A Message from AHA Executive Director Fish Stark

(August 21, 2026) — Four years ago last Wednesday, Salman Rushdie was attacked at Chautauqua Institution as he spoke about free speech and protecting the civil liberties of writers. And on the four-year anniversary of the attack, I spoke at Chautauqua about what it is that compels humanists to sacrifice for human rights and civil liberties – and why we need a bold, growing humanist movement at a time where human dignity itself is under attack.

Rushdie wore his humanism like a badge of honor. He didn’t just accept our Humanist of the Year Award, he was a patron of Humanists UK, and an advisor to our partners at the Secular Coalition for America. He built a career about telling stories that challenged convention and authority and demanded respect for the humanity of others.

As he said when accepting his Humanist of the Year award:

“Humankind must be placed at the center of the building of the civilization of the world; the human scale is all-important. And when it is lost, so is something crucial about humanity.”

Humankind must be placed at the center of the building of the civilization of the world.

There are people who disagree. They believe that profit should be placed at the center of building civilization. Or obedience to a religious figure. Or whiteness.

And the legacy of humanism is that our tradition teaches us to say: No. Absolutely not. That doesn’t work. Human dignity has to be the central pillar we build around, or the whole thing falls.

I was at Chautauqua that week to talk about the role that humanists had played in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, a humanist, chaired the drafting committee. John Humphrey, a humanist, penned the first draft. Other humanists like Julian Huxley were active in standing up groups like UNESCO that protected human rights.

The international order that was rebuilt after World War II was shaped by humanists, around our primary conviction – that human need and human dignity should be at the center of our moral universe. Not religion, not wealth or power for any one entity, not any abstraction. Human rights are the cornerstone.

Not much is left of the dream Roosevelt and Humphrey envisioned. From Gaza to Myanmar to Sudan, human dignity is being used as a bargaining chip. America slashed aid to the world’s poorest; millions of children will die over the next decade from preventable diseases so the American taxpayer can save eighteen cents a day.

And yet there are still people like Rushdie who believe in the dream. Who believe people are meant to live unbounded and curious and not prostrated to a higher authority. He believed it enough that he was ready to die for it.

That is the tradition we come from. The Roosevelts and the Rushdies.

So at Chautauqua, I spoke about the need for humanists to defend the international liberal order that we built, and to do so in partnership with people of faith. I talked about the need for every tradition to curb its authoritarian impulses and amplify its humanistic ones. I talked about what it means to build your politics – and build systems – on a foundation of dignity, rather than a foundation of conditional worth.

But a speech is a speech. The Universal Declaration is the closest thing we have to a holy text, but like most scripture, everyone endorses it and nobody reads it, and few follow it. Roosevelt and Humphrey wrote human dignity into the founding document of the modern world, but it didn’t stop the genocides in Gaza or Myanmar or Sudan, because a document is only worth the number of people willing to fight for what’s in it.

That’s why I keep saying our job is building power, not just raising awareness. Nobody at Chautauqua needed to be told that human rights are good. They’ve got a hundred years of speakers telling them that. What they need – what everybody needs right now – is a movement large enough and loud enough and organized enough that when someone in power decides dignity is negotiable, there’s a cost.

Here’s a glimmer of hope to show you why it matters. Yesterday, the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down a decision by the Mayor of Quincy to spend nearly a million dollars of taxpayer funds on twelve-foot, bronze statues of Catholic saints. We were proud to file an amicus brief in that case, in partnership with a dozen groups, including liberal faith groups. It was a big win for the idea that government belongs to all of us, and that public systems should show no favoritism on the basis of religion.

Defending dignity means taking on risk. It means doing the hard work of trying to get bigger. It means working with unlikely, sometimes even frustrating allies.

But it’s worth it. Because people are worth it.

For humanity,
Fish