Ouch — American Atheists gets a slap that hurts

All the religious fanatics and Christian and Muslim weirdos who criticize atheists can take a flying leap — and when Bill Donohue rants and raves about atheist billboards, it’s a vindication and a triumph. But when one of our own, the black atheist Sikivu Hutchinson, speaks out in criticism, it’s a message that must be taken seriously and addressed.

But AA’s ahistorical paternalistic approach to “secular” public service messaging is one of the main reasons why New Atheism is still racially segregated and lily white. Clearly AA doesn’t give a damn about the reality of urban communities of color in the U.S. vis-à-vis the institutional role of organized religion in a white supremacist capitalist context.

David Silverman, are you listening? I know this is not the message you want to send, but it’s what people are hearing. Fix this. Don’t tell people of color what they want, listen when they tell you what they need.

So is AA on the frontlines of providing prisoner re-entry resources—the real regime of 21st century “enslavement” for millions of African Americans—to families and communities that are permanently locked out of the so-called American dream due to the legal disenfranchisement of former convicted felons in employment, housing, and voting? Did AA even deign to consult with local interfaith and secular, humanist or atheist people of color about the cultural and psychological impact of the legacy of slavery in a nation where black bodies are still the primary targets of violent police suppression, racist criminal sentencing and capital punishment?

Why, I do believe there’s a hint or two in there about what would win people over to our side…

Get out while you can, Catholics!

I’ve known a lot of wonderful people who are Catholics; I’ve even met some Catholic priests who do great and ennobling social work. And then there are all those ordinary American Catholics who ignore all the doctrine, like the ban on birth control, and yet keep on going to church every week. The one thing I always want to ask these people is…WHY DO YOU STILL SUPPORT THAT BACKWARD, MEDIEVAL NONSENSE? There’s such a tremendous disjoint between the thuggish, conservative church and these people’s lives that it is so wrong that they continue to support it.

Now Annie Laurie Gaylor hits one out of the park with an excellent open letter to liberal and nominal Catholics. Go read it, even if you’re an atheist already. If you’ve got Catholic family, forward it to them — it can be your ‘coming out’ announcement!

Also, the FFRF is trying to raise money to publish it as a full page ad in the NYT. Help them out. If nothing else, it’ll be hilarious watching Bill Donohue rupture himself in an apoplectic fit.

Predatory and reptilian

Thomas Nast, the 19th century political cartoonist who gave us our standard image of both Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, is going to be enrolled in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. This isn’t really controversial: he was extremely influential. He was not entirely a nice guy, though, being a bit of a nativist and also responsible for promoting the stereotype of the Irish as violent drunks…so I would hope that his exhibit in the Hall of Fame would also highlight his bigotry. That’s not acceptable to Bill Donohue, though — Nast is the subject of his latest fit of apoplexy, because, unfortunately, while having a biased attitude towards the Irish people, he also portrayed Catholicism accurately.

I confess. I laughed.

You mean it wasn’t the hippies’ fault?

Last week, the news was full of stories about this report that supposedly explained the Catholic church’s history of pedophilia: the major surprising conclusion that was reported is that the problem wasn’t gay priests, it was all those dirty rotten hippies who were miseducated in the free-love Sixties. Until now I’ve seen one substantial ‘analysis’ of the report, but unfortunately, it was by Crazy Bill Donohue, who is frothingly angry that it didn’t blame the homosexuals. He also blames the hippies, but it’s all the fault of all those gay hippies who infiltrated the church, with their weird ideas about being nonjudgmental. Catholics are supposed to be angrily judgmental about any deviance from whitebread procreation, and Bill is the world’s expert on angry denunciation of any variation from his narrow version of Catholicism.

Now, though, Miranda Hale has read the whole ugly thing, and it doesn’t sound good…but for very different reasons than Donohue’s. She points out that the study was entirely funded and approved by Catholic organizations — if it hadn’t arrived at pre-approved conclusions, it would not have been permitted to have been released. They also fudged the data in unconscionable ways: by changing the definition of pedophilia in an entirely arbitrary way, they changed the frequency of pedophilic abuse in the church from 73% down to 22%. Tsk, tsk. Not only were they dishonest, they were stupidly dishonest.

