“What kind of breakfast do you call that?” He pointed accusingly with a fork.

“I haven’t shopped. I had to…” He waved her silent again.

“One tiny sausage, and that egg’s got a red spot. Pathetic.” He speared the sausage.

Dumping the egg in the Disposall, she tried again. “I need to ask… OW!!”

“Stupid bitch,” he grumbled, stumping out. “No need to waste an egg.”

Moving her hand from her stinging head to her midriff, she muttered, “There’s my answer.”

The three interviews she’s given since (one by Hemant Mehta, a harder hitting one by Greta Christina, and an Ask-Me-Anything on Reddit) haven’t helped at all; the general perception (which I share) is that she tried the exact kind of mendacious and logically fallacious spin-doctoring that atheists hate most. In fact, I’d say that the attempt to paper over the flaws is what has really doomed her chances. Matt Dillahunty expressed the general misgivings well, and Ashley Miller gave a great example of the kind of communications that might have mitigated the damage.

The following is just my own musing on the subject.

There is one way in which the Republican Party is like the atheist movement (i.e. the activist, outspoken, politically aware atheists who make up the core of the people the SCA and its member organizations represent); there is a small but important libertarian (lower case!) component to both groups, ornery independent types who mostly just want to be left alone, and a much larger component that has markedly different values and priorities.

The larger part of the Republican Party are the so-called social conservatives (though it would be more accurate to call them reactionary radicals) in thrall to the Religious Right, obsessed with “restoring” a largely mythical America of the past, utterly dominated by white Christian nuclear families with Dads at the head, women in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant, and children who are chaste, respectful, heterosexual and want nothing more than to follow in their parents’ footsteps. To this end they have demonstrated incredibly strong propensities for disingenuous deception (including quite astonishing levels of outright lying) and obstruction of the functions of government, with little or no regard for the actual human consequences of their actions.

The larger part of the atheist movement are far more activist, increasingly organized in groups like those represented under the SCA’s umbrella, and tend to be left-leaning (at least by American standards). In addition to being militant about their own rights as secular citizens, we also tend to be so about the rights of other minorities and disempowered populations – gays and transexuals, women, immigrants, racial minorities, people living in poverty. We tend to favor science and we like our government to pursue evidence-based policies across the board. The Democratic Party is, of the two available in practice, now the only one which makes any attempt to steer policy according to what actually works, as opposed to what ideology says should work. Sometimes, anyway.

The two minor sections, libertarian Republicans and individualist freethinkers, are not incompatible at all. The two major sections, the religious right and the liberal atheists, could not be much more incompatible.

Edwina Rogers may be able to make some inroads into that smaller part of the Republican Party, where some of those individualist atheists do hang their hats politically, but those atheist are not the ones deeply vested in the SCA, and those libertarian Republicans are not the people now in charge of the GOP.

For all the verbal love given to small government by the Tea Party crowd, they have not behaved that way in office. For a decade now, encompassing the entire time of the Tea Party movement, the GOP’s primary goals have been to been get rid of women’s reproductive rights in the form of access to abortion (and even contraception, FFS!), as well as women’s rights to legal redress for workplace pay and benefit discrimination and women’s rights in domestic violence cases, ensure gays don’t get any new legal protections and roll back the ones they have already managed to get, set up the most draconian possible anti-immigration policies including state laws that rival the repressive laws used in totalitarian dictatorships, roll back laws protecting racial minorities from workplace discrimination, and wholesale disenfranchisement through carefully crafted voter ID laws (justified as preventing voter fraud of ttypes which they can’t produce any examples of) of the poor and elderly and students.

So Ms. Rogers’ disingenuous appeals that not everyone in the GOP is anti-secular, anti-gay, anti-woman, yadda yadda yadda, are just that: disingenuous. Her long support of that party probably doesn’t matter much to the individualst, non-group-oriented secularists out there, but then those aren’t the ones she is to be representing as Executive Director of the SCA either, more or less by definition: the SCA is the group of atheist groups, non-grouping atheists don’t join it.

I’m already seeing the SCA itself lose support over this choice, though its member organizations seem to still be well regarded so far. The nebulous possibility of an upside through reaching out to Republicans seems very limited to me, for the reasons I’ve laid out above. I hope the SCA board reconsiders this choice, using her as a lobbyist perhaps but letting the face of the organization be that of someone a majority of the active members can relate to.

