Cloaking hatred with a thin veil of love

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is The Scathing Atheist, and it lives up to its name. One of the regular bits on the show is called the diatribe, where they just cut loose and fulminate for a few minutes on some subject that has sparked their rage, and while I don’t always agree with it, I do have to respect a righteous rant. Last week, they focused their fire on Ray Moore, and the topic of the diatribe was how Christianity has become, or perhaps always has been, a religion of hate. It has become a reliable motivator of evangelical Christians lately — they will throw away all their principles, cast off even the illusion of morality, and vote for whatever racist, sexist pig screams the loudest and angriest about Muslims or the gays or the liberals or the transgenders or the Chinese or whatever other has caught their eye this week. It has become an ideology that serves only tribalism, without regard for any positive belief.

I agree with that diatribe. Religion is not a benefit to mankind in any way, and we’d be better off without it — or more fundamentally, we’d be better off without this tribal thinking that divides humanity into Us and Them. But I also think the show didn’t bring up two other important points (which is OK, if they threw in everything the podcast would be longer than my gym time).

One is that religion is often a master of Orwellian subterfuge. You can point out how often religious thinkers are endorsing hate, but the true believer will simply look a millimeter deep at the holy texts and tell you that they are all about love. I’ve seen no clearer example of this than a recent declaration by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. It’s all about love and understanding and forgiveness, don’t you know.

At the outset they make their position crystal clear.

As leaders of various communities of faith throughout the United States, many of us came together in the past to affirm our commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman and as the foundation of society. We reiterate that natural marriage continues to be invaluable to American society.

We come together to join our voices on a more fundamental precept of our shared existence, namely, that human beings are male or female and that the socio-cultural reality of gender cannot be separated from one’s sex as male or female.

We acknowledge and affirm that all human beings are created by God and thereby have an inherent dignity. We also believe that God created each person male or female; therefore, sexual difference is not an accident or a flaw—it is a gift from God that helps draw us closer to each other and to God. What God has created is good. “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

No gay marriage — it’s unnatural. There are only two genders, male and female, and you will accommodate yourself to the one God gave you. That, bluntly, is what this document is about: a gang of old celibates are here to inform you of the truth about sex and gender and identity, and in the name of love will tell you who you get to love.

But they’re going to surround their authoritarian perspective with a good amount of fluffy padding. The only difference between Westboro Baptist and the Catholic Church is the amount of pretense they package around their hate.

A person’s discomfort with his or her sex, or the desire to be identified as the other sex, is a complicated reality that needs to be addressed with sensitivity and truth. Each person deserves to be heard and treated with respect; it is our responsibility to respond to their concerns with compassion, mercy and honesty. As religious leaders, we express our commitment to urge the members of our communities to also respond to those wrestling with this challenge with patience and love.

Sensitivity and truth, patience and love…we know members of our communities are struggling with the complexities of identity and desire, and we’re going to listen attentively to you before we crush your concerns with brutal simplifications. And then we’re going to go all But the children! on you. You transgender men and women are hurting the children and destroying our society, but we love you anyway, if you’ll conform.

Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can “change” their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults. Parents deserve better guidance on these important decisions, and we urge our medical institutions to honor the basic medical principle of “first, do no harm.” Gender ideology harms individuals and societies by sowing confusion and self-doubt. The state itself has a compelling interest, therefore, in maintaining policies that uphold the scientific fact of human biology and supporting the social institutions and norms that surround it.

Religious leaders who claim their adherence to the scientific fact of human biology while dispensing fact-free ideological recommendations to medical institutions are disingenuous hypocrites. Fuck off, you frauds.

The movement today to enforce the false idea—that a man can be or become a woman or vice versa—is deeply troubling. It compels people to either go against reason—that is, to agree with something that is not true—or face ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation.

Read that paragraph again. Who is facing ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation? It’s not the frequently bullied transgender boys and girls, or the young people who are asexual or bisexual or androgynous or queer. These old assholes fear that acceptance of people’s identities will lead to them being ridiculed for trying to enforce a false binary. They are the victims, in their heads. How troubling!

