Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to interview Melody Hensley from CFI-DC about a conference she’s organizing about women’s issues and the secular movement. Hopefully we got a few more people to attend it but if nothing else it’s gotten me thinking about these issues a little more. So check out these weird sexist dudes I’ve learned about this week.
*
Peterson, seen here, getting stupid all over the place.
Jesse Lee Peterson is a pastor who sounds a lot like a stroke victim. He also has some problems with women. For one thing, they’re in positions of power nowadays, which means that America is “over.” Also, their power isn’t “real” because “the world” gave it to them. It would only be “real power” if it came from The Jesus. Apparently their fake power is only real enough to DESTROY AMERICA, which is a pretty easy thing to do since all you need to do for that is to make this oversensitive, mouth-breathing simpleton uncomfortable.
Speaking of destroying America, Peterson supported Newt Gingrich for President. It turns out he was a big fan of Newt’s race-baiting comments about how minority children should be made to get jobs as janitors at their schools so they could learn a work ethic. Peterson concurred and even doubled down by telling The HuffPo that blacks should be “sent back to the plantation.”
While most African-Americans in reality are doing fine with the “work ethic,” Peterson definitely is not. He’s a preacher, which means he begs for money for giving hate-filled speeches like the one above about how he’s afraid of women and offended by feminism. That’s all he does for “work.” That and, I don’t know, probably trying to fit his fist in his mouth or something like that.
*
She can wreck our national sovereignty any time.
Alex Jones, you guys! In his admittedly impressive 23 hours of programming a day he’s got this video in which he exposes Angelina Jolie. Unfortunately he would mean to use the term exposure in the “journalistic” sense of the word. Even worse and in true Alex Jones style he fails to do even that.
But first of all, Kony 2012 is a scam people! That’s not to say that it’s rife with inaccuracies as most of us by now know. No, it’s all war propaganda, coincidentally like all other forms of media not owned by Alex Jones, Inc.
And do you know who else besides Invisible Children makes non-Alex Jones movies? That’s right; Angelina Jolie! And what’s more is that she supports the United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. Doesn’t she know that Alex Jones disapproves?
Of course it’s not enough for Jones to say that he thinks Jolie is mistaken because she isn’t taking his conspiracy theories into account. She has to be evil. And when you’re a puritanical Christian nutjob with women issues, the way you disagree with a woman is to call her a “globalist whore,” a “cunning vampire,” and a “re-animated corpse” that “needs to be arrested” for her political opinions.
See, Jones is a “libertarian” and definitely “not a fascist” even though he sounds exactly like one all the time with his paranoid rants about the communist — erg, I mean “globalist” — world takeover and how people who disagree with him should be imprisoned. It’s kind of like how he’s “not a misogynist” even though the only way he can disagree with a woman is by calling her a whore.
*
I’ve kind of buried the lede here. It’s a good thing to point out how badly religion treats women. But what does it say about the secular movement when even in spite of all this, it’s still largely male-dominated?
There’s definitely a problem within the community with both passive and overt sexism. There are hopelessly aloof academics like Richard Dawkins who seem to think Western feminism’s job is over and done with. And then there are despicable scumbags like TJ Kincaid, the “Amazing Atheist,” who makes not-so-amazing rape threats. If those anecdotes aren’t convincing, then consider the data showing that women are more religious than men. The reasons for this fact are probably many and complicated, but what’s most surprising about this is how so many of the major religious texts have — to put it mildly — a problem with women in general. But even the openly misogynist antics of dudes like Paul, Mohammed, Jesse Peterson, and Alex Jones seem to create a more welcoming atmosphere to women than the secular community. That’s pretty shameful.
There was an old joke in the Soviet Union that went like this: What did communism do that capitalism couldn’t? It made capitalism look good. And the sad truth seems to be that one thing secularism is doing that religion can’t is to make religion look feminist — or at least palatable to women.
Most of us probably know about all the bizarre religious doctrines about how women on their period need to be shunned and sent out of the village, or how a woman not being a virgin when she’s married is a crime punishable by death. Although they’re actually written into the holy texts of various religions, most of their practitioners ignore them nowadays. But obviously there is still lots of sexism going on within religious communities. I’m going to point out a few because we should remember that even in spite of all this horrible shit, apparently more women feel more comfortable allied with religion than with the secular community. And that should alarm us.
*
[...] crazies is between belief in the Illuminati and misogyny. It’s pretty easy to see how misogynistic religious nuts justify their hatred of women. But there are also lots of conspiracy nuts who constantly whine about how feminism offends their [...]