Frank Schaeffer, who with his father was one of the aggressive peddlers of anti-choice ideas, has commendably accepted part of the blame for the Tiller murder, admitting that he and his kind contributed to the atmosphere of hate. Unfortunately, he fails with this bit in the middle.

Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It’s the late term abortions that horrify most people. And for the sake of keeping abortion legal adjustments need to be made. Roe is far too all or nothing (as I explain in my book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All — or Almost All — of It Back). As I say in my book today I believe that abortion should be legal but more regulated than Roe allows. I also think that we should do what President Obama calls for: use sex education and contraceptive distribution and programs to help women and children in a way that results in less abortions.

No, not good enough. Abortion must remain a decision between a woman and her doctor…crazy evangelists (or ex-evangelists) and senators have no part in it. And the late term abortions? I am so fed up with the oh-so-concerned “pro-lifers” being “horrified” by them — those abortions are carried out when the pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother. Those are specifically decisions from which some patriarchal relic should be ejected. Does he really hope to place more obstacles and more stress in the way of frightened and often grieving women?

And speaking of not-pologies, look at Randall Terry’s.

“George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.

Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”

Randall Terry is available for comment at FUK-YOU-TERY

He’s more concerned about the government response to a murder by zealots like him? And he’s afraid the government will close down his most effective actions…like what, murder? Or is he afraid his ability to terrify frightened women and harass health care professionals might be limited? Way to place your priorities, man.

As for being available for comment, I hope no one bothers with the grandstanding ghoul.

A few years ago, the creationist organization Answers in Genesis launched an ill-conceived ad campaign that featured kids with guns; the message was “If God doesn’t matter to him, do you?”. They were trying to hop onto the fear bandwagon, so popular among conservatives now, of trying to convince people that you must support their aims, or some Other will kill you.

That sign and the whole aborted ad campaign (it died away fairly quickly after AiG started it) has everything backwards. We start with the recognition of and respect for the right of every person to live, and then…it doesn’t matter whether you believe in gods or not. There are Christians and atheists who are sincerely appalled at the murder of anyone, whether they share the same political views or not, and there are hateful, callous enablers of death who cross all religious lines. And yes, I’ve noticed some presumed atheists ranting about “justifiable homicide” and murdering anti-abortionist families in the comments here, and I deplore it. The only reason I am not deleting those vile comments right and left is that I think they are useful warnings: do not become the monsters you despise.

There’s another place where you can find people arguing for “justifiable homicide”. It’s what Scott Roeder, the killer of George Tiller, believed in. He’s a so-called “Christian Patriot” — a double scoundrel, in other words — who has a history of fringe beliefs, a criminal record of association with violent anti-government groups, and a paper trail in which he wraps himself in religious sanctimony and advocates death for abortionists.

In many ways, though, his religiosity is going to be a distraction. It simply doesn’t matter, and the strongest conclusion we can draw from it is that religion fails to provide a reasonable framework for morality, since it is so easily and regularly subverted to rationalize evil. Focus instead on the root of the problem: Roeder was an amoral, obsessed nut who found support for his delusions among a particularly ugly American subculture. Gods don’t matter. And when you think gods do, you lose sight of the truth: other people matter.

Feministe has an excellent list of pro-choice charities. Want to do something to infuriate the women-hating anti-choicers and do something positive in honor of Tiller’s work? Donate!

While we’re all feeling a bit shocked at the horrible event in Kansas, we can all turn to the Reagan legacy. Mike Reagan is giving away free copies of a book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, written by (or more likely, ghost-written for) his father, Ronald Reagan. The title is wonderfully ironic, since these people clearly don’t have much of a conscience. Everyone order a copy, they’re free; suck the money away from these enablers of killers, and put another copy of their trash into the trash.

These are the people who fuel the kind of self-righteous ignorance that encourages people to picket reproductive health clinics, treat ob-gyns as public criminals, and incite murder. The heroes are the doctors who sacrifice so much — privacy, security, and in this case, their life — to provide essential services to women, the women in whom Reaganites find so little value, unless they are pregnant. One of the tragedies of this recent killing and the conservative tradition is that it will be increasingly difficult to find heroes brave enough to step into this role…exactly as these narrow-minded, puritanical enemies of human liberty want.

New Hampshire is working on legalizing gay marriage, and has a bill pending…unfortunately, it is being compromised.

The new version, which is expected to come up for a vote Wednesday, adds a sentence specifying that all religious organizations, associations or societies have exclusive control over their religious doctrines, policies, teachings and beliefs on marriage. It also clarifies that church-related organizations that serve charitable or educational purposes are exempt from having to provide insurance and other benefits to same sex spouses of employees.

Lovely. The first part is fair — I don’t think churches should be compelled to endorse gay marriage — but the last part is odious. It’s basically a loophole that says religious groups can be as bigoted as they want to be. In another decade or so, when gay civil rights are accepted as matter-of-fact and we look back on these years with the same disbelief and disgust that we look back on the days of racial segregation in the 50s now, remember that religion actively lobbied for the right to cling to discrimination and the denial of civil rights to a segment of society.

