Americans United for Separation of Church and State give us this helpful graphic showing the Alabama counties that are defying the federal court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Roy Moore should be kicked out of office a second time.

The defiant counties are in blue.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Guardian reported last Friday that George Galloway is angry at the BBC.

George Galloway has hit out at the BBC following his appearance on Question Time, saying he was set up and that David Dimbleby privately apologised to him afterwards.

The controversy centred around a question that one audience member asked about a rise in antisemitism in the UK.

But the question also included a reference to the MP for Bradford West bearing some responsibility for this rise, an inclusion he said that had not been agreed beforehand.

So what? He’s an MP – he’s expected to field questions, isn’t he? Isn’t that part of the job?

The anti-war politician said the host David Dimbleby later apologised to him for this, but it represented what he said was a set-up within the BBC.

The anti-war politician? That’s his sobriquet? But he’s not an anti-war politician; he’s not opposed to all wars or war as such.

Galloway said:

“To accuse a parliamentarian of 27 years of being responsible for a spike in antisemitism is totally ludicrous.”

??? Why on earth? A parliamentarian is well placed to cause a spike in attitude, better placed than most people. What’s ludicrous about saying so?

Fellow panel member and Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland also did not escape the Respect party MP’s ire, as he said he had stoked the fires and for that he would never forgive him.

“There was not a single Muslim person in the audience even though there are 50,000 Muslims in the borough,” he said.

“Jonathan Freedland was the prosecutor-in-chief, he lit the touch paper and then smugly retired and for that I will never forgive him.

“Any antisemitic attack of any kind is utterly despicable but there are at least ten times the number of attacks on mosques. Mr Freedland claimed there had been 1,000 attacks on Jews but there have actually been 84.

“The impression was given that people are roaming around the UK looking for Jews to attack but far more people are walking around Britain looking for Muslims.”

Freedland said: “I certainly did not set out to prosecute George Galloway. I simply pointed out that he has in the past inflamed an already tense issue by making wild, unfounded accusations – a point he did not address. I too was disappointed at the way some in the audience behaved. As some viewers saw, I wanted them to respect George Galloway’s right to make his case.

“I did not ‘smugly retire’: I wanted to speak again but was not given that chance. If I had, I would have repeated my long-standing condemnation of Islamophobia and objected to some of the attitudes voiced by members of the audience. On the numbers, the Community Security Trust report showed more than 1168 antisemitic incidents last year, the highest ever figure. Still, Jews and Muslims are not in competition over who is hated most: that’s not a competition anyone would want to win.”

More spotlight for George.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Twitter account @GlobalCivility has a lot of tweets about that terrible “global civility” protest in Downing Street yesterday. I followed Raquel’s example and asked if they’d be protesting things like the flogging of Raif and Boko Haram massacres and mobs killing alleged “blasphemers” in Pakistan. It took them maybe 10 seconds to block me.

Demonstrating.

Global Civility @GlobalCivility · Feb 8
Demonstrating our love

All men in the first; all women in the second. Civility.

There they are. Not petitioning Saudi Arabia to stop torturing a liberal blogger, but petitioning all of us to shut up about their prophet. If they represent their prophet, then he’s a horror.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Raquel Saraswati posted some photos from that “shut up” protest in London yesterday, along with some (cough) skeptical comments.

Raquel E Saraswati @RaquelEvita 21 hours ago
That awkward moment when these guys in London used freedom of speech to protest against freedom of speech today.

.@GlobalCivility blocked me after I suggested demos against lashing of #RaifBadawi + against gender based violence.

How…civil.

Alex ‏@Alexdurrant7 21 hours ago
@RaquelEvita Wow, very diverse crowd there…

Raquel E Saraswati @RaquelEvita
@Alexdurrant7 some of the men are shouting and some are merely scowling. So diverse!

Ha! That’s a good one.

Raquel E Saraswati @RaquelEvita 2 hours ago
So the London march was also segregated by gender. #hijabdesk

Global civility indeed.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More from Greg Epstein on the Harvard Humanist of the Year award to Anita Sarkeesian.

Greg Epstein @gregmepstein 23 hours ago
Loved hosting @femfreq, our @HarvardHumanist of 2014 awardee. Humanism requires feminism; feminism=good f/all genders

So sad for the harassers. Streisand effect. If they hadn’t harassed her…

…well we’ll never know now.

