Ed Brayton

Author's details

Name: Ed Brayton
Date registered: June 30, 2011
URL: http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches

Biography

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

Latest posts

  1. Who’ll Stop the Rain for Obama? — May 21, 2013
  2. Barber Lies About DOJ Pride Pamphlet — May 21, 2013
  3. So, This Organization Exists — May 21, 2013
  4. Saudi Wingnut: Twitter Leads to Hell — May 21, 2013
  5. Texas Judge Uses ‘Morality Clause’ to Split Up Couple — May 21, 2013

Most commented posts

  1. It Appears I’ve Started An ‘Atheist Cult’ — 842 comments
  2. Shermer and the Myth of Feminist Persecution — 405 comments
  3. Major Changes at Freethought Blogs — 390 comments
  4. Professor: Rape is Okay if Woman is Unconscious — 375 comments
  5. Butler: Arrest Anti-Muslim Filmmaker — 258 comments

Author's posts listings

May 19 2013

Humanist Weddings Controversial in Britain

Categories:

Religious Authoritarianism

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It appears that non-religious weddings are more controversial than same-sex weddings in Britain, where members of parliament are running into opposition in trying to add recognition for humanist weddings into a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage.

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19 comments

May 18 2013

Why is Obama Going After AP So Hard?

Categories:

Civil Liberties

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The Obama administration has a terrible track record when it comes to pursuing whistleblowers and leakers, far worse than Bush ever had. But why are they going after the Associated Press so aggressively over the leak about the CIA operation in Yemen? No operational details were released and the AP even held off on the …

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10 comments

May 18 2013

The Lumpkin Prayer Case Gets Worse

Categories:

Church and State

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Remember that situation a couple weeks ago at a school in Georgia where a coach and 50 student prayed together in his office for two hours as the students missed class? Things seem to have been much worse than originally indicated. The FFRF has written a letter to the school with new information from their …

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38 comments

May 18 2013

Judge Endorses Heckler’s Veto

Categories:

Civil Liberties, Constitutional law, Free Speech

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The Dearborn Arab International Festival has been the site of many clashes between the police and Christian evangelists who go there to preach to the mostly Muslim crowd. This has resulted in several arrests that ended in acquittals and lawsuits that vindicated the protesters and forced the city to apologize. But in one case from …

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43 comments

May 18 2013

Ray Comfort Teaches How to Proselytize

Categories:

Wingnuttia

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In Ray Comfort’s latest column for the Worldnutdaily, he decides to teach people how to proselytize to gay people. He offers up this conversation he allegedly had on an airplane with a lesbian couple as the perfect example of how to do this the right way:

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37 comments

May 18 2013

The Disturbing Story of Kamran Rizvi

Categories:

Human Rights

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You should read this. It’s a moving and disturbing story about Kamran Rizvi, who has gone from a political prisoner of the dictator General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan to a human rights adviser to Benazir Bhutto to an impoverished immigrant working at a gas station in America. It includes this story:

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27 comments

May 17 2013

Is the Seizure of AP Phone Records a Scandal?

Categories:

Civil Liberties, Transparency

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There’s an interesting debate going on at the Volokh Conspiracy over whether the story about the DOJ seizing phone records of innumerable AP reporters and editors is a real story or not. Orin Kerr, who is a libertarian-leaning law professor and therefore generally likely to oppose unnecessary searches and seizures, declares it a non-story at …

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25 comments

May 17 2013

Misogyny in the Bible

Categories:

Feminism, Religious Weirdness

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It truly baffles me that any woman could be a Christian (or for that matter, a Jew or a Muslim since they all accept the passage I’m about to recite as coming directly from God). The Bible is virulently patriarchal and misogynist in a hundred different ways. Like Leviticus 12:

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41 comments

May 17 2013

The Fallen Eagle Has Landed. With a Thud.

Categories:

Wingnuttia

by

falleneagle

Oh man, the latest freakout in the right wing blogosphere is quite hilarious. The White House twitter account has a fallen eagle on it! OMG! It’s some sort of secret Muslim signal, like those infamous “terrorist fist bumps” that the president and first lady give one another. The Jawa Report appears to have started the …

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34 comments

May 17 2013

Adelson Hit With $70 Million Verdict

Categories:

Corporate Influence in Politics

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Sheldon Adelson, one of the world’s richest men and now one of the primary money men for Republican politicians, has lost another major lawsuit. A jury awarded a man who had helped Adelson get a license to open several casinos in Macau a $70 million judgment.

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7 comments

May 17 2013

Ralph Reed’s Moneymaking Scheme

Categories:

Wingnuttia

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Ralph Reed was once Pat Robertson’s boy wonder, the head of the Christian Coalition. Then he left, made a failed run at governor of Georgia and founded his own group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. And now he uses his deep connections on the Christian right and his massive mailing list to make some serious …

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2 comments

May 17 2013

Buehner: Single Women Under Father’s Control

Categories:

Feminism, Wingnuttia

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Dave Buehner of Generations Radio launched into quite a diatribe on his radio show, explaining — accurately — how the Bible clearly says that a woman is owned by her father until she gets married, then she is owned by her husband. And therefore they have no freedom or self-determination at any point:

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31 comments

May 17 2013

Another Virginia Republican Theocrat

Categories:

Christian Nation, Church and State, Religious Authoritarianism

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On Tuesday, Al Bedrosian won the Republican primary for a seat on the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors. He ran largely on a platform of being in favor of opening that board’s meetings with prayer, which has been a matter of some controversy. The Roanoke Times reprints an article Bedrosian wrote in 2007 where he …

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20 comments

May 17 2013

Royce Lamberth Just Became My Favorite Judge

Categories:

Civil Liberties, Constitutional law

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Judge Royce Lamberth is one of those federal judges, like Richard Posner and Alex Kozinski, whose status in the legal profession exceeds their position, rivaling Supreme Court justices. And for good reason, too. He’s finally saying what few other jurists will say, that the judiciary is far too deferential to the executive branch on national …

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3 comments

May 17 2013

The Koch Brothers Boogeyman

Categories:

Politics, Skepticism

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This post is undoubtedly going to irritate some of my longtime readers, but as I often like to say it has the great virtue of being true. I mostly agree with Michael Moynihan that the Koch brothers have too often been used as a cartoon bad guy by liberals painting with too broad a brush …

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41 comments

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