Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Funny times with Forced Birthers.

Jill Filipovic has a good piece up in Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan) entitled Abortion Clinic Protesters: “Sidewalk Counselors” or “Sidewalk Terrorists”? It covers the usual rabid theocrats and misogynist circus clowns, and it documents (as we already know) that these assholes are not driven by “baby killing” per se, they are really railing against women (and others) having non-church sanctioned, non-procreative sex. I have never understood this motivation personally because that is, quite obviously I would think, the best kind of sex to have. Nevertheless, this particular attitude, incomprehensible as it may be, explains why Forced Birthers are also dead set against birth control—which would, you know, actually reduce abortions.

Now maybe this is because I have a terrible fucking head cold, a hacking cough and a fever (OMG! EBOLA!) but for whatever reason I found the clinic protesters interviewed for this article hilarious. Don’t get me wrong—they are as rage-inducing as ever, and I still loathe each and every one of them with the burning fire of ten thousand suns. But this, my friends, is comic gold:

“[Women] had equality,” [demonstrator Fred] Delouis says about the 1950s, before Supreme Court cases legalized contraception and abortion. “But they had to be obedient to their husbands. That’s where equality comes: where the mother stayed home and raised the children in God’s light, and the husband worked, and everything was great. When I grew up, there were no problems.”

Equality, y’all! EVERYTHING was GREAT! And there were NO PROBLEMS…for Fred! LOL!

And Fred just keeps the hits right on coming:

“Society was great before they had abortions,” he says. “Because there wasn’t as much evil in the world.”

Did you know World War II happened after Roe v. Wade? HAHAHA!

“They weren’t murdering God’s babies, which is the most important thing.”

Silly Fred! Abortions are actually helping God murder his babies, because if there’s one thing we all know God loves, it’s murdering his babies! If 50% of pregnancies spontaneously abort, obviously clinics are just doing some of God’s baby murderin’ work for him! You would think Fred would show a little more enthusiasm and gratitude. He can be pretty funny, but I think he’s a little confused.

Then there’s the Death D00d:

Inside the clinic, Deb Fenton, regional director of Central and Western Massachusetts Planned Parenthood, peers out the window, looking for one of the regular protesters who shows up in an Angel of Death costume. “Is the Grim Reaper out there today?” she asks.

Excellent! I want to hang around Grim Reaper d00d while wearing my trademark bloody coat hanger dress—always a big hit at parties. I had been thinking of festooning it with bloody doll parts around the coat hanger anyway, and I feel this would nicely complement the whole “bloody dismembered fetus” theme they’ve got going on their posters and signage. I’ll fit right in! It’ll be a hoot!

Then there’s Ruth:

“I consider my profession having been a mother and a grandmother,” Ruth says, adding that her children agree with her values: two of her daughters got pregnant out of wedlock, one in high school, and both placed their children for adoption.

Oh, Ruth. Priceless!

And the lovely Nancy Clark:

“Abstinence,” Clark says. “It’s possible. I taught my daughters abstinence. It doesn’t mean I’ve been successful with my first two, but I have three more to go.”

Third time’s the charm? Bwahahahaha!

 

Clark says that after marriage, “natural family planning” is the only way to go. And she’s mystified by its lack of popularity:

“You can’t even get Catholics to use it,” she says. “It does work though. Of course, I have nine kids.”

Stop it Nancy! You’re killin’ me!

 

Clark testified in the Supreme Court’s recent clinic buffer zone case—presumably under penalty of perjury—that:

“close personal communication” in a “kind, gentle voice” was her preferred method of approaching women, and that “speaking in a raised voice, shouting or yelling is counterproductive.”

Once the shitheads on the high court struck down the clinic buffer zone law (a unanimous decision, by the way, issued from the safety and comfort of the court’s own 200 foot buffer zone), Clark now enjoys having more options of where she can approach women in a “kind, gentle voice.”

“Instead of yelling from here,” she says, gesturing across the street to the clinic, “I get to yell from over there.”

What a scream! (<—Hahaha. Sometimes I crack myself up.)

Next, meet Father Andrew Beauregard, a Franciscan monk—i.e. a celibate d00d (at least we hope…). He’s here to helpfully ‘splain everything you need to know about wimmenz lives:

“The fullness of being a woman is being a mother.”

And here I thought the fullness of being a woman was me eating too much of Frankie’s pizza. Huh. So I guess the fullness of being a man is being a daddy? Then why the fuck are you here yellin’ at pregnant people instead of making the babies? Dust that thing off and get to work, Father. God needs more babies to murder!

“For a woman to say that she has to have control over her body or over herself in such a way that she can’t be a mother really speaks to a degradation towards women.”

Conversely, compulsory childbirth is in no way degrading to women! I can’t stand it! This guy is a fucking pisser!

Protesters also told Filipovic they had a “save” the week before: that is, they convinced a man (*ahem*) to convince his girlfriend to leave the clinic:

Recounting their “save,” Meija and Pablo say the woman was going to terminate because her boyfriend had another girlfriend and had also fathered children with other women. But, they say, the boyfriend didn’t want the abortion from the beginning and after he promised he would support the baby, she came out of the clinic crying, and they walked away together.

Well that sure sounds like a win for everyone!

“We saw them together,” Pablo says. “That’s the most great thing — to see them together as a family.”

Remember, people, this is all about traditional family values: one d00d, his two girlfriends, plus a bunch of kids he’s had with other women. The MOST GREAT THING. Probably ever! Tee-hee-hee!

There is one thing I don’t get, though: if you’re so content with the choices you’ve made in your own life, what the hell are you doing spending your days harassing and yelling at other people for making choices of their own? I thought this would go without saying, but nine kids just isn’t for everybody. Hell, marriage isn’t for everyone, either. Just ask Father Beauregard about that!

It never occurred to me before, but I’m starting to think maybe they do it for the lulz.

[cross-posted at perry street palace]

 

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Andrew Sullivan: FREE SPEECH™ of straight white d00ds dooooomed by evil feminists.

Portrait of Andrew Sullivan

by Iris Vander Pluym
oil on canvas, 30 ft. x 50 ft.
$10 million

[TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of sexist, racist and other problematic language.]

