I’m not sorry atheists are divided

I’m sorry we need to be.

Jaclyn Glenn’s ‘video about Atheism+ and pussies’, in which she at no point actually mentions Atheism Plus, has been praised and pilloried seemingly in equal measure. I have the same problem with it that I did with Phil Plait’s ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ speech a few years back, which also polarised responses. Plait, whom generally I like, never says who or what it is that ‘in some specific places’ he finds objectionably venomous, and similarly, Glenn’s entire attack on feminists in atheism consists of a parodic tiff between two animal rights advocates, never naming any actual feminists, quoting them or taking to task their real views.

Speaking persuasively in platitudes, abstract principles and innuendo is easy, but no substitute for the stubborn, meaty specificity of facts. I’ve been accused of writing personal ‘hit pieces’, but when you don’t say clearly who and what you’re arguing with, this is what happens. In a more recent video, Glenn admonishes her critics for failing to address her argument, but rebutting something so nonspecific is like trying to catch smoke: there’s no outright assertion to challenge.

Based on her characters’ lines, Glenn seems to dislike atheist feminists a) because we start unnecessary and divisive arguments and b) because we can’t stomach disagreement. These objections appear to refute each other, but the first one is worth discussing. ‘My respect requires full agreement with every position that I hold’, her imaginary SJW tells the figure insisting they’re on the same side, ‘and therefore I would rather fight with you than with people who aren’t even activists [for our shared cause] at all.’

Strawish as this is, it contains a mustard seed of truth. I don’t post about religion half as much as a year or two ago, and I know I’m not alone in this among the writers I work with. I wish I did – I’m considering focusing next month’s posts, in fact, specifically on atheist topics just to get back in the game – but the truth is I’ve felt unable to. I’d love to spend my every waking hour bashing puritanism, superstition and the notion drinking the Kool-Aid is a valorous way to live one’s life, but every time I’m about to I lay eyes on my own congregation. It is, as Geoffrey Howe said of serving under Margaret Thatcher, ‘like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ (Americans, click here.)

To supply the specific details Glenn leaves out, ours is a movement in which…

Since I’m responding to Glenn’s video, this is to speak only of misogyny and the exclusion of women in atheism; I could give similar lists of our collective failings when it comes to class, race, disability or queerness, but that’s another post. (Actually, it’s several.) None of this is cricket.

When I remind myself and others that the people who carry out the above are supposed to be my allies, I find myself much less worried that I argue with them more than with believers. I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t: if I weren’t so divisive, and there were no rifts between us, I’d be fighting for the same new world they are, and that thought terrifies me. With friends like these, who needs religion?

If colleagues and I are creating the divisions Glenn describes, I’m proud of it, because unlike her I do find them necessary. We all want the same, she says, but I’m less sure: I want a secular movement as accessible to women as men, that challenges religious sexism with authority and isn’t the preserve of powerful men and misogynists. If building one requires rifts today, then like Jen McCreight, I want deep rifts.

I’m not sorry atheists are divided. I’m sorry we need to be.

I’m not sorry atheists are divided
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Cameron’s Britain: this property-owning democracy is no place for queer youth

When Margaret Thatcher died this April, ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ reached number two on the UK singles chart. Campaigns on social networks all but swept the song to the top spot, but the BBC, citing concerns of propriety, offense and taste, refused to play the song in its official countdown. Instead, a five second clip was shown in a news item. The socialist left and liberal right, of course, bristled at this while conservatives applauded, but the real joke was on Thatcher: her Cold War rhetoric sold us the notion high capitalism enfranchised us – that purchasing power was people power, and property-owning democracy the only kind. Could there be a better rebuttal? To send a message, Britons spent tens of thousands downloading the song, embodying the commerce-as-democracy narrative, but in an instant, Britain’s state media defused their action.

Current Prime Minister David Cameron, recently praised for his Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s signing gay marriage into law, has cultivated an image cuddlier by far than Thatcher’s. On personal approval ratings, he is easily his party’s greatest asset, and marketed himself from his leadership’s outset as ‘a modern, compassionate conservative’, declaring in his first conference speech that marriage means something ‘whether you’re a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man’. This isn’t the Tory Party of Section 28, the law that banned ‘public promotion of homosexuality‘ – and subsequently, Conservative support among LGBTs rose from 11 percent at the 2010 election to 30 percent at the end of last year. Yet Cameron is at least a Thatcherite. Inflicting spending cuts unrivalled since World War Two, his government makes hers look virtually left wing. His early statement, ‘There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’ was pitched to distance him from her, but reified in fact her central axiom that aiding the poor or homeless lay outside government’s purview. In 2011, he even promised us the ‘new presumption’ all public services would by default be at least part-privatised.

That the Daily Telegraph column in which he wrote this glossed private takeovers as ‘diversity’, liberal byword for LGBT inclusion, says much of Cameron: he’s a man for whom, like Thatcher, all logic returns to that of the market. In the ninety minutes following Barack Obama’s statement, ‘Same-sex couples should be able to get married’, a million dollars went to his re-election campaign, and as a media executive before his time in parliament (who, only two years prior to his leadership, voted to keep Section 28), it’s conceivable the PM’s ‘pro-gay’ stances are more about profit than principle – I believe, though, that deep Thatcherite impulses drive them. His earliest support for civil partnerships came in the context of an argument the nation needed more marriage and less divorce; it’s no surprise he wishes to give married couples tax breaks, because for him, marital and family ‘commitment’ means personal responsibility – an alternative, that is, to public provision. Cameron’s political rhetoric, too, blames ‘family breakdown’ on overindulgent spending, slashing welfare to keep husbands and wives together. Behind the PM’s love of gay marriage, and marriage in general, hangs this bleak backdrop.

When he said he supported gay marriage due to, and not despite, being a Conservative, he wasn’t lying; as it did for Andrew Sullivan before him, gay marriage serves a regressive agenda for Cameron, informed by the same marketising Thatcherism he’s worked to purge from his public image. Elsewhere, that Thatcherism embattles queer Britons, and especially queer youth. What fate, in a property-owning democracy, befalls those who own least or stand themselves to be disowned?

Read the rest at {Young}ist.

Cameron’s Britain: this property-owning democracy is no place for queer youth