We desire the health and happiness of all men, women, and children. Therefore, we call for policies that uphold the truth of a person’s sexual identity as male or female, and the privacy and safety of all. We hope for renewed appreciation of the beauty of sexual difference in our culture and for authentic support of those who experience conflict with their God-given sexual identity.

They desire health and happiness for all who accept the narrow dictates of the Church, who ignore the sexual identity expressed in their minds, and adopt one of two (and only two!) gender roles, the traditional masculine and feminine. And the genitals you were born with had better well align with those roles!

This is all counterfactual assertion and raw denial, with the intent of condemning and ostracizing the people who refuse to conform to their rules. It is a call to the tribal majority to reject the outsiders, the weirdos, those strange Others who do not accept their arbitrary rules, or their supernatural justification for them. But notice how they mask it all with the language of kindness and love. I’m sure the Inquisition also thought the thumbscrews were a loving way to bring heretics to the grace of God.

Hey, there’s a second point I wanted to make, but it’s one I’ve made before, and maybe I’ll let it rest with just a brief mention. If we’re going to rail against the hateful tribalism of religion, we should do likewise with atheism. There’s a significant component of the atheist movement that has sent it sliding off the rails: those atheists who equate reason and rationalism with hating Muslims, all Muslims, or with contempt for feminism. This represents a cheap appeal for popularity that is as vile as Catholic bishops spitting on gay marriage, and on transgender men and women — it’s an attempt to fuel the movement with hate. It might just work, as far as growth goes. But it also produces a framework for thinking that I don’t want to be a part of.

Can atheism, at least, be an idea that is willing to accept people for who they are, rather than trying to wedge them into ill-fitting pigeonholes?

Is “celebrity” synonymous with “hemorrhoid”?

I’m beginning to think so. The latest asshat to have used his influence to engage in sexual harassment is “celebrity” chef* Mario Batali, who then issued an apology for his behavior as his business and reputation flamed out with spectacular rapidity. He’s resigned from his multiple restaurants, he’s lost his TV appearances, and Walmart and Target aren’t selling his line of crap anymore. I’m a little exasperated with the big rich guys who suddenly decide an apology after the fact will rescue their crumbling empires, but Batali took it to the next level. His apology starts out well, but then…

How can you possibly hold groping unconscious women against me? I give you pizza dough cinnamon roles! Delicious!

Do the substitution. Hemorrhoid Chef Mario Batali. You’ll never want to eat there again.

How to purge yourself of The Gay

I was darned close to a perfect 0 on the Kinsey scale, exclusively heterosexual. But let’s face it, we’re all able to experience some degree of same-sex attraction — even I could feel a little internal tremor when I saw Jason Mamoa. But no more. I have achieved a perfect 0. You might ask how, how can you too drive yourself to Absolute Heterosexual Manliness? And I will tell you.

I started reading this interview with Matt Damon, who I might once have said was reasonably attractive in the right light. But as I read deeper, I first felt that there was something mildly disturbing here, like, how can he be so self-centered about accusations of harassment? Then when he starts rationalizing about how we ought to forgive Louis CK because he has been punished enough, the self-loathing started to well up. And then by the time he says his response to a hypothetical accusation against himself would be to lawyer up and buy her off, my journey was complete: I now hate all men. Jason, I’m sorry. I couldn’t bear to spend any time with you now.

I thought that was enough. I was now pure. But I didn’t know that Tom Hanks — sweet, avuncular, gentle Tom Hanks — was going to speak up.

He he told the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: If you threw out every film or TV show that was made by an a**hole, Netflix would go out of business. I think you do just have … to wait because this is a long game.

Fuck damn. I’m thoroughly suffused with the spirit of misandry now. All of my Y chromosomes are cowering in a dark corner of my nuclei. This might be sorta like a massive autoimmune reaction, and I might die.

