This is one of the essays I delivered to my patrons last month. If you want to support more work like this, and see it earlier, you can sign up here.

“When the revolution comes….”

It’s a dream, a mantra, a prayer for some. I’ve heard it from the anarchists. I’ve heard it from the socialists. I’ve heard it from the communists. I haven’t heard it from the libertarians or the secessionists or the sovereign citizens, but that’s probably only because I know that sometimes I have to choose between the polite smile and actually listening.

I haven’t said it myself. I don’t expect I will. All impulses to burn everything down to the contrary, I’m a reformer at heart. Everything I’ve learned about revolution has reinforced that tendency. Even having revolutionaries near and dear to my heart and among the people I want to grow up to be hasn’t shaken me on this.

It does, however, make me want to explain why I believe revolution is a terrible idea in most democratic states.

Before I do that, though, what do I mean by “revolution”? I mean the transfer of governmental power within a state through extra-legal means, not merely rapid political change. If the mass of U.S. non-voters rose up next year and wrote in coordinated candidate slates at every level of government, the potential for change would be enormous. It would not, however, be revolution.

In a revolution, power is seized rather than granted. Additional changes to the political system are then required to maintain that power rather than have the upstarts thrown out and prosecuted. With enough backing, a revolution can be bloodless, but this isn’t the norm.

That’s what I mean when I talk about revolution. That’s generally what people mean when they talk about “the revolution” coming, though they may be hazy on the details of how it’s supposed to happen or how power is supposed to held and maintained under the new system.

There’s a good reason those details are hazy for most people who are pro-revolution. It’s because the process of a revolution is ugly. It’s ugly in the lead-up, ugly in the transfer of power, and usually ugly in the outcome. Continue reading “You Say You Want a Revolution” →

This is a two-part guest post from my dear friend Kelly McCullough, one of the few people I really enjoy arguing politics with. He was also one of the people I had in mind a few days ago when I observed that it was a joyful thing to watch good writers who normally keep mum on politics reach their breaking points.

This was from Kelly yesterday.

Refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils is fundamentally anti-democratic.* It’s also stunningly bad tactics. Politicians cater to the people who vote. It’s a shockingly simple concept that seems to be lost on a number of people on the left.

The way that the conservative movement pushed the Republicans so far to the right is simple. They showed up. They did it for primaries and caucuses, they did it for local elections, they did it for off year elections, and they did it by supplying people from their own ranks to run for local offices because those local politicians of today are the national politicians of tomorrow. And they did it by making sure that that the politicians knew that they would be there for every election.

Every single time the Democrats lose an election they move to the right because that’s where the voters who showed up are. Not showing up doesn’t create more progressive Democratic candidates it creates more conservative ones.

We are in the mess we’re in now with so much state control in Republican hands, and gerrymanders because conservative Republicans reliably show up and Democrats as a group don’t.

I’m not particularly sympathetic to the claims that Democrats don’t show up because the candidates don’t inspire them either, because the way to get candidates that inspire you is to show up and elect them in caucuses and primaries, and if no one on the ballot at that level agrees with everything you want done, then run for office yourself.

Getting your views represented in the halls of government is work. Sometimes, it’s the kind of work that means you have to do it yourself. I did.

*It’s anti democratic because it says that your purity of heart in waiting for the perfect candidate is more important than all the harm that will be done if the greater evil is elected. Democracy is about making the best governing choice at every level for the common good. It’s not about you, it’s about coming to a governing consensus. Sometimes that means you don’t get everything you want, but you compromise to get some of it. Sometimes it means that you don’t get anything you want personally, but you do it to protect the rights and gains of others because that’s important.

I haven’t followed all the discussions where this was shared, but Kelly asked me to look over this follow-up today. Continue reading “Why I Will Vote for the Candidate Who Doesn’t Address All My Needs” →

There are a handful of tweets and memes being passed around right now about how Donald Trump, gleeful fascist and leading GOP presidential candidate, is an internet comments section come to life. They’re missing something important.

There are a handful of analyses of Trump’s polling numbers (most notably one by Nate Silver) being passed around right now, purporting to show that Trump can’t become the GOP candidate, much less our next president. They are also missing something important.

This is not a time for missing things.

Paul Fidalgo has a new post that captures something very important.

