PZ Myers seems to be floating a new conspiracy theory – if you are a lesbian who does not believe that women have penises and produce sperm, it’s because you have been duped by the Religious Right. According to Myers, the Religious Right has this master plan to split up the LGBT community. And Myers even thinks it is “strategically brilliant.” It’s odd how one day the Religious Right is do dumb they worship paintings of Trump, yet another day, they are so brilliant that they are breaking up the LGBT family.
Look, my whole life I have heard about the Religious Right bogeyman and how it was just millimeters away from enslaving us all in a theocracy. The crackpots who advocate such lunacy have never been right about this. Not even close. Yet they cling to this bogeyman either because they are mentally unstable or…….they are playing a clever game of misdirection.
To ground yourself in reality, simply realize that in 2021, there are two primary, powerful sources of cultural power – the education system and the media (news and entertainment). Both sources shape minds and beliefs. Once you can acknowledge this fairly obvious fact, next simply notice how much power/influence the Religious Right has in either. Answer? Next to none. In contrast, the LGBT community has immense power/influence in both. I could build on this and point to multiple examples where the Religious Right is not very savvy at manipulating the media to further underscore its lack of power. But no need.
What this means is that any attempt to blame the Religious Right for any splintering in the LGBT community is nonsensical. It’s the old “theology is coming” bogeyman argument in a cheap tuxedo. Yet that people like Myers are trying to raise the bogeyman tells there is indeed disharmony in the LGBT community. Hmmmm. For example, when the trans community is trashing the lesbian community simply because lesbians don’t want to date women with penises, is that really the clever manipulation of the Religious Right at play?
Shadow To Light 
So long as he’s blaming the Religious Right, he has failed to identify the actual threat, and the circular firing squad will continue to operate. Keep up the good work, PZ.
PZ Myers, linked > …they are having remarkable success at picking off one narrow demographic at a time and weakening the bonds of our unity.
Here’s a 2016 Guardian article entitled “No Asians, no black people. Why do gay people tolerate blatant racism?”, which sums up with:
What are these various different groups and communities supposedly united by, exactly?
To me it makes little sense to insist that one’s race, gender identiy or sexual orientation is a significant part of one’s identity – i.e. an attribute that sets oneself apart from others – and then at the same time demand not to be set apart from anyone else based on them.
H/t Jery Coyne’s fun 2017 blog post entitled “NYT editor decries “intersectionality”, says Chicago Dyke March was wrong to ban the Jewish Pride flag; Dyke March says it was misunderstood.”:
Unity?
To me it makes little sense to insist that one’s race, gender identiy or sexual orientation is a significant part of one’s identity – i.e. an attribute that sets oneself apart from others – and then at the same time demand not to be set apart from anyone else based on them.
Exactly. You can’t demand I pay attention to whatever demographic checkbox you are obsessed with and then act surprised when I pay attention to it.
I hear that ignoring people’s skin color is now a racist microagression. Seems like someone once had a dream that this not be the case.
> Look, my whole life I have heard about the Religious Right bogeyman and how it was just millimeters away from enslaving us all in a theocracy.
While a Christian theocracy has not happened, a Christian insurrection has.
I think I bungled the html above. Here is the link: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/only-the-church-can-truly-defeat
@ nihilst2christian: I can see where ones race can set one apart but this has to do with heritage and therefore culture: language, food, customs, though I do fail to see how such things unite others outside of a specific culture when in times of peace.
I’m quite sure that those who warn about the possibly of a theocracy that will strip away abortion and gay “rights” don’t know the definition of such a thing let alone can give an example of a theocracy.
Anyone who uses the term “insurrection” to describe what happened is using it to justify their plans for retaliation, in much the same way that Leftists label people “Nazi” or “Fascist” to justify their own violence and aggression against their targets. These are the same baldfaced liars who describe it as “mostly peaceful” when BLM burn down a district, loot the stores, and leave a corpse or two in their wake. Accusations coming from such brazen, partisan liars, have no moral legitimacy. They merely act as a telegraphed warning regarding what they feel they have the moral authority to do to you as payback.