The Hayek revelations

Good grief. I just read Salma Hayek’s piece in the New York Times. It’s a horror through and through — Harvey Weinstein is a terrible human being. There was the familiar constant pressure for sex, and his anger when denied, but what’s new here is how Weinstein, who had a reputation for sponsoring great art movies, was in active force in compromising the art. What he did to Hayek’s movie, Frida, was unconscionable.

Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s “unibrow.” He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.

Frida Kahlo did many self-portraits, and her striking appearance was part of her identity, and Weinstein wanted to reduce her looks to something more conventional? She was afflicted with polio as a child and severely injured in an accident in her teens, and lived her whole life with a disability and chronic pain, and Weinstein wanted to erase that in a biography? How clueless is he, and how many of the good Weinstein-produced movies were made in spite of his interference, and how much better would they have been if he’d never been allowed to say a word?

He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.

Christ. Hayek gave in on that demand, reluctantly, and with much anguish. But now you’ll need to keep this in mind next time you watch Game of Thrones or some cop show which features a stroll through a strip joint. The nudity isn’t some critical part of the story, or even a part of the atmosphere added for verisimilitude. It’s probably because some guy high up in the production likes the power of being able to compel the women acting in his show to expose themselves. It’s not that nudity and sex can’t be a natural part of a story, but that there’s so much of it, and it’s almost entirely gratuitous.

It sort of turns out well, with regard to the movie, at least…except for the part where Hayek’s success was added to the Weinstein luster, and that he then intentionally stunted her career.

Months later, in October 2002, this film, about my hero and inspiration — this Mexican artist who never truly got acknowledged in her time with her limp and her unibrow, this film that Harvey never wanted to do, gave him a box office success that no one could have predicted, and despite his lack of support, added six Academy Award nominations to his collection, including best actress.

Even though “Frida” eventually won him two Oscars, I still didn’t see any joy. He never offered me a starring role in a movie again. The films that I was obliged to do under my original deal with Miramax were all minor supporting roles.

It seems just to me that Weinstein’s reputation as a patron of the arts is going down in flames, along with his reputation as a decent person.

All the 14 year old girls in America just burned me…and probably you

It’s OK, though, because this open letter in McSweeney’s is entirely accurate and honest, and also hilarious. The girls explain that they don’t want to have sex with us.

But it’s not just about us. It’s about you, being ancient. You still think you’re so young, don’t you? Yeah… no. Each and every one of you is just wrinkled, withering proof that mortality comes for us all. If you remember where you were on 9/11, you’re too old for us. Did just thinking about that make you feel old? That’s because you’re old. You’re all a thousand to us. Your faces make us sad.

And you know what? Even if we seem interested — even if we SAY we’re into you — here is a cool idea: Don’t listen to us! Who lets an eighth grader just do whatever she wants? We also want to drive cars. We want to drink beer. We want to slap peanut butter on a Pop-Tart and call it a well-balanced breakfast. This Roy Moore guy, 100 percent, is the kind of dad who wouldn’t let his own daughter wear eyeliner, for fuck’s sake. So like, be the adult in the room. Okay? Don’t make us be the grown-ups here. We hate that.

All it takes is a little self-awareness to understand this. I wonder who lacks that? Only one of the creepiest guys in the country.

It’s a start

I’m not going to praise Time magazine, since they’re just another tool of the conservative establishment, but they did make a wise choice in their selection for their Person of the Year cover, “The Silence-Breakers”, all the women who have started a wave of change against a culture of harassment.

Donald Trump gets several mentions in the article, and they aren’t flattering. He must be fuming. Frame it and put that on the wall of your golf courses, Donnie boy. I hope these women are part of the reaction that tears you down.

I hope this recognition is a small part of a change that’s beginning — just beginning. There’s a long way to go. I’m just reminded of how disgracefully our social media has been shaped to be a tool enabling harassers to thrive: how Facebook is openly discriminating against women who protest, while I know of a great many men on Twitter who are notorious abusers, and still are given a platform. Like Donald Trump.

