Pullman responds to Donohue

But of course fanatical Catholic Bill Donohue is furious about the upcoming movie, The Golden Compass, and is ranting and raving about it. Pullman offers a universally useful and sensible response.

“To regard it as this Donohue man has said — that I’m a militant atheist, and my intention is to convert people — how the hell does he know that? Why don’t we trust readers? Why don’t we trust filmgoers?” Pullman said. “Oh, it causes me to shake my head with sorrow that such nitwits could be loose in the world.”

It’s just a book and a movie, and it doesn’t compel the reader to like it — and we could say that about any of the overtly atheist books that have been published lately. Maybe Donohue should save the outrage for the day we have tax-exempt Pullman reading rooms, or when Pullman is required reading in science classes, or when politicians are elected on the basis of their attractiveness to Kingmaker Philip Pullman and his lobbying group, Fantasy for the Family.

The bad news from the past week

I have been lost in a haze of pain for the past week, and missed out on some of the news — I’m reading it now, so forgive me, my posts might sound a bit like I’m a time traveler from the misty long-ago of July 2023. First up: people died without me noticing.

Peewee Herman (Paul Reubens) is gone? I loved that guy. Apparently, a lot of people loved him, but he didn’t tell them he was dying of cancer. That’s strength of character.

Also, he was 70 years old? I need to know his secrets, and it’s too late.

We also lost Sinead O’Connor. I remember watching Saturday Night Live back in 1992 — that is, when I still watched the show — and standing up and cheering when she ripped up the photo of the pope. Good for her. Of course, she was immediately blacklisted by the show, which was one reason I no longer watch it.

You will not be surprised to learn that Bill Donohue of the Catholic League did not like O’Connor at all, and took this as an opportunity to spit on her memory. It’s a strangely digressive whine — he rambles on about various other people he claims to have destroyed, and claims there is no sexual abuse problem in the church. It’s those damned homosexuals.

The truth is that anyone who talks about clergy sexual abuse and refuses to tell the truth about the oversized role played by homosexuals is either ignorant or dishonest: they were responsible for 8 in 10 cases of molestation. And they got away with it because of the gay subculture that orchestrated the cover-up. All of this is detailed in my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes.

It is an amusingly un-self-aware and horrifically homophobic rant. He claims to have vanquished the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, which still exists and has multiple locations around the world.

Michael McDonnell is quoted in the AP article speaking favorably about Sinead. He is identified as the “interim executive director” of SNAP. Poor Mike has been the “interim director” for quite some time now. The reason he is still “interim” is because SNAP does not exist anymore. It’s nothing but his cell phone.

Pretty ironic, coming from one lone homophobic crank with a fax machine.

I listened to an “evil” song and survived

I heard a little buzz about the Grammy awards last weekend — there was one song performed that infuriated the culture war conservatives. It got Ted Cruz mad.

“This… is… evil,” Cruz wrote on Twitter, the ellipses perhaps representing the breaks he took to consume more pornography. His post was a re-tweet from conservative commenter and former OANN presenter Liz Wheeler, famed for having the kind of brain you normally find in an aquarium. “Demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan,” she wrote. “I could throw up.”

Well, then. As an atheist in good standing, I had to look this performance up. Here you go, everyone can watch the Sam Smith and Kim Petras song, “Unholy.”

They lied to me. Oh, sure, Sam Smith wears a top hat with devil horns, but the song isn’t about Satan worship, it’s all about people of ambiguous and not-so-ambiguous gender gyrating on the dance floor at a hot club, with lots of lascivious behavior. Anyone interrupting the proceedings with a sermon about Satanism would be a killjoy, and would probably be thrown out. It wasn’t about God or Satan at all, it was about sex.

That’s what make the conservatives uncomfortable — it’s simply their current obsession with changing mores about sex, and the fact that a singer wears a hat with horns allows them to claim it’s all about their religion. It’s not. Christians have sex, too. Some of them are gay or trans even. All that’s going on is that they’ve got an excuse to exercise their authoritarian purity culture.

