Author: Ophelia Benson

Exactly. If only more people realized this.

It’s a question of integrity. If I don’t agree with some of the church’s most central teachings that rule out – on a spectrum from abomination to sinful – contraception, abortion, sex before marriage, homosexual sex, divorce and women priests, then I really shouldn’t be a member.

Quite right, not least because your membership does its bit to endorse those central teachings. Membership is a kind of vote – passive, but nonetheless countable. If you think some of the church’s most central teachings are reactionary and hostile to women, then quite right, you shouldn’t cast your vote for them.

I haven’t practised since I made my Confirmation, yet my name is still on the membership register, the baptismal roll. The church can count on my apparent allegiance when quoting membership statistics to bolster its authority. It does so routinely when opposing legislative change. In Australia a quarter of the population identifies as Catholic, although only 15 per cent of that quarter attend Mass regularly. In Ireland about 43 per cent of the total population are churchgoers, with about 90 per cent of residents identifying as Catholic. Now, after the clerical child abuse scandals, I’ve had enough. Way too much. I want out.

Quite right. See if you can get Madeleine Bunting to go with you.

Salon has an amusing piece by Alex Pareene on what the pranks of Andrew Breitbart mean. First Pareene quotes Politico’s take on that:

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

then points out

Actually, VandeHarris, lots of people figured this one out! It was really easy!

Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of anything. Some things are not as difficult as some people make out. Obvious glaring fakes are not as hard to spot as some people claim.

Pareene points out a lot of things that made the story look fake to the most casual eye.

Real-life reporters are supposed to be baffled as to how to respond to this fact-lite outrage? Shouldn’t they have just found the full video, or interviewed Sherrod, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did? If you have to write about the latest Breitbart outrage RIGHT THIS SECOND, you write, “Bomb-throwing propagandist with history of disregard for factual accuracy posts race-baiting video intended to score political points against NAACP and black people in general.” It was a really easy story!

Yes, that does sound familiar.

Several people (some via email rather than comments) have pointed out this observation of Glenn Greenwald’s in a letter at Salon:

I think it’d be worth it to sue [Andrew Breitbart] just to uncover his “source” who did the editing. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Ignore the part about suing, that’s not the issue here. The issue is the implicit claim that a fraudulent “source” does not deserve or have a right to remain anonymous and the explicit claim that journalists are supposed to expose such sources when they (the sources) use the journalist to propagate the fraud. The above-mentioned people note that this means Chris Mooney, being a journalist, is supposed to expose his fraudulent “source” who used him to perpetrate a fraud.

That is an interesting point. It prompted me to take another look at those two (everlasting, wretched) “Tom Johnson” posts. Well yes – Mooney does help the fraud to perpetrate smears of Dawkins, PZ and Jerry Coyne.

In Counterproductive Attacks on Religion – Exhibit A “Tom Johnson” says

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like…

In comment 10 on that post “Tom Johnson” corroborates his own story by saying it’s true:

Sorbet, I don’t doubt that you have NA friends who are not combative, but please don’t doubt that I have NA colleagues that are. For what it’s worth, I’m not exaggerating my case or making things up.

Well, it is, of course, worth nothing, and exaggerating and making things up are exactly what he was doing. He goes on, in his pleasant way:

…when I ask them about why they feel that they need to chastise the faithful when they’ve asked us to come help (trust me, we have heated discussions), they directly quote PZ Meyers, Jerry Coyne (especially), and Dawkins as why it should be a “good” scientist’s job these days to attack the faithful – no matter how moderate the faithful may be. I then get called a faithiest (thanks, Jerry Coyne) for NOT calling the religious ignorant and stupid.

So there you have it – a known fraud telling lies about people on the blog of a journalist, who is still protecting his identity. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

On the second post, My Thanks to Tom Johnson, Mooney smeared a number of people:

Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym).

I’m part of that offensively-named “machine” because I did a post, not “targeting” the Tom Johnson post, but pointing out that it looked like bullshit and was the product of an anonymous source and that Mooney, as a journalist, should be more skeptical than that. I was right, and I did nothing wrong in expressing skepticism about “Tom Johnson,” but I was part of the smear based on the lies told by the fraudulent “source.” “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Food for thought.

Martha Nussbaum starts her discussion of burqa bans with her version of the justification for the free exercise clause of the US Constitution and freedom of religion in general. It’s a rather sentimental picture.

Let’s start with an assumption that is widely shared: that all human beings are equal bearers of human dignity.  It is widely agreed that government must treat that dignity with equal respect.   But what is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance?

We now add a further premise: that the faculty with which people search for life’s ultimate meaning — frequently called “conscience” ─  is a very important part of people, closely related to their dignity.

The problem with that as a justification for the free exercise clause and for freedom religious practice is that it’s so incomplete. Nussbaum is very very fond of talking about religion as the way “people search for life’s ultimate meaning,” but that’s far from being all that religion is, and Nussbaum’s presenting it that way is misleading, even obfuscatory. Religion is other things too, including a set of rules. A religious set of rules is often reactionary, and it is always “sacred,” which makes it less accountable to human ideas and wishes, and more difficult to change.

Religion is not just about the individual’s search for meaning; religion is social, and often demanding, or frankly coercive. The free exercise of religion often means the freedom to force subordinates to obey religious rules. Nussbaum makes the whole system sound a lot more benevolent than it can be assumed to be.

That’s especially obvious in the case of the burqa. The burqa is not really part of women’s “search for meaning” in the sense people like Nussbaum, and like me, understand it; it’s part of a system of rules forced on people by tradition and custom and authority. Yes it may be that some people “find meaning” by obeying such rules, but the truth is it doesn’t matter if they do or not; the rules are rules, and they have nothing to do with freedom.