If there’s one utterly important thing to learn from your four-ish years of college, it’s this: Bitches Be Crazy.

Least that’s the takeaway from a recent satire – and I use that word as loosely as the last leaf on an autumn tree – penned by the vice-president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in The Daily Caller.

FIRE is a nonprofit group primarily founded around the defending of college students’ right to free speech and expression, while The Daily Caller apparently still exists. This is the same paper who led the crusade to bury Democrat Senator Robert Menendez via the later-revealed-to-be-bribed testimony of two Dominican women by the way.

This time around, they’re playing host to FIRE VP Robert Shibley’s rant against the evils of ‘new’ guidelines released by the Departments of Education and Justice concerning sexual harassment and assault on college campuses.

And what a great opinion that is.

As the result of an investigation begun in 2012, the DOE and DOJ released a 31-page report the Thursday before last outlining specific failures by University of Montana officials to properly handle allegations of sexual assault and the like over the last three years. The report is part diagnostic and part manual, with recommendations offered on how to streamline cases, clarify contradictory or confusing guidelines and protect students from retaliation. According to Shibley and the rest of the conservative blogosphere that’s since picked up this story though, there’s something much more sinister behind the report; the hijacking of every red blooded American male’s right to ask for a date.

Here’s Shibley relating to us an a mock interview with a Washington bureaucrat about what these new regulations really mean.

Q: I heard that this means that asking someone out on a date can be sexual harassment. That can’t be right, can it?

A: Indeed it is, and thank goodness! As you may know, many people see “dates” as a prelude to a relationship or even sex. That’s all well and good, but sometimes, people are asked for dates by people they wouldn’t dream of going out with. That makes such requests “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” — in other words, sexual harassment!

By expanding the definition of sexual harassment, Shibley warns us that a deep chill of expression and speech will set in, stifling the voices of pushy daters everywhere. Not just them, but virtually all discussions of sex will be kept under lock-and-key lest someone find offense under these new provisions. Everything from performances of the Vagina Monologues to courtyard rallies in support of same-sex marriage will be outlawed, and with it, the sexpocalypse can’t be far off!

Here’s one of the actual passages in question for context, with appropriate bolding as necessary.

Third, Sexual Harassment Policy 406.5.1 improperly suggests that the conduct does not constitute sexual harassment unless it is objectively offensive…Whether conduct is objectively offensive is a factor used to determine if a hostile environment has been created, but it is not the standard to determine whether conduct was “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” and therefore constitutes “sexual harassment”.

Far from the trumpeting of a ‘new’ definition, the U.S. government, as least as recently as 2010, has been very clear about what “sexual harassment” legally means. It IS unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. This can include verbal conduct, sure, but to what extent is something that’s left to the person who would or would not want to file a claim.

This isn’t to say that every instance of personal offense is harassment, it’s to say that every claim of harassment needs to be taken seriously, because otherwise its victims will hesitate to report instances they feel aren’t ‘objectively’ harassing.

For all the idiotic hypotheticals Shibley and others throw out, the actual data tells us that people vastly underreport sexual harassment in the workplace and the public. One of the reasons why? Because they think they won’t be believed. Because they think anything they say will be dismissed out of hand as not serious enough. Because people like Shibley are immensely more concerned about imaginary femiharpies who sink their claws into any would-be Romeo who approaches than about a person’s right to walk to class without getting yelled at for being a prudish cunt. Only one of those things happens on a regular basis.

Shibley’s fantasy of a college campus turned puritan wasteland betrays a basic truth: women aren’t allowed to reject men any other way than nicely. And they don’t. There’s no epidemic of tarring and feathering innocent men as sexual harassers, but there are, as projects like Everyday Sexism showcase vividly, plenty of idiots who alienate and threaten women right out in the streets and campuses.