Greg Epstein @gregmepstein 23 hours ago
.@femfreq’s message was so reasonable, so dare-I-say moderate, the controversy is sad. It must be said far, wide: humanism requires feminism

Proud of 100+ men who attended today’s event, joined others in 3 standing ovations. Hope it becomes known: @humanisthub, you meet good guys

As opposed to raging misogynist shits. Yes that does make a difference.

Greg Epstein @gregmepstein 23 hours ago
.@D4M10N Blocking people who tweet insensitive, ugly language at me isn’t about thin/thick skin. It’s to say: our community is a safe space.

.@GRIMACHU ‘I’m not sexist BUT Humanism makes feminism redundant’? No. It IS sexist to deny women’s history, reality. Strong men see this.

And “non-sexist” men who feel so entitled to call a strong woman “fraud” or “liar” if you dislike her success? Blocked. #Notinourcommunity

.@femfreq You spoke powerfully; your message is vital to the humanist community. All of us @HarvardHumanist thank you

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The ever-useful clarification:

xkcd

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh goody, it’s Brown v Board all over again – with reactionary officials defying a federal court in a last ditch effort to deny people civil rights. Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court last night told the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Monday. George Wallace lives!

“Effective immediately, no probate judge of the State of Alabama nor any agent or employee of any Alabama probate judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent” with the Alabama Constitution or state law, the chief justice wrote in his order.

The order, coming just hours before the January decisions of United States District Court Judge Callie V. S. Granade were scheduled to take effect, was almost certainly going to thrust this state into legal turmoil. It was not immediately clear how the state’s 68 probate judges, who, like Chief Justice Moore, are popularly elected, would respond to the order.

District Court is higher than a state Supreme Court, as I understand it. State courts aren’t supposed to flout rulings by District Courts. But then this is Roy Moore…

Some judges across the state had already signaled they would do nothing to aid gay couples and, in some instances, any couples. “Marriage licenses and ceremonies are no longer available at the Pike County Probate Office,” the office said.

And Washington County Probate Judge Nick Williams released a “declaration in support of marriage” in which he said he would “only issue marriage licenses and solemnize ceremonies consistent with Alabama law and the U.S. Constitution; namely, between one man and one woman only, so help me God.”

Several judges elsewhere announced variations of those plans after a push by Chief Justice Moore, who rose to national prominence in the early 2000s when he defied a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a Montgomery building and was subsequently ousted from his post leading the high court. He staged a political comeback, became chief justice again in 2013, and has in recent weeks said that Alabama’s probate judges are not bound by a federal trial court’s decisions. His argument has deep resonance in a place where a governor, George Wallace, stood in a doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an unsuccessful bid to block its federally ordered integration.

Right, it has deep resonance. Deep, bad resonance.

Although much has changed from Wallace’s era, Chief Justice Moore had used a series of strongly worded letters and memorandums to insist that Judge Granade, an appointee of President George W. Bush who joined the federal bench in 2002, had instigated a grave breach of law.

The result had been a legal and cultural debate rife with overtones of history, closely held religious beliefs and a chronically bubbling mistrust of the federal government that was expected to play out at Alabama’s courthouses Monday.

Yay! Let’s have this fight all over again. Let’s draw a line in the sand denying other people civil rights so that we can hog all the civil rights to our own sweet Christian selves. Let’s pride ourselves on being the wrong side of history and the wrong side of all human rights issues. Let’s make a big point of oppressing minority groups for no reason other than to puff up ourselves and our imagined god.

The chief justice’s misgivings speak to widespread concerns here about federal overreach and same-sex marriage in Alabama, where about 81 percent of voters in 2006 supported a constitutional amendment banning gay nuptials. Few here doubt the force of his belief that Judge Granade’s orders hold only “persuasive authority,” and not binding power, on Alabama judges.

“My guess is that is actually the way Roy Moore sincerely understands the federal-state relationship,” said Joseph Smith, a judicial politics expert at the University of Alabama. “He’s also an elected politician, and he knows who his constituency is.”

All theocratic bigots are they?

For many here, it is unsurprising that Chief Justice Moore emerged as a strident voice in a social debate after the dispute about the Ten Commandments display, known as “Roy’s Rock,” forced him from power.