Quit playing the fool, guys — you’re hurting our reputation

Oh, god. Could you make it any more about you? Men are wondering if hugging women is still OK.

“Have we gotten to the point now where men can’t say, ‘That’s a nice dress’ or ‘Did you do something with your hair?’” says the veteran sales associate for a Los Angeles company. “The potential problem is you can’t even feel safe saying, ‘Good morning’ anymore.”

The sexual misconduct allegations that have brought down powerful men in Hollywood, media, politics and business are sending a shiver through the workplace. Men are wondering if it’s still OK to hug a female colleague or ask about her weekend. And some are asking themselves if they ever, perhaps even inadvertently, crossed the line.

You can still comment on women’s appearance in a complimentary way, if you’re also the kind of guy who says “That’s a nice shirt” to your male co-workers. You can comment on their hairstyle, if you also say the same sort of thing about other men.

“Good morning” is always safe, you dumbass.

Hugging is also safe, if you ask permission first, and if you don’t use it as an excuse to send your hands on a scouting mission to various prominences in the landscape. Again, I have to wonder, though, how often hugging is an important part of your interactions with other men.

Also, if you have to ask yourselves if you’ve crossed a line, then yes, you have crossed a line.

I’m really getting annoyed with these men who are playing dumb and incapable of understanding simple social cues and rules of behavior. We men aren’t that stupid, and no one is fooled — even you aren’t that dim. Apparently, though, the cost of appearing stupid is the price you’re willing to pay for an excuse to clumsily fondle women against their will.

“You don’t feel save saying ‘good morning’ anymore.” Sheesh. You really are willing to play the imbecile for a cheap feel.

Why does the city of Charlotte hate women?

Oh, look. It’s a row of scrota marching to demand the right to fill your uterus.

Over a thousand sanctimonious assholes marched around an abortion clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, shouting and waving signs and doing their best to intimidate and suppress women’s access to health care. Despite the noisy zealots, though, the clinic remained open.

Clinic staff considered it a victory that it remained open despite the thousands of anti-choice activists, the large police presence, the large sound systems not just at the clinic but also a quarter of a mile up the drive, and the buses shuttling LLC attendees from parking lots to the rally site and back again. But there is little doubt that as many as 20 patients were unable to access an abortion that day simply because they were too confused, too overwhelmed, or too scared to navigate the sea of barricades, officers, and teal-shirted anti-abortion activists—even if those activists were primarily doing nothing but silently walking and praying.

“We have no-shows and drive-bys that happen on a normal day, with 10 to 15 protesters,” said Anders, the clinic escort organizer. “They circle around a few times and drive away, and I’m sure it was a patient who didn’t want to come in, who was intimidated and didn’t want to talk to these street preachers. Today, I can’t imagine.”

“Access is being impeded by groups who come down these small side streets and swarm these clinics, putting them under siege, which blocks access for patients and also confuses patients who don’t know if that clinic is open,” said Jen Ferris, Progress North Carolina, a progressive liberal policies action group out of Raleigh that is working with the clinic. “People should be able to access clinics without fear of harassment.”

Can we get something clear here? This is not free speech. It’s abusing the right to peaceably assemble to instead blockade and impede someone else’s rights. And a big part of the problem is the goddamn city of Charlotte, which refuses to recognize the tyrannical character of the shrieking protesters’ transparent assault on the liberty of others.

Ferris suggests that one thing the city should do to ensure patients don’t face similar situations is to stop issuing parade permits like the one it issued today. “Today they gave a permit for 5,000 people to come down this small street,” she said. “You can see traffic is backing up. They could stop issuing sound permits. You can hear this inside the clinic and there is no reason a patient needs to hear religion shouted at them while they sit inside a clinic.” Rewire has previously reported on noise levels outside of the clinic and the inadequate response of city officials in addressing them.

The city of Charlotte is aiding and abetting anti-woman offenses against humanity. I guess that’s fine with the city administration, so clearly, they need to go.