And anyhow, as if this needs to be said, a claim of harassment wouldn’t end at word one of someone crying woe to a performance of ‘The Laramie Project’. It’d be investigated, like every claim would. And in the former case, it’d rightly be dismissed fairly shortly. Nearly all the articles and posts writing on this have turned white at the idea of complaints flooding into colleges over petty offenses and overblown dramas. Which again, makes no sense considering that — and this needs to be repeated as some sort of massive public service announcement every morning – women and men don’t report the sexual harassment and assault they already deal with. Believing otherwise just lays bare the deep haze of female mistrust and implicit sexism running through a person’s head. (And makes you wonder how the hell they ask for dates)

I mean, how dare anyone allow Boobs McGee to judge for herself whether that man who won’t stop staring at her through the coffee shop window is harassing her for super cerrealz!?

The reality is that sexual harassment, especially public harassment, is often times NOT a repetitive action by any one individual. It might be the same catcall repeated ad-nauseum, but not the same harasser. A group of men screaming at a women for not talking to them might not be physical or ‘serious’ enough, but it doesn’t make the experience any less frightening or worth reporting. The reality is that women don’t give a shit about making sure the geeky guy in chemistry gets cited for asking them out to that horrible Thai place with the gym smell on campus. The reality is that letting people know they can turn to others is the only way you can make sure they feel safe and respected.

Something organizations who supposedly champion the rights of college students like FIRE might want to remember.

For anyone tuning into the (U.S.) skeptical world lately, the big event this weekend was the second annual Women In Secularism conference held in Washington D.C.

From discussions of race and gender in the secular community to talks on how to criticize religions like Islam without lending yourself to bigotry, it’s fair to say the conference came out big and bold this year. Not just because of a slew of talented female speakers who might not have received as big a platform as they deserved in the past, but because the discussions they provoked in their talks are ones that any community who wants to have a positive impact on the larger culture needs to have.

Which is why it’s disappointing that CFI President Ron Lindsay’s opening talk at the conference on Friday apparently left many in the audience both scratching their heads and alienated.

I won’t mince too many words on the content of the speech as it’s linkable here. And I won’t spend much time picking apart the false equivalencies Lindsay made in comparing prominent women skeptics who refuse to hold debates with people who harass them to Marxists. Or his strange understanding that people who use the concept of privilege intend it as a means of silencing any personal criticism. Or that even if they did want to, that they can use it to silence people. Last I checked, one of the most willfully ignorant and pointedly anti-feminist skeptics around, Justin Vacula, is alive, well and blithely speaking despite having attended the conference.

…In fact, that was it. That’s pretty much all I have to say about that.

No, the real meat of this post is on showcasing the best and brightest of comments supporting Lindsay on the followup post defending his talk, soon to become the new skeptical primer on how to dig holes.

Let’s get started with a reply to one of the earlier comments by BigBamboo:

“Does Ron Lindsay experience street harassment? No? I have. Plenty of times.”

Translation: Men keep telling this worthless crackhead whore to quit pestering them about a $20 blowjob in the WalMart parking lot.

What an erudite and poignant counterargument. Point goes to the fellow who knows an awful lot about the going-ons of the local WalMart black market.

Here’s commentator Nobody and the joke just wrote itself ten minutes ago with a name like that so why bother?

I wonder when it was that being a victim became a strength. It’s a war amongst everyone to see who is more abused, disadvantaged, aggrieved and downtrodden.

You know what?

I’d prefer to do and be as monstrous as these lunatic radfems claim men are. It seems that treating people as equals will never be a benefit to me, because I’ll always be treated like one of the Oppressors—so long as I don’t act exactly as they say I should.

Thanks for ruining feminism. It could have been great.

Take that ever-lowering rates of (reported) sexual assault! Feminism is ruined now! Personally thought jeggings would have been its comeuppance, but that’s just me. Great to see folks choosing to be monsters via committee vote though.

Here’s Astrokid with a much awaited update to the dictionary:

Feminism: The never ending project to improve the woman’s condition, not giving a damn for the corresponding man’s condition.

You can rest assured that as long as feminism raises its head in the Atheist community, there are many that will beat it down. The internet.. where religions come to die & where ideologies also come to die.

“Unless it’s my ideologies! Those can stay! & all the &’s in the world! They belong to atheism now!”

And sadly, not at all lastly, here’s Sister Chromatid enjoying some scrumptious German expressions:

By the way, do you ever stop to ask yourself if you are achieving your goals? Would you want to know if you weren’t? Maybe just maybe if you and your cohorts quit vilifying every atheist who doesn’t see your brand of feminism as representative of their understanding of feminism, people will stop documenting your hypocrisy with such delicious shadenfreude.

