The following is an address made at the 25th Anniversary celebration of NOSHA’s founding, held at Messina’s Runway Cafe located at the Lakefront Airport on September 21, 2024. Following the address, recognition of the members in attendance who were at the very first meeting and some that joined very soon after: David and Connie Schultz, Will Hunn, Lucy Tierney, and John-Patrick and Patricia Lestrade and Grant and Suzy Smith, as well as Charlotte Klasson stood to the appreciative applause of the folks at the gathering. 

—Marty B., Ed.

Some time in the first half of 1999, a young woman and mother in New Orleans wrote to the Council for Secular Humanism,  a national group  founded by a  collaboration of scientists and philosophers such as Carl Sagan, Isac Asimov, B.F. Skinner, James Randi, and humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz, and began publishing  the magazine Free Inquiry.  The woman wrote inquiring if  the Council it could give her  suggestions about forming a group of open-minded folks like herself in this area. . 

Gina Cetodal has long-since moved from the area, and no one really knows what motivated her to want a local group like this…… but it was very likely  that she, like the founders of the council, was witnessing a quickly growing movement of the religious political right, starting with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family in 1977, followed by Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority in 1979, then by televangelist and one-time presidential candidate Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in 1987, and Louisiana’s own Tony Perkins and his own Family Research Council, all along with a popular  fundamentalist homeschool movement, and  dozens of other lesser known organizations that continue to surface. Like the founders of the Council, she recognized the hypocrisy in these very un-Christian-like but innocently titled  organizations which were pressing for more and more political power, for the sole purpose of establishing a Christian theocracy to replace our current constitution’s liberal democracy.

The Council was happy to help her: they gathered the names and addresses of people in this area that were subscribed to their Free Inquiry magazine and mailed each a letter to see who would be interested in participating in a group in New Orleans. Gina was then given the addresses and phone numbers of those who had responded positively, and contacted them about when and where to meet. 

That’s all it took.

About a dozen of them met for the first time in August 1999 at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Metairie. That  would be the first of many spaces they would call home. NOSHA led  a literal nomadic existence for over ten years before it now seems to have a permanent home. After Barnes and Noble came the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in Lakeview. After that it was the New Orleans Public Library on Harrison Ave; after that, the Jefferson Parish library on Metairie Road. Then came the main branch of the New Orleans Library on Loyola Avenue, then  it found a small auditorium located in the Audubon Zoo, and finally, now, we call  Jefferson Parish East Bank Regional Library home, along  with some substitute help from the UnitarianChurch on Claiborne Ave. when our regular space at East Bank Regional is transformed to  a polling place.

How could it come to pass that an unorthodox, religion-rejecting club like ours make inroads into the educational and social life of  a city that has been under the  powerful influence of the second oldest Catholic archdiocese in America, and which lies not far south of that stronghold of fundamentalist protestants called the Bible Belt?  A  social demographer with a penchant for  gambling would have given very low odds that a group like us— in this particular location— would survive, even for a year.

But we did.

The odds favoring our failure would have gone through the stratosphere when  adding in the two–epic–natural disasters of Katrina and COVID-19, either of which alone would probably have ended many loosely-knit  social groups for good, with each disaster destroying the social fabric in its own way. Katrina was an explosion, creating a diaspora of evacuees, many good members never to return. Covid, was an implosion, confining and immobilizing memberships into closed and confined quarters. And with that, too, a few have never returned even though they never went anywhere. Maybe they have never been able  to shake off the  bunker mentality that can be a curse on  certain personality types.

But we won that bet, too, in spite of the slim odds. You might say we overcame  both catastrophes with the help of technology:  emails and cell phones in the case of Katrina, and social media messaging and Zoom during Covid. Wishes, thoughts, or prayers just wouldn’t  have done it.

But then, let’s get real: we all know that it takes PEOPLE working together with shared purposes and goals and are the genuine first cause  that give an organization the will  and cohesion.The search for truth simplifies the process, being for some, the most powerful motivator of all.