Friends, I am sorry to report that FREE SPEECH™ is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And not just in Dawkinsland either, where Richard and his fellow…what's the word?… "rationalists" I believe they call themselves, are at this very moment cowering in abject fear of no exaggeration witch hunts, actual Inquisitions and literal Orwellian Thought Police. As I'm sure we can all imagine, that is exactly what it is like being rebuked for saying factually wrong or long-debunked shit on Twitter—or worse, being informed that you've just said something harmful to people who are not you. Can you even imagine? Thankfully, Dawkins & Co. keep on bravely fighting the good fight for FREE SPEECH™ for all of us, by brilliantly deploying the tried-and-true tactic of repeating rape culture tropes that have plagued sexual assault victims for millennia. THOUGHT EXPERIMENTIN'! BREAKIN' TABOOS! PHILOSOPHIZIN'! 'SPLAININ' LOGIC! If that doesn't make feminists shut the fuck up, surely nothing will. I mean, what is the point of even having FREE SPEECH™ if other people are going to actually criticize things you say?

But this terrifying campaign of violent censorship has now gone far beyond even that. Andrew Sullivan, "conservative-libertarian" columnist, reports with alarm that "The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter." For the uninitiated, "SJW" stands for Social Justice Warrior, i.e., a person who advocates for equality and against bigotry and oppression with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. (Believe it or not, SJW is actually meant as derogatory slur.) So what exactly are these jack-booted thugs doing to end FREE SPEECH™ on Twitter?

Well, a group called WAM! (Women, Action & the Media) has just entered into a pilot program in collaboration with Twitter intended to address the epidemic of gender-based harassment and abuse plaguing the platform. The purpose is to "learn about what kind of gendered harassment is happening on Twitter, how that harassment intersects with other kinds of harassment (racist, transphobic, etc.), and which kinds of cases Twitter is prepared (and less prepared) to respond to." WAM! will work with Twitter to track the data and improve their responses. The way it works is pretty straightforward: if you're being harassed on Twitter, you fill out this form on the WAM! site. Once they verify your information, they escalate it a.s.a.p. directly to Twitter, and try to get you a quick resolution. WAM! makes clear right on the form that they can only advocate: they have neither the authority nor the ability to make decisions or take any action on behalf of Twitter.

Just to be clear: we are not talking here about hurt fee-fees because somebody tweeted something mean at me and now I haz a sad. We are talking about relentless threats of violent rape and gruesome death, some credible enough that recently at least three women have been driven from their own homes. We are talking about violations of federal law under 18 U.S. Code § 875(c), which provides that "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." In New York State, we are talking about a class A misdemeanor under § 120.50(3), or depending on the circumstances, possibly a class E or D felony. In a case like Zerlina Maxwell's, we are also talking about a hate crime subject to enhanced sentencing. And more to the point, we are talking about violations of Twitter's own terms of service, which Twitter itself has proven unable to enforce.

This is the FREE SPEECH™ hill that Andrew Sullivan is prepared to die on.

If you think about it, it's actually kind of shitty that a nonprofit like WAM! has to step in and do this work for Twitter (to say nothing of local, state and federal law enforcement). But to Twitter's credit, this certainly represents a step in the right direction, and one with the potential to lead to in-house reforms.

But not for Andrew Sullivan. Oh, no. He is filled with the foreboding sense that this unholy alliance between WAM! and Twitter portends the end of FREE SPEECH™ as we know it. In his mind, "Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day." And Sullivan does not like these lefty-feminists one bit, no siree! So much so that he imagines—naturally based on no evidence whatsoever—that WAM!s actual Sooper Seekrit Agenda™ is ultimately enforcing "gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves." Gender quotas! LOL! Also: simply stating the demonstrable fact that straight, white males have overwhelmingly dominated public discourse is disparaging straight white males as a group. And sure, WAM! may say their mission is to advocate for the inclusion of more diverse and historically marginalized voices in media, but Andrew Sullivan ain't buying it: "WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter." WAM!'s real goal, he knows, "is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism." Never mind that, again, WAM! cannot censor anything, anywhere (except their own web site). Twitter is "handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation."

Obviously, if these terrible lefty feminist censors are not stopped pronto, next thing you know straight white men will be the ones fleeing their homes in fear for their lives. Just like Richard Dawkins.

Seriously, though, the whole rant is wildly entertaining. "Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard," he writes with comical cluelessness, "they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices." D00d. In case the fourth paragraph of this very blog post did not adequately demonstrate for you that the web is quite clearly "rigged against female voices," a recent Pew research study found that (a) women overall are disproportionately targeted by the most severe forms of online abuse, (b) 25 percent of young women have been sexually harassed online, and (c) 26 percent have experienced stalking.

And guess what else? Queer women, women of color, trans women and women with other marginalized identities are especially targeted and abused. Sullivan quotes WAM!'s Jaclyn Friedman:

“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.

Behold, his insightful retort:

How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?

Yes, that must be it: it's feminists who believe women are delicate flowers who cannot possibly handle the "rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech." Like routine rape and death threats, doxxing (releasing private information such as home addresses, phone numbers, employer, etc. in order to get people to harass women offline, too), libel, hate speech, revenge porn and all sorts of other "rough-and-tumble," "uninhibited online speech" Sullivan is apparently so invested in protecting. FREE SPEECH™, y'all.

Then he says:

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others –

Okay! That's fantastic. We're all on board, then.

but

Uh-oh…

if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment,

It can't. Because that's not actually what the word "harassment" means.

then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism?

No, dear. It's designed to curtail harassment and abuse. And it's starting with misogynist harassment and abuse, albeit with an intersectional focus (racism, transphobia, etc.). FYI, the group is called Women, Action & Media.

What about blasphemy?

Let's see. I just tweeted this:

"Jeezus fookin' Christ.
That is all."
-@irisvanderpluym

I await the terrifying Feminazi Stormtroopers who will be smashing in my door any minute, and dragging me away to be burned at the stake with all the "rationalists."

Of course no one wants to prevent Andrew Sullivan or anyone else from embarrassing themselves on Twitter. I mean, what would we do around here all day without conservatives providing a steady stream of hilarious blog fodder? Unfortunately, how these nefarious evildoers at WAM! will accomplish all of their evildoing by forwarding misogynist harassment complaints to some people at Twitter is left unstated by Sullivan. But I'll definitely be bringing it up at next week's regular meeting of the White-Straight-Man-Hating Social Justice Warriors For Censorship and World Domination™.

[cross-posted at perry street palace.]

Jadehawk Jadehawk's Blog, salon

Sticks and Stones and Jokes

The belief that words, especially if intended as humorous, cannot cause harm is counterfactual. And because it is counterfactual, it does harm in itself.