The second was asphyxiated, gagged with a polychromic feather boa, throat stuffed with rhinestone studded opera gloves.

The third, striped polyester shirt and spotted nylons melted where the chainmail belt had drawn sparks from the third rail, confirmed the now obvious truth.

The Fashion Police had met their Bernhardt Goetz, but the ugliest crime was yet to come: the fall debut of the Bravo network’s “Fashion Vigilante” reality show.

Actually I suspect he’s privately long held that view, but the political climate has changed enough recently that he calculated he could say it out loud, hence the mildness of my plaudits. Most people are now crediting him with great personal political courage if they like him and/or equal marriage. (If they don’t he’s destroying America, of course.) I like both, myself, but I just don’t see this as all that daring.

First of all, whether it’s his views or his willingness to speak them that’s evolved, he waited until the policy had majority or plurality support in almost every poll. It’s not that daring to express a view only after it achieves popularity.

Secondly, he only expressed it as a personal view. The personal views of Presidents on controversial subjects don’t have to, and more often than not don’t, have much bearing on their policies or what legislation they push for passage. His policies have in fact been quite progressive on gay rights, such as ending DADT, extending spousal privileges to federal employees in same-sex partnerships and so forth, so I’m hopeful he will do some pushing, but it’s not certain.

Thirdly, this move helps him by energizing his progressive base, especially the youth, who compared with four years ago have been distinctly cooler about getting involved. At the same time, the people most likely to turn against him because of this are already against him, because of his above mentioned prior substantive support for the LGBT coomunites.

Finally, he expressed support for gay marriage explicitly in terms of if States want to allow it. He has nothing to do with State laws, and while he has instructed his Justice Department to stop vigorously defending DOMA he has not made any gestures to indicate he will push to have that plainly un-Constitutional law overturned for its Fourteenth Amendment violation. I’m sure he wouldn’t oppose such an attempt, but he’s certainly not helping nurture one.

So yeah, I’m glad he said it, but it’s not all that impressive in and of itself.

The geriatric televangelist was the worst. “You’re going to burn!” he cackled.

The mail order minister jeered, “Now we’re in His waiting room. What will you say, atheist?”

The tubby atheist addressed stuck out his chin, insofar as possible. “I still say it makes no sense. These gates are too tall; no metal could support itself! They’re…” He gulped. “Opening.”

Beyond was… Screams of madness tore out.

He smiled dementedly. “NOW it makes sense.” He ran toward the tentacles, determined to be eaten first.

This was supposedly a spontaneous walkout by these 100 students, reacting to Savage’s calling the homophobia in the Bible “bullshit” and suggesting that modern Christians should feel as free to ignore it as they do the Bible’s other generally ignored precepts, such as the forbidding of shellfish and clothing of mixed threads, or its acceptance of slavery.

I seriously doubt that this was spontaneous. The camera doesn’t show the start of the walkout, but Jen McCreight was apparently there and reports that the single file of Christian students started with a row standing up in unison. I have not yet found another recording with an angle that would confirm or deny this, but the smirks on some of those faces causes me to lend it credence.

Now Dan has walked back some of the rhetorical flourishes; he joked shortly afterward that the students could come back in because he was done “bashing their Bible” and noted that it was funny how “pansy-assed” people became when their prejudices are challenged, and he’s shuffled a bit on the use of the word “bullshit” and finally, he clarified that he was attacking the Bible inspired homophobic attitude of some Christians but not Christians in general. Naturally these attempts to make nice have had absolutely no effect on the indignant posturings of Christian social conservatives.

The comments on articles about the walkout on this Fox News affiliated site are by turns hilarious (‘So Savage should apologize for using strong language to discuss a book that advocates he be killed for who he is? I guess the hundreds of young people who cheered his comments should also apologize for agreeing with him?’) and disturbing (‘Dan Savage is why we NEED bullying. What an ass… We need to establish a national “Kick Dan Savage Day”‘). Just a reminder, this is the inflammatory rhetoric that would justify Kick Dan Savage Day:

“People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullyings because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say Christians don’t own people. Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible said about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong: slavery.

What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100%. The Bible says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night – that a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, that she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they’re not virgins. At least not yet. We don’t know where the GOP is going these days. People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.