Jeb, Cruz, Rubio, they all like to contrast themselves with Trump to show themselves as somehow above his demagoguery. But be it on this issue, or on many, many others such as women’s rights, LGBT rights, and even acceptance of scientific facts of existential importance, when it comes to what they themselves say they believe, they are all Trumps. They just suck at it.

There is another meme floating around. I’ve only seen it once or twice. It shows another GOP candidate (Cruz?) leaning in to whisper in Trump’s ear. “You weren’t supposed to say that out loud.”

Saying these things isn’t the problem. Believing these things is the problem. Being comfortable in those beliefs is the problem. Being willing to act on them is the problem.

Not understanding the scope of the problem is also a problem. Continue reading “Trump, Code, and Why I Need You to Read Those Comments” →

A few months back, Heina wrote a great piece about people who appear in the media to complain about the lack of diversity in the atheist movement without ever mentioning anyone but white male atheists.

It’s old news to atheists that we have an across-the-board diversity problem. We know we are, as a whole, a little too educated, able (and ableist), middle-to-upper class, white, and male to claim that we are part of a truly inclusive movement. In the years since Dear Muslima, many people have been tirelessly working to make the movement better. If you take the excellent reactions on the part of many of the skepto-atheist-secular orgs into account, that work has not been in vain. If you rely on the Twitter feed of one of the down-to-three Four Horsemen to tell you what the “atheist id” might be, then the hard work of the non-white and/or non-male people and their white and/or male allies in the fight has been not only tireless, but utterly thankless.

I refuse to accept narratives that complain about the lack of diversity in atheism yet do nothing to promote those who are working to improve things. Such writing is complicit in furthering the damaging notion that atheism is the sole province of rich white men and erases those faces and voices within it who are struggling for recognition.

Heina’s post came in out February. I mention it now because this is still a problem and it’s a broader problem than even Heina mentioned. She focused on journalists and illustrated the post with a non-atheist. The fact is that this is also a problem among the rank and file in the atheist movement. We’ve gotten caught up into a complaint cycle that keeps the focus right on those white men while ignoring almost everyone else.

There was another one of these “Ugh, big-name atheist dudes” articles in the Guardian recently. I’m not going to link it because there’s really nothing to distinguish it from every other piece like it except perhaps a bit of Eurocentrism. It was about terrible political opinions instead of diversity per se, but those are actually more common than diversity pieces. If you missed this one, don’t worry. You can read another in a week or two.

I saw another atheist share the piece uncritically. I shared it in order to point out the problem that Heina had named in February: Mentioning that there’s too much attention on the wrong people without refocusing some of that attention on the right people only adds to the problem. Then several people shared the article from me uncritically, I banged my head on the wall, and I went to bed.

So, having slept, let me say this explicitly: If we, as atheists, only or mostly share news about the high-profile problem people in the atheist movement, we’re adding to the problem. Continue reading “If You Want a Better Public Face of Atheism, You Have to Build It” →

It’s been surreal watching people excuse the words of Republican presidential candidates–most prominently but nothing like exclusively Donald Trump–as empty rhetoric we don’t really have to worry about. I wrote this on Facebook yesterday, in the aftermath of the murders at Planned Parenthood. Someone asked for it to be sharable as a blog post as well.

Once upon a time, a politician telling you he (mostly “he” then) was pro-life meant that you knew who contributed to his campaign. He wasn’t going to actually do much of anything about it. He could get elected talking about it, but action risked re-election in most places. Besides, the courts weren’t terribly friendly to the idea. He could point to them if his constituents wanted to know why he wasn’t getting anywhere.

As a country, we got comfortable electing these people. It didn’t do any harm, you see. Continue reading “Empty Rhetoric” →

If you’ve seen me talk about Catholic health care in the U.S. before, you know that there are a number of things that piss me off. You also know that one of the top items on this list is that Catholic health services prevent patients from making informed choices about their health or giving informed consent to their health care providers.

Not only do these facilities maintain a list of directives where they will substitute their “moral” judgment for evidence-based standards of care, but they won’t tell you that they do so. They won’t disclose all your treatment options, and they won’t tell you when a safer option than the one they’re recommending exists. They have decided in all their heavenly wisdom that it is better to keep you in the dark than run the risk that you’ll seek these treatments elsewhere.

American Atheists has just made me very happy by announcing a plan to change that. Continue reading “Protecting a Patient’s Right to Know” →