While a Christian theocracy has not happened, a Christian insurrection has.
Adding more support to my point. It has been almost one month since The Great Insurrection of 2021. And where’s the theocracy? No where to be found. So even with The Great Insurrection of 2021, a theocracy failed to materialize and, it never had a chance of materializing. Tell us Sem, are you one of those kooks who is afraid the Religious Right is close to enslaving us all in a Theocracy?
OP > Religious Right bogeyman … enslaving us all in a theocracy.
Sem > While a Christian theocracy has not happened, a Christian insurrection has.
I’m British, so no expert on US demographics; the US is too remote and too foreign for me to have an informed opinion. What I can do is ask questions, and ask you to ask yourself the same questions: what is the relationship between the Religious Right, the Alt-Right, Evangelical Christians, Christian Nationalists, and those Donald Trump Rallyers who invaded the Capitol; do you claim these are five distinct and separate groups, partially overlapping groups (and how far so), or one group by five names?
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About four years ago I commented on a Friendly Atheist post by Sarabeth Kaplin — she’s nowadays known as Beth Stoneburner — in which she claims – actually no, she insinuates, insinuates strongly, several times, without actually saying it – that “the vast majority” of the Charlottesville White Supremacy Rallyers were Christians.
That was questionable, and a very good cause to question it was provided by Hemant Mehta just a few days later in his “Alt-Right Expert Claims Movement Includes a “Lot of Agnostics and Atheists”” post, in which he quoted and linked to Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama; Hawley’s expert — Mehta says — research showed that:
Let’s re-phrase that first bit: Hawley has never talked to even one Alt-Right supporter that was a serious Christian; re-phrased again, Hawley has never talked to even one serious Christian who was an Alt-Right supporter.
Mehta himself admits that, yes, “Richard Spencer, one of the figureheads for the alt-right movement, is an atheist”, and continues to tell readers that Spencer described the average alt-right supporter as:
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/friendly-atheist-alternative-facts/#comment-19493
My point is, the Alt-Right seem to be a) predominantly atheists and b) to not overlap at all – or not to any significant extent – with either 1) Evangelical Christians or 2) the Religious Right. So back to questioning: were the Trump Rallyers at the Capitol Alt-Right… or were they not? I don’t have an answer myself, but would not accept an answer that amounts to insinuation or to “Everybody knows [insert claim here].”
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Mehta gives the impression of believing that the Religious Right is largely Evangelicals, and Evangelicals are largely the Religious Right. If the invaders of the Capitol were all or most from the Religious Right, were they largely Southern Baptists and their like? How does anybody know one way or the other?
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Were the invaders of the Capitol Christian? Mehta says Yes:
Silly Mehta, just one person said that prayer, the “QAnon Shaman” and he turns out to be a genuine shaman (in his own eyes, at any rate), espousing a mix of pagan and New Age-like religious beliefs, meditation (as I discovered later), ley lines and ley-line energies, and the “white light” he went about at length in his bumbling, non-Christian prayer: the rest just said “Amen”, which given the prayer wording was presumably said not from convinced agreement with the words about God’s fictitious and unBiblical “white light” but possibly from social reflex and politeness.
I note that for some, token ‘Christianity’ is a group membership badge, a part of the self-image of the White American Nationalist – much as ‘Science and Reason’ is a group membership badge mostly worn by people whose nearest approach to Science is eg the second-hand, second-class Science of brushing teeth with toothpaste, and whose nearest approach to Reason is the second-class Reason of eg “I’ve just got time and money to pop in and get those two bags of nappies before commuting home” – so I don’t set much store by mere “Amens”.
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/friendly-atheist-alternative-facts/#comment-38949
Understanding and intent matter in prayer: how much of either was there in the self-appointed prayer leaders; or in those saying “Amen”?
