I got an email from an old-school atheist activist. They asked a hard question. Or is it?

The AA magazine is filled with LGBTQ stuff
Did you get the latest AA magazine?

I was appalled to find that the biggest story in the July- October issue of the AA magazine is about something called “Drag Queen Story Hour.” IT TOOK UP SIX FULL PAGES PLUS THE COVER PHOTO.

What the futz do drag queens have to do with Atheism?

Whoa. What should be in American Atheist magazine? Six full pages of blank white pages and a cover with a title and nothing else? This writer clearly has a vision for the magazine, not that they’ve said what it is, and it doesn’t include drag queens. Why not? I guess we’re suppose to have nothing but articles about separation of church and state issues, legal shenanigans, and opposition to religion, which all sounds very dry and boring.

You can read American Atheist’s concerns about the drag queen story for yourself. The rationale is crystal clear.

Yesterday, American Atheists, Southern Maryland Area Secular Humanists (SMASH), PFLAG National, and PFLAG’s Leonardtown chapter sent a letter to the commission warning that the organizations “are prepared to seek judicial remedies for [the] violation of their rights.”

“At Drag Queen Story Hour, the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department arrested and charged a Christian extremist with five misdemeanors after he barged into the meeting room, terrorizing young attendees,” explained Samantha McGuire, SMASH Chapter Coordinator and National Field Director of American Atheists. “This anti-LGBTQ protester broke the law, yet St. Mary’s County Commission is blaming the victims, forcing the library to foot the bill to protect children from out-of-control fundamentalists.”

A Christian fanatic tried to disrupt the event, and Christian fundamentalist organizations are howling to shut down the participation of drag queens in any event, “for the good of the children”. I’m sorry, but are we only supposed to defend people from religious oppression when they are cis het straight people who conform to social expectations of dress? It sure sounds like my correspondent only wants to support atheists who fit their expectations of conventional behavior…which is exactly what the religious zealots want. It’s just that their ideal of conventional behavior includes going to church every Sunday.

It wasn’t just a lone loon disrupting an event, either. The county commissioners punished the library by taking funding away. AA has a few things to say about that, too.

“By kowtowing to Christian supremacists, the Commission is sending the message that bigoted protesters should use any means necessary, including threatening innocent children and committing multiple crimes, to get what they want,” said Nick Fish, American Atheists’ president.

I mean, you don’t need to read very far into this story to figure out why an atheist organization would take sides against Christian supremacy in action. Is this not enough for you?

My vision of atheism has always been that it is a tool for battling dogmatism, that it’s something more than a narrow answer, “NO”, to the question of the existence of gods. It is a vehicle for opening minds and defeating the constrictions imposed on us by authoritarian superstition. It’s not just for nerdy old white guys with conservative haircuts and a boring style of dress. We’ve already got the social approval and the ability to move into positions of relative authority.

We should be about anti-authoritarian secularism and breaking the bounds of unthinking custom. Just being an atheist is freeing one foot from the shackles, we should celebrate the people who break free of all pointless restraints.

Drag queens have everything to do with atheism. So do purple-haired ace furries, free-thinking hippies who like to knit, and staid old gomers who are comfortable in traditional relationships. All of us. We all need defending from the rigid authoritarianism of religious orthodoxy, and my atheism is not going to question inclusion and equality.

Oh, boy, this will set some asses on fire. Dr Subrena Smith argues that Evolutionary Psychology is built on failed premises (I’ve been saying the same thing for years), but she goes deeply into the contradictions in the field. None of their prior claims are valid, and they don’t fit with what we do know about evolution and the brain!

In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that the mind has an architecture that has been conserved since the Pleistocene, and that our psychology can be fruitfully understood in terms of the original, fitness-enhancing functions of these conserved psychological mechanisms. But for evolutionary psychological explanations to succeed, practitioners must be able to show that contemporary cognitive mechanisms correspond to those that were selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that these present-day cognitive mechanisms are descended from the corresponding ancestral mechanisms, and that they have retained the functions of the ancestral mechanisms from which they are descended. I refer to the problem of demonstrating that these conditions obtain as “the matching problem,” argue that evolutionary psychology does not have the resources to address it, and conclude that evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is therefore impossible.

I also appreciate this bit. One of the common insults that Evolutionary Psychologists deploy is that their critics believe that humans only evolved below the neck, which is nonsense. One can accept that the brain is an evolved organ without believing in the narrow, specific, and oddly improbable premises demanded by Evolutionary Psychologists.

These methodological problems prompt the question, “Is evolutionary psychology possible?” It is important to distinguish evolutionary psychological explanations of human behavior from evolutionary explanations of human behavior simpliciter. This is particularly important given that evolutionary psychologists often claim that those who reject evolutionary psychology but accept evolutionary theory are committed to a contradiction. However, evolutionary theory does not entail nativism or massive modularity. One might reject the theoretical apparatus proposed by evolutionary psychologists while still embracing an evolutionary account of the human mind.

Not that any of this will have any effect on EP at all — that’s a field that relies more on an emotional belief that they can study the past entirely by imposing their desired conclusions on weak data. Smith, on the other hand, has a strong understanding of logic and recognizes where these Evolutionary Psychologists have made a huge leap beyond what the data entails.

The latest confession comes from a lackey of Alex Jones, a guy named Josh Owens. Now that Jones’ empire of lies is crumbling, he finally steps forward to tell all.

I began listening to Jones’s radio show — the flagship program of what is now a conspiracist media empire with an audience that until recently surpassed a million people — in the last days of George W. Bush’s presidency. The American public had been sold a war through outright fabrications; the economy was in free fall thanks to Wall Street greed and the failure of Washington regulators. Most of the mainstream media was caught flat-footed by these developments, but Jones seemed to have an explanation for everything. He railed against government corruption and secrecy, the militarization of police. He confronted those in power, traipsed through the California redwoods to expose the secretive all-male meeting of elites at Bohemian Grove and even appeared in two Richard Linklater films as himself, screaming into a megaphone.

But it wasn’t the politics that initially drew me in. Jones had a way of imbuing the world with mystery, adding a layer of cinematic verisimilitude that caught my attention. Suddenly, I was no longer a bored kid attending an overpriced art school. I was Fox Mulder combing through the X-Files, Rod Serling opening a door to the Twilight Zone, even Rosemary Woodhouse convinced that the neighbors were members of a ritualistic cult. I believed that the world was strategically run by a shadowy, organized cabal, and that Jones was a hero for exposing it.

I had my limits. I can’t say I ever believed his avowed theory that Sandy Hook was a staged event to push for gun control; to Jones, everything was a “false flag.” I didn’t believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama smelled like sulfur because of their proximity to hell or that Planned Parenthood was run by “Nazi baby killers.” But it was easy to brush off these fever dreams as eccentricities and excesses — not the heart of the Alex Jones operation but mere diversions.

Owens was a conspiracy theorist who accepted a job from the most far-out conspiracy theorist around. He did not have qualms when he was paid large sums of money, or when Jones threw even more money at him, or when Jones abused animals or his employees, or when he was dragged off to record imaginary Islamic no-go zones. There were all these things he now says he didn’t believe, but he edited videos about them anyway, and willingly spread the nonsense to the populace.

Now he claims he was made uneasy, but it didn’t stop him from propping up the Alex Jones garbage heap for 5 years.

I’m afraid, Josh Owens, that you are not forgiven. Some of us knew all along that he was a ratbag lunatic, it’s deplorable that it took you so long to see the obvious.