One thing I want to talk about is – ha, so you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back in because I’m done beating up the Bible. It’s funny that someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react to being pushed back. I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings but I have the right to defend myself, and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting that we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”

The consensus among the outraged seems to be that by saying the Bible contains “bullshit” that should be ignored instead of being used as an excuse for bullying gay teens, Dan Savage was actually being a terribly harsh bully himself. Never mind that he wasn’t attacking a single person; he was being a bully because he said mean things about a collection of Bronze and Iron Age writings, and a vocal portion of loving Christians feel he should have his ass kicked for that – and of course for being gay in the first place.

This excessive protectiveness of scripture reminds me of nothing so much as Muslims rioting over insults to the Koran, and of course another recurring theme is “WHY didn’t he attack Islam instead? They treat the gays even worse!” Um, maybe because he suspected that most of the people in the audience who might be tempted to bully gay teens would be Bible-inspired rather than Koran-inspired here in America?

The simple fact of the matter is that Savage’s point, however undiplomatically expressed, is a valid one: the Bible condemns and condones many things, not a few of them deserving of the “bullshit” label he applied, and Christians pick and choose what to take from it all the time. If they choose to take their bigotries from it, that does *not* justify their bigotries.

Bullshit is bullshit, even if it’s scraped out of ancient crocks that people choose to imbue with mystical awe.

I must confess I have never actually completed Atlas Shrugged. I took a run at it three times but the writing is just so bloody awful I couldn’t stand to finish it, and I’ve read the damn Bible cover to cover twice. I’m not saying her writing is actually worse than all of the Bible (it’s hard to beat Leviticus), but the quality and style of the Bible varies enough to avoid the stupefyingly monolithic nature of Rand’s fiction, and some parts of it (Song of Solomon for example) have good literary quality. Maybe some day I’ll try just picking up where I left off instead of starting from the beginning again, just so I can finally say I’ve slogged through the whole tedious thing… or maybe not. I really doubt there’s much left to learn from it, to judge by the story so far and Rand’s other writing.

I really do wonder what people see in Rand’s fiction. There are only three characters in any of it, as far as I can tell; the Alpha Dogs straight off the Nazi recruiting posters who inflame everyone with their brilliance and workaholism, the Beta Dogs who admire them with their servile mouths agape, and the Slimy Curs who drag everyone down by sponging off the first two. The former are always fine physical specimens, typically with blue eyes (even when they’re supposed to be Hispanic), the latter are unappetizing pudding-like blobs, and the Beta Dogs are, you guessed it, somewhere in the middle.

The description of the three characters basically also describes every Rand plot structure; the only question is if the heroes will triumph or the villains drag everyone into the mire, but by the time you get there it’s hard to care much whether it’s the useless sponges or the Fascistic uebermensches who triumph; the loyal serfs are simply animate furniture, and there isn’t a genuinely appealing character to be found anywhere in there.

Maybe it’s just the endless pretentious purple prose description they like? Surely not!!!

It’s not often that the straightforward polemic reads more easily than the fictional treatment, but I actually find Rand easier to take straight from her demented lecturing than in her puerile storytelling, and that’s truly saying something. Her viewpoint is basically the force majeure of Fascism or any other totalitarianism, with the appeal to group loyalty being replaced by facile assurances that simple pure selfishness will simply work out somehow in the end to create the best of all possible worlds.

Are any of my readers Rand fans who’d like to tell me why I’m wrong?

Across intergalactic gaps, dark energy draws tresses of her hair. The hiss of singularities echoes her goodbye. Her light dies at the edge of space, broken stars fade.

Everything blurs away. He cries, small warm human tears, and begins to heal.

I’m used to seeing horrible, awful, no-good laws from theocrats, especially when they’re drunk with new power like Egypt’s newly Islamist government, but usually I can see the logic even if I thoroughly disapprove of it. I can grok, for example, the other laws referred to in the article, viz. keeping women uneducated and dependent on their husband’s income, taking away a woman’s right to divorce, and lowering the marriageable age of girls to fourteen. When your culture sees women as nothing but baby-making machines for men, and the men are so terrified of being cuckolded that virginity is an absolute requirement in the women they want to mate with, it’s not surprising that the guys flirt with outright pedophilia. Hell, pervy old Mohammad himself jumped all over that nymphet Aysha, right?

"Trust me, it is Allah's will. He likes to watch."

I suppose it’s a victimless crime though, since the dead can’t feel the fucks, and maybe the time limit is a nod to public safety… though this being Egypt the mummificator’s union might try to get that part taken out.

Lookin' good, Hatshepsut!!