Early this month Hemant posted a love note to the Secular Coalition for America.
I don’t love the SCA myself. I love it now a lot less than I did a week ago (which wasn’t much), because of its “Global Secular Council” and its way of responding to my questions about same. But Hemant, for some reason, is more gung ho about it. He did an email interview with Edwina Rogers that was worded in such a way as to indicate a certain amount of…distaste for her critics.
When you first took the position, the fact that you were a Republican was a point of controversy. Do you still get pushback from atheists who can’t see past that label? If so, how do you respond to it?
See there? Those atheists who thought a Republican lobbyist wasn’t an ideal choice for a secular organization “can’t see past that label.” It’s not that they have reasons for thinking there are tensions between the two, it’s that they can’t see past the label. How friendly.
As a female leader in our movement, what do you think are some of the biggest issues we must address as a community in regards to sexism?
We must continue to fight efforts to legislate away women’s rights on the basis of religion, especially the right of women to make their own health care decisions. Harmful legislation passed in many state legislatures this past year making it difficult or nearly impossible to get an abortion. Supporters claim they want to protect women, but in reality they are assaulting women’s bodily autonomy.
Our society needs to stop trying to control women’s sexuality. A woman’s right to a health care plan that includes contraception and abortion coverage is her choice, not her employer’s, not the government’s, and not the churches’. We also need to make sure we are teaching medically-accurate sexual education in our schools and eliminate the so called “slut-shaming” culture and damaging gender stereotypes that often come along with it.
Not a word about the sexism within the “community.” That’s not surprising, given how cozy the SCA is with Richard Dawkins and his eponymous foundation, but it’s cynical and annoying.
At the end Hemant sums up.
More importantly, I have yet to hear any reason that Rogers’ political affiliation has done any damage. While some of her responses still sound awkward (getting the attention of CPAC board members won’t win her many atheist fans…), I still believe there’s a benefit in getting Republicans to hear our message. It’s not like our side’s more progressive leaders will get GOP members to change their minds about atheists, so if anyone can, it’s her. (And if they don’t change their minds, well, it’s not like we were making any headway in the first place.)
I also appreciate that she hasn’t allowed herself to get dragged down by criticism that doesn’t affect her organization. She appears to be focused on her job — and doesn’t get distracted by commentary from Internet critics (for better or for worse). Her staff, in my experience, has worked in a similar way. They’re dedicated to their work and, while they hear what we’re saying, they won’t be getting into online wars anytime soon.
Another way of putting that would be “I also appreciate that she ignores all criticism from people outside her organization.” That’s a bizarre thing to appreciate. What’s so great about an organization’s ignoring criticism from its core demographic? The mere fact that people are on the Internet doesn’t magically turn them into aliens whose criticism is wholly irrelevant, especially if they criticize under their own names. I don’t think it’s clever of a secularist organization to display contempt for (let’s spell out what Hemant only implied) bloggers, since blogs can after all help with publicity and communication.
I’d love to hear from anyone who criticized Rogers’ appointment two years ago. Has your opinion changed since then? If not, what’s holding you back?
Yes my opinion has changed since then; it’s changed since last week; it’s gone way down.
Yet he doesn’t say anything about those people who can’t see past the label “atheist” and therefore think everybody who doesn’t believe in a deity is therefore “on the same side.” I wonder why…
Ha, I said therefore twice. Whoops. 🙂
Has Edwina Rogers ever recanted her statement to Greta Christina:
My first exposure to Rogers was the interview she had with Greta. I got the impression then that Rogers was either lying, not very intelligent, or had contempt for SCA’s core constituency. I agree with Ophelia:
There’s technically nothing to recant.
She didn’t say it wasn’t a thing. She said she didn’t recall that it was a thing. Facts don’t matter. As long as she frames it in terms of ‘I don’t recall’ or ‘I can’t remember’, there’s nothing to be corrected, because who can say what she actually remembers but her?
I mean, of course obviously she’s lying. Anti-choice has been a mainstream GOP plank for decades, and only a complete political novice or a liar would claim to be ignorant of the fact. Basically, she’d rather we believe her to be incompetent, rather than catch her in a lie.
I’ve been seeing this more and more lately (as lately I’ve been dealing with a lot more bankers and salesmen than I used to). There’s a certain type of personality that the only time that they say they do not know something is when they know something, and they know you won’t like it, so they pretend not to know. If there’s a thing that they actually don’t know, they will invariably pretend to know all about it already, because they don’t want to seem ignorant. Once you realize that the person you’re talking to is this type, you get a lot more information out of the ‘I don’t know’s and the ‘I can’t recall’s.
