I wanted to present a link here to an article that is running my hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle. Ken Chitwood, a Houston journalist with the apparently quirky and uncommon trait of wanting to present balanced information, wrote a piece about women in the secular movement.
http://blog.chron.com/sacredduty/2013/05/female-atheists-fight-for-equality-in-freethought-movement/
To be clear there were a lot of deficits in the story he told, so I made a comment and suggested that there was a bigger picture happening than the one he was telling.
His response was to thank me for the input and include a link to AVFM in the article, as well as in the tags.
PZ Myers showed up later in the comments doing his regular ad hom shtick, trying to make sure that Chitwood felt a sting for including diverse opinions, or anything else that PZ would disagree with, in his story. The journalist handled Myers with deftness and clarity.
A rep of the slymepit.com, which had already been mentioned in the article, showed up via email to clarify their position, and do a little PZish name calling of his own – like Myers he dropped insinuation and opinion about AVFM like it was known fact.
I post this here because it is important. We stay very occupied around here with what is happening on college campuses and in courtrooms across the western world. But the fact is that a battle continues to rage in the online secular community. On one hand, you have rational thinkers that want to keep their communities free of ideology and open to discourse from a variety of voices. And then you have PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson and their ilk, bent on establishing an orthodoxy of disinformation and agitprop, silencing anyone who gets in the way. Well, where they can silence people, anyway.
Their influence is shrinking as time goes by, much to the dismay of those who want everyone in the secular community to feed in to the feminist hysteria of victimhood and damseling – looking for special considerations.
Comments are open on this article. And PZ has already made a post calling in the flying monkeys of FTB to go in and harass Chitwood.
Please make your comments courteous and to the point. Thanks! PE