I am worried that we’re going to drown in all the flop sweat

Shall we tally up the casualties in the ongoing War on Men for the weekend?

Wow. Big names are falling like dominoes. You might be thinking this is good news, that bad men are finally being held to account for their misdeeds, but there is still criminal injustice going on all the time. Matt Lauer thinks NBC owes him $30 million dollars. And then there’s the student who raped a drunken women at ASU — he’s getting off because he has a 3.9 GPA. His rationalizations have to be seen to be believed.

In a lengthy statement, he described how he considered himself a supporter of women’s rights. I am an advocate of gender equality, including equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work and access to essential, basic healthcare for women, he said. However, as has historically been the case for previously under-represented groups, there is an over-compensation where the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction and creates another injustice. This does not create gender equality, but rather allows a person to make heinous, unsubstantiated claims without consequence.

James even went as far to suggest that his punishment is prohibiting him from helping to solve world hunger.

He said his suspension greatly impairs my ability to contribute to my research team in sustainable engineering, where we are attempting to invent and implement ways of ensuring we can feed a population of soon to be ten billion on a rapidly degrading planet.

Gosh, study hard, do well in school, and you too can get a rape license. And ladies — you’d better submit to rape if you want to end world hunger. It’s OK because James is sort of a feminist, he says. Toppling a few big wigs is not going to lead to a long-term solution as long as we keep promoting Junior Weinsteins like James.

New/old excuses are being deployed as I write. There’s the old “Men are inherently brutal and sexist” story, which isn’t true: we are what we make ourselves. There are plenty of healthy, normal men who don’t want to walk all over women — but there are also social structures that enable misbehavior, and actually reward successful men with tolerance for their abuses. That has to change, and then we can discover good men who succeed on their abilities, rather than by their viciousness in climbing an ugly ladder to the top ranks.

There are also lots of moanings about how hard it is to be a man right now, which is also not true. It might be believable if loads of innocent men were being loaded into the tumbrels, but look at all of them: they’re all guilty as hell, there is evidence supporting the accusations, and often these men are reluctantly confessing to their abuses. I, for instance, am resting easy because I know I don’t have any terrible crimes in my past, and I suspect that’s true for the majority of my male readers. It’s the ones with guilty consciences who are sweating bullets and trying to argue that they are unjustly persecuted, and the worrisome thing is how many Top Men are looking shiny with sweat.

The atmosphere is indeed a peculiar one. (Though if one more person calls it a “witch hunt” I will scream, because co-opting a historical occurrence that disproportionately, gruesomely punished single women with death as a metaphor for uncovering abuses by powerful men is not acceptable.) The air seems to vibrate with powerful (and abusive) men’s fear as more allegations are brought into the public eye, and that’s essentially unprecedented. And as new stories come out again and again, I fully encourage men to re-examine themselves and their past behavior. Just like not being racist in a deeply racist world takes work, not being sexist in an environment that normalizes sexist attitudes requires conscious commitment and awareness.

But what you don’t get to do is complain about it — because, congratulations, you are now getting a free sample of how women have to act around men all the time.

I get email

I had no idea that Rich Sanderson still existed, but gosh, he was turning up on Twitter a lot this week. You may recall Sanderson from about 5 years ago, when his thing was repetitively harassing women and feminists: he called himself Atheist, skeptic, aka THE KING! Coiner of the term #FTBullies. I guess he still does. That’s his grand claim to immortality, that he coined the hashtag #FTBullies. That’s kind of…it. It’s rather sad, really. I’m picturing his poor mother getting together with her girlfriends, and they’re all bragging about their childrens’ accomplishments, and all she’s got is that her little Richie has a hashtag that only he uses in his obsessive campaign against Rebecca Watson and PZ Myers, still, and he thinks he’s a KING.

Anyway, his name keeps popping up in this twitter thread, where he’s babbling about the time I was threatened with a rape accusation. Let it go, little Richie. Let it go.

Then this morning I got some email. I suspect it’s from him. It sure sounds like him, and contains his predictable hobby horse.