Shadenfreude (¿¿sp??): Now in Crazy Cranberry and Esoteric Eggplant!

What is all this if not guilt-by-association? Poisoning-the-well? Striking-the-bob? Well I don’t know, especially since that last one is probably not a real thing. The point being made here isn’t that Lindsay is a raging misogynist (few really are), it’s that there’s a sizable chunk within our society who have mistaken ideas about how marginalized groups are treated in their day-to-day lives. Some of those ideas and attitudes are hilariously stupid as well evidenced. Some are couched in misunderstandings and misconceptions. But the worst ones? Those are the ones powered by pride and willful ignorance. We all have them, all from one column or another. As so-called skeptics, it’s that much more important we self-correct them.

Lindsay’s bad idea? Near as I can tell, it’s reading PZ Myers’ (and it’s almost certainly not a phrase he coined himself) suggestion backwards. It’s not “listen and shut-up”. It’s “shut-up and listen”. As in taking a step back from your preconceptions about what the situation is (ex: women and minorities in the secular community) and listening to those actually involved in it. It’s not listening when you ignore or forget the things they tell you immediately after, by the way. It’s condescending.

And at least from the feedback many others are voicing, it’s not just Rebecca Watson who thinks Lindsay did just that during his opening speech and especially in his latest response to critics.

But the most important reason for this post?

I, and I can’t emphasize this enough, really wanted to make fun of idiotic comments.

This week, my alma mater, the University at Buffalo, is finding itself beset by The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a pro-life group whose raison d’etre appears to be little more than a shoddy impersonation of the Westburo Bapist Church; showing up to colleges across the country with outrageously offensive and graphic signs comparing abortions to the Holocaust and other charming past events. Known as the Genocide Awareness Project, the CBR’s campus outreach program tops it off with its ‘Reproductive Choice Trucks’, wheeled and mobile versions of the signs. Let’s have the CBR explain it for us:

As part of its Genocide Awareness Project, The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform exhibits large photo murals comparing aborted babies with Jewish Holocaust victims, African Americans killed in racist lynchings, Native Americans exterminated by the US Army, etc. Our purpose is to illuminate the conceptual similarities which exist between abortion and more widely recognized forms of genocide. This is important because perpetrators of genocide always call it something else and the word “abortion”has, therefore, lost most of its meaning.

What is the difference between that image and me saying fuck!? What is the difference!?

What better way to prove their moral superiority than lording over their civility? Many of the original comments on Youtube chided the professor for her offensive language while presumptively holding the belief that women should be forced to carry to term a pregnancy against her will. Respectfully, of course.

These are the same people who advocate misleading others with myths about sex, contraception and abortion (including those graphic images which misrepresent most abortions). They’re the people who would strip away federal funds for health programs not at all tied to abortion services run by groups like Planned Parenthood. They hold horribly profane beliefs that are actively damaging women in the U.S. every single minute, and in states like Missouri, they’re succeeding. But, then again, the only thing worse than believing a woman’s body belongs to everyone but the woman, is being rude about how idiotic they are.

The point isn’t that there shouldn’t be a standard for respectful disagreement. There should. For one, violence shouldn’t be the go-to when faced with opposing ideas, whatever the degree of harm they hold. But feigned and passive objectivity is just as horrible a standard to bring ourselves up to. The substance of an idea is its merit, not the emotion with which it’s said; letting others define it as the latter just allows them to circumvent the former. Which is all perfectly fine if you’re looking to avoid picking a side in the first place, as student and UB College Republicans Vice-President Alana Barricks illustrated in a interview with local campus paper, the Spectrum, on the past two days:

“The people who are out there are all extremists…They are basically yelling at each other, and they are the people who will never have their opinions change on the issue … We are not saying which side is right or wrong. We are just saying none of this is doing any good – it’s all negative.”