Read his own words and see what he thinks is “the most important part” of the announcement of a major scientific milestone. He’s welcome to his own religious beliefs; the problem is that he has the arrogance to think they need to be trumpeted as part of the science.

Some days, I think other people must be aliens. Or I must be. For instance, there’s a lot of noise right now about this article analyzing the future of information and media that, if you read the comments, you will discover that people are praising to an astonishing degree. I looked at it and saw this graph:

And my bullshit detector went insane. It’s supposed to be saying something about where people are and will be getting their information, but there’s no information about where this information came from, and it’s meaningless!

Way back in high school, I had this excellent chemistry teacher, Mr Thompson, who taught me the only worthwhile stuff I got out of my science classes in those years. He was really big on thinking — I know, a real radical — and he didn’t have us simply plug-and-chug through basic chemistry problems, he forced us to work out why we were doing what we were doing. For instance, he did simple things like make us put away our slide rules (that’s how long ago this was) and pencils and think through a problem, getting a ballpark estimate in our heads for the magnitude of the answer, and then we’d work through the details of the solution. (Come to think of it, using slide rules was a real advantage for this kind of reasoning.) We were always doing back-of-the-envelope estimates for problems he’d throw at us.

The other thing he did was introduce us to unit analysis. If we thought we had a way to figure out the answer, forget the numbers for a minute, just work through the units and see that it actually makes sense. If you’re trying to figure out grams/liter of a solution you’re making, and when you work out the units and discover it’s coming out liters/mole, you know you’re doing it wrong.

Simple, basic stuff. You ought to have absorbed this into your bones in grade school if you want to be a scientist.

So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if the inconsistency of the intervals is extremely annoying. But what are the units of the Y axis? What’s being measured? I have no idea. I presume it’s a stacked percentage of something, but that’s unclear. Information produced? Absorbed? Thrown at a wall and forgotten? What kind of information? It’s all lumped together and unspecified. Could we have some units, please? And can you really categorize a single unit of information that applies appropriately to what comes from a newspaper and what comes from a social networking site?

The other data we’re missing is a source and methodology. If it’s saying that someone in 2009 is getting 10% of their “information”, nebulous as that means in this context, from blogs, how was that determined, and where are the raw data that was used to compile this chart?

Surprise — there isn’t any. This whole chart was built out of some guy’s impressions. There are no numbers and no sources and no measurements were made. It puts up a colorful pretense of being quantitative, but there’s nothing but vapor and handwaving there. Mr Thompson would have been horrified.

And then this imaginary data is used to extrapolate imaginary trends into an imaginary future and make unbelievable predictions, which everybody seems to believe. I really don’t get it. If a student put this kind of garbage on my desk, I’d at least draw big red X’s across the pages and slap an “F” on it; I’d be tempted to set it on fire, throw it in my trash can, and piss on it. You cannot build plausible predictions from garbage data.

So, I must be an alien, because no one else seems to be expressing visceral disgust at this kind of nonsense, except for Larry Moran, who probably is also an alien. I’ll have to see how many extraterrestrials are lurking in my comments section now.

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The graph has been much improved.

Now she has been awarded the first ever Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

The Stephen Jay Gould Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould.

The winner of the 2009 Stephen Jay Gould Prize is Eugenie C. Scott. Dr. Scott has devoted her life to advancing public understanding of evolution. As the executive director of the National Center for Science Education she has been in the forefront of battles to ensure that public education clearly distinguishes science from non-science and that the principles of evolution are taught in all biology courses. She has served on the boards of many organizations, such as the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and as a consultant to organizations from the National Academy of Sciences to WGBH/NOVA to the Mississippi Department of Education. In these efforts, she has been an important leader in the public sphere, molding and focusing the efforts of scientists, educators, lay people, religious groups, skeptics, agnostics, believers, scholars, and ordinary citizens through firm but gentle guidance.

Dr. Scott is a gifted communicator and public intellectual. She is a frequent guest on radio and television shows, and an eloquent spokeswoman for science. Her writings have illuminated the process of science to thousands, and her books have exposed the efforts of many groups in our society to hobble and undermine the teaching of science to our younger generation. The organization she helped create far transcends the considerable reach of her own voice, vastly amplifying her impact on public understanding. For these many reasons, it is extremely appropriate that Dr. Scott be the first recipient of the Gould Prize.

Congratulations!

The California court ruled today on the constitutionality of proposition 8, the measure that prohibited same sex marriage. Unfortunately, the court upheld the ban.

California should be embarrassed. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Vermont allow or will allow same-sex marriages, and New York and New Hampshire are working on it. The trend is going one way, towards recognizing the civil rights of all individuals. Californians better get to work, you don’t want Mississippi to beat you to the 21st century. (Although I will be quite pleased when Mississippi legalizes gay marriage, whenever that may happen and no matter what order the states accomplish it.)

I got home late, and have just tuned in to The Link, the grossly overyhyped History Channel documentary on Darwinius masillae. I haven’t seen much of it so far, but there is good and bad. The good: lots of long closeups of the fossil itself. The bad: it’s kind of slow and talky. Fortunately, I haven’t seen any grand pronouncements that it’s going to change the universe, although the title is a bit annoying.

Those of you who have seen more of it can leave your comments and opinions here.