The Centre for Inquiry is the third atheist group whose events I’ve attended, after the then-new Secular Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics for Reason, Knowledge, and Science (SHAARKS) in Miami and the Humanist Association of Ottawa.  I enjoyed both sets, because I urgently needed a space in my life where being an atheist was a given and not something I had to carefully guard on pain of losing friends.  One set I had to abandon when I graduated from the University of Miami and, promptly, left town; the other I set aside because it seemed geared to an older crowd and because my preternatural awkwardness kept me from feeling at home there.

The one that stuck, the one that made me want to come back and get involved and watch the Internet for their upcoming events and eat and drink with its members in pubs—that was the Centre for Inquiry.  It was the Centre for Inquiry that seemed to hit on that magic combination of activism, public events, and community that could and did engross me.  I put effort into this organization.  I wrote web site content and provided public presentations.  Ania put far more, aggressively promoting CFI-Ottawa’s biggest venture ever despite being effectively sabotaged by CFI-Canada’s then-executive director and known MRA Justin Trottier.  We sought sponsors, cultivated relationships with other organizations, promoted other events, attended protests, designed media, and handed out flyers at Gay Pride.

We stuck around through the protracted process of getting Justin Trottier removed from his management role in the national organization, and then his de facto replacement Michael Payton, both for what seemed to veer madly from sheer incompetence to active antipathy toward CFI-Ottawa and its events.  We stuck around through the growing pains of an organization still finding its voice and its priorities. Like so many other corners of the atheosphere, the Centre for Inquiry still had to decide whether it would be an inclusive and welcoming space for people marginalized elsewhere for reasons other than their atheism, or whether it would perpetuate the same inequalities and claim reason and science as their justification.  It looked, for all intents and purposes, to be an enthusiastic CFI-Ottawa executive body against a complacent membership and a complacent-at-best national organization, and that was a battle we could win.

That’s when I began noticing cracks.

A member here, a volunteer there betrayed involvement in causes contrary to the Centre for Inquiry’s stated values, in particular the unambiguous commitment to humanism, skepticism, and rational thought.  I had a Code of Conduct citation come and go based on me being aggressively critical of a post from another CFI branch that suggested that Justin Trottier was being restored to prominence; it turned out to be old news from before his most vigorous removal, so I let the matter go.  One local fixture famously had her clock cleaned by Matt Dillahunty on the subject of bodily autonomy for people with uteruses.  Another spends most of his free time instigating “debates” between people he ostensibly agrees with and people who hold values he claims are antithetical to his but whom he clearly likes much better than the others and pointedly values politeness over not harming people.  Several turned out to be active and vocal supporters of A Voice for Men, the Canadian Association for Equality, the Slymepit, and other wells of organized atheist misogyny, much like their fallen hero Justin Trottier, and therefore implacably opposed to most of the points in Paul Kurtz’s statement of humanism as they relate to the role of women in society, by which CFI specifically purports to conduct its affairs.

It was and is disgusting enough that an organization with the gall to call itself “humanist” and claim a commitment to “transcending divisive parochial loyalties” could carry itself in a way that would appeal at all to such derelict humans, or that they’d find such a place anything but hotly opposed to their destructive ideas.  But the lure of the “big tent” is strong, and in a volunteer-run organization the choice is often between excluding fundamentally unsuitable people who want to be included and things not getting done.  But we stuck around, because we had the reins and we had the chance to define an organizational culture that would be inclusive, intersectional, smart, and safe—the exact opposite of what MRAs and “secular” pro-lifers require to exist.

This is the specific case of the general rule by which I govern my Internet affairs.  Any space that will have me will challenge and deal with transphobic, anti-feminist, and other bigoted chicanery wherever it appears, and make sure to be deeply, hotly unwelcoming to such ideas and to those who insistently hold them.  One of these offenders was someone I knew outside of CFI, and that made it all the more urgent for me to challenge the noisome ideas that flowed from her Facebook presence to mine.  I challenged her repeatedly and inconclusively, we had long conversations that seemed to begin to move her, she sent me a video by a prominent YouTube MRA that was so loaded with pretentious falseness that I couldn’t get past the first five minutes.  But she was CFI and she was a contact in other contexts as well, and leading her out of her anti-humanist errors would improve her, my life, my Facebook feed, and CFI-Ottawa alike.