First, I’d like to point out that in many cases, even people who make this claim often don’t act as if they believed it: e.g. people who will defend the use of slurs because words are harmless will easily turn around and whine for ages about how being criticized is bullying. That’s not behavior consistent with “words don’t harm”, it’s behavior consistent with a belief that some words don’t cause harm, while others do.

Now, let’s look at the actual idea that words in general cannot cause harm. At the individual level, “verbal aggression, statements intended to humiliate or infantilize, insults, threats of abandonment or institutionalization” are all part of the medical definition of emotional abuse[1], and the CDC includes a number of verbal actions as constituting psychological abuse[2]. At the institutional level, the right to free speech is valued precisely because it is powerful; to believe this power only works for people’s benefit and never to their harm is to succumb to a Just World bias in which the Good Guys always win. In reality, any tool that can be used to threaten and discredit harmful institutions can also be used to prop them up, or else threaten and smear beneficial institutions (see: Fox News; all of it, on any topic. See also: Breitbart, O’Keefe, Rose)[3].

So, words can hurt. How about jokes?

First, use of disparagement humor can be a sign of underlying problems. People high in hostile sexism and men high in benevolent sexism tended to experience more amusement and less aversion in regard to sexist humor[4]. Furthermore, when people feel a valued social identity is being threatened, they will often resort to disparagement humor against a group that’s deemed an acceptable social target for harassment by their immediate social environment[5]. In other words, frequent appearance of disparagement humor in a community can be an indicator for community members holding prejudices against the disparaged group.

Beyond just being an indicator of prejudice, disparagement humor also creates new negative effects. A 2004 paper reviewing some of the literature on disparagement humor noted a number of effects, some in common with non-jokey disparagement, some specific to disparagement in the form of a joke. Reciting prejudiced comments (jokey or not) worsens one’s own attitude towards the group disparaged. Exposure to disparagement humor on the other hand doesn’t seem to affect the prejudices people hold; instead, it seems to affect how/whether people will act on their prejudices. The authors suggest that this happens because the degree to which individuals high in prejudice act on that prejudice depends largely on external cues of prejudice-tolerance, and the presence of disparagement humor creates the impression of such tolerance more easily than non-humorous disparagement or non-disparaging humor; but (of course) only if the joke teller doesn’t receive pushback[6]. Despite the above evidence, the trope that something cannot be harmful because it’s “just a joke” is widespread enough to even make it directly into the title of a paper which tests the “prejudiced norm theory” suggested in the 2004 review. It demonstrates that “[t]he acceptance of sexist humor leads men to believe that sexist behavior falls within the bounds of social acceptability”[7]; thus, sexist men behave in a more sexist fashion than they would otherwise. In one experiment, that meant the sexists gave less money to a women’s organization; in another, it meant they actively took money away from such an organization[8].

Of course, disparagement humor doesn’t just affect the jokesters and bigots; it also affects the people who are being disparaged and/or who reject the bigotry in the joke. For example, disparaging comments, joking or otherwise, can trigger stereotype threat in certain situations[9]. There’s also evidence that exposure to sexist humor triggers negative emotional reactions (e.g. disgust, anger, hostility)in members of the targeted group[10]. In addition, finding oneself in the presence of bigoted humor can, in specific circumstances, actually lessen one’s critical stance towards that bigotry: if one believes oneself to be someone who speaks up against bigotry but then doesn’t act on that self-image, the discrepancy can cause cognitive dissonance. When the discrepancy can be explained by external factors (e.g. reasonable fear of harm to oneself), then the discomfort is the only end-result of experiencing cognitive dissonance. The same is true if there’s an opportunity to plaster over the discomfort by reaffirming a different part of one’s self-image. However, when external explanations are lacking (e.g. one believes there’s no actual harm, and all it takes is growing a thicker skin) and there are no opportunities for (self-)distraction, the cognitive dissonance is resolved instead by trivialization: since one is the sort of person who’d speak up against bigotry yet one didn’t, then the instance mustn’t have been all that bigoted; or maybe speaking up just isn’t that important to fighting bigotry, after all[11].

So what’s the overall picture? Disparagement humor is an indicator for existent prejudice, both in the jokester and the social environment where it appears; it strengthens the prejudice in the jokester; it creates permissiveness for other bigots to act more bigoted; and it may create apathy towards bigotry in previously critical, non-prejudiced audiences as well as discomfort and a hostile climate for the targets of the disparagement humor. And those are just the effects in the few papers I listed (I had to stop going through more literature, or else never finish this essay). Bigoted speech is, in other words, an indicator and partial cause for e.g. the toxic rape culture environments we find in fraternities across the country[12]. That’s not harmless. Bigoted speech hurts, even when it’s a joke.

– – –

[1] McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (2002). New York, NY, USA: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[2]National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (2008). Psychological/Emotional Abuse. [web].

[3]This point shamelessly borrowed from here.

[4]Woodzicka, J. A. & Ford, T.E. (2010). “A framework for thinking about the (not-so-funny) effects of sexist humor”, Europe’s Journal of Psychology, vol. 6(3), pp. 174-195. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[5]Pound, L. B. (2008). Jokes are No Laughing Matter: Disparagement Humor and Social Identity Theory. [Master’s thesis]. Retrieved from here.

[6]Ford, T.E. & Ferguson, M.A. (2004). “Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor: A Prejudiced Norm Theory”, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 8(1), pp. 79-94. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[7]Western Carolina University (Nov 7, 2007). “Sexist Humor No Laughing Matter, Psychologist Says”. ScienceDaily. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[8]Ford, T.E., Boxer, C.F., Armstrong, J. & Edel, J.R. (2008). “More Than ‘Just a Joke’: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 34(2), pp. 159-170. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[9]Singletary, S.L., Ruggs, E.N., Hebl, M.R. & Davies, P.G. (2009). Info Sheet: Stereotype Threat: Causes, Effects, & Remedies. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[10]LaFrance, M. & Woodzicka, J. A. (1998).”No laughing matter: Women’s verbal and nonverbal reactions to sexist humor”, in Swim, J.K. & Stangor, C. (Editors). Prejudice: The target’s perspective, pp. 61-80. [book chapter]. San Diego, CA, USA: Academic Press. Retrieved from here.