With all proper offense meant…fuck that. There are real quantifiable facts to deal with. Considerations which mean real things in real life. Women who face poverty, unsafe medical procedures or their rights being taken away if not given the opportunity to decide what’s best for their future. People, actual people, who suffer in fear and ostracization as a result of the wrong side who constantly disperse lie after lie to the public. People who die in hospital beds as a result of principled morals. Fuck your passive aggressive positivity if that matters more than the facts.

On Tuesday, UB students organized their own counter-protest in front of the Student Union, a large group of some-150 standing close by with signs and placards, effectively blocking many of the GAP images, which for added good taste were placed several feet away from the preschool on site. Though I’m sure tensions were high, there were no arrests. And later today, a debate will be held on campus by the UB Students for Life. I can only anticipate the level of discourse drenched in false analogies, loaded presumptions and outright lies.

How civil.

With as many discussions as in the last few days, it would be wrong not to post anything, so this is the first of (probably) three posts based on thoughts I had at QED. Unfortunately, but because I believe in saving the best for last, I’m starting with the one thing which irked me slightly.

Yesterday on QED’s second and last day, Carrie Poppy of Oh No, Ross and Carrie! fame (her talk on anecdotes, by the way, was excellent) moderated the ‘God Panel’, a discussion between Mitch Benn, Richard Dawkins, Mike Hall and Lawrence Krauss and the programme’s one specific atheist event. When a question was posed about mistakes our movement had made, the first example given – I think by Mitch Benn, though it might have been Mike Hall – was Atheism Plus, an answer audience members seemed to like and onto which other panellists piled.

Mitch Benn (again, it may have been Mike Hall) said A+ makes atheism into more than non-belief.

Lawrence Krauss said a ‘PC’ ‘orthodoxy’ now clamps down on people who say the wrong things.

Richard Dawkins called A+ an ‘obvious example’ of atheists doing things wrong, and bemoaned the use of the word ‘douchebag’ in reference to people deemed sexist. (It wasn’t the accusations of sexism to which he objected, so far as I could tell, but the word ‘douchebag’ specifically.)

Panel speakers, obviously, are entitled to speak their minds and likely to agree at times, but this is a contentious issue, and I’d have liked to see A+ get some right of reply. I know people from this year’s QED who are pro-A+, and my Twitter responses got a fair amount of support – at any rate, it all felt rather one-sided.

It’s unfortunate there wasn’t a Q&A session afterward; had there been one, I’d like to think some defence of A+ would have been mounted – if not by anyone else, then by me. Since there wasn’t, I’m posting here (in slightly extended form) what I felt like saying at the time.

First of all, I’m not particularly a user of the A+ label. I’ve said why before, and some of that bears saying again here. Certainly, I think there are valid critiques to make of how the project’s taken shape. I’m not sure, for example, that giving the pre-existing ‘social justice’ faction of the atheist community an explicit, solidified name like Atheism Plus or carving out spaces and organisations for it has been entirely beneficial – part of me wonders if the case might be made better by floating, distributed individuals than a unified identity group – and of course, numerous (googleable) issues with the A+ forum have been raised online. So don’t imagine I’m just engaged in partisan parrying here.

But no: Atheism Plus does not make atheism into ‘a thing’, or redefine it as something more than non-theism.

To quote the FAQ on the A+ website:

Atheism Plus does not attempt to conflate atheism with feminism or any other ideology. It does not call for the incorporation of liberal values into the definition of atheism.

There. You see?

To put it another way, see Jen McCreight’s original ‘Atheism+’ blog post.

Being an atheist and a feminist, and calling yourself an atheist plus [a feminist] does not redefine atheism as a positive value – no more than being an atheist and a comedian, an atheist and a physicist or an atheist and a science advocate.

If in practice, your comedy is closely related to atheism and religion, as Mitch’s seems to be; if physics plays a strong part in your atheism, as it clearly does in Lawrence’s; if you see atheism as a scientific position, which obviously Richard does – indicating the relationship between the two makes perfect sense.

This doesn’t make atheism a positive value, or define it as something other than non-theism. If you think A+ misunderstands ‘atheism’, you likely misunderstand ‘plus’.

And by the way – in Jen’s words, aren’t we all ‘atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism’? Isn’t that what meetings like QED are about? The God Panel even said, pretty unanimously, that their atheism was consequential to their skepticism and that other people’s ought to be too.

