Only you can help prevent bishops

CFI is also taking on the bishops, by defending birth control and telling Obama to do likewise.

And we can help.

HHS is allowing public comments on the new guidelines until Tuesday, June 19, 2012. Here’s how you can get involved:

1.   Visit www.regulations.gov.

2.   In the search field, type the following: CMS–9968–ANPRM.

3.   Scroll to the top result and click on “Submit a Comment.”

This drawn out debate over something as basic as birth control is a perfect example of the harmful influence of religious institutions on public policy. Send a message to policy makers at HHS right now and tell them it’s time to finalize the contraceptive rule and move on.

Remember, the deadline is Tuesday, June 19, 2012!

Dooo eeeeet!

CFI expresses outrage over the sentencing of Alexander Aan

The Center for Inquiry is organizing a protest outside the Indonesian embassy in DC next week. The protest is at the prison sentence handed down to Alexander Aan for expressing an opinion about religion.

Alexander Aan did nothing more than exercise the most basic of human rights — the liberty to express his beliefs — yet he is now in great danger. Not only has he lost his freedom, but many people in Indonesia are calling for his death. It is unconscionable that any person could be jailed or face death threats for simply stating his or her position regarding religion. Freedom of belief and expression are universal rights that should be afforded to all individuals.

In response to today’s ruling, CFI is organizing a protest outside the Indonesian embassy in Washington, D.C. The protest will take place next week, most likely on Monday afternoon, June 18. If you can attend, please email Michael De Dora at mdedora@centerforinquiry.net

Thank you CFI.

Alexander Aan

In actually important news – Alexander Aan has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.

An Indonesian man arrested after writing “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page was jailed for 30 months Thursday for sharing explicit material about the Prophet Mohammed online.

Alexander Aan, 30, was found guilty of “deliberately spreading information inciting religious hatred and animosity”, presiding judge Eka Prasetya Budi Dharma told the Muaro Sijunjung district court in western Sumatra.

Utterly disgusting.

 

Mike Gillis

Mike Gillis of Ask an Atheist decided he hadn’t been rude enough yet, when he called my objection to posting my email without permission “such a stupid pedantic distraction from Becky’s actual response.” So he commented again:

Ophelia, knock it off. Now you’re just looking for excuses to dismiss Becky’s arguments.

Actually no. I said what I had to say about her “arguments” in a later post. My objection to her publishing my email without asking is not an excuse at all, it’s a very real objection.

Not worth a post, obviously. I just did it by way of using The Hammer of Shame.

Why is she going there?

And then there’s a bunch of guys doing a video about how stupid and awful women who talk about harassment are. I haven’t watched it (and oh god do I not want to) but it’s partly transcribed, and what’s there is awful. It’s so awful, and the comments by one of the guys involved with it are so awful, that the combination had me slamming on the brakes and deciding (again) that I can’t do a talk at TAM.

But there are people who tell me they decided to go partly because I’m going to be there, and I would feel like a worm if I didn’t go, so I took the brakes off again. But this stuff is pissing me off like you would not believe.

Gilliel provides a relevant (to me) segment:

-“Ophelia Benson compared TAM to Nazi Germany” 11:12:15 Another blatant lie. I don’t agree with Ophelia’s post, but that’s not what she wrote. It simply isn’t. -“If Ophelia thinks TAM is like Nazi Germany, why is she going there?” Well, it might be because she never actually said that…(1:12:35)

Also, it’s because I was invited and I accepted long before DJ decided to do all this blaming of the women talking about harassment. The comparison I did make (which was not “TAM is like Nazi Germany”) came after DJ blamed the women talking about harassment (which could, for all I knew and still know, have included me).

But anyway – that kind of ERVesque bullying doesn’t make me look forward to going.

DJ should do something about all this. I still don’t understand why he thought it would be a good idea to antagonize a bunch of women (and a bunch of men) some of whom were part of the program at TAM, a few weeks before TAM. I think of the wonderful people who organized QED, and how welcome I felt before I got there and while I was there and after I left. I wonder why DJ does not operate more like them.