[11]Rasinski, H.M., Geers, A.L. & Czopp, A.M. (2013).”‘I Guess What He Said Wasn’t That Bad’: Dissonance in Nonconfronting Targets of Prejudice”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 39(7), pp. 856-869. [pdf]. Retrieved from here.

[12]Chemaly, S. (Nov 4, 2014). “Still Think Rape Jokes Are Harmless Fun?” Role Reboot. [web]. Retrieved from here.

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Operation Hand Sanitizer

As a lifelong student of the deadly scourge known as “conservatism,” I read with great interest a recent piece by Ezra Klein in Vox entitled Standing near hand sanitizer makes Americans more conservative. So what will Ebola do?. Klein reports on a growing mass of evidence that human social and political cultures are emergent properties of our responses to infectious disease threats—or “pathogen stress,” as the fancy lib’rul eeleet perfessers like to call it. The gist of the theory is this: through all of human history, infectious diseases have been the single greatest threat to human populations—killing more people than wars, natural disasters and noninfectious diseases combined—such that humans (like other animals) have evolved behavioral responses to avoid them. Just as our biological immune system is triggered by the presence of diseases, so too is our “behavioral immune system” activated by (perceived) disease threats in our environment. Klein gives the examples of our fear and aversion upon encountering a rat, and feeling disgusted when you get a whiff of rotten meat. It works at a surprisingly granular level, too: humans react with disgust to yellowish liquids that resemble pus, yet we remain unfazed by blueish substances of the same texture.

 

It turns out that the reaction of disgust in particular has profound moral and political implications, not just for individuals but for culture writ large. There is a well-demonstrated link between moral notions of “purity” and social conservatism, and conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Where this gets very, very interesting is the finding that even subtle reminders of cleanliness (or its opposite, impurity) can trigger more conservative attitudes—in anyone. In a clever set of experiments, Cornell University psychologists Erik Helzer and David Pizarro approached every ninth college student entering a campus hallway and asked them to take a quick survey about their demographics and political beliefs. Half the students were asked to “step over to the hand-sanitizer dispenser to complete the questionnaire,” and the other half were asked to “step over to the wall to complete the questionnaire” where the hand sanitizer had been removed. The researchers reported:

Participants who reported their political attitudes in the presence of the hand-sanitizer dispenser reported a less liberal political orientation than did participants in the control condition. Despite the noisy nature of the public hallway in which we collected the data, it appears as if a simple reminder of physical purity was able to shift participants’ responses toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.

The conservative effect held for fiscal, social and moral positions. Helzer and Pizarro then ran a second experiment in the lab, where half the participants were offered a hand sanitizer wipe before using the lab computers to answer a questionnaire about their moral values. Again, the researchers found that those exposed to the cleanliness cue reported significantly more conservative political attitudes than subjects who were not.

 

In other words we are pretty much meat robots, subconsciously programmed by cues in our environments. Even our most cherished and fiercely held moral and political beliefs can be profoundly affected by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It is worth remembering that we are talking about tendencies here; these are modern manifestations of ancient survival mechanisms in a much more complex world. It’s probably a safe bet that it would require a whole lot more hand sanitizer to get some of us to vote for some berserker theocrat than it would our fellow citizens who are already well on their way to Hitlerville. Still, as research in the field has been expanding, the ramifications of the behavioral immune system are turning up everywhere. Mark Schaller  & Co. found that subjects primed to think about disease were much more prejudiced and fearful toward immigrants; in light of this, it is hardly surprising to discover that wherever there is a higher risk of infectious disease, societies tend to be more xenophobic. And it gets weirder. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have found not only that societies in which pathogen-avoidant behaviors flourish are likely to coalesce into repressive and autocratic government systems, but that pathogen stress is positively correlated with "high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior." [Emphasis added.]

 

That's right: patriarchy flourishes with the perceived threat of contagious diseases.

 

WHAT.

 

Naturally, this really got my beanie a-spinning. I wondered whether, in much the same way that the biological immune system can be tricked into positive action by vaccines, perhaps the behavioral immune system can be recruited to virtually eradicate the conservative pestilence infecting our nation (<—see what I did there? Hahaha.). And then it came to me in a flash: clearly what is needed here is a massive operation to get all of the hand sanitizer out of the halls of Congress and state houses across the country! After that, we can go after the hand sanitizer in the homes and offices of MRAs, Baptist clergy and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

 

Who's with me?

 

[A version of this post appeared at perry street palace.]

Major Mike Mansplainer Major Mike Mansplainer, salon

Major Mike responds to the “Conflict in the Secular Movement” Survey

Worst Survey Ever

Worst Survey Ever. Why so many choices?

There, that's Better

There. That's better.

I’m a big fan of the “Conflict in the Secular Movement Survey” that’s been going around.

It’s about time that somebody found a forum for us to express how we feel about conflict within the secular community. At long last we can find out the question that’s on everybody’s minds: are feminists causing all this trouble, or is there no trouble at all?

As is fitting for such an important topic, the survey has been meticulously designed by research professionals. Nice they could scare up enough scientists in the atheist community. That must have been tough. Way to go, boys — and gals!

I wanted to share my answers with y’all. If you haven’t taken it yet — no cheating!

1. If you had to choose one, what is the cause of conflict in the secular movement?

A) Divisive figures who purposefully cause conflict

B) Differences in ideologies

C) Miscommunication

My only complaint rests with the first question. Why do I have to choose just one? Look at Rebecca Watson. She's an A) divisive figure who caused conflict about her B) differing feminism ideology by C) miscommunicating her statement, "Guys, don't do that."

That's how #Elevatorgamergate started.

2. Do you believe feminists in the secular movement create conflict because of their emphasis on feminism?

A) Yes

B) No

What? No “of course” button?

Ok, I’m being nitpicky. Better to make people take a stand: are feminists causing the problem or not? Answer — Take it, Steve Carell: 

3. Do you believe that the secular movement is welcoming to all people?

A) Yes

B) No

YES. I have always felt welcome in the secular movement.

Again, I’m glad they didn’t waste time with any of the usual questionnaire pseudoscience, making people waste their time to provide more “nuanced” (or wishy-washy) responses like:

Very Welcoming 

Somewhat Welcoming

Neither Welcoming or Not Welcoming

Somewhat Not Welcoming 

Not at all Welcoming

I mean really, is it welcoming or not? Make up your mind!

4. Do you believe the secular movement needs to be diversified?

A) Yes

B) No

NO. I’d really hate for Christians to be welcomed in our movement. Can’t we all just be atheists?

Again, thanks guys (and gals) for making us stick to yes-or-no choices.

5. If you do not think diversity is a problem, do you believe the secular community is working hard to outreach minorities?

A) Yes, the secular community is working hard in minority outreach

B) No, the secular community needs to work harder to outreach minorities

C) I do not think diversity is a problem in the secular movement

I've often said I don't think diversity is a problem, so (C). Logic for the win!

Although they should have made it the first option, rescuing me from having to read the other two choices.

6. Do you believe that most conflict orginates in the internet?

A) Yes

B) No

YES. Little known fact: the Israel / Palestine conflict originated on the Internet.

7. Do you believe conflict can be reduced if there was less use of social media?

A) Yes

B) No

Simple: YES. First thing the secular movement needs to do is to find out a way to keep people from using social media. This will fix everything.

8. Do you believe there should be more emphasis on social justice issues?

A) Yes

B) There is enough emphasis on social justice issues

C) The secular movement should not involve itself with social justice issues

C, of course!

We need to focus on issues like prayer in public school, the right for kids to avoid saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and the rights of atheists in the workplace.

None of these have anything to do with social justice.

9. In your opinion, is there unnecessary name calling during arguments online?

A) Yes

B) No

Anybody who thinks there isn’t unnecessary name calling online is a fucking goober nimrod.

10. In your opinion, do you believe that the responses over an argument are generally appropriate or antagonistic?

A) Antagonistic

B) Appropriate

Both! I think I can be appropriately antagonistic.

CONCLUSION

This survey managed to capture all of the nuances of the current debate — and in only 10 questions!

I’m sure the responses will give us some answers about how we can all move forward.

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

If this is not sacrificing your daughter on “the alter of men,” then nothing is.

Once again, it has come to my attention that people who write misogynist shit are not universally mocked for dehumanizing women and girls. No, I’m not talking about Richard fucking Dawkins—although no one would be surprised at anything embarrassingly ill-informed and sexist emanating from him. Today I’m talking about Christian clergy who opine thusly:

2 Reasons Why My Daughter Will Not Go to College
by Pastor Karl Heitman

Meet Annalise. She is my only little princess…She’s five years old and, like every loving father, I’ll be forced to give her away one day. Until then, my wife and I have the immense opportunity to train her and prepare her to be a woman of God. More specifically, we have the mandate to prepare her to be a wife and mother. To be honest, I have a deep concern for her because of the feministic culture we live in. Let’s face it; feminism has so influenced American culture that it has infiltrated the Christian culture just as much in more subtle ways. The average Christian woman is not trained from the home, nor encouraged, to find a husband as an alternative to going to college and starting a career.

Wait, feminists cannot be wives and mothers? That’s news to me—and my mom, my sister and many friends. And probably to Angelina Jolie.

Of course college is not for every woman, nor is ambitious careerism—the same goes for men. But neither is marriage and/or having children for everyone. In any case, none of these things are mutually exclusive. But please—go on, pastor:

When I even suggest the possibility of not sending my daughter to college, I almost always get the stink eye.

Good. She’s five fucking years old, and presumably does not yet know—as my remarkable sister did at that age—how she wants to live her life. (<—Emphasis on her life.)

This grieves me because we have allowed the culture to sear our conscience to the point where the plain reading of Scripture is scoffed at by professing Christians.

And thank the fuckin’ Lard “the plain reading of scripture is scoffed at by professing Christians”! Otherwise they’d be stoning disobedient children to death (and gay men, rape victims and people who do yard work on Sundays). And banning the wearing of cotton-wool blends, eating pork or shellfish, and taking oaths (like the pledge of allegiance). So, you ignore all sorts of morally grotesque and bizarre biblical rules that you’ve conveniently decided should not apply to you. But all that misogynist shit? Well, all that definitely applies to the wimmenz:

This is why I have a drive to see our churches be more passionate about Titus 2 than conforming to the cultural expectation of women being independent of man. Thankfully this doesn’t pertain to all single truly converted ladies. I have met a few women from godly families who have been trained to be “managers of the home” (Titus 2:4-5).

Hey, why don’t we take a closer look at what this Titus-writin’ d00d had to say in his second chapter, shall we?

Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things (Titus 2:9).

Uh-oh. That’s right, slaves: obey your masters! And please them well in all things. This is only right and godly.

What a horror show. Okay, maybe that was just a helpful suggestion?

These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. (Titus 2:15).

I guess not. Well, I have to assume the good pastor is 100% on board with slavery. Most of Titus 2 is about men tightly controlling women’s lives—and he is certainly 100% on board with that.

I’m calling all Christians to stop, pause, and ask, “Have I bought into the cultural expectations imposed on our young women of the faith? Are we, in practice, setting up our young women to function in a role they weren’t designed to?” To put it another way, is it wise to expect young women to go to a university and pursue a career?

Why, that sounds like a hypothesis that can actually be tested by investigating the real world! Let’s see…what do you know, lookie here:

Companies With Female CEOs Beat The Stock Market.
Covert, B., Think Progress (Jul. 2014).

Female CEOs at the country’s biggest companies oversee financial results, on average, that beat the stock market, according to Fortune Magazine’s analysis of data from Factset Research Systems.

Fortune 1000 companies with a woman in the top role saw an average return of 103.4 percent over the women’s tenures, compared to an average 69.5 percent return for the S&P 500 stock index over the same periods.

The companies with female CEOs also seem to generate an outsized amount of revenue compared to others…

Other studies have found that companies run by women outperform others. Hedge funds run by women had a 6 percent return between 2007 and 2013, beating both a global hedge fund index at the stock market.

Numerous studies have also found that companies with women on their boards of directors perform better than male-only ones.

Gosh, pastor, are we, in practice, setting up our young men to function in a role they weren’t designed to? To put it another way, is it wise to expect young men to go to a university and pursue a career?

Pastor…? Hello…?

I have come up with two reasons why my daughter won’t go to college:

1. My daughter won’t go to college if…her motive is wrong. For starters, I’m NOT opposed to my daughter getting a higher Christian (emphasis on Christian) education given that her heart is right (i.e., she does not want to get a degree just so that she can be independent of a man; see 1 Cor 11:9).

Corinthians, huh? Then I am sure the pastor is equally dedicated to a similar crusade to ensure Christians never sue each other (see 1 Cor 6). Right?

