Category: sexual misconduct

The Catholic Church abuse scandal in Pennsylvania: the power of religion

August 31, 2018 • 1:45 pm

Grania sent me three items relevant to the ongoing scandal about sex abuse by the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania.  #MeToo highlighted how power imbalances led to sexual abuse of many women, and this scandal shows the same thing with respect to the power of the Church. In fact, I can barely think of a religion (perhaps Quakers?) in which religious power has not led to rape and sexual abuse—mistreatment that wouldn’t have occurred in the absence of the cloak of sanctity covering church officials.

The Grand Jury’s report on the abuse is here, but if you don’t want to wade through the 1,356 pages, both Andrew Seidel, an attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), and Hemant Mehta, boss of The Friendly Atheist website, have done it for you. And both have summarized the results, with Hemant giving some of the more horrible details. (You need to read about those so you’ll realize how deep, disgusting, and traumatic to children this behavior was.) Here are the two pieces and an excerpt from each. (Click on screenshots to go to the articles.)

First, from the Freethought Now! website of the FFRF on Patheos:

Religion is the problem.

There are many gut-wrenching, heartbreaking details in the report — for an abbreviated catalog of horrors, see The Friendly Atheist’s article — but the consistent theme underlying the analysis is authority. Unquestionable, unassailable authority. Divine authority. In my opinion, that is the biggest contributor to the depth, breadth and severity of this menace.

If the Catholic Church were a chain of private schools or a secular, multinational corporation, it could never get away with raping children on an industrial scale and covering it up. The difference is that these young victims are taught by everyone in their orbit that their tormentors are divine. They are the representatives of god on earth. They are not to be questioned and certainly not to be disobeyed. In fact, to disobey your tormentor is to disobey god. Under Catholic Canon law, adherents are required to give a “religious submission of the intellect and will” to their church.

The entire power structure of the Catholic Church is predicated on complete obedience to “men of God.” The abuse is so bad in the church because it is a church. As one victim put it, the priests “are much above anybody else in your family or they are God in the flesh.”

The evil is boundless because of the power of religion.

And from the Friendly Atheist, whose examples will turn your stomach:

When you read this report and realize it’s just one group of priests in one state, you have to wonder what the stories would look like if a similar document was produced across the country, if not the world.

. . .So brace yourself.

Here’s a running list of some of the more egregious things you’ll find in the report.

(JAC: I’ve just given a couple; Hemant gives more).

  • Father Chester Gawronski fondled and masturbated at least 12 different children by saying he was just showing them “how to check for cancer.” (When one of these stories went public in 2002, Bishop Donald Trautman chastised the victim by arguing that he was only 14 when it happened, not 11 like the article said.)
  • Father Thomas D. Skotek raped an underage girl, got her pregnant, then paid for her abortion. His Bishop later said, “This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief.” That letter was addressed to Skotek, not his victim.
  • Father George Zirwas was part of a predatory priest “ring” that “shared intelligence” on victims and exchanged them with each other. They “manufactured child pornography” on church property, using “whips, violence and sadism in raping their victims.”
  • Reverend Gerald Royer once molested a 12-year-old boy. The boy’s friend didn’t believe it… until, hidden in a closet, he witnessed the abuse himself. The victim, now 83, fought in wars, yet because of what Royer did, he could never hug or kiss his own children, who were boys. He can’t shake hands with men to this day. He can’t even see male doctors or dentists.
  • Father Gregory Flohr took a victim into the confessional and tied him up with rope. When the victim screamed, Flohr shut him up by shoving his penis in the victim’s mouth. When the victim wouldn’t accept it, Flohr sodomized him with a crucifix and called him a “bad boy.”
  • Reverend James Beeman raped a seven-year-old in the hospital just after she had “had her tonsils removed.” He raped her again when she was 19 and pregnant.