There was another prayer reported, one said outside by a leader of the far-right group the Proud Boys. As seen inside, “prayer” can be one guy with a bullhorn, spouting religiously literate or religiously illiterate words, and a chorus of “Amen”. In this case, the prayer leader prayed:
This is religiously illiterate; they “asked God for the restoration of their value systems”: the kingdom of God entails, not God restoring their value system but them restoring God’s value system; the prayer that Jesus taught says “Thy will be done…”; these look like very shallow or nominal Christians.
Mehta says, Yes, they were Christian: how far is Mehta right, and how far is he wrong; and how do you know?
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Hopefully I have raised doubts that the invasion of the Capitol was a Christian insurrection.
Let’s not forget that the Alt Right demon, Richard Spencer, endorsed Biden this time. Is anyone on the Left worried about the guilt by association that brings? No? Not worried that the self-described Alt-Right Fascist endorsed Biden? It was a big deal when he endorsed Trump, as I recall.
It’s pointless trying to hold Leftists to their own standards, because they don’t have any. They just act like they do when it’s politically convenient for them. It’s not hypocrisy: that would imply that they have standards and just fail to live by them. The behaviour is better understood as cynical opportunism.
It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
Er, I never bought into the whole “stop the steal” thing. Never liked Trump and never followed his Tweets. People do desperate and stupid things when they buy into extreme views and conspriracy theories. And French did make many good points. This one is spot on:
I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.
And if you think about it, blogs like The Friendly Atheist make money by daily spreading enabling lies. A great example of an enabling lie is the “Coming Theocracy” claim I have heard my whole life. Look, I have come to realize most atheists are afraid of my questions. I did ask you one, remember? I asked, “Tell us Sem, are you one of those kooks who is afraid the Religious Right is close to enslaving us all in a Theocracy?”
If you buy into that lie, you are in no position to expect others to engage in any “introspection.” Tend to your own enabling lie first, extremist.
Sem > It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
I, too, like David French’s article and views. I also like his quoting Micah 6:8, a favourite verse of mine:
French starts his article:
Green wrote about the overt Christianity on display and tells readers:
This snippet from Green’s report on the Jericho March stands out for me as reason to question their credentials as committed Christians:
Those there might well have been some or all of them Christian… but I see that for many or most, Jesus was not their first love.
Sem> It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
The US is a majority Christian country (70.6% of adults, says Pew), which means that many Democrat voters were Christian, and conversely means that many Christians were Democrat voters; if you find it difficult “to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection” you, you personally, have a failure not only of imagination but of rationality.
It’s not at all difficult for me, myself, to read that article (and Emma Green’s) yet still resist engaging in introspection. I am a very un-evangelical member of a very un-evangelical British church, someone who has never, ever voted Tory let alone anything more right-wing; so neither article comes close to giving me rational cause to introspect my own involvement – none – in the invasion of the Capitol. You, you personally, have a failure not only of imagination but of rationality.
Sem > It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
One of my past employers required me to take an online course (then occasional refreshers) on ‘Equality and Diversity’, a course both promoting seeking equality and valuing diversity and deprecating prejudice and bigotry: to illustrate what prejudice and bigotry are, and how even people opposed to prejudice and bigotry can easily fall into it themselves without realising it, the course started out with an exercise involving matching people and their gender, age, ethnic origins etc with descriptions of their jobs and interests; if you matched by the stereotype for that gender/age/ethnicity/etc you got every single one wrong; the point was, that if you expect people to conform to the relevant stereotype for ‘people like them’ you can expect to get it wrong very often. If you characterise people — and especially if you behave thus towards them — as if they are mere representatives of ‘their group’, as typical of their group’s stereotype, rather than as unique individuals, you are consciously or unconsciously displaying and acting out prejudice and bigotry.
You plainly have it in mind that Michael and his Christian responders are a match for some unspecified but unflattering stereotype; French would probably call your implicit claim – implicit! do you hope your not making your claim explicit reduces the likelihood of it being shot down?… French would probably call your implicit claim an “enabling lie”, though I prefer to call it a baseless assertion; or I could call it prejudice and bigotry: should you, yourself, be engaging in introspection?
