In Memoriam: Kerry Lund and Gene Kasmar

By Kristine Lund

My mom, Kerry Lund, and her life partner, Gene
Kasmar, are no longer with us in their embodied forms. They spent their last years in Oklahoma City,
having left Minnesota to escape the snow. They also left behind their activist life, focusing more on gardening and traveling.

My mom’s issue was overpopulation and its link to the earth’s depletion of natural resources. She was a proud supporter of Planned Parenthood. In 1995, she was invited to speak about the earth’s carrying capacity on the “Atheists Talk” television show.

As she said then, “Carrying capacity is the number of individuals a habitat can support without endangering the future social, cultural, and environmental support system….The decision is ours. We choose our population and at the moment we are choosing way past the carrying capacity for the lifestyle we wish to lead.” And it turns out that today, people are more aware of climate change. Mom was always right.

Gene’s issue was atheism and he was militant. In 1992, he famously petitioned the District 286 Board of Education to ban the Bible in the Brooklyn Center school libraries. He self-published the book All the Obscenities of the Bible. Gene did not win his case. But given that the religious right has often banned books because of what they deemed “inappropriate content,” it was humorous to see their own argument turned against them in a way they never thought possible.

Gene and Kerry participated in highway cleanups with the humanists and volunteered
in other ways, including for Minnesota Atheists (which awarded them both Distinguished Service Awards in 1997).

Originally published by the MN Humanists.