It’s abundantly clear, as far as I’m concerned, that organised atheist culture in its current form has lots of stances other than pure atheism, and that these stances are interrelated.

We’re all, or almost all, atheists plus secularists, atheists plus science supporters and skeptics, atheists plus people who think religion is a bad thing, including when it isn’t traditionally theistic. When you meet someone in an atheist space – a public meet-up, say, or a web group – you can confidently assume they hold these views.

Being an atheist, then, may strictly mean no more than not being a theist, but being a card-carrying atheist – someone who wears the Scarlet A, attends conventions and is generally part of the current ‘movement’ – has all kinds of implications. Atheist culture has its pillars already: the contention of A+ is that social awareness should be one of them.

I have a problem with the idea wanting sexism-free atheist culture is PC orthodoxy. (Insert other social inequities at your leisure, obviously.) For one thing, anti-sexism is not orthodoxy because, as one hopes Laurence Krauss can testify after his recent encounter with IERA, sexism is not radical.

As for being called a douchebag, he and Richard Dawkins are public figures. Public figures say things, and sometimes they get heat for it. Your views being criticised, as most of us wish creationists would realise, is not evidence of a conspiring hegemony – it’s evidence not everyone likes all your views, and not everyone thinks you’re above being told so.

Among some sections of the skeptic-atheist community, I see a tendency to deny culture exists at all; to insist even in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that structures like gender and race are never relevant to anything. The keystone of A+, as I see it, is the radical notion that culture does exist, bringing with it an array of influential social contexts – and that if we want to be effective at getting skeptical or atheistic messages across to all parts of society and not just some, we need to be aware of these.

If we want to be an optimally effective movement, we need not just to be a white movement, and that means not only making white atheists visible.

If we want to be optimally effective, we need to avoid exclusionary imagery and language about minorities in our publicity.

If we want to be optimally effective, we need to make sure everyone can afford to come to our events, including low-waged and unemployed people.

If we want to be effective, we should keep events accessible for wheelchair users, provide signing for deaf audience members or those with limited hearing, and generally accommodate attendees with disabilities.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

This isn’t PC orthodoxy. It’s common fucking sense.

As a former Catholic, I’m never astounded by the reluctance some of my fellow ex-Catholics have towards condemning the religion entirely. There is a beauty in the ritual; the calming words of a Father as he recites from the Gospel, the mediation of kneeling onto the pews (True story, they’re called kneelers!). God is comforting. Unfortunately He doesn’t make much sense past the first impression and the Church itself is irredeemably corrupted, if we’re being honest here, but I understand faith. As did the late Roger Ebert.

With news of his recent death at the hands of a long struggle with cancer, the 70-year-old critic, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, and national icon leaves behind an enormous wake in the cultural consciousness. Reams of digital words will flow in justified adoration over the influence he had in shaping our perceptions of media. Not only that, but he was a vocal advocate of progressive principles, speaking out loudly about climate change, gun control and race. He was a pronounced humanist who voiced his non-belief of God without ire and wrote lyrically about his lack of fear at death’s door.

There is much to respect and emulate about the man, but, and I’m sorry to say this, Roger Ebert also had horrible opinions about women, abortion, and religion that shouldn’t be whitewashed away.

In an article no less than a month ago titled How I Am a Roman Catholic, Ebert spoke of his Catholic faith growing up and his current adoration of its rituals, if not its core tenets. He attributes many of his strong societal beliefs to his upbringing:

Through a mental process that has by now become almost instinctive, those nuns guided me into supporting Universal Health Care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders.

Yet when the topic of the sex-abuse scandal comes up, he offers a rather curious take, almost justification, of the situation:

The great scandal in today’s Church is of course child abuse. I have no idea what such surveys mean or what they’re based on, but given how much I’ve read about it I was surprised to learn that only a little more than four percent of today’s clergy seems to have been involved in it.

What he fails to mention or remember is the systemic cover-up by the larger majority of Church officials to bury incidents of abuse through bribery, bullying, and in more than one horrific instance, castration. It may have only been four percent of the clergy directly involved with victimizing children, but it wasn’t only four percent of them involved in keeping their crimes hidden for decades. Ignoring that is ignoring the reason why the later relevations were so devastating.

