I am so tired of religious conservatives calling atheists immoral

Here’s Stephen Moore, a rather prominent conservative chosen by Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve board, a fellow who has strong opinions on the importance of traditional marriage, husband as the breadwinner, wife as the mother and homemaker.

Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”.

Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.

Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.

He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.

You would think a guy like that would be a dedicated husband and father, wouldn’t you? Setting an example and all that.

Nope.

The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010.

Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said.

Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.

There’s more. He has remarkable history of bad ideas.

“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work. They want equal pay for inferior work,” Moore wrote. He went on to claim that the real “injustice” was that female pros were paid, while men playing college tennis who could “beat them handily” were not.

“I’m a radical on this; I’d get rid of a lot of these child labor laws. I want people starting to work at 11, 12,” he said during the debate.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males, as well. They’ve been declining, and that is, I think, a big problem,” he said in a CNBC interview.

“I want everybody’s wages to rise, of course, but you know, people are talking about women’s earnings — they’ve risen,” Moore continued. “The problem, actually, has been the steady decline in male earnings, and I think we should pay attention to that, because I think that has very negative consequences for the economy and for society.”

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.),” Moore wrote. “It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”

“The NCAA has been touting this as example of how progressive they are. I see it as an obscenity,” Moore wrote. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women? What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”

Moore’s solution? “No more women refs, no more women announcers, no more women beer venders, no women anything.” He did offer one caveat: “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like (sportscaster) Bonnie Bernstein. The fact that Bonnie knows nothing about basketball is entirely irrelevant.”

I think it’s kind of obvious that he has a deep contempt for women, and that his ideal of traditional roles for women is simply chattel slavery.

Whoa. I thought having a vagina & no Y chromosome defined a woman?

Although, if you think about it, having two characters already meant it wasn’t a binary, but that you had 4 possible states. It looks like there are other characters people were avoiding talking about, which means there are already a heck of a lot more possible states.

This is all about the complicated story of Caster Semenya, an Olympics-class track star who has XX chromosomes and female genitalia (I’m sorry, she’s been poked and invasively examined to a degree no person should be subjected to), which, according to all the TERFs who yell at me now and then, ought to be sufficient to define her as ALL-WOMAN, but a committee has determined that her testosterone levels are too high, and that she shouldn’t be allowed to compete with the “aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics”. So apparently the vagina/XX chromosome requirement is insufficient, and you also have to have lower testosterone levels than a certain amount?

The physiology of top athletes is already weird and abnormal, or they wouldn’t be top athletes. There are subtle differences in proportions in some cases, and blood cell and bone density may be greater, and don’t get me started on the freakish psychology of people who spend long years in intense physical training. Maybe we should also insist that no one can compete in women’s events with a hematocrit above 40, or set an upper limit on the proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers they can have. Uh-oh…body fat. Women on average have more body fat than men. If they train so hard that they get lean, maybe they should be declared non-women. But it’s the nature of athletics to have to exercise hard. A conundrum!

The good news for us men is that all the policing of the boundaries of acceptable human morphology and biochemistry seems to be executed on women, not us. No one seems to be looking at athletes and suggesting that maybe that much muscle mass means you aren’t human anymore, and you should go home — that it would be unfair for you to compete with normal human beings, to preserve the integrity of the athletics of Homo sapiens. It isn’t a Harrison Bergeron situation if only women get handicapped.

It’s almost as human sexual properties are multifactorial and on a continuum. But that can’t be, right?

CORRECTION: Semenya is 46 XY DSD.

I still don’t know which bathroom she’s supposed to use.

Skepchicks, assemble!

This is good news. After a long hiatus, Rebecca Watson is gathering her team of superheroes to relaunch Skepchick. I find her reason personally inspiring.

I’ve long had it in the back of my head that I should relaunch, but depression, anxiety, and life found a way to stop me (or allow me to stop myself). Then, a few months back, a lawyer emailed me threatening to sue me over something one of my writers wrote ages ago. I realized I needed to do something, as I was spending thousands of dollars on server space and now I was preparing to spend many more thousands of dollars on a legal case, all for a website I’d been ignoring for years. I decided I would shut everything down.

