The list of Fellows gets shorter again

Hemant reported in an update yesterday that Phil Zuckerman had asked to be removed from the Secular Policy Institute’s list of Fellows; today he is off the list.

Two more have left: Ron Lindsay and Stephen Law.

CFI is no longer a member of the SPI. (Or possibly never was – at any rate it’s not now. We know they have a history of adding organizations without asking, and then balking when asked to remove.)

All the superheroes

David Koepsell has a beautiful piece at the CFI blog which you must read right this minute. It’s in the form of a letter to his daughter.

Dear Amelia,

It broke my heart last week when we were talking as I drove you to school. You saw the poster for the Avengers movie and asked who “the girl” was. When I explained she is Black Widow, and that she is an Avenger, you laughed and said “how can she be an Avenger? Avengers are superheroes, and she’s a girl.” It horrifies me to know that already, there are forces at work on you that convince you that somehow, girls and women cannot be anything you want. And I meant it when I told you that yes, women can be superheroes.You can be.

The world is full of people who will try to tell you that you can’t be or do something, sometimes due to you background, sometimes due to other things that don’t matter. Many members of your father’s family, my grandparents and their relatives, were despised, imprisoned, tortured, and killed because of our ethnicity, because we are descended from Jews. Millions of people were judged as unworthy, unclean, unfit. While the nations that tried to wipe us out lost in a world war, the battles over prejudice continue. Captain America cannot save us from the ongoing harm that those who judge others due to ethnicity, religion, skin color, and gender pose to every child who wants to be exactly what she wants to be.

There, that should be enough to make it impossible for you not to read the rest.

Never cite Brendan

Updating to add: I had it in mind all along that Hunt was pushed out of a non-tenured position, but the post doesn’t reflect that. He wouldn’t be pushed out of a tenured position because of his remarks, and I wouldn’t advocate that he should be.

Many of the usual suspects – Dawkins, yes, but not only Dawkins – are raging about the illiberal attacks on Tim Hunt. But they’re doing it by ignoring the time and place at which he made his oh so funny “joke.” They’re ignoring the fact that he said it in a work environment. Picture an admiral trash-talking about women in the Navy, at an official Navy event. Would that be generally considered a mere joke? Picture a CEO making racist comments at a company banquet – would that be seen as just some yuks among buddies?

I don’t think so.

Dawkins in his tweet cited this awful article in Reason by the always-awful Brendan O’Neill. (Yes really, Our Brendan yet again.) The whole piece is deeply dishonest, because it does that pretending it was just a joke on a social occasion thing. [Read more…]

The witch-hunt under the bed

And more from the Department of Please Please Please Please Stop, Dawkins Division:

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins Jun 14
“A moment to savour”? Really? Please, Guardian, could we just lighten up on the witch-hunts? #ReinstateTimHunt. http://reason.com/archives/2015/06/13/the-illiberal-persecution-of-tim-

Again with the putative witch hunts – again used by a man, to rebuke women for rebelling against casually contemptuous treatment. Wouldn’t it be nice if Richard Dawkins actually came out against some item of casually contemptuous treatment of women? Wouldn’t it be nice if he didn’t keep insisting that because stonings and forced marriages are so horrific, therefore women in places like the UK and the US should stop rebelling against casually contemptuous treatment? I think that would be nice. It would make a change, too. [Read more…]

Under the rock

More on Hemant’s post about the “Secular Policy Council.”

He starts with pointing out that a lot of their content is identical to content from the Secular Coalition for America – where she used to be Executive Director until she…erm…left it a year ago. Mary Ellen Sikes points out in a comment that the content has a Creative Commons agreement. That sounds benign until you remember that Rogers used to work for them. Quoting Mary Ellen:

If you check the bottom of page 3 of the SCA’s Model Secular Policy Guide, you’ll see the following: “Permission is granted for the reproduction of this document in whole or in part without consent of the authors and the Secular Coalition for America.” [The website terms of use state, “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.” — but the specific statement on the Guide itself seems to override that.]

In other words, Edwina Rogers oversaw the development of a Model Secular Policy Guide that lacked a copyright, thus allowing her to republish it at another organization. As well, the Creative Commons license for the site as a whole represents a change which I believe (but am not positive) came about under her direction.. Perhaps the SCA Board can explain its thinking about these alterations to its intellectual property status.

[Read more…]

A fellowship should be consensual

Oh my god.

You know I’ve always wondered why all those Big Name atheist and secularist types signed up to the “Global Secular Institute” now more modestly named the Secular Policy Institute. You know I wondered it very loudly and without muffling or disguise.

Now we know.

Hemant has a post today titled Notable Atheists and Scientists Are Disassociating from the Secular Policy Institute. I did a loud sustained intake of breath – “gasped” is inadequate to describe what I did – when I reached this bit:

Daniel Dennett in particular told me he asked to be removed from their list after learning that Rogers had filed a lawsuit against the Secular Coalition for America(which made some damning allegations about the SCA and several people associated with it).

Not only did Dennett inform many of the other Fellows why he was leaving (prompting them to do the same), here’s the most shocking part of what he told me:

I didn’t know I was a Fellow of SPI until I saw my picture and name on the website.

Oh.my.god.