Sem > It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
It’s an emotive article designed to appeal to the emotions of people like yourself. I understand its force, but it’s based upon subjective impressions rather than striving for objectivity. Clearly French means his readers to conclude that the invaders of the Capitol were all or most of them fervently evangelical Christians, but was that so? Time, then, to stand back and look for some objective analysis of who they were… such as this research:
In their 02 February 2021 The Atlantic article entitled “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists: We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 riot—and found a new kind of American radicalism” two researchers from the University of Chicago researched and analysed what characterised those arrested (roughly a quarter of the invaders of the Capitol) — newspaper reports say those arrested were the obvious leaders plus those invaders who came equipped for violent insurrection:
For fuller information on those characteristics, and more, see:
https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/americas_insurrectionists_online_2021_02_05.pdf?mtime=1612585947
Which The Guardian has summarised as:
Evangelicalism is not mentioned as being a common denominator of these leaders of the invasion of the Capitol, nor mentioned as being a characteristic of most or many. Likewise, Christianity is not mentioned as being a common denominator of these leaders of the invasion of the Capitol, nor mentioned as being a characteristic of most or many.
I searched the researchers’ words in vain, in both article and research, for any mention of evangelicals or Christians.
In vain.
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It’s almost certainly incorrect to assume that the researchers took the invaders’ Christianity (or evangelical Christianity) for granted, as such an obvious characteristic it didn’t need mention. The research compared and contrasted the Capitol invaders’ characteristics with those arrested for perpetrating (or plotting?) right-wing political violence during the five years previously.
Had there been a comparison to be made, or a contrast to be made, in levels of Christian fervency, either should surely have been worthy of the researchers’ mention and analysis. Does anyone sincerely think the researchers set out to ignore (if existing) a level of evangelical and Christian fervour that French (Emma Green likewise) seemingly opines is so very, very relevant that it can be claimed to be direct indirect cause of the invasion?
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For clarity: I have no doubt that there were fervent Christians present on the march to the Capitol and present outside during some or all of the invasion of the Capitol. Whether any of them fought the police, forced entry, mortally wounded a policeman, invaded the Capitol, attempted to lay hands on the lawmakers, etc is unclear: the research on the quarter of invaders who were leading says, No, or not enough of them to be a research finding and of interest for further research.
I know there definitely were fervent Christians present, because there was a two-day Jericho March around the Capitol scheduled for the 5th and again for the 6th. There had been earlier Jericho Marches in multiple locations, Marches designed to appeal to and attract and recruit people combining three characteristics: Trump supporters, who were convinced there was election fraud and of a need to ‘Stop the Steal’, and who were fervent Christians (fervent, else the ‘Walls of Jericho’ symbolism would have no appeal, but not so Biblically knowledgeable and fervent that they were aware that the culmination of the Biblical circumambulation was, “Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.”!)
Having been lured to a two-day Jericho March starting on the 5th, I have no doubt those fervently Trump-supporting fervent Christians would have been there on the 6th, too, cheering at the Rally before the invasion, participating in the march on the Capitol and fervently, proudly, unmissably loudly Christian.
French and Green should have used some commonsense instead of claiming that the presence of fervent Christians meant the invaders were Christian and that it was a Christian insurrection.
That’s doubtful — doubt based on evidence and reason.
> Look, I have come to realize most atheists are afraid of my questions.
It would seem “atheists” (WTF? Why the fuck do you think I’m an atheist and how the fuck is that relevant?) appear to be afraid of your questions because you block their comments which answer them.
I see that David French’s article includes a nice illustration of how prejudice works:
Sem > It is difficult for me to imagine a follower of Jesus reading David French’s article yet still resist engaging in introspection.
Yep, Sem knows what Christians in general — US Baptists, British URC members, Catholics worldwide, South Korean Pentacostalists, all Christians in the US, all Christians everywhere – Sem knows what “they” are “really like.”
It’s an extremely comfortable mode of thinking. It repeatedly reinforces his priors.
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Sem > It would seem “atheists” (…) appear to be afraid of your questions because you block their comments which answer them.
