online, The Utne Reader, Newsday and other newspapers nationwide. Kingdom Coming is her first book.