Dear PZ,

Don’t “dear” me, you demented wackaloon.

If you are sincere about your support for #MeToo campaign, if you’re sincere in statements like “You screwed yourself while trying to screw others, and no one feels any particular reason to redeem you.” If you really believe that, why have you not even discussed the time an adult woman sexually harassed you by threatening to accuse you of rape?

Hey, you disingenuous goober, the only reason you know about that incident is because I openly discussed it. I wasn’t sexually harassed; a student tried to extort a better grade out of me by threatening to lie. It was handled quickly and appropriately.

If you are sincere, you will name and shame her, or you will at least discuss the issue in relation to this latest movement to end sexual harassment. If you don’t want to or are afraid to, can you explain why that is?

Sincerely yours,

Critically Thinking

You want me to torment a student who made a mistake 25 years ago? No.

But wait. I can make a contribution to the #MeToo campaign! I can tell everyone how to handle that rare circumstance in which a man is unjustly accused of sexual misbehavior! I have experience! Unfortunately, it’s not very useful experience, because it doesn’t happen very often. But I can tell you exactly how to cope.

So imagine a woman accuses you of improper behavior towards her at work. What do you do?

  • First and most importantly, be innocent. That means that you must treat all women fairly and not take advantage of your position to take liberties with her, or to belittle her. I know that seems to be surprisingly difficult for way too many men, but it’s a necessary prerequisite for this technique to work. If you aren’t innocent…well, bugger off, you horrible little man. You’re deservedly screwed.

  • Next, you need to acknowledge that this person is trying to do you harm. What should you do? Get out of that situation. Leave. Don’t try to argue, and for jebus sake, don’t try to dominate and suppress them — that’s playing into their hands and creating a situation they can use as evidence that you’re abusing them.

  • Report. Go to human resources, your supervisor, anyone with any authority. Describe the situation honestly — if you can’t describe it honestly, you shouldn’t bother following this script. You’re screwed. But if you’re innocent, you should be completely open and transparent and document the event to a third party.

  • Step back and wait. You’re done. Any further interaction will involve other people looking deeper into the matter (and you’re innocent, remember? So they’re not going to find anything inappropriate, right?) In my case, another faculty member, a woman, was delegated to hear the student’s side of the story. It fell apart immediately, she was contrite, and the situation was over.

  • It is possible that a determinedly vindictive woman could push it further. But again, you’re innocent — there isn’t any evidence of misbehavior, right? She doesn’t have dick pics on her phone, there aren’t witnesses to you slapping her butt, you didn’t get drunk and proposition her at a party, you aren’t on record with unwarranted punishments or promises? Right? If there are, fuck you, go away, you’re going to get what you deserved. Otherwise, if your behavior has been spotless, back off, be impersonal, get a lawyer, let it be handled by professionals.

Easy!

Notice that you, a man, have advantages here, and this plan takes advantage of them. Women ought to be able to follow the same plan too, when faced with a nefarious male with bad intentions, but the good deal for you is a) you won’t be automatically disbelieved, b) you won’t be immediately labeled a disruptive influence, and c) you won’t be fired as a shortcut to silencing a complaint. We can get our concerns addressed. In a perfect world, when a Matt Lauer or a Harvey Weinstein importunes a woman, she ought to also be able to immediately walk away, report the situation, and get a third party to look into the matter objectively, and take appropriate action against the guilty party, whoever it may be.

We know that doesn’t happen often enough. It’s grossly unfair. That’s why women are using the “#MeToo” hashtag, to publicize the frequency of this injustice. Because we men have made justice our privilege, and made the world a hell for those who do not recieve what ought to be universal rights. There’s even a song about it now.

You don’t get to use my example of an innocent man who got a swift and fair response as a reason to further trivialize the right of women to also be treated equitably.

You fucking dishonest wanker.

By the way, this twit emailed me using a throw-away email account, “[email protected]”. It’s blocked now, along with all the other accounts he’s used to pester me with in email.