I trust you know the difference between moderation, which causes a slight delay before (normally) approval – the approved comment then appears in the thread – and blocking.
You are specific in your complaint’s claim: you have provided answers – two or more comments in reply – to Michael’s questions in his OP, his replies to you or in both; these answering comments have not merely had their appearance in this thread delayed, they have been blocked.
He has, I notice, allowed through four of your comments – though one merely Oops’d to add a missing web-link, so I can safely discount that one as a mere edit by other means, leaving just three comments – three comments.
Each of these three consists of one sentence. The last is not thread topic relevant, it’s a complaint, so that’s just two sentences of thread-relevant comment supplied by you in this entire thread – apart from the multiple comments you say Michael blocked, that is, comments which I look forward to seeing because the two sentences visible represent a poor effort.
The first doesn’t make an actual argument, it merely asserts that the invasion of the Capitol was a Christian insurrection, adding a link to David French’s nearly 2,400 word long article. The second also doesn’t make an actual argument, it merely repeats the invitation to read and agree with French’s article. The third also doesn’t even make an argument: it is a complaint along the lines of ‘don’t label me’ or ‘don’t mis-label me’ – I have some sympathy with that; and it is an accusation that Michael is blocking you.
Michael has long and often shown exemplary tolerance of dissenting views: that he has suddenly changed tack and is now blocking your comments seems unlikely, and if it were so, the appearance of your final comment, the complaint, would rather undercut your accusation.
I look forward to Michael unblocking all of your blocked comments answering his questions. They must be real humdingers of answers if Michael is (presumably) so cowed by your intellect, expressed in devastating arguments, that he feels the need to suppress your answers to (presumably, again) avoid public shame.
I notice that although I have expended much time providing several long and detailed responses to just one of your sentences, you have apparently not yet responded to so many as one of them. Michael is presumably suppressing your answers to me in order that my blushes, too, can be spared.
Fear not, I authorise Michael to release your devastating answers forthwith (and to let me know if there never were any.)
I’d love to see those answers or “answers”. Or – echoing back to you your jibe against Michael in the other thread – is your claim of “answers” satire after all, then?
It would seem “atheists” (WTF? Why the fuck do you think I’m an atheist and how the fuck is that relevant?) appear to be afraid of your questions because you block their comments which answer them.
False. Now, are you going to answer the question?
Sem, quoting Michael > “I have come to realize most atheists are afraid of my questions”
Sem, responding > It would seem “atheists” (WTF? Why the fuck do you think I’m an atheist and how the fuck is that relevant?)…
In my last response I concentrated on the second part of that composite sentence, assuming Sem was making a valid claim in the first part, that reproduced above. But no, I see that the context of Michael’s “I have come to realize most atheists are afraid of my questions” is:
As I read the original, and as I think a reasonable person would read the original, Michael didn’t refer to Sem as an atheist. I’ll paraphrase, for clarity: the Friendly Atheist blog spreads enabling lies daily; the “Coming Theocracy” is one such enabling lie; most atheists are afraid of my questions [such as] the one I asked you, “Tell us Sem, are you one of those kooks who is afraid the Religious Right is close to enslaving us all in a Theocracy?”…
Channelling Sem: WTF? Why the fuck does Sem think Michael thinks he’s an atheist and how the fuck is that relevant?
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I’ll ask Sem my own question: Who are you posturing before, who are you seeking to impress?
Michael > A great example of an enabling lie is the “Coming Theocracy” claim I have heard my whole life. … “Tell us Sem, are you one of those kooks who is afraid the Religious Right is close to enslaving us all in a Theocracy?”