 

Bad analogies are bad

Here’s some of what Becky Friedman said in her post addressed to me at Ask an Atheist:

My argument is that feminism applied dogmatically, along with employing shame and zero-sum tactics of approach, work at cross purposes to eliminating misogyny and harassment in the atheist/skeptics community(ies). So I’ll give a few examples of how I see your writing as part of that larger observation. I’m not going to go looking for “too-dogmatic” things because that was never my argument.

In my original editorial I state: “Is our womanhood and feminism so holy that we cannot and will not open ourselves to criticism, discussion, and questions? Because the tone I’ve seen is unforgiving.” I could very well have linked the following comment on your Misogyny?  What Misogyny? post as one example of this:

I don’t want to see [commenter] Justicar as a decent human being in one place despite knowing that he’s not one via what he’s said in other places.

This strikes me as dogmatically rejecting all ideas a person has based on experience/contact with them in another arena. If myself and a pastor got into a spat about evolution, but then the pastor said “I don’t even want to see evidence of you doing charity because I know that in another arena you deny the majesty and wonder of the Almighty Creator!” we’d easily identify that as dogmatic.

That’s an idiotic analogy. My mention of Jews in Germany in 1936 was a bad analogy because it was much too strong to compare with women reporting harassment at conferences. Becky Friedman’s analogy is a bad analogy because it’s much too weak to compare with a guy who calls me and other women “cunts” more times than a search function can count.

Becky Friedman was comparing my view of Justicar to a pastor’s view of an atheist who denies the majesty of god. Bad analogy. My view of Justicar is not that he denies the majesty of god or anything comparable to that; it’s that he calls women cunts and whips up contempt for them in every way he can think of.

It’s not “dogmatic” in any relevant sense to refuse to chat with someone who calls women cunts. That’s not the right word, and it’s not the right category. It’s not “dogmatic” to refuse to break bread with someone who calls people by racist epithets, and it’s not “dogmatic” to refuse to argue with someone who calls people by sexist epithets.

Not the right Atheist to ask

There is way too much shrapnel flying around today, I can’t grab a minute to write a post not nohow. So the shrapnel is going to pile up in a big pile while I grab this minute.

Becky Friedman of Ask an Atheist did a post addressed to me yesterday (but I didn’t see it until today). She started off by saying

I received a personal email from blogger Ophelia Benson around 5 pm on Tuesday:

and then after the colon she pasted in the whole personal email. Without having asked for my permission. Which would not have been forthcoming.

I pointed that out this morning.

About an hour ago Mike Gillis also of Ask an Atheist responded to the issue of posting an email without permission:

This is such a stupid pedantic distraction from Becky’s actual response.

These are not good people.

 

Eff up your effigy

I’m not going to blame religion for this, because it would be a cheap shot. It’s not religion so much as cranked-up nastiness – with a religious veneer.

The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., has hanged an effigy of President Barack Obama from a gallows on its front lawn, a move DWOC pastor Terry Jones said was in response to Obama’s recent endorsement of same-sex marriage, as well as his stance on abortion and what Jones called his “appeasing of radical Islam.”

What was that I was saying about threatoids and threat-like remarks? Hanging people in effigy is the same kind of thing. It used to be fairly common, I think, or at least not unknown…but then so did flogging and slavery and child labor. Hanging people in effigy is not an old custom that ought to be revived.

The effigy is suspended from a makeshift gallows with a noose of yellow rope, has a doll in its right hand and a rainbow-colored gay pride flag in its left.

In a telephone interview with The Huffington Post, Jones said the flag was meant to call attention to Obama’s stance on same-sex marriage and that the baby doll is there because the president is “favorable toward abortion.”

But then Obama should have an abortion in his hand, not a baby. Get your ducks in a row. Gay pride flag: something Obama approves of and Pastor Jones hates. Baby: something Obama is taken to want to see aborted before it gets to be a baby and Pastor Jones loves. See? The two don’t match. He did it wrong. It has to be: something Obama approves of and Pastor Jones hates, for both items.

People are so sloppy with these things.