On abortion, Ebert had this to say during the same article:

Birth control? Here I subscribe to an unofficial “double” loophole often applied in practice by Catholics faced with perplexing choices: Do that which results in the greater good and the lesser evil. I support freedom of choice. My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born.

On the one hand, Ebert appears to be stating merely his personal preference, and not what he believes should be public policy. On the other, it’s a personal preference that shows callous disregard for the innocent life of the potential mother whom Ebert felt should be forced to endure nine months of carrying her rapist’s fetus inside her. Which makes Ebert here only a few shades better than a Todd Akin, in action though certainly not in belief. Also keep in mind this was one of our country’s most widely celebrated and respected voices who will be quoted ad-nauseum on Facebook walls and in articles by the end of today. How many of them will neglect to include the previous one?

It bears mentioning, because many will no doubt remind, that Ebert was far from a raging misogynist; there are earlier articles where he correctly identifies and condemns the patriarchal underpinnings of religion and society, not only in his personal essays, but in his reviews. Yet, even there Ebert was flawed, as he effortlessly proved in a piece last year titled, Women Are Better Than Men.

Again, Ebert makes many correct observations about the state of the world, pointing out the wide disparity in the violence and crime committed by both genders. Unfortunately he then offers all this up on a platter of gender essentialism:

Most of these things are intuitively true. I believe that a great many things can be explained by the process of evolution, and differences in the sexes are certainly included. We are the descendants of primitive hunting and gathering societies. Men are better are hunting, and women are better at gathering. Men are taller, heavier, stronger. They’re not in the child-rearing business.

It’s the same old tired appeal to biology that so many people, scientists included, are fond of making when it comes to gender. He continues on about testosterone making for crueler CEO’s and women making natural nurturers of the stone-age men. He ends on this note:

Women have evolved to focus more on prudent long-term survival, and less on immediate gains. When women give birth and spend months suckling an infant, they understand better that we all depend on each other. They’re programmed to nurture the defenseless, plan for the future, value others for their qualities rather than for their externals.

All this might even be true generally (he does make sure to speak in generalizations), but why does it have to be biological? Are women seen as kinder and more empathetic because of estrogen or because we expect and encourage women to be so or face ostracization? Are men crueler because of their man-juice or because we celebrate and glorify male violence and power struggles at every turn? If women were exclusively in power with nothing else changed, would the world turn into Disneyland or would the dynamics of a culture that venerates the strong preying on the weak for as much profit as possible rear its ugly head? I don’t know the answer to all that, but I do know work in the social sciences is pretty damning about just how biological our perceived differences really are. It’s smart to point out that women in general treat and are treated by society differently, it’s lazy to conclude that it’s in our genes. Not to mention it opens up all sorts of more dangerous arguments in the name of ‘Well that’s just the way men and women are’. The fact that too many of us hold those same sorts of beliefs isn’t an excuse for Ebert either.

There’s more I could point to if need be. There was the time Ebert displayed his racial myopia when he took to Twitter last year upon hearing the rerelease of Mark Twain’s novel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ was to change some of its language; instances of the word “n*****” being replaced with “slave”. In discussing the merits of the change, Ebert nonchalantly tweeted, “I’d rather be called a N***** than a Slave.” (The original tweet was uncensored). Stupid and shortsighted as it was, especially for a man married to an African American women, Ebert did quickly apologize there.

All this isn’t an exercise in quote-mining. These were the current thoughts and beliefs expressed by the same man who warned us not to ignore a warming earth and instilled a joy of movies in millions. It is the same man, taken as a whole and there is no disrespect in recognizing that. His life and opinions gave us countless discussions of art and society, his death should do the same. The less savory ones shouldn’t be brushed aside in deference to the man, but rather laid out aside the rest as teachable moments. Ebert, as important and as taken seriously as he was, deserves our warranted criticism even, especially, in passing.

I’m sure the Illinois-native critic would expect or want nothing less.

Corrections: ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ was incorrectly identified as being written by Tom Sawyer, the fictional character, as opposed to its true author, Mark Twain.