“Unfortunately, sometimes it makes for very good politics here to be seen as opposing federal intervention, whether it’s from a court or a federal agency,” said David G. Kennedy, who represents two women involved in a case that prompted Judge Granade’s decision. “The situation here is that this is not federal intervention. It’s not federal intervention at all. What it is, is a federal court declaring what same-sex couples’ rights are under the federal Constitution.”

Federal constitution. Alabama is not part of that federation. It…it…it abstains.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Milène Larsson interviews the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Luz for VICE.

It’s tough going, but worth it; very worth it.

He’s annoyed at the New York Times for refusing to publish the Je suis Charlie cover.

The Charlie Hebdo survivors are uneasy about the whole “je suis Charlie” thing. They’re uneasy about being symbols because Charlie has always been about making fun of symbols.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebL1oCy6tgY

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

BuzzFeed says Paul Elam and AVFM are the more respectable wing of the MRA movement. That seems surprising. Neither is all that respectable.

A Voice for Men is often portrayed in the media as a relatively sober voice of reason in the abrasive world of men’s rights. “If Men’s Rights Activism has a Gloria Steinem, it is Paul Elam,” Emmett Rensin wrote this week for Vox. “The website is one of the oldest and, if there is such a thing, most respected hubs for MRA activity. Elam and his staff do, at the very least, engage in genuine advocacy on behalf of men.” Rensin didn’t cite any examples of said advocacy. This is not surprising, given that the site’s advocacy efforts are difficult to discern.

On the other hand it does make him a lot of money. That’s respectable in itself, right?

What is clear is that Elam has amassed tens of thousands of followers — and lined his pockets with their donations to the for-profit AVFM, which are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (When asked how this money is spent, Elam told BuzzFeed News that A Voice for Men’s finances were “none of your fucking business.”)

Hundreds of thousands for raging at women. Enterprising.

But here’s the scoop part: he ditched his own children and didn’t pay child support.

Now, exclusive interviews with Elam’s ex-wives and daughter and newly uncovered court records shed light on a man who, they told BuzzFeed News, has depended on and emotionally abused the women in his own life.

For example, although Elam compares the family court system’s treatment of fathers to Jim Crow, he abandoned his biological children not once but twice. Although Elam saysthat “fathers are forced to pay child support like it was mafia protection money,” he accused his first wife of lying about being raped so he could relinquish his parental rights and avoid paying child support.

His ex-wife and his daughter said he has only been able to make A Voice for Men his full-time job because of the women who have supported him throughout his life.

Well but so…so then they’re castrating him! Yeah that’s it! It’s still all their fault. Like his mother, who tried to interfere with his god-given right to squirt liquid shit. When he was only 13 years old, a tiny helpless innocent little baby,

his mother tried to force him to take his diarrhea medicine.

Elam’s brothers held him down on the kitchen floor while his mother screamed and hit him with a wooden spoon until a concerned neighbor knocked on the door. “I felt like I was engaged in the battle of my life,” Elam said. “I was a rebel from that moment on … I’m still that 13-year-old kid on the floor that won’t take the medicine.”

A hero! A hero of the liquid shit movement! A rebel with a cause: never let them take your diarrhea away from you. He’s still 13 and he still has the diarrhea.

Then follows the squalid story of his young adulthood, when he drank and did drugs and expected his wife to support him and do all the domestic work. What a catch, eh? What an impressive human being. Then to get out of paying child support he said his kids weren’t his.

Susan received full custody of both children after their divorce in February 1981. Elam was granted visitation rights every other Sunday afternoon, but only if he wasn’t “under the influence of alcohol or drugs or in the company of people under the influence of alcohol or drugs.” He was also ordered to pay child support every month as well as some previously owed child support and a variety of other debts and court fines. But he didn’t. So Susan took him to court again. Finally, he wrote a petition to the court explaining that he didn’t believe he should be held in contempt of court or pay attorneys’ fees because he didn’t think Bonnie was his.

“Susan has a history of promiscuity which never, to my knowledge now, ceased during the three years that we were married,” Elam wrote in the petition. He said he would take a paternity test, but that he felt he had “paid enough for the unfaithfulness” of his ex-wife.

What a mensch.

Now, Elam often writes about false rape allegations. “Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true,” he once explained in a blog post, due to how often he believes women lie about being assaulted.

Yet this guy is considered the respectable part of the MRA movement. This guy.

