Following in the footsteps of some very powerful companies—including Apple, IBM, Wal-Mart, the NFL, the NBA and American Airlines—that are pressuring the state of North Carolina to repeal its evil law that forbids anti-discrimination statutes that protect LGBT people in any way, and bans trans people from using restrooms appropriate for their gender identities, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is piling on:
Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, is a self-identified conservative. So is Jamila Bey, who sits on AAs board, and who last year gave a speech at CPAC, the annual right-wing clown circus attracting virtually every conservative shitweasel dedicated to ruining life on Earth for everyone (except themselves of course).
Samantha Bee sent a crew to cover Dave Silverman and American Atheists’ presence at this year’s colossal shitshow. It’s a hilarious segment. (If you haven’t been watching her new show Full Frontal on TBS, it is the genuine heir to John Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.)
My favorite part is when AA’s Amanda Knief says this about Silverman (@1:28):
Dave is what we call a firebrand. In any movement, we need people who are dicks. Who are assholes.
Perhaps this is true. But it is also true that there are different kinds of assholes. And movement atheism, which likes to consider itself a “Big Tent,” is already so chock full of them that many, many good people have been driven away and quite understandably want nothing to do with it.
This fact was highlighted in a recent podcast by one of my awesome new colleagues here at FtB, Trav Mamone at Bi Any Means. Trav was interviewing some d00d named Justin Scott, who has recently made a splash trolling all the presidential candidates by asking them their views on religious freedom. Scott had volunteered with American Atheists at CPAC this year, which prompted this question from Trav (@4:18):
I’m Iris, and I really don’t like conservatives. Or squirrels.
(More on that in a minute.)
I’m one of those notorious godless, feminist leftists, living in New York City for two decades now. I was raised in and around Philadelphia by Christian conservatives, and thereby indoctrinated with the notion that Nice Girls™ never talk about sex, religion or politics. As it turns out though, those are pretty much the only subjects I have any interest in discussing (besides the fucking squirrels OBVIOUSLY).
I blog at perry street palace, and I’m not yet sure whether or to what extent I will move the Palace here. I figure I can just hang out in this space for a while and see how it goes. In the meantime I’ll probably cross-post and re-post here when it feels appropriate, so apologies in advance to my Many Tens of Loyal Readers™ if you’ve followed me here expecting a spectacular cornucopia of new material. Despite appearances, Your Humble Monarch™ is only human, people. I can only crank out so much snark (and craptastic graphics) in a day.
I also blog at Secular Woman and contribute to the HerStory project there, a collaboration with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to celebrate the work of secular women and counter their pervasive erasure from contemporary and historical narratives. I write for the The Greanville Post, and have guest posted at Pharyngula and Worldwide Hippies/Citizen Journalist Exchange and blah blah blah I don’t really like talking about myself MOVING ON.
I write about a lot of things, but mocking conservatives is truly my calling.
It may be worthwhile to briefly take stock of exactly what it is that US conservatives so fervently wish to conserve: an imperialist oligarchy, in a perpetual state of permanent war, governing a society that is structurally racist, sexist, violent, social Darwinist, ubercapitalist, patriarchal and viciously punitive.
So there’s that.
Because violence (except when necessary for defense) is never a good solution to any problem (except for the goddamn squirrels), this is where mockery can come in quite handy. Properly deployed, it is an extraordinarily potent weapon; that is precisely why petty tyrants, repressive regimes and right-wing asshats the world over will attempt to suppress and seek to outright ban political satire. Clearly it is worth engaging in mockery just to piss off these kinds of people alone.
More broadly though, the social spaces in which conservatives freely regurgitate their toxic views with impunity are downright ubiquitous in the US. If we want to subvert this reality—that is, make the spaces conservatives have heretofore inhabited comfortably uncomfortable for them (for a refreshing change)—then there must be a social price to pay for spewing that tripe. And as any social justice warrior worth her trolls will tell you, silence in the face of harmful speech, from rape jokes to racist slurs, is taken as agreement and solidarity by the speaker, and by others who may witness it.
In one sense, mocking conservatives is easy. Having dedicated much of my adult life to the study of conservatives in the wild (and not coincidentally, much of my childhood to surviving them), I can tell you that these people are some seriously fragile flowers. Conservatives are compulsively status- and approval-seeking creatures, and place a weirdly high value on superficial norms and social conformity. This makes them uniquely vulnerable to any suggestion that they are the outsider (and incidentally explains why they prefer to dwell in the homogeneous bubbles they erroneously construe as the One True Real America™).
I can also tell you that conservatives generally do not change their views in response to overwhelming evidence and reason; in fact, they have an unfortunate propensity to cling to their demonstrably wrong views even more tightly when confronted with rational appeals. So while it isn’t remotely realistic to envision conservatives becoming more reality-based in numbers significant enough to bring about an enlightened egalitarian society in the US, it is a legitimate (if daunting) goal to make sure it is in their own best interests to shut the fuck up. After all, their own interests are pretty much the only thing that has ever motivated them.
But if mocking conservatives is easy in theory, it is not so easy in practice. Whenever we launch rhetorical barbs at our conservative enemies, we must take great care to avoid collateral damage to innocent third parties—and particularly to third parties who are marginalized, oppressed or otherwise less privileged. We do not want to be the ones perpetuating the ugly status quo; that’s their thing. As all activists do, I sometimes fuck this up (and I welcome being called out when I do). But nevertheless it is necessary to leverage whatever privilege, power and platforms we have to punch up—never down—and to only use our mockery superpowers for good.
That said, conservatives are manifestly not marginalized, oppressed or less-privileged in any way. They control the government of the most powerful nation on Earth, have done so for decades if not centuries, and show no sign of retreat (quite the opposite). They have also taken over state and local governments across the nation and are eagerly destroying civil liberties, labor unions, the human right to bodily autonomy, the air and the water, the rule of law, living wages, public education, the woefully insufficient social safety net, crops and coastlines, the wall of separation between church and state, the wall of separation between big business and government, and the lives of countless millions of innocent people, including children, here and around the globe. (This is hardly a complete list of conservative evils.)
Therefore it is our goddamn patriotic duty to mock them, relentlessly, until they are the ones whose voices are marginalized. As opposed to, you know, everyone else. Then and only then will we quit. (Maybe.)
I’m against it! I’m a capital “A” Atheist and Anti-theist and not shy about it. I think faith itself—that is, belief without evidence—is a terrible pox on humanity. (And then pretending that is some kind of virtue?! PLEASE.) Faith as an epistemology fosters all kinds of tragedies, like irrationality and gullibility, wars, toxic masculinity and awful music. I abhor it, and would like it to go away forever THE END.
But the thing is, my Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Hindu and neopagan and astrologist friends and neighbors are intelligent and kind and tolerant people. Except for the supernatural bullshit, their values and priorities overlap with mine considerably. You will therefore be unsurprised to learn that they are not conservatives.
From this observation I think we can gain some important insights into some very big and complex issues we face, as a nation and as a species. For example, the problem in the Middle East isn’t Islam—it’s conservative Islam. ISIS is not made up of liberal Muslims seeking to create a pluralistic society based on democracy, equality and tolerance. Likewise, the problem in the US isn’t Christianity—it’s conservative Christianity. The problem in Myanmar is conservative Buddhists, if you can believe it.
So while I’m not about to stop skewering faith or religion generally, I naturally tend to direct my most pointed mockery at the conservatives among the faithful. THEY ARE THE FUCKING WORST.
But it isn’t because they’re religious, at least not fundamentally. It’s because they’re—say it with me now!—conservatives.
For what it’s worth (probably not much) I once took a silly political test and scored so far off the left end of the graph that I had to redesign the chart just to plot my position:
Economic score (Left/Right): -18.25 Social score (Libertarian/Authoritarian): -9.03
I call your attention to this chart incident not to flaunt my lefty bona fides or anything, but to perhaps offer some perspective on my otherwise inexplicable loathing of all things conservative, and my burning mission to mock them. Mercilessly.
OMFG I have so, so much to tell you! But this post is waaaay too long already. (I may have forgotten to mention that I can be excruciatingly verbose? Oops.) So the fucking squirrels will have to wait.
But would be remiss if I did not leave you with this advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I disrespectfully disagree.