She changed scripts and started posting derogatory comments about people with ADHD, including the oft-repeated, oft-debunked slur that the disease is a lie invented to sedate unruly children with high-powered stimulants.  (Because that makes sense.)  When called on that slur and the harm it does to thousands of people who could and should be diagnosed with ADHD but aren’t because they aren’t the white boys who actually are over-diagnosed, she doubled and tripled and quadrupled down.  When the lot of us pointed out that, as a vocal self-identified autistic person, she should know way, way better than to spread dangerous lies about “overdiagnosis” about a misunderstood mental condition, she told her detractors that if they’re this bad at handling “reality” they should kill themselves.  She earned herself a blocking from Ania and an unfriending from me in that moment.  But even then, after a tense conversation with me, she rendered an apology that got the blocking rescinded and let her far enough back into my good graces to restore Facebook friendship.

The MRA nonsense continued, to the point that some of the earlier items probably happened here and not above.  I got into a long spat with a physicist friend of hers who frequents CFI and Ottawa Skeptics events, which inspired a blog post.  When that argument over bog-standard MRA talking points offered as CAFE’s mission statement finally petered out and I vented my accumulated spleen on my own timeline, she felt the need to tag him into the conversation, ostensibly to defend himself.  I squashed that immediately, but the attempt was noted for what she almost certainly didn’t think of it as but what if effectively was: sic’ing a fellow MRA on me in my own space.

I kept her around until she posted a genuine, unapologetic link to the A Voice for Men homepage, directing her fellow anti-feminists to a “safe” and “supportive” place for people like them.  The implication that it is feminists who persecute MRAs, and not MRAs who spam rape hotlines, make death and rape threats by the thousands against prominent women in various fields, and massacre people in the name of opposing feminism, was too much of an insult to tolerate.  I removed her from my friends list, and I left a public message so that she would know why and so others would know what kind of behavior is not tolerated in my sphere:

Fast forward four months.  Let me emphasize that: fast-forward four months.  Four months.  Four months.

Four months later, coincidentally just after CFI-Ottawa experienced a change of leadership that put the power in the hands of the obsessive devil’s advocate from earlier and one of the MRAs, and somewhat longer than that since the last time CFI-Ottawa did something I could get enthusiastic about, I get an Email from Centre for Inquiry Ottawa’s leadership team:

I considered deleting the relevant line once I found it, after about 30 min of looking through status updates from, I stress, four months ago, but I could not bring myself to comply with such bullshit reasoning in such a bullshit request, so I instead changed its share settings to “Friends only” from “Public” and specifically excluded or unfriended every CFI-Ottawa personality I could remember.  I later learned that I missed a few.

I have redacted the names of people whose relationship to CFI is not a matter of CFI press releases because of potential professional consequences and to avoid a potential torrent of MRA abuse.  Should this matter escalate, those names will be made public.

I was annoyed that having my own Facebook interactions policed by CFI-Ottawa’s management whenever they touched upon CFI or other members thereof was becoming a pattern.  I was incensed that CFI-Ottawa’s leadership team had felt the need to dredge up a conflict that I had thought settled four months ago.  I was completely blown away that the person who earned that dismissal had the gall to bring it before the leadership team when she remembers exactly the stream of abuse she directed at me and mine for the month prior that I had not reported because I thought we had solved the matter between us like adults.  I was also satisfied that, by remembering that abuse all too well, I had turned this situation to my advantage, so I gloated.

Apparently, this was so unacceptable that it got me attention from Eric Adriaans, the current National Executive Director of Centre for Inquiry Canada, on 10 November 2014:

Yes, you and your organization are opposed to misogyny.  That’s why the new heads of CFI-Ottawa are a raging Internet misogynist and someone who posts a rich assortment of misogynistic Internet content to “spark debate” and preferentially removes from his sphere people who have a problem with that, as opposed to people who applaud him for populating his Internet presence with God’s truth.

But in the end, the colors show.

Eric Adriaans can fuck right off and take CFI-Canada with him.  If this is how I am going to be treated, then I am done.  I did not come to CFI have its members harass the most important people in my world.  I did not come to CFI to have its members turn their own Code of Conduct into a harassment tool against me.  I did not come to CFI to have its own management take my harasser’s side and bar me from any attendance or participation whatsoever in CFI functions because I had the chutzpah to not take it lying down.