gender politics

August 16, 2013April 18, 2020

Why Can’t I Have A He-Man Woman Hater Atheist Club?

image from Braveheart with No women in text

Not the kind of atheist meeting I want to attend

The secular community has been rocked by a firestorm over sexism in the movement. Blogs and tweets have flown back and forth between women speaking out about it and some men who disagree that it is an issue. Recently accusations of sexual assault have been leveled at some prominent men in the movement and at some conferences. Since there is such strong male privilege and a cult of personality in a lot of these groups, it seems these gender issues are beyond being fixed (at least until the current generation of sexist men die off). Maybe we need to have separate groups.

There have been plenty of articles and blog posts about the firestorm but not too many that examine the underlying issue of why it seems the sexism won’t go away in a movement that prides itself on freethought, evidence and logic:

February 11, 2013April 18, 2020

Due Process Is Not Being Dropped In Violence Against Women Act

Those zany conservatives at the Heritage Action and FreedomWorks groups complained that the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act is unfair to men. Besides the claim that men would lose their right of due process, the groups also complain that domestic violence is redefined into something vague where name calling would be classified as violence toward women. Like all zany conservative conspiracy theories, this one is also false and is only being used to raise money.

October 13, 2012April 18, 2020

I’m White And Have A Penis – So What!

Self-portrait – Really!

Not since college have had been immersed in gender politics like I have recently. It’s weird that in the twenty plus years since I experienced diversity debates in college, the arguments haven’t changed. I think it’s because the young people who come up in the freethought movement discover biases based on gender and feel that this is one injustice they can overcome. I have to admit that I’m white and I have a penis – so what! I think we all need to work on those issue we can solve together and acknowledge that we can’t be perfect. I’m not going to pick a side and I’m not going to apologize for being white and male.

What sparked this blog post is the STILL burning Atheism+/gender identity storm in the freethought community. Each side of the debate are doing purity checks and using extreme gender politics in an effort to make a utopia in their own image. Instead of using our tools to make a better world all freethinkers, both sides want to burn down our own house and rebuild it how they assume it should look – opposing view points be damned.