Let’s see what notorious libertine and Catholic League president Bill Donohue has to say about it all.

Kim Petras is a man who thinks he’s a woman, or what is today called a “transgender person” (they really don’t exist, but that’s for another day). He said he “personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn’t want me to be a part of it.”

He did not say who told him he could not be a part of whatever religion he was talking about, or why. But he did admit that “as a trans person, I’m kind of already not wanted in religion.” He did not explain why that might be.

Wow. Donohue has always been an ugly little man, but he really embraces the hatefulness. Also obliviousness.

Petras says she (a person who really exists) was sympathetic to and curious about religion, but was rejected by religion. Donohue then stupidly complains that she didn’t say who or why she was told this religion would not accept her, or why she might not be wanted by that religion. I mean, read what you wrote, Bill. You are a shining example of the problem.

Man, I haven’t read anything by Bill since those long ago days when he was happily hating me. I think he’s gotten worse.

By the way, about the song: I didn’t much care for it, and it won’t be getting much play around my house, and that’s OK! It’s not evil, it just wasn’t to my taste. If you liked it, that’s OK, too! This shouldn’t be about the song, but about authoritarians who want to dictate your personal preferences.

I’m gonna need a fax machine

Just one. And some letterhead. And a catchy name.

We’ve seen this strategy before: remember Bill Donohue and the Catholic League? He’s got no clout at all with Catholics or anyone else, but he’s got his little office with his fax machine and maybe a secretary (at best), and a willingness to fire off angry press releases, and this translates into invitations to appear on Fox News and donations.

Here’s another one: One Million Moms and Monica Cole. She’s it. The other 999,999 moms don’t seem to do much except echo Monica in annoying emails to their nieces and grandchildren and other hapless relatives. She has a kind of power, though, since she bullied the Hallmark Channel into yanking an ad that featured a lesbian couple.

Hey! I want to be able to bully the Hallmark Channel, too!

So now I’m thinking I ought to falsely claim to be the head of a mighty swarm of angry fanatics. I’ll just need to reserve a domain name and design some stationery and start firing off demanding press releases. I only have to come up with that intimidating title.

Which do you think is scarier? “onemillionatheists.com” or “tentrillionspiders.com”? I can tweak the numbers freely, since they don’t actually mean anything real. Hmm, maybe the arachnidleague.com. Let me know what you think.

I’d almost forgotten what a terrible atheist I am

Suddenly I’m seeing this image popping up all over. But it’s over ten years old! And worst of all, it’s not real — it’s made by an atheist, which explains why the list of characteristics sounds so awesome. It’s also not a particularly useful perspective on how non-atheists think.

Hate atheists? So do we! Your typical atheist smokes marijuanana associates with jews masturbates regularly partakes in deviant sexual proclivities worships at the alter of the internet. To find out more come to atheist awareness week!!! april 2008

While I was trying to track this down, though, I ran across this old post on Scienceblogs by Matt Nisbet, which reminded me of how much I was hated by some of my colleagues on that site. No, really, you might have seen evidence of the friction in some of the published posts, but there were a couple of people who really pulled out the knives in the back channel. This is relatively mild stuff.

Consider this recent article at the National Catholic Register. Titled “The Face of the New Atheism,” it profiles PZ Myers and his rants against the Eucharist and the Catholic community. Notice the key words emphasized. The dominant image of atheism portrayed in the article is one of “hate,” “contempt,” “dogmatism,” “a junior high level understanding of religion,” “irate,” “incredulous,” “bigoted”…the list goes on.

Is this how we really want Catholics to view us? Do we really want a group of moderately religious Americans–who polls show otherwise prize science and reason, and who stand for many of the same values that we hold dear–to think of us through the prism of PZ Myers?

Right. The National Catholic Register. This is a guy holding up as a source an extremely conservative newspaper that idolizes Bill Donohue, echoing the arguments of Donohue and Mark Mathis, producer of the movie Expelled, which worships Catholicism, and considers atheists as tools of the anti-christ. I guess he thought it was as valid a source of information about atheists as anything else. It’s a bad memory. Sometimes things got rather toxic at the old site.