I’ll spare you the rest. Hemant details the way the Church deflected or avoided blame, and, at the end, summarizes the Grand Jury’s recommendations (not shown here). Here’s the Church’s strategy:

The grand jury also noted how the Church managed to cover all these crimes up as long as they did. Leaders, they said, followed a “playbook for concealing the truth” that consisted of seven steps:

  1. Use euphemisms. (“Never say “rape”; say “inappropriate contact” or “boundary issues.”)
  2. Don’t investigate with trained personnel. (Instead, let clergy members ask the victims “inadequate” questions before judging their own colleagues.)
  3. Evaluate priests at church-run “treatment centers.”
  4. Never say why a priest was removed. (Just say he’s on “sick leave” or something.)
  5. Keep providing priests with living expenses regardless of the allegations.
  6. Transfer the priests if his crime becomes public knowledge. (Send him to a place where “no one will know he is a child abuser.”)
  7. Don’t tell the police. (Keep it “in house.”)

I really don’t know how, after these revelations, which extend to high levels in the Church, one can remain a Catholic—a member of this organization.

Finally, here’s a video by The Thinking Atheist on the mess, which includes a long interview with Andrew Seidel.

Bari Weiss returns with a column on Asia Argento, Avital Ronell, #MeToo, and the Shoe on the Other Foot

August 22, 2018 • 1:30 pm

I don’t know how anyone can find this new New York Times column by Bari Weiss objectionable, but I know they’ll try. (Click on screenshot to read it.)

The column is about two women who have been accused of sexual abuse. The first, Asia Argento, is an actor who was revealed to have paid $380,000 to buy the silence of a 17 year old boy (below the age of consent) with whom she apparently had sex. The ironic thing is that Argento was one of the main accusers of Harvey Weinstein in the #MeToo scandal.  Argento was important in helping bring down Weinstein, and in calling attention to men’s use of power to leverage sexual mistreatment of women, but it turned out she herself had apparently committed sexual malfeasance.

Weiss’s column is balanced, pointing out that women, too, can be abusive, manipulative, and cruel. Yet at the same time she’s fully on the side of the movement that is going after men for sexual abuse, and noting that sometimes women who abuse get treated more lightly than men.

Sadly, Argento, like Rose McGowen, seems a bit unbalanced to me. I can’t get over the rumors that Argento’s infidelities contributed to the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, but, more important, for her and McGowan, I feel they’ve used the #MeToo movement to draw attention to themselves. That doesn’t for a minute denigrate (for either me or Weiss) the salubrious outing of sexually harassing and mistreating males. All it does is put the shoe on the other foot, promoting the principle that no matter who abuses their power to get sex, they should be treated the same regardless of gender.

So, for example, Weiss notes this vis-à-vis McGowan:

But others in Hollywood offered sober calls for caution and context. These are particularly striking when they come from those who typically deliver public statements with muzzle velocity, like the #MeToo leader Rose McGowan:

Ms. McGowan, herself a victim of Mr. Weinstein, has a point. We ought to reserve judgment. We ought to take seriously the ruining of a person’s reputation and career until we have all the facts. We ought to consider the context of the accusation.

But the advice is a bit rich coming from a person who has insisted that anything less than immediately believing accusers is moral cowardice:

It is a bit confusing coming from someone who has advocated mercilessness toward alleged sexual harassers:

Given that Mr. Bennett [the boy paid off by Argento] seems to have been financially strapped when he made the accusation against Ms. Argento, there are reasons to wonder whether he had an ulterior motive. But this willingness to weigh the complicated context of such an allegation is one the movement has seldom applied when the accuser has been a woman. Perhaps that will change.

The larger question is whether the Argento story might undermine the #MeToo movement. Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer certainly hopes it will. So do various anti-feminists, right-wing bloggers and conspiracy theorists, who are already fashioning the Argento plot twist into Pizzagate 2.0.

Most people aren’t going to fall for this nonsense. They’re not going to stop taking sexual abuse seriously because of one high-profile hypocrite.