Many remain untaught about the role of women from a biblical perspective.

Hahaha. I wish.

A woman was created to fill the role of a helper and a companion, specifically to a husband. That’s why God created Eve (Gen 2:18).

How convenient. For you.

Until that happens, nowhere in Scripture does it command fathers to release their daughter into the world and demand that she learn how to fend for herself.

Since you won’t “release” your hostage daughter, Annalise will have to plan and execute her escape all by herself.  🙁

Paul says twice in two different letters that a woman’s primary place of business is in the home (1 Tim 5:14; Tit 2:4). This role is precious and sacred, but the church has bought into the idea that to be a stay-at-home wife/mommy is second class and it’s despised…even in most churches.

WTF. That is an appalling view churches have toward women who choose (<—*ahem*) to dedicate themselves to their marriages, their homes and/or raising children. Even the evil feminists don’t do that. Perhaps—and I’m just thinkin’ out loud here—churches have bought into the idea that all women are second class citizens, because that’s what the fucking bible teaches.

Christian women are indeed pursuing the same things as unbelieving women: independence from a man.

Something is wrong with men who feel compelled to have women be utterly dependent upon them. Treating a grown woman like a helpless child is not just degrading and infantilizing, it raises more than one red flag for abuse.

Eve acted outside the authority and protection of Adam and, well, you know where that led to.

Indeed. If women are not kept at home and tightly monitored and controlled by men, THEY WILL TOTALLY RUIN EVERYTHING!!!11!!!

(Unlike men, who’ve been doing such a bangup job of things themselves.)

2. My daughter won’t go to college if…I can’t afford it.

Hopefully when Annalise finally escapes from you controlling assholes she moves to Germany. I will personally buy her a one-way ticket.

The blame for the church’s cultural compromises fall squarely on the shoulders of church leaders and fathers.

Well, better buckle down, men. Gotta keep women in line!

I pledged to myself that I will not sacrifice my daughter on the altar of men by sending her out of my home, care, and protection at age 18 just so that she can get a degree and achieve some worldly status…Now, I have a beautiful wife and precious little girl. It’s neither her burden nor her role to work outside the home in order to provide for me. The gifts God has given her are employed every single hour in her service to her husband, her children, and her church. Her job is 24 hours and I thank her often for it.

Thanks, honey, for your 24/7 unpaid labor as my servant.

The bottom line is this: the Bible does not command women to leave home at a young, vulnerable age, get a formal education, get a reputable job, and then have a family when she feels like it.

Only men should leave home at a young, vulnerable age, get a formal education, get a reputable job, and then have a family when they feel like it. See, it’s godly when they do it. What could possibly go wrong for Annalise?

One the other hand, the Bible reveals that it is God’s will for women to get married, raise godly children, and keep the home. It’s a high calling.

Yet strangely, this “high calling” pays nothing, discourages education, severely limits opportunities, encourages domination and abuse, and leaves women utterly dependent upon and subservient to a d00d.

If this is not sacrificing your daughter “on the alter of men,” then nothing is.

__________

Photo: background altar image by DAVID ILIFF, under license: CC-BY-SA 3.0.

[cross-posted at Perry Street Palace.]

M A Melby M. A. Melby's blog, salon

Open Minded

My two sisters and my one brother are much older than me.  I often joke that I was an only child with five parents.  It’s very difficult for me, even though I will be 40 years old on my next birthday, to out-live the title of “baby of the family”.

 

Conversations with my neo-conservative sister (seven years older) often involve wading into a controversial subject that would end in her evaluating the interaction and giving me some motherly  sisterly advice.  Nearly every conversation would end with, “Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.”

 

If I disagreed with her about taxes: Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.

 

If I disagreed with her about political systems: Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.

 

If I disagreed with her about military intervention: Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.

 

If I disagree with her about religion: Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.

 

One particularly heated argument (by Scandinavian-American standards – which involves any discussion that could even be called ‘an argument’), a very long time ago, concerned marriage equality.  She insisted that “homosexual” was a willful action and not an identity referring to sexual orientation and various nonsense about “gay marriage” being ridiculous and supporting it being ungodly or whatever and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.  I responded to her “arguments” but she accused me of not listening to her and just waiting for her to get done talking so that I could hear myself speak.

 

I was a bit indignant – but I knew it was true.  There is nothing she could possibly say that would change my mind.  What?  She was going to convince me that my friends shouldn’t have the right to marry their partners?

 

It’s not happening.

 

It simply wasn’t up for debate – well not REAL debate.  A real debate is a negotiation where various stake-holders come to the table, make their cases and come to a conclusion.  I’d be happy to “debate” marriage equality as a means of convincing an audience, as some sort of spectacle, but there was no audience to convince.  The stake-holders were also not invited – so what sort of legitimate “debate” could there be on this issue between us? 

 

I absolutely was just waiting for her to get done talking so I could put in my two cents; so I could articulate my thoughts; so I could explain how she was wrong.

 

Then she said, “Don’t be so open minded that you’ll let anything in.”  Instead of, yet again, allowing my stance to be discredited as simply youthful contrarianism or whimsy – I finally told my sister:

 

“I’m not open minded.  I disagree with you.”

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Richard Dawkins, hysterical dumbass.

[CONTENT NOTE: misogyny; harassment; rape; rape apologia.]

Richard Dawkins has been keeping himself very busy indeed during his stay as an involuntary organ donor in the Palace Abattoir. In response to a widely-read piece by Mark Oppenheimer about misogyny in the atheoskeptisphere, he has bravely taken to Twitter to defend his BFF Michael Shermer, the notorious subject of multiple accusations of predatory sexual behavior toward women. Shermer’s MO, as described in the Oppenheimer piece by TAM staffer Alison Smith, shares most of the typical hallmarks of an overwhelming number of rapists-at-large: boundary testing; planning assaults using sophisticated strategies to isolate victims; deploying psychological manipulation, e.g., power, control; and last but certainly not least, using alcohol deliberately in order to render targets more vulnerable if not outright unconscious. They calculate, quite correctly it turns out, that this particular modus operandi puts them at miniscule risk of ever being accused—let alone reported, investigated, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and jailed. Regardless of whether you believe Smith’s or other women’s accounts regarding Shermer, these are just facts, and this is how rape culture works in the real world.