But what redeems it all is that Nisbet then goes on to cite as a counter-example, his paragon of what a good atheist should be. It’s DJ Grothe, the guy who later was found to have covered up sexual harassment at the Amazing Meetings, who abruptly left the JREF under a cloud, who was strangely characterized as a psychopath by people who had to spend much time with him, and who had a fondness for crude rape jokes.

I actually first met DJ Grothe about a year before at Dragon*Con in 2010. I had admired his work on Point of Inquiry and when he became president of the JREF I thought it would be a great thing. When I got a chance to meet him that year I was excited. We encountered one another at a Skepchick party (one that had to be moved to the lobby because of noise complaints as soon as it started). He was drunk, but it was a social occasion and I’d had a couple cocktails as well. No big deal. I was fairly surprised though, when DJ turned to me and said that the reason everyone loved the Skepchicks was because they “want pussy”. That seemed to be a rather dismissive and insultingly sexist way to dismiss the work of your professional colleagues (not to mention the people whose booze you were at that moment drinking.

I’m embarrassed to say that at the time I was still a bit fame-struck and too shocked to really process it. I didn’t do what I should have done, and told him how rude, insulting, and unprofessional it was to say something like that, even while drunk. Even in a casual social setting. But then it got more bizarre and incredible. I’m a tall guy, chubby (fat, honestly) and bearded. If I were gay I would definitely be a bear. This was discussed and DJ then made an hilarious horrendous “joke” about how I should pay him a visit down in Los Angeles so that he could drug me and let some of his friends have some fun with me. You know, in other words so that I could be gang raped.

Nisbet’s post hasn’t aged well, and I’m now proud to have been such a bad atheist, if that’s what atheism is supposed to be more like.

By the way, Rebecca Watson talked about Grothe back in 2014. If you want a glimpse into what a shitshow the skeptic/atheist movements have been, just read the comments.

Milo Yiannopoulos meets the Church Militant, and a love-in follows

It’s the damnedest thing. Yiannopoulos gets invited on to Michael Voris’s reactionary Catholic show, and he accepted. I guess that tells you how desperate for attention he has become.

I tangled with Voris a few times 8 or 9 years ago — he had a YouTube channel called The Vortex (it’s now been shuffled around to the “ChurchMilitant Archives”) in which he railed against atheists, Catholics who weren’t Catholic enough, and gays, and demanded that America become a Catholic monarchy…so kind of a squirrely Bill Donohue on meth. The pairing of Voris and Yiannopoulos was unexpected, but they really hit it off and had a little lovefest online. It’s a bit like those old commercials for Reese’s — “You got peanut butter on my chocolate! No, you got chocolate on my peanut butter! Yum, it’s delicious” — only substitute shit and snot for peanut butter and chocolate, and no, I’m not going to try it to see if the combination suddenly acquires a delightful flavor.

Here, you can suffer as I did.

It begins with Yiannopoulos whining about his ‘tragic’ fall from grace. His explanation is that he got too big and too powerful, so a leftist conspiracy was mobilized to tear him down with lies.

But who cares about Milo Yiannopoulos, anyway? The bulk of the conversation — if we can call it that, Voris only gets an occasional word in edgewise — is Milo rambling on and on about how he despises Pope Francis, but reveres the institution of the papacy, which is where he and Voris are clearly copacetic. Both think the the church is full of deviants and perverts, and that the way to fix the Catholic church is to clear out all the gay priests, although, Milo is quick to add, Leftists make way too much noise about priestly rapists, it wasn’t that bad, he got over it, the real problem is social justice warriors getting all up in arms about it. Blah blah blah. Talking fast to bury all the lies and inconsistencies.

He also comes down strongly on the nature vs nurture debate (I say there is no debate, it’s both, and you can’t untangle all the influences.) Milo strangely argues that it’s all nurture, that you can shape a child any ol’ way you want, making him the only blank-slater I’ve ever heard from.