Because that is the only option for actively responding to questions or criticisms.
Seriously, in 2014 people are still using “internet” and “online” as snide pejoratives? Including a guy whose shtick was writing a book about selling his soul on Ebay?
I also note the contradiction of praising the SCA for not getting “distracted” by critics, while also dismissing criticism of the SCA’s conservative-outreach as “hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained!” Either the SCA’s resources are broad enough to handle multiple discussions at once — in which case engaging the critics who are potentially your best supporters seems like a no-brainer — or its resources are very scarce and it needs to avoid wasting them on unproductive discussion — in which case, the conservative outreach has to produce results to justify those resources.
Awesome how these groups claim to represent us, while appreciating ZERO input from anyone who doesn’t agree with them 100%.
@7 Yeah…I can’t, from what Hemant said, figure out if that’s really supposed to be the case or not (that they represent us).
Because if the SCA is supposed to represent us, then criticism from us should damn well “affect her organization.” Which also leads me to have to ask what Hemant thinks her job is, exactly?
Yet, earlier, he called her “a…leader in our movement.” If she’s supposed to brush off criticism from the movement, then in what sense is she a leader? Or are we supposed to just be sheep that blindly follow?
Geez, what a load of nerfball questions – does Hemant Mehta want to be the next Chris Matthews?
Our society needs to stop trying to control women’s sexuality. A woman’s right to a health care plan that includes contraception and abortion coverage is her choice, not her employer’s, not the government’s, and not the churches’. We also need to make sure we are teaching medically-accurate sexual education in our schools and eliminate the so called “slut-shaming” culture and damaging gender stereotypes that often come along with it.
For a [fill in the blankety-blank] Republican, this elementary common sense represents a bridge-burning breakthrough. Maybe one day she’ll even get to the point of acknowledging gays’ rights to be gay.
Has Rogers managed to come out against Pat Robertson or Tony Perkins [or blankety-blank-blank] yet? How about sticking up for the kids still forced to say “the Pledge”™ when they don’t want to? Or opposing Christian monuments pretending to be veterans’ memorials on public lands? Getting a handful of protesters on the sidewalk for the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby hearing day doesn’t mean much – did SCA at least file an amicus brief?
@Leo Buzalsky,
They want to have it both ways: they want to be treated as leaders by us and get paid with our money, without having anything to do with us or our concerns.
I was not impressed with Rogers, either — her experience seemed to be in schmoozing the elites of the Republican party. And now she’s schmoozing the elites of the atheism movement. Nothing has changed.
sez pzmyers: “I was not impressed with Rogers, either — her experience seemed to be in schmoozing the elites of the Republican party. And now she’s schmoozing the elites of the atheism movement. Nothing has changed.”
The “elites of the Republican party” are, by and large, people with the will and power to get things done. The things which elite Republicans get done are generally in the service of making rich people richer and pouring yet another layer of fuck-you on the underclass, but they do get them done.
Can the “elites of the atheist movement” be said to get things done?
No, they cannot, which was (at least part of) the point.
So the leader of an organization ostensibly dedicated to defending women’s bodily autonomy and eliminating damaging gender stereotypes (as opposed to beneficial ones?) starts a spinoff clu-…organization featuring several proponents of Evolutionary Psychology on record as supporting gender stereotypes and a blog post offering “if you think a fetus is no more valuable than a tumor, I think you’re confused if you think you’re a humanist.”* Good job.
*By the way, there were at one point comments on that post, including at least one critical comment about that particular remark. I really don’t think I imagined them. Now it says the post has “0 replies” despite the fact that it still says “Want to join the discussion? Feel free to contribute!”
Stevarious: holy shit, thank you, that is an incredibly useful point about Dealing With Humans that I had not put together and will now use the hell out of.
I don’t know if they just added a mission statement, if they’ve changed it, or if I missed it before (the site is somewhat…counterintuitive), but I was just reading it:
Claiming this doesn’t make it so.
Well, at least they’re not arrogant.
You did not imagine them SC. They were there. I was the one who posted the criticism of the remark to which you referred. I did not know the comments had been removed until I read your comment above. I am a little pissed, to say the least. I just went to the site and posted, asking why the comments were removed.
I’m a part of the local SCA chapter and I’ve been impressed by the resources their website has available. There is a full listing of all legislation proposed in my state and they pay for entrance fees to parades or conventions if we want to set up a table for SCA. Also, they lobby against abortion legislation in my state which surprised me since I figured SCA was going to be just like AU or FFRF.
Meaning, anti-abortion legislation, right?
Yes indeed.
“Want to join the discussion? Feel free to contribute!”
Admittedly, that’s a good example of how to do “public relations”