And what about those hippies?

In other words, the researchers believe that the vast majority of priest-abusers, whether they attended seminary in 1930 or in the early 1970s (or any time in-between), committed their crimes during the 1960s and 1970s (the time they refer to as the “peak”), and that this is primarily due to the fact that their seminaries failed to provide these priest-abusers with a proper “human formation” curriculum.

All of this begs the question (one that the researchers completely ignore): why would any priest have to be taught (in a “human formation” curriculum or otherwise) that it’s never acceptable, ethically or legally, to sexually abuse a child? According to the researchers, we should unquestioningly accept their baseless assertion because, without a proper training in “human formation”, these priest-abusers were unable to understand “appropriate forms of closeness to others” (121) and that certain behaviors are not “appropriate to a life of celibacy” (120).

That argument never did ring true. I’m old enough to have known hippies, although also young enough that I just missed most of the fun, despite at least living in Eugene, Oregon for 9 years, where the hippie subculture still lingers. And never did I encounter a hippie who endorsed the idea that child-raping is OK.

I guess you had to be brought up in the amoral atmosphere of a Catholic seminary to absorb that message.

The War on Christmas opens a new front

It’s escalating. Now it’s not just defending Jesus, it’s about…well, you’d be surprised.

The West Village YMCA in NY is replacing Santa Claus with Frosty the Snowman. Guess who’s mad about that now? Bill Donohue:

“Christmas is not about Jack Frost; it’s not about snowmen,” fumed Bill Donohue of the Catholic League.

“We’re not talking about some secular organization that has no religious roots. If they can’t celebrate Christmas, then they should check out. What a bunch of cowards.”

Hey, Bill! It’s not called Santamas, you know.

How authoritarians treat art

Somebody needs to grab Bill Donohue by the ear and drag him to the Neues Musem in Berlin — all the way to the airport, during the long transatlantic flight, and on the taxi ride to the museum. Pinch hard, too, and make him squeal all the way.

While digging a subway tunnel in Berlin, construction workers discovered a cache of buried expressionist sculptures, hidden survivors of the Nazi campaign to destroy what they considered “degenerate art”.

Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by Edwin Scharff, a nearly forgotten German modernist, from around 1920. It seemed anomalous until August, when more sculpture emerged nearby: “Standing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” by Marg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators also rescued another fragment, a different head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman.” October produced yet a further batch.

The 11 sculptures proved to be survivors of Hitler’s campaign against what the Nazis notoriously called “degenerate art.” Several works, records showed, were seized from German museums in the 1930s, paraded in the fateful “Degenerate Art” show, and in a couple of cases also exploited for a 1941 Nazi film, an anti-Semitic comedy lambasting modern art. They were last known to have been stored in the depot of the Reichspropagandaministerium, which organized the “Degenerate” show.

I’ve found one small collection of photos of these works, and of the “Degenerate” show. They’re interesting, not great masterworks or anything, but it’s amazing how a touch of harsh history imbues them with much greater meaning.

Mr Donohue should contemplate how history regards people who try to dictate what art means, and that the person who is thought to have hidden these works from the hammers of the Nazis, Erhard Oewerdieck, is now considered heroic.

Smithsonian announces that art can’t be controversial

Bill Donohue is on a roll. First he bravely put up a billboard that reassures everyone that Jesus was real, which is no problem, as far as I’m concerned; it’s not true, but he isn’t interfering with other people’s right to express themselves. But now he has really done it: he has successfully pressured the National Portrait Gallery to remove an art work that Donohue did not like. That is obstructing the right of free expression, and is deplorable.