There’s also a prolonged eruption of misogyny. Did you know that lesbians ruined everything, that they’re all bitter divorcees and spinsters, and that If you take god away from a woman and she’s 35 and doesn’t have a man by her side, bad things happen, and that he’s certain that Generation Z will change everything back. He wants to see women burning their briefcases and marching in defense of motherhood, which roused Voris to interject that that is authentic feminism, as represented by the Blessed Mother.

The last bit of the video is the two of them going back and forth, piously declaring that they’ll pray for each other, and Milo suggesting that he might come back to the way of purity and light and Catholicism, but he needs 5 or 10 years more to have fun indulging in his degeneracy. Voris is cool with that.

Only watch on an empty stomach. Anthony Barcellos, you are a wicked man for sending me that — I’m pretty sure it was a mortal sin.

I wonder what the Catholic League has to say about the Catholic pedophile ring in Pennsylvania?

Here we go again. As announced by Pennsylvania State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a grand jury has released a report on the child-raping pedophiles employed by the Catholic church as priests.

The nearly 1,400-page report’s introduction makes clear that few criminal cases may result from the massive investigation.

“As a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted,” it reads.

“We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests. Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands.”

Some details and names that might reveal the clergy listed have been redacted from the report. Legal challenges by clergy delayed the report’s release, after some said it is a violation of their constitutional rights. Shapiro said they will work to remove every redaction.

It’s indefensible, but then…the actions of the Catholic church have always been repellent and indefensible, but they just keep on keepin’ on. So I got to wondering what that ardent and reactionary defender of the Holy Mother Church, Bill Donohue, had to say. Easy: it’s a conspiracy.

So if no one can be prosecuted, and there is no investigation of the clergy from other religions, to say nothing of the widespread sexual abuse of minors in the public schools, why is Shapiro presiding over the grand jury report on priests? It’s not exactly hard to figure out: he wants to stick it to the Catholic Church.

The goal is obvious: the release of the most graphic accounts of molestation is being done to embarrass the Church. Why? So it will weaken its moral authority. That is what Salacious Shapiro wants to do.

Donohue has two excuses. The first is that other religions are doing it, and they’re getting away with it, so why pick on the Catholic church? I think most of us learned by kindergarten that somebody else doing a bad thing doesn’t mean you get to do it, too. This part is basically an admission that there are child-rapers in the Catholic clergy, it’s just that it’s unfair to only pick on Catholics.

But then his second excuse is that releasing stories of child molestation weakens the moral authority of the Church. I hate to tell you this, Bill, but it’s not the public exposure of moral corruption with the church that discredits it, it’s the acts of corruption themselves that do that.

I also don’t think the report is intended to stick it to the Catholic Church. There’s a simpler motivation. The Attorney General would like priests to stop raping children, for the Catholic Church to stop enabling them, and for the Church to stop its criminal efforts to hide the facts of heinous crimes.

Maybe the alt-right is non-binary

Jason Wilson writes about the alt-right’s tactics. Here’s one perfect example: Andy Ngo is a kind of inflammatory yellow journalist whose specialty is capturing tiny slices of left wing events that he then distorts into the kind of lie useful for enraging the Fox News/Breitbart crowd. For instance, here’s how he handled a visit by James Damore to Portland State:

In the lead-up to Damore’s appearance, Ngo penned an article for the Wall Street Journal alleging that the event had been threatened, writing that that “we expected controversy. But we also got danger.” The evidence of danger, as reported in Willamette Week, was “two violent threats on Facebook, three diversity events held on campus as counter-programming, and a scornful blog post”.

This was more than enough for Fox News, who ran an item under the headline “Antifa targets ‘Google memo’ author James Damore’s talk at Portland State”.

Impressive. Everything is coming up antifa nowadays. I suspect this post makes me antifa, at this rate.