But not in Dawkinsland, it doesn’t. Nope! Yesterday, in defense of Michael Shermer the Infallible King of Reason tweeted:

Officer, it’s not my fault I was drunk driving. You see, somebody got me drunk.” –Richard Dawkins

Astute readers will note that this is Richard Dawkins taking Smith’s allegations as true, knowing that by all accounts (including his own) Shermer was sober during the alleged incident, and then oh-so-very-cleverly sneering that she is responsible—by likening an alleged rape victim to a drunk driver.

Here’s Stephanie Zvan with a nice fisk:

He doesn’t appear to believe Shermer’s story, which is that Shermer had sex with Smith after she sobered up. Dawkins took Smith’s story as read, although he isolated it from Ashley’s story and Pamela’s.

Then he ignored the parts of that story that make Smith’s lack of consent and Shermer’s knowledge of it clear. He ignored that Shermer followed Smith away from the party. He ignored the promise to help Smith back to her room, only to end up in Shermer’s. Instead, he grasped the fact that Smith was drunk to the point of not remembering parts of the evening and used that to assign responsibility to her. He claimed Smith was responsible for the encounter despite the one fact that both parties agree on being that Shermer was sober.

He believed her story, not Shermer’s.

He believed she was intoxicated.

He knew Shermer was not, from all sources of information.

He believed Shermer deceived her in the process of getting her past the point of being able to consent.

Then he tweeted that she was responsible for the encounter.

Then he compared Shermer following Smith away from the party to Smith driving drunk.

Then he compared Shermer taking Smith to a different room than promised to Smith driving drunk.

Then he compared Shermer sexually assaulting Smith to Smith driving drunk.

I’ma say this once more for the cheap seats:

THE ONLY THING A RAPE VICTIM HAS DONE “WRONG” IS TO FIND HERSELF (OR HIMSELF) IN THE PRESENCE OF A RAPIST.

Fortunately, the vast majority of men do not rape. But those who do can always rely on victim-blaming shitweasels like Richard Dawkins to provide comfort and cover, so they can continue to operate unimpeded.

Then the Lord of All Logic tweeted this:

The REAL Rape Culture: “All occurrences of sexual intercourse are rape unless there is certified evidence to the contrary.” –Richard Dawkins

No, my precious little cupcake: All occurrences of sexual intercourse are rape unless there is consent. This is really not difficult for most people to grok. And I find it… telling interesting when people are so highly motivated not to grok it. Before he deleted this tweet (“claiming it was sarcastic. There’s no word on what part of it he didn’t mean, however…”), he responded to a follower concerned that he “might fall in trouble again with Feminists”:

With a certain kind of feminist, of course. Not with feminists who truly respect women instead of patronising them as victims –Richard Dawkins

This one sent PZ off on a righteous rant (which I highly recommend reading in its entirety):

Who are these mysterious patronizing feminists? They don’t actually exist. You are echoing a strategy of denial: you approve of feminists, but not the ones who actually point out sexist problems in our culture, or fight against discrimination, or point out that they’ve been raped, or abused, or cheated in the workplace, or any of the other realities of a sexist culture. This is what anti-feminists say: be quiet about the problems. If you mention the problems, you are perpetuating the sisterhood of oppression, you are playing the martyr, you are being a pathetic victim who must be treated with contempt.

But if no woman speaks out about the problems, how will we ever know to correct them? If we shame every victim for being a victim and daring to reveal her victimhood, it becomes very easy to pretend that there is no oppression.

Oh, silly PZ! You see, in Dawkinsville there are no “victims,” only irresponsible drunk drivers crashing themselves willy-nilly right into rapists’ penises!

But this morning’s tweet absolutely takes the cake:

Raping a drunk woman is appalling. So is jailing a man when the sole prosecution evidence is “I was too drunk to remember what happened.” –Richard Dawkins

Heh.

Hahaha.

HOLY SHIT HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! 

Now, Twitter is a unique medium with pros and cons like every other; suffice it to say it does not particularly lend itself to schooling pompous assholes on the many wonders of reality. But I did my best:

 

@RichardDawkins false reports: est. 2-8%. Rape hugely underreported. 3% of rapist[s] do jail time. Now go away and learn how to think. –Iris Vander Pluym

(Incidentally, citations for these statistics can be found all over the fucking internet here and here.)

@RichardDawkins As if men are prosecuted when “the sole prosecution evidence is ‘I was too drunk to remember what happened.'” #dumbass –Iris Vander Pluym

Jeezus. “I was too drunk to remember what happened” is exculpatory evidence: it creates reasonable doubt and nearly always benefits the accused. That is why prosecutors almost universally do not take such cases to trial: when they do, they lose, and this is true even when they present heaps of additional incriminating evidence to a jury. Seriously, this has got to be the stupidest thing His Intellectual Excellency has ever said—and that is saying something, my friends.

PZ’s plea to Dawkins closes:

And could you please stop supporting reactionary anti-feminists? Thanks.

No, he cannot. Because the World’s Greatest Rationalist is a reactionary anti-feminist, and thus there is no reasoning with him.

[for Tony.]

[cross-posted at Perry Street Palace.]

 

 

 

 

 

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

BREAKING: Richard Dawkins, live organ donor!

[CONTENT NOTE: minimizing gender-based harassment; misogynist abuse; minimizing pedophilia and rape; ableism; extreme hostility to consent, bodily autonomy and agency; one m-f* bomb.]

Once upon a time, Your Humble Correspondent™ fell madly in love with evolutionary biology, and read every book written by one Clinton Richard Dawkins. When he unleashed The God Delusion, oh how my inner voices screamed yes! yes! upon savoring (nearly) every page. The author of these magnificent tomes came across as a truly decent sort, wicked smart, remarkably deft at communicating philosophical and scientific complexities to the laity without talking down to them—and with a razor sharp wit to boot. Whattaguy.

The Mask Slips

Then came the Dear Muslima gambit, in which a snide Professor Dawkins shat forth a classic relative privation fallacy on a Pharyngula thread. This would have been disappointing enough, coming as it did from such a proclaimed paragon of rationalism. But he deployed this foolishness in the service of (a) minimizing gender-based harassment, and (b) spitefully belittling Rebecca Watson. At the time it seemed so surreal that none of us could believe the words were actually his—until PZ Myers verified his IP address. We sniped back along the lines of “Gosh, Richard, what the fuck are you doing promoting science education when women are being brutally raped in war zones right now huh?!” But it was no use: he just kept digging deeper.