Those kooks certainly do exist, and one group of such kooks is the ‘Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers’:
Hemant Mehta shows us what that billboard (and two others) looks like; I see they omitted the huge crucifix, otherwise it’s as described:
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/02/10/these-billboards-call-out-christian-nationalist-bills-filed-by-iowa-lawmakers/
Fascinating! I see the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers have had a “shiny, brand-spanking-new website”, with that Heathen of the Corn blog on it, since 16 January 2020. It took the blogger eight months, until 16 September, to figure out and publicise how the blog readers can post comments on his IAF blog; evidently it took the blog readers, those Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers the same eight months not to figure out how to post comments (Anne, commenting on 1 February, was the sole exception):
https://www.iowaatheists.org/new-blog/comments-we-have-comments
These are self-declared rational, STEM type people; or is that just their preferred type of Iowa lawmakers:
To be fair to IAF members, the first few January posts didn’t have a facility to make comments. But after those first few, I think anyone clicking around the blog and in possession of half a brain and minimal experience (or none) of how blog navigation normally works would or should discover the Comments box in seconds to a few minutes; I find it difficult to credit that for all but one of them it took eight months.
So much for the claim to hold the high ground of evidence, science, reason and critical thinking: these guys — with the honourable exception of Anne — weren’t bright enough to work out where to find the Comments in a pretty standard blog design.
Not for eight months, anyway.
> PZ Myers seems to be floating a new conspiracy theory – if you are a lesbian who does not believe that women have penises and produce sperm, it’s because you have been duped by the Religious Right. According to Myers, the Religious Right has this master plan to split up the LGBT community.
Myers quotes a Southern Poverty Law Center article as his authority:
Why assume a conspiracy theory to separate transgender rights advocates “from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates” when the evidence in Myers’ Comments — read those comments, or see the next Shadow to Light post and thread, entitled “Lesbian Accused of Being Transphobe” — is that Trans advocates and their LGBT advocate allies need no help or manipulation to make each other feel unwelcome and othered.
Why assume a conspiracy theory to separate transgender rights advocates “from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates”
Because if the extreme social justice left has any defining trait, it is absolute certainty in the moral correctness of their beliefs. One has to blame evil external influences to explain their internal failures, as they are inherently pure.
From what I can tell, they measure a person’s morality by the political/social positions he/she publicly espouses rather than the things they actually do. To admit fault or culpability would imply that their political and social opinions are incorrect, and they can’t do that because their political and social opinions make up their personal identity.
I guess that’s what happens when Christianity – previously the West’s chief source of morality, meaning and identity – is removed and replaced with self-worship.
In his 23 February 2021 “Like I have any clout with American Atheists at all” PZ Myers complains about e-mailers who expect him to have influence on the American Atheists organisation; and he complains about, and quotes an atheist who says the AA managers should not be supporting LGBT groups and their aims:
Myers jumps on this:
But as is obvious from the e-mail it’s not — contra Myers — that reciprocation of support wasn’t immediate, it’s that there has evidently been no reciprocation of support on the Boys Scouts issue or on any other issue — “Not a damn thing” — no reciprocation of support at all.
Unity?
I could point out that PZ, as a philosophical materialist, has no grounds for asserting either the Golden Rule or the idea of “right” in the sense of objective morality, but such objections are old and tired. This time, I’d be more interested to know why he extends his Golden Rule behaviour to the LGBTs and not the Boy Scouts. How golden and rule-like is the rule if it doesn’t apply to the Boy Scouts? And if it doesn’t apply to the Boy Scouts, then why does it apply to the LGBTs? We get the following hints.
It looks to me like his reference to the Golden Rule was a citation bluff. There is no evidence of a Golden Rule in operation here. He’s not promoting a “do as you would be done by” attitude towards others: he’s a “Civil Rights Activist,” which is a horse of an entirely different colour. More precisely, the kind of “Civil Rights” for which he is an activist consist of a fairly narrowly-targeted set of anti-Christian ideals, centred on the sexes, sexual roles, sexual relationships, marriage, and family, plus “religious freedom” in any sense which weakens Christianity or strengthens its opponents. As such, he’s for anything and everything which harms or undermines the Christian (and plain old Natural Law) model of these things
If PZ were honest with himself and his correspondent, his answer would not have required reference to “the golden rule, and doing things because they’re right.” A forthright and candid response would have looked something like the following.
Sem > While a Christian theocracy has not happened, a Christian insurrection has.