Then I talked to some very kind lawyers, who told me the person threatening me was a troll who makes his living scaring bloggers into paying him off in the hopes they won’t go to court. They gave me information on how to go about fighting him, and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is what I love doing.” I love fighting bullies. I love exposing scam artists. And I love providing a platform for other writers and activists to do the same.

So instead of shutting Skepchick down, I decided to relaunch. I contacted our writers and many of them were excited to come back on. You can see the full list of them (thus far) here. You’ll once again see our daily Quickies, and you’ll be able to read voices other than mine.

A troll is threatening to sue her, and instead of caving in, she gets angry and reinvigorated? That’s excellent. That’s what I need to hear, because…well, there’ll be some ugly news I share later.

Still not a fan of debate

But this discussion between Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers is half-entertaining. Sommers is stuttering and stammering and throwing around her usual garbage — there is no pay gap, #metoo has gone too far, constant exaggeration of “hysteria” on college campuses — and Gay is calm and strong and focused. It was worth it for her commentary alone, so the whole thing could have been half as long and ten times better by cutting out the jittery blonde hack.

Wow, Jacob Wohl is really working hard to be the poster boy for Dunning-Krueger

Wohl is just full of ambitious plans, most of them revolving around presenting himself as a Machiavellian genius, despite being the dumbest man on the internet. One of his recent schemes was a company, the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence (ACPI), which would make money by manipulating political betting pools.

Bumbling conservative provocateur Jacob Wohl pitched investors this spring on a scheme to use fraudulent news stories to manipulate political betting markets, according to a fundraising document obtained by The Daily Beast.

The document indicates that Wohl attempted to raise $1 million to fund the Arlington Center for Political Intelligence, which he claimed would “make shit up” to profit from bets on political races and would suppress Democratic turnout in 2020.

“Make shit up” is a direct quote from his plea. It’s also the centerpiece of his cunning plan — all he had to do was lie, lie, lie, and nobody would ever notice his reputation as a liar.

“With a superior handle on American cultural nuances ACPI will be able to have a devastating impact on Democrat candidates,” the document reads.

The group also planned to create “high-impact political publicity stunts” to affect political races. The pitch praises two recent headline-grabbing conservative efforts—the GoFundMe campaign to fund the border wall and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer handcuffing herself to Twitter’s New York office—as activities to emulate.

“ACPI plans to execute similar sophisticated and impactful stunts as frequently as possible in order to influence political outcomes in the favor of our backers during the 2020 election cycle,” the pitch reads.

Wohl really needs to crack open a dictionary. Words he needs to learn the definition of are: intelligence, nuance, sophisticated. Everything he does is the opposite of those.

Also in his catalog of stupid schemes, he decided that Pete Buttigieg was a major danger for Trump, so his goal was to kneecap him.

That scenario jibes with how the Buttigieg smear circulated on Monday. After the sexual assault allegation appeared in a vague Medium post under Kelly’s name, the unverified claim was quickly trumpeted by a number of right-wing blogs, including Big League Politics, The Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars. From there, it circulated widely on conservative Twitter accounts and other blogs for hours until the accuser denied the allegations and The Daily Beast revealed that Wohl and Burkman were accused of soliciting men to make up stories about the candidate.

A source told The Daily Beast that Wohl and Burkman said the goal of that scheme was to take down the Democrat who poses a threat to President Donald Trump’s re-election. The apparent aim of ACPI’s plan was profit.

Fool. His pointless ploy was to no avail, because as we all know, you only have to wait for a Democrat to open their mouth before they’ll kneecap themselves. As Mayor Pete promptly did, saying something idiotic about vaccinations.

These exemptions include medical exemptions in all cases (as in cases where it is unsafe for the individual to get vaccinated), and personal/religious exemptions if states can maintain local herd immunity and there is no public health crisis.

Vaccinations are to prevent that public health crisis — complacency and obliging faith-based rejection of good medicine, as Buttigieg is advocating, is what leads to them. His statement is simply political pandering to both sides.