In 2011, after feminist writer Jessica Valenti’s personal information was added to Register Her and Elam went after her on his radio show (“We’re gonna be all over her like Ron Jeremy on a drug-addled bimbo,” he said, calling her a “chickenshit” and “scared little girl”), Valenti was so inundated with threats that she contacted the FBI and, she said, left her house until things died down.

Projects like these are why Elam and his website have become known less for political or policy advocacy than for his abrasive approach to debate. In one post, Elam wrote that “all the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”

I wouldn’t call that an “abrasive approach to debate.” I wouldn’t call it any kind of approach to debate.

“The claim that Elam and his friends are merely trying to have a conversation about the rights of men in modern society is bogus. What it’s really about is the defamation of women as a group; that’s called misogyny,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has described AVFM as part of a network of “misogynists” and “women haters.”

On the one hand you have your Frederick Douglass, your Diane Nash, your John Lewis, your Eugene Debs, your Margaret Sanger, your Bella Abzug – and on the other hand you have Paul Elam.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mother Jones sought answers to the burning questions who is Warren Farrell, and why? He’s a former feminist who became a mover and shaker of the men’s rights movement, which in a way is all you need to know. (Other sufficiencies of that type: people who are pillars of the white people’s rights movement, or the movement for straight liberation, or the union of rich people who own the means of production.)

For some, the “manosphere” offers a place to air real grievances about issues such as bias in family courts or sexual abuse suffered by men. But it also has spawned a network of activists and sites that take Farrell’s ideology in a disturbing direction. Men’s rights forums on sites like 4chan and Reddit are awash in misogyny and anti-feminist vitriol. Participants argue that false allegations of rape and domestic abuse are rampant, or that shelters for battered women are a financial scam. Others rail against women for being independent or sexually promiscuous.

So we now live in a world awash in frank unapologetic hatred of women.

These ideas have given rise to aggressive tactics and rhetoric. The National Coalition for Men—whose board of advisers includes Farrell—has fought to cut off state funding for domestic-violence programs if men aren’t included. A Voice for Men’s founder, Paul Elam, who is a friend and protégé of Farrell’s, has justified violence against women and written that some of them “walk through life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH—PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.” Other activists have published names of women they consider enemies and have praised online stalkers, such as the “Gamergate” mobs who bombard feminist critics with rape and death threats.

And they make Warren Farrell look reasonable. They do him the favor of moving the Overton window so that it’s right in front of him.

Elam pairs his big-tent approach with brazen, in-your-face rhetoric. When video surfaced last September of NFL star Ray Rice punching out his fiancee in an Atlantic City elevator, Elam argued that Rice was justified because she had lunged at him (though he suggested Rice shouldn’t have hit her so hard). Elam has also dubbed October “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” and declared that men who are physically attacked by women should “beat the living shit out of them.”

“I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open-handed pop on the face to get them to settle down,” he wrote on his website. “I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles. And then make them clean up the mess.”

Elam says it was satire, and also that violent rhetoric is the only way to get anyone’s attention, and also that he wasn’t even in the building that day.

But such rhetoric could lead to violence, warns Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups. “When you have a movement pumping out nasty propaganda, it invariably finds fertile ground in the mind of someone like Elliot Rodger or the man behind the 1989 Montreal massacre,” she says, referring to 25-year-old Marc Lépine, a misogynist who shot 14 women to death at a university.

Beirich cited a third example: mass murderer Anders Breivik, who carried out attacks on a government building and summer camp in Norway in 2011, killing 77 children and adults. Breivik wrote a manifesto that seized on men’s rights ideology—he declared that fathers had become “disposable,” that women use their “erotic capital” to “manipulate” men, and that the media turns men into a “touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.” Men’s rights activist Peter Andrew Nolan, who runs a site called Crimes Against Fathers, praised Breivik, suggesting he was “a hero.”

Cue 40 thousand MRAs accusing Heidi Beirich of hate speech.

Following Elliot Rodger’s murder rampage last May, Farrell and the men’s rights movement drew attention like never before. There is no evidence that Rodger (or other killers) had any ties to Farrell, Elam, or men’s rights organizations. But commentators highlighted Rodger’s focus on the Pickup Artist sceneand his ideas about women and their sexual dominion over men. “They think like beasts,” he wrote.

