Polyamory Gone Wild

We have learned that the world’s leading Myther and outspoken feminist, well-known for scolding other New Atheist leaders for their sexual conduct, has himself been accused of sexual harassment.So serious are the accusations that Carrier has been banned from future Skepticon meetings and dropped as a speaker for the Secular Student Alliance.  And when an ethics committee at the FtB network began to look into the accusations, Carrier quickly backed out of the network.

One problem seems to be that the 46-year-old Carrier exploited his position as a speaker on college campuses to hit on 18 and 19 year old female college students.  As he admitted:

And they already noted that I had publicly said years ago that if I wanted to have the freedom to date students (and thus express interest in them), and the SSA insisted on that being against policy, “I’d just withdraw from the SSA Speaker’s Bureau.” So we agreed that’s what I should do. And I did. I haven’t been on it for over a year. And I since date or have dated students or former students, without incident.

So it appears that one of the main motivators for Carrier’s talks was that they represented opportunities “to express interest” in the college students half-his-age.  Given the lengths that Carrier goes to rationalize his polyamorous sexual appetite, one can only imagine the polished sensitive-male-feminist routine he had developed to score dates with the young atheist women .  So addicted to his desire for lovers, he was apparently blind to fact that many young women would be creeped out by an old mans’ attempts to express interest in them.

When Carrier became aware that the others at FreethoughtBlogs were going to gather information about his behavior (as if it was news to them), Carrier seems to have panicked.  On his blog, he makes it sound like he left FtB to protect FtB from having to be associated with this controversy:

But I do not want FreethoughtBlogs or its mission to be compromised by having to devote resources to defending me or vetting claims or choosing sides.

But PZ Myers paints a very different picture:

The thing is, we’re not investigating anything now. We’re done. The story is over. He’s left, and we have no further interest in getting to the heart of the matter…and his threats to sue tell us we’re not going to get any cooperation from him, so we’re even less equipped now.

He seems to believe that we wanted to hunt him down, and that now that he’s left, we’ll be tracking him down with an “investigation”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And it gets worse:

Yes, I have more information than you do. I was the contact person who got the personal accounts and relayed them to the Ethics Committee, so I’ve read everything. I’m also in contact with the people at the-orbit and skepticon who’ve been dealing with this. I’ve had a short phone conversation with Carrier in which he presented his ultimatums. And most damningly, we’ve seen his ‘defense’, which I sincerely hope he doesn’t use for his own sake, which consists almost entirely of extortionate threats to reveal secrets of the sex life of his accusers.

The hole he’s digging in public really is nothing compared to the mohole he’s excavating in private.

Richard Carrier, the man who has long bashed Christians as “anti-women,” presents ultimatums and threatens to expose the secret sex lives of the women he once “expressed interest in.” How do you like those for secular values?

Carrier once wrote, ” To call polyamory, which is about honesty and love and the assurance of consent, “sin” is just to expose how immoral Christianity has become as an ideology.”  It’s difficult not to laugh at the self-absorbed, delusional essence of this posturing coming from a 46-old man who got booted as a speaker of the SSA and at Skepticon because of his obsession with finding young “lovers” and who now, according to PZ, threatens to humiliate those who were offended by his attempts to get them to join his love family.