The work in question was a video about the pain of AIDS victims in Mexico, and references the Catholicism of that country by showing a crucifix with ants crawling on it. Apparently, you can make explicit movies that show Jesus getting whipped, tortured, nailed, and stabbed (Donohue loved Gibson’s Passion!), but we’ve got to draw the line at showing bugs crawling on him. Although, probably, Donohue doesn’t so much object to tormenting Jesus as he does to the implicit criticism of Catholicism, which is his true god. And perhaps also to the fact that it was part of an exhibit on sexual and gender identity, which makes all patriarchal homophobes a little queasy.

But so what? Since when do individuals or organizations get to declare what kind of art is permissible, and get national art institutions to yank out exhibits? I am unsurprised that Donohue brayed like an idiot, because that’s what he does, but I am appalled at the response from the gallery.

National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan said in a statement about the current video that Wojnarowicz’s intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. He said the museum did not intend to offend anyone.

If the museum did not intend to offend anyone, then it wasn’t doing its job. Great art is supposed to challenge the mind, and sometimes that means by necessity that it will offend. Does the National Portrait Gallery include religious art? I know it does. Then it offends atheists. Does it include works by abstract expressionists? I know it does. Then it offends all those people who will declare that they have pictures by their 3 year old on their refrigerators that look better. They’d best get rid of those bold and aggressive paintings by Picasso and replace them with something safer … say, some Thomas Kinkade originals, or perhaps a wing of Elvii painted on black velvet.

Are they going to let Bill Donohue dictate everything that they’re allowed to exhibit? And if Bill Donohue, why not me, or John Waters, or Al Goldstein? Oh, maybe because non-authoritarians are willing to allow work they dislike to stand, unlike wretched bluenoses like Bill Donohue.

You know what’s really sweet about this, though? Donohue’s protest got one obscure exhibit pulled from one art gallery, and now it’s going to blossom on a thousand web sites and millions of people will see it. Quite the triumph, Billy!

The War on Christmas escalates

Now the Catholic League — you know it’s going to get ugly when Bill Donohue joins the fray — has bought a billboard near the American Atheists’ billboard. The pro-superstition sign says, “You Know It’s Real: This Season Celebrate Jesus“. Isn’t that sweet? It’s just like the religious side to proclaim a falsehood. Anyway, they’re welcome to buy the ad space. The real winners here are the commercial enterprises marketing billboards and selling, selling, selling…and when you get right down to it, isn’t that what Christmas is really all about?

Meanwhile, the British have their own weird version of an indignant Christian majority standing up against oppression: a group has launched the Not Ashamed campaign, in which Christians are urged to be shameless, as if they’ve ever had a problem with that.

Paul Sims calls them out on the silliness. They’re seeing the same ridiculous whining over there that we are here, where outraged empurpled Christians claim that “Merry Christmas” is an endangered phrase and somehow they’re being repressed by the fact that sometimes people say “Season’s Greetings!” or “Happy Holidays!”, which I have to say as an atheist are about the two least ferocious battle cries I could imagine. In response to the Christian persecution complex over Christmas, he says:

But it isn’t happening. When are campaigners like Carey – and members of the government like Eric Pickles – going to take a look around them and finally admit that there is no widespread movement to ban Christmas. Lots of non-religious people (I’d wager the majority) even quite like it. I know I do. Some might even (whisper it…) confess that they quite enjoy hearing the odd carol, and find the local nativity scene (yes they still exist) quite endearing. Sure, there are Season’s Greetings cards and the like, but I guarantee that your local card shop will have plenty of religious ones too. It’s called catering to a diverse market – Christmas is a Christian festival, yes, but it’s also a mid-winter celebration (whose history stretches back to pagan times) that means lots of different things to lots of different people. But one thing we can all agree on is that it’s an enjoyable time of year, whether you include the baby Jesus or not. Banning it would be a really bad (and quite frankly bizarre) thing to do.

He also has a poll question. Would you believe that so far, it looks like people will still be able to celebrate Christmas even when the atheist dictators take over the universe?

Would you like to ban the Christian version of Christmas?

Yes 11.39%

No 88.61%

Of course, the evil truth is that I don’t want to ban Christmas either — I plan to coopt it as an atheist holiday. Bwahahahahahaha!