Continuing my questioning that the invasion of the Capitol was a Christian insurrection, I observe that a The Atlantic article linked to and quoted by Michael in his 11 March 2021 “Secular Zealotry” OP includes:
As Hamid has it, those Trump rallyers, a movement “stripped of Christian witness”, had but draped themselves in the trappings — the trappings! — of Christianity.
What one journalist — David French — plainly asserts, that a “Christian insurrection invaded and occupied the Capitol”, another journalist — Shadi Hamid — as plainly denies.
> According to Myers, the Religious Right has this master plan to split up the LGBT community.
Not just according to PZ Myers, there’s others saying the same, indeed he’s parroting the 2017 Southern Poverty Law Centre — they mostly promote Woke activism nowadays — article he links to.
But it’s not just the Religious Right: one of the founders of the UK’s LGB charity, Stonewall is severely critical of its over-focus on Trans issues, saying that the charity had “lost its way”:
Ms Kelley, Stonewall’s head, acknowledges indirectly that Stonewall has indeed got diverted as described:
Not just a Religious Right conspiracy, then, but also an internal debate among LGBTQ+ people themselves, with strongly held divergent views expressed and clashing.
Breaking news: in the UK, Maya Forstater’s appeal, against the earlier Employment Tribunal judgment that her employer was right in law to sack her for holding, and expressing on social media, the view that trans-women are not biological women, has been allowed: her employer (and the lower court judge ruling in favour of said employer) was wrong in law
Both opinions are correct. But while harassment of, and discrimination against trans-people remains illegal and a potentially sackable offence, harassment of, and discrimination against people criticising the more outrageous claims trans-people and their allies make, that, too, has now been ruled illegal.
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We’ll have to wait and see whether this will or will not bring back for reassessment the later Kristie Higgs case, in which the judge relied on the Forstater case as precedent in deciding what were the relevant points of law.
More on the above, from Maya Forstater herself, and a bit more light on the controversy (two above) within Stonewall:
“It is clear…”; yep, that’s a clear enough judgment, and a slap in the face for Stonewall. I wonder whether Stonewall will now change its advice to reflect how this judgment on how UK law is to be applied, or whether it will continue to advise what its Woke LGBT activist head wishes.
They must know the vast majority of the public would agree with (or simply not care enough to oppose) Forstater’s position. They must know that.
Further to my last two responses above, the UK Kristie Higgs case is indeed coming back to court to appeal the original judgment. Part of the case against Higgs was that her expressed gender-critical views failed one of the criteria for a protected belief in the precedent case of Nicholson v Grainger, namely “[36 (e)] It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.” The recent Maya Forstater appeal succeeded because the appeal court ruled that particular criterion unlawful:
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Whether or not Higgs’ lawyers will be arguing that the ruling against Higgs should be set aside for the same or similar reasons as for Forstater is not at all clear from the Daily Mail report I have. Having seen her ‘Christian Legal Centre’ lawyers fail her (and themselves) last time round because they had their eyes on protesting discrimination against Christians in general instead of fighting for Higgs specifically, and argued inappropriately — argued the wrong case, if you like — I am not particularly confident they will adopt a sensible approach that will succeed in the appeal; indeed, I consider those blinkered lawyers an obstacle not only to Higgs’ chances but also to their own Christian activist cause.
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But there are other issues at hand: an employment tribunal judge sits with two lay advisors, one representing the viewpoint of employers, the other of employees; Higgs’ appeal is scheduled to appear before a panel including the prominent trans-activist, Edward Lord, as one of the lay advisors:
Well, it’s what judges and their panel members are officially required to do, it would be odd if Lord had not answered that he could achieve that level of impartiality, he would be removed from his position on this and any judging panel if he did not claim to meet the standard all judicial office holders are required to meet.
It might even be that so outspoken a trans-activist can put his habitual views, his strong views strongly expressed, put them aside and, by co-judging fairly, give Higgs a fair hearing and a fair judgment. But can he reasonably be expected to actually do so? I, like Higgs and her lawyers, I question whether he will, whether he can; and I observe that justice must not just be done, it must be seen to be done.