Then the ever-ridiculous Peter Boghossian chimes in. This is where it gets really interesting, because there is a phenomenon many of us have noticed before: people who like to claim to be on the Left, usually referring to themselves as “classical liberals” or “centrists”, who are remarkably consistent in siding with the Right to deplore anything and everything anyone on the Left does, yet also pay lip service to rejecting the traditional Right. Maybe we ought to start recognizing that the usual political binary is often invalid, and that there are multiple axes of polarization. Maybe we ought to appreciate that someone like me can despise, for example, Bill Donohue, and so can a Boghossian, and at the same time, Boghossian and I can mutually reject each other. It’s amazing! More than two categories? Brains will explode!

Still, people will cluster in domains of mutual sympathy, it’s just that there are definitely many more than two of them. Boghossian helpfully engages in a little taxonomy for us, in the process of saying stupid stuff.

Boghossian does seem to see members of her discipline in a dark hue. At the Damore event, he said that “diversity is a Trojan horse for a political agenda.”

When asked later what was inside the Trojan horse, he said “the diversity they try to create is the most superficial kind of diversity and doesn’t include ideological diversity.”

When asked who “they” were, Boghossian replies “all disciplines infected by postmodernism, and women’s studies and gender studies in particular.

“It’s intersectionality, it’s diversity, it’s those values which are riding in the wake of postmodernity,” he added.

“Jordan Peterson speaks about this, Gad Saad speaks about this, Steven Pinker speaks about this, there’s a whole circle of us speaking about this.”

Despite his criticisms of the campus left, however, Boghossian insists that he is not rightwing, that he “can’t stand Republicans”, and complains about recent accusations that he is “alt-right”. He insists it’s all about Enlightenment values.

Ngo too. “I identify as a centrist if I was forced to answer”, he writes, adding that “Freethinkers is a nonpartisan organization”.

Strange, then, that they, and the movement that Boghossian claims membership of, take such trouble over antagonizing the left, and drawing rightwing attention.

I’m actually kind of impressed here. There are quite a few people mentioned in the article who I, as an outsider to their group, would have lumped together, and there’s Boghossian, unconsciously affirming my taxonomy. Yes — Boghossian, Peterson, Saad, Pinker, they all belong in a single taxon. The defining character seems to be, at least in the context of this excerpt, that they are all pretentious academics who do not understand the meaning of the word “post-modern”, while hating it fiercely, all while huddling under the banner of the Enlightenment, an 18th century movement that they believe entitles them to consider themselves progressive. They also consider themselves liberal while hating diversity in a multicultural nation, and despising gender and women’s studies at universities that are encouraging students, who are mostly women, to examine the complexity of our social and cultural environment.

They’re a weird, regressive bunch. Their clique also includes other people mentioned in the article, like Christina Hoff Sommers, the anti-feminist who calls herself a feminist, and Dave Rubin, the cheerleader for right-wingers who insists he is a centrist, Enlightenment liberal.

I’m perfectly willing to recognize that this is an ugly mess of a beast that is completely different from the ugly mess of a beast called the Republican party. The American landscape is filling up with a diverse collection of shambolic monsters, united only in their willingness to shit on anything that resembles a progressive vision of our future.

I think I can skip this one

The Minnesota Republic is another of those fringey conservative student newspapers that get surprisingly well funded by the Republicans, and aren’t at all representative of the campus as a whole. This one is on the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota, and they get enough money that they’re bringing in a couple of well-known speakers to discuss an issue of concern.

That issue is feminism.

And to discuss it, they’re flying in two people. Guess who? Hint: they’re not well-informed experts. They have more of a reputation as anti-feminist ideologues. Try to come up with the two worst names you can imagine.

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Is the Pope Catholic?

badpope

This is my regular reminder: don’t fall for the traps and snares of the wily Pope. He’s been getting a lot of praise lately for his rejection of climate change denialism (and even I have felt faint twinges of affection for a Pope who can get Bill Donohue to puff out his lower lip and pout), but it’s not good enough. I didn’t find his Papal Encyclical to be that good — it’s great that it acknowledges the scientific evidence in the first chapter, but it’s theme is fundamentally anti-science, and he’s more than willing to abandon evidence if it contradicts his dogma.

Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”. Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.

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