Edwin Kagin

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Edwin Frederick Kagin, J.D., (born November 26, 1940) is an attorney at law in Union, Kentucky, and the founder of Camp Quest, the first secular summer camp in the United States for the children of freethinkers. He is married to Helen McGregor Kagin, a Canadian of Scottish descent from Regina, Saskatchewan, who is a retired anesthesiologist.

1 Early life
2 Career and activism
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Early life

Edwin Kagin was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to a Presbyterian minister father who had been born in Kentucky and a Daughters of the American Revolution mother who had been born in South Carolina. His ancestry is Calvinistic German on his father's side and Scottish Presbyterian on his mother's.

In youth Kagin became an Eagle Scout. In early adulthood he served in the United States Air Force as a medic in London, England, and received an Honorable Discharge in 1962. He then attended The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio; Park College in Parkville, Missouri; and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, Missouri. At the School of Law of the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, he earned his Juris Doctor. The late 1960s intersected with this period of his higher education, and Kagin was among those who grew their hair long and challenged the status quo on a number of cultural and political issues.

[edit] Career and activism

Kagin worked for a time as a college English instructor and served as editor of the American Association of Mental Deficiency and National Institute for Mental Health project that created the Adaptive Behavior Scale, an instrument for the assessment of mental retardation. But the larger part of his career has been as an attorney, sometimes focusing on civil liberties and constitutional issues.

After abandoning belief in Christianity Kagin became a freethought activist. He was a founding member in 1991 of the Free Inquiry Group, Inc., (FIG) of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and served as its vice president.

Through his writings in Fig Leaves, the FIG newsletter, as well as those he published and circulated via the Internet, Kagin gradually became known in wider humanist and freethought circles. This led in 2003 to his authorship of a chapter in Kimberly Blaker's Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America and in 2005 to his own book, Baubles of Blasphemy, a collection of some of his often irreverent essays and poetry.

Also through FIG, Kagin established Camp Quest in 1996, becoming its first director. Later he became codirector with his wife Helen. Camp Quest was separately incorporated in 2002 with the Kagins among the founding board members. The two retired as directors at the conclusion of the 2005 camp season, finishing the camp's first decade of operation. That same year they were named "Atheists of the Year" by American Atheists.

Kagin was also a founder and board member of Recover Resources Center, which provides an alternative addiction recovery program to the religiously-oriented Alcoholics Anonymous. He currently serves on the national advisory board of the Secular Student Alliance, is Kentucky state director for American Atheists, and on January 13, 2006, was named national legal director for American Atheists, replacing the retiring Duane Buchholtz.

As an outspoken public critic of religious intrusions into government, Kagin is a frequent speaker and debater at local and national events and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs, sparring on more than one occasion with Michael Medved. Kagin has also run prominently, albeit unsuccessfully, as “the candidate without a prayer” for the Kentucky Supreme Court (1998) and the Kentucky State Senate (2000). Moreover, some of his legal work has involved him in religious issues and church-state separation controversies in addition to other civil liberties and constitutional issues. He has been a member in good standing of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1975.

Beyond the above, Kagin is a National Rifle Association Certified Handgun Instructor, an Honorary Black belt in Kenpo karate, and an honorary Kentucky Colonel.