As if all of this were not quite douchey enough, according to at least one source the good doctor allegedly attempted to bully conference organizers into blacklisting Rebecca Watson from the Reason Rally, where His Eminence would be speaking. Only recently did he finally see fit to mumble a two-cent apology, an afterthought in a typically self-serving blog post wherein he wildly mischaracterizes his critics’ arguments. Meanwhile, in the intervening years, Rebecca Watson has been the target of an unrelenting campaign of violent rape threats, doxxing, DDOS attacks, harassment and all manner of misogynist abuse—a crusade during which her attackers were no doubt emboldened by the knowledge that they were on the side of The Great Man himself.

Thus it came to pass that Richard Dawkins broke my fucking heart. But see, here’s the thing: no one breaks my heart twice. Not anymore. This is because I have come to realize that, with very rare exceptions, people don’t really change. Sure, they can become better skilled at masking their more odious views and restraining their more noxious impulses. Alternatively, they can become less concerned about letting the mask slip, revealing the ugliness underneath. Regardless, in my experience this observation turns out to be especially true of privilege-blind narcissistic assholes and unrepentant shitweasels of every stripe. (Those are not mutually exclusive categories, by any means.)

I held my cynical little tongue while others pored over The Dawk’s every utterance that could be—if you rephrased it a bit, then reinterpreted it in the most charitable light (no matter how antithetical this might be to its plain meaning)—a welcome sign that His Grace was finally open to becoming a more decent and reasonable human being. Maybe admitting he had not the first fucking clue about certain subjects upon which he was so imperiously opining? Perhaps even addressing his more knowledgeable critics’ actual arguments? Grokking social media 101?

Don’t be silly. As if.

The Downward Spiral

He kept right on cycling through the same bizarre pattern. Minimizing child molestation(?!) and others’ reactions thereto, and then, utterly predictably, misconstruing his critics and spitting out a defensive notpology. Ranking the relative harms of various contexts of pedophilia(?!!) and rape(?!!!), solely in order to deride imaginary critics for engaging in—wait for it—the very same relative privation fallacy he so relished in Dear Muslima:

LOL, d00d. No one thinks that. Well, except for Richard Fucking Dawkins, all the way back in…2011.

In rapid succession came two more tweets:

Right on cue came his trademarked missing-the-point blog post (*yawn*)—then another one even more absurd, if you can believe it. No, seriously: see, our brave Atheist King merely “wanted to challenge the taboo against rational discussion of sensitive issues,” notwithstanding the (taboo?) rational discussions of these issues that have repeatedly revealed him to be empirically flat-out fucking wrong. But wait—it gets funnier!

“it is also deplorable that there are many people in the same atheist community who are literally afraid to think and speak freely, afraid to raise even hypothetical questions such as those I have mentioned in this article. They are afraid – and I promise you I am not exaggerating – of witch-hunts: hunts for latter day blasphemers by latter day Inquisitions and latter day incarnations of Orwell’s Thought Police.”

These poor atheists live in paralyzing fear of NO EXAGGERATION witch hunts! ACTUAL Inquisitions! LITERAL Orwellian Thought Police! Yes friends, that is exactly what it’s like to be rebuked for spewing pig-ignorant, long-debunked bullshit on Twitter. And yet! In a noble and selfless endeavor to ‘splain Teh Logickz™ to the rest of us overly emotional and hopelessly irrational inferiors, they and they alone are courageous enough to regurgitate harmful rape culture myths that have plagued sexual assault victims for millennia.

More Shitweaselry

Shortly thereafter, we were all treated to a terse dismissal of the humanity of people with Down Syndrome and righteous judgement upon parent(s) who might be willing and able to welcome such a child:

This was immediately followed by (surprise!) grandiose thrashings of straw critics, hilarious backfilling and (OMG! surprise again!) a smarmy notpology. Lather, rinse, repeat. Zzzzzz.

WHAT?! Oh sorry. I must have dozed off there.

Ordinarily at such junctures we would snort derisively, and wonder bemusedly whether his hapless defenders would ever, finally, just give it up. And then the other day, lo and behold two more tweets emanated from the sacred thumbs of His Excellency:

Yes: our pontifex maximus has just decreed that a person ought to be enslaved and forced to donate his (or perhaps her?) tissue and organs to a hypothetical poet-fetus, else face the penalty of murder charges. Most foul indeed, Sir! And nothing new, as it turns out: just last year we were all to be enslaved organ donors to fetuses that feel pain. And possibly to pigs as well, although as usual with the preeminent science communicator’s Twitter rantings, who even knows what the fuck he is talking about. (I guess I snoozed through this one, thank the Lard.)

And so it has come to pass that a certain Richard of Dawkins fame now finds himself participating in our world-famous involuntary organ donor program—wherein we perform extractions of lifesaving organs whether people consent to them or not!

Live By It, Motherfucker

Of course we don’t go around forcefully harvesting organs from just anyone willy-nilly. No! Our involuntary donors all meet one very strict criteria: they would eagerly force others to donate lifesaving organs without their consent. Since they feel so strongly about this principle, it is only right and fair that they live (or die) by it! We are saving lives, people! (Maybe even poets.)

It is true that organ extraction does involve some risks. But none of our donors could possibly object to any of that when they are openly hostile to the very notion of consent, at least with respect to the fair use(s) of living human bodies to which our society is morally entitled. Still, rest assured that we harvest organs using only state-of-the-art equipment and extraction procedures. It’s not like we’re running an illegal abortion clinic here! Finally, to ensure donors are fully informed (if not consenting!), they are subject to a trans-vaginal (and/or rectal) ultrasound, for an exquisite view of the organ(s) from which they will soon be permanently parted.

The Lord of All Logic will find much in common with his many fellow involuntary donors, as they pass the time waiting until someone has a life-threatening condition requiring one or more of their body parts. There’s the gaggle of 447 active and retired members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who I am told are most anxious to hear more of his insightful pontifications on the relatively minimal harms of “mild pedophilia.” There is Sarah Palin of course, who can provide him with a more humane and enlightened perspective on people with Down Syndrome (<—I cannot fucking believe I just typed that. Fuck you for that alone, Richard Dawkins.). We’ve got various and sundry godbots and media personalities just as pompous as His Highness, which should make for some entertaining drama. Unfortunately, there are also U.S. Senators. (The congresscritters are always the most despicable of the lot, I’m afraid.)

Sorry, Richard: go away until you learn how to MORAL.

Until then…METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.