Conservatives rushed in to defend the men’s movement: Helen Smith, who blogs for the website PJ Media, argued that “feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys’ and men’s issues” may have been to blame for Rodger’s attack. After the protesters showed up at the Hilton DoubleTree in Detroit, Fox News suggested their goal was “muzzling” men. “Feminists are up in arms, calling a men’s conference a hate group even though it included all races and sexes,” said morning show host Steve Doocy, pointing to the diverse community Elam had built. “So who are the ones being intolerant?” An opinion piece on cnn.com by Marc Randazza, a First Amendment lawyer who has spoken up for Rush Limbaugh, violent video games, and the pornography industry, suggested that A Voice for Men had endured protests and threats simply because it had the “audacity to question certain issues from a man’s perspective.”

Uh huh. That’s all Elliot Rodger and Anders Breivik did, too. Sure.

Missing from that coverage were the group’s fierce tactics, which have continued unabated. In October, with vicious misogyny raging online around the Gamergate controversy, feminist pop-culture critic Anita Sarkeesian canceled a talk at Utah State University after administrators received an email threatening “the deadliest school shooting in American history.” A Voice for Men responded with an essay asserting that the email’s author was in fact a feminist posing as a men’s rights activist, and insinuating that Sarkeesian stood to profit from the episode.

And we saw the reaction when the Harvard Humanists declared her Humanist of the Year. That award is being presented right now as I type, at a sold-out event that was moved to a larger venue because of the demand for tickets.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Chris Moos was at the Secular Conference in London yesterday, talking about gender segregation in UK universities.

He tweeted this photo – that’s Gita Sahgal, Chris, Maryam, and Magdulien Abaida.

London Black Atheists tweeted this one –

I wish I could have been there.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Via Gnu Atheism –

And more -

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Brilliant idea.

In a poignant and powerful response to the horrific attacks on their colleagues in Paris, the world’s top cartoonists have teamed up to produce I am Charlie, a book featuring the top Charlie Hebdo cartoons published around the globe.

All proceeds will go to The Committee to Protect Journalists, the worldwide organization devoted to promoting freedom of the press.

The book, features 86 Charlie Hebdo editorial cartoons created by artists in Europe, the Middle East, The Americas, Australia, and Asia.

Cartoonists represented include Osama and Emad Haljaj from Jordan, Pang Li from China, and Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Steve Sack from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The book features an introduction from Daryl Cagle, cartoonist and founder of the leading editorial cartoon site politicalcartoons.com. The book is edited and published by Andrew Pillsbury, former head of business development at The New Yorker Magazine’s cartoon division.

Both the physical and electronic versions of the book will be released February 21, the six week anniversary of the attacks.  The ebook retails for $9.99, the physical book retails for $14.99.

Brill iant.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Don’t forget, girls and boys, we achieved gender equality in 1972, so ever since then feminism has been nothing but an extremist attempt to monopolize all the good things for women only.

But then how do you explain a discouraging pattern in how women and men are seen and evaluated?

Aviva Shen at Think Progress:

Students tend to think their male professors are “geniuses,” while their female professors are “bossy,” a new interactive chart reveals. Using data from RateMyProfessors.com, a popular forum for griping or raving about classes, Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University professor, was able to clearly map out students’ biases.

The chart breaks down reviews to sort which words are affiliated with each gender and discipline. According to The Upshot, “Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.”

You know…that could be another reason all the putative Stars of the atheoskepto movement are men. It could be partly because men like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens are seen as geniuses while a woman with the same qualities would be seen as a bossy pain in the ass. It’s not as if women aren’t aware of the general pattern, so it’s pretty likely that women try to adjust their presentation of self accordingly, and it’s also pretty likely that the resulting presentation of self isn’t the kind that makes you a star among atheoskeptics. It’s a double bind, in short. Women are under massive pressure not to come across as geniusbossy, and people who come across as Nicer don’t rise to the top in this particular niche.

Gendered language is one way those biases manifest themselves, and can do significant damage to women’s professional and personal lives. A recent analysis of performance reviews in the tech industry found that women were far more likely to receive criticism from their supervisors. The word “abrasive” was used many times to describe female employees, but never appeared in a review for any of the men.

“Abrasive” is also more likely to be used to describe a female professor on RateMyProfessor…

See? That which is considered “abrasive” and bad in a woman is considered merit in a man, so men get to use those qualities where they’re useful, and women either avoid them or are penalized for using them.

Discouraging, isn’t it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)