Support Stephanie's legal defense

zinnia-150px-may-2015

(Donate to Stephanie’s legal defense fund!)

Stephanie Guttormson is the Operations Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. She’s advised secular advocacy groups on trans issues, she debunks pseudoscience on her YouTube channel, and she’s a good friend. And now, she needs our help.

Recently, a lawsuit was filed against Stephanie by a so-called faith healer, Adam Miller, after she pointed out that his claims of faith healing are completely unsupportable. I mean, it’s faith healing. Seriously, does anyone actually think that does anything? Miller wants her video removed from YouTube, but his allegations of “copyright infringement” and “defamation” are extremely unlikely to hold up. This is just another frivolous lawsuit intended to harass critics and silence debate.

Open critique of religious claims is not something that can be considered disposable in a free society. And this takes on even greater importance when “faith-based” treatment is being offered as a substitute for actual medical care. This is like pharmacies that stock homeopathic products next to real medicine: bad enough on its own, but imagine if they sued anyone who pointed out why this is so irresponsible.

Stephanie has a legal defense fund set up at gofundme.com/srglegalfund. I hope that people will do what they can to support her defense. Stephanie is far from the only one debunking bad science and bad arguments on YouTube – harassment and silencing of skeptics is something that affects all of us. Support Stephanie. Screw faith healers.

{advertisement}
Support Stephanie's legal defense
{advertisement}

4 thoughts on “Support Stephanie's legal defense

  1. 2

    Penn Jillette, the famous magician and skeptic, has joined with the well known atheist broadcasters Matt Dillahunty and Seth Andrews in promoting the skeptic video blogger’s case and in contributing to her defence fund.

    They and Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers (Biologist and activist) SL Singh (physicist famous at least in England) and other lesser known commentators have tweeted about this to well over three and a half million followers on twitter.

  2. 3

    Has she contacted Ken White at popehat.com? He is often able to arrange pro bono counsel for those targeted by precisely this kind of frivolous legal action.

  3. 4

    It isn’t copyright infringement, but he might have a point vis-a-vis defamation.

    Assuming that this post is an accurate description of the lawsuit, he doesn’t.

    By her standards, most advertisements are fraudulent lies.

    That is legally irrelevent.

    I recommend you read popehat.com, specifically Ken White’s posts. He’s a lawyer who blogs about cases very similar to this one. He’ll explain the relevent law.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *