The word from Atheist Alliance International is that David Silverman has resigned.
At a Board Meeting on Sunday, David P. Silverman resigned as Executive Director. Accepting his resignation, AAI President, Gail Miller, thanked David for the contribution he had made in reorganizing the AAI board and its operations. This, together with a successful year-end fund-raising drive, will leave the alliance in a stronger position to take its campaigns forward in 2020 than in previous years.
AAI is now looking for an Executive Director, and will begin its search immediately.
That didn’t last long. It’s interesting how certain people crumple at the threat of an investigation. I wonder if a lawsuit will be next — that’s the usual trajectory for these sorts of things.
I do wonder how hiring a guy, and then firing the same guy, can both have the effect of strengthening an organization.
One has to wonder if there was a cash buyout.
Theoretically this can happen if needs change. For instance, if a group was in legal difficulty because their record keeping was way too disorganized and they couldn’t adequately respond to disclosure requirements, you might love to have a lawyer as your ED for a time who will use that executive power to clean up the organization. But then once that task is over, with proper procedures in place you don’t need to have a Non-Profit BusOrg lawyer vested with executive powers and, for instance, raising funds might become the new focus on the ED’s job…which might not be a strength for your lawyer-ED.
Practically speaking, I agree with you. Even if there are theoretical situations in which both these things are true, I doubt very seriously that there’s any meaningful sense in which both can be true in this case.
Adding Silverman dramatically increased their potential legal liability, particularly because everything about his f*d up past was out in the open. Anyone abused or harassed by Silverman would have a much easier time proving in court that AAI condoned such behavior since they hired him knowing he had (almost certainly) repeatedly engaged in such misconduct.
Whatever benefit they got from Silverman was outweighed from the start by these risks, because these risks were there from before Silverman was hired. If they were enough to merit getting rid of him no, ipso ergo QE de facto, they were enough to merit not hiring him. The board just didn’t bother to do the calculus until someone hit them upside the head with a clue-by-four.
For the good of the atheist “movement”, David, please go away. Like, forever.
That was probably intended as spin in order to save face among all involved parties, but it makes AAI’s board look ridiculous. Assault women (allegedly!), call them all liars, and sue both them and a big-name atheist organization, and AAI will bend over backwards to praise you. Why, exactly, should I take their organization seriously if their standards are so badly warped?
Completely agreed.
They must have assumed that DS’s past, out in thhe open as it was, was all due to those dreaded 3rd Wave Feminists tm. Then when he was really there they discovered they were kidding themselves.
I mean the handsy prick isn’t gonna learn anything, but maybe, just maybe he’s going to have a big enough warning sign over his head by now so that people can be safe around him.
=8/-DX
Poor David. Guess it’s back to insurance sales.
Good riddance. If you look at his Twitter feed it’s almost all retweets of IDW and alt-right personalities, whining about the usual stuff.
Like others, his next stops will be the rightwing talk circuit (all podcasts) and the faint hope of a semi-regular column at the national review…whose (I’m guessing) 99% male staff wouldn’t be in danger.
So they alienated a whole bunch of members for what reason again? To hire this dude for 3 weeks. I hope the big donors who wanted them to hire Silverman feel embarrassed right now (although, knowing how those people operate, probably not).
Not yet mentioned is the impression this makes on outsiders. I’ve already been getting the impression that for a lot of capital-A atheists, the point of atheism is that it means they are superior beings who are above the usual rules of decency and morality which lesser folks are held to. That certainly seems to be the case for most of atheists I’ve heard of in places other than the atheist blogosphere. If it were not for some (not all!) of the bloggers I have read on Freethough Blogs and its fellow SJW blogs, I would assume that atheism causes people to become assholes.
This sort of behavior, and the widespread acceptance of such behavior, has also driven a lot of people who don’t believe in a God to disassociate themselves from “atheism.” It’s reminiscent of the way that the racism of mainstream feminists has led many, many African-American women who hold feminist ideas to eschew the label “feminist.”