But I do think the stakes at this moment are high for the #MeToo movement. Outspoken feminists will lose credibility if they ignore this story or try to explain it away with clichés, however true, about how hurt people hurt people.

Indeed. But I’m heartened that feminists are not ignoring the Argento story. Nor are they ignoring the other subject of Weiss’s column, the suspension of Avital Ronell, a “feminist star professor” at NYU who was found guilty of sexually harassing her graduate student Nimrod Reitman. Ronell was let go for a year, but I suspect won’t be coming back to NYU. The irony here is the number of feminists (including the odious Judith Butler) who wrote a letter defending Ronell by touting her intellectual superstardom and asking for either lenient treatment or for complete exculpation. That would never fly with a male accused of the same things, and is a big fat case of hypocrisy. As Weiss says,

Believe survivors, right? Not so fast. In a letter signed by some of academia’s biggest feminist luminaries, including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Mr. Reitman is accused of waging a “malicious campaign” against the professor. The signatories “testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.” Apparently, dignity is a privilege reserved for the tenured.

“We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare,” they wrote.

The tone-deafness here is almost comical. A young up-and-comer blows the whistle on a powerful mentor who wielded control over his career. Entrenched interests rush to the defense of the accused, venerating the powerful and actively smearing the character and motivations of the accuser. It’s a repeat of the sexual harassment stories we’ve spent the past year reading about, only with the genders flipped.

This isn’t a good look. And it will become increasingly untenable as young men come forward with similar stories of harassment and abuse, as they surely will in this new stage of #MeToo. “Believe women” only works as a rule of thumb when all women are good. That myth falls flat outside Victorian England.

But Weiss isn’t evincing Schadenfreude here, merely calling for equal treatment for equal malfeasance. There’s no doubt that Weiss stands on the side of the victimized women, and I can’t imagine, as I said, anyone taking umbrage at her column. But Weiss is now among the Control-Left Untouchables, and I expect pushback. After all, she’s not entitled to criticize those still on the side of Moral Purity.

h/t; cesar

Lawrence Krauss removed as head of Arizona State University Origins project

August 3, 2018 • 8:15 am

In March of this year, after several reports of sexual harassment and groping by physicist Lawrence Krauss (the most prominent article was published in Buzzfeed), I decided that, in light of multiple consilient reports, I’d do my own small investigation. I turned up at least three highly credible allegations by people I know reporting Krauss’s harassing behavior and inappropriate touching. After that, I decided that I couldn’t keep quiet about it. I wrote a post on this site, disassociating myself from him and decrying his behavior, as well as similar behavior by anyone towards women. In that post I took the rare step of prohibiting comments, as I didn’t want a social media pile-on.  For both my post and my policy, I took a lot of flak, but I stand by what I said.

After the accusations, Krauss himself was removed from several positions, including his association with the Center for Inquiry, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association. Krauss also resigned from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that sets the “Doomsday Clock.”

Now Krauss has also been removed from the Origins Project at Arizona State University (ASU), an important project that he headed. As AZCentral reports, Krauss has been replaced as director by Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, ASU’s director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration. Krauss is still employed at ASU, but is on paid leave and is undergoing further investigation to see whether he should be kept on the ASU faculty.

Krauss himself announced the news on his Twitter feed:

As the AZCentral article notes, Krauss denied the allegations against him.

I am leaving the comments open this time, but I make a special request that commenters be civil, which is the usual requirement for posting.

h/t: Tom

Famed geneticist Francisco J. Ayala resigns after his university finds him guilty of sexual harassment

June 29, 2018 • 7:30 am

If you’re in evolutionary genetics, you’ll know the name of Francisco J. Ayala.  When I first met him in 1971 at Rockefeller University, where he was studying fly genetics in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s lab (I was a beginning grad student), he was a Dominican priest, and came to lab in his priest suit, complete with collar.  When Dobzhansky retired and moved to the University of California at Davis in 1971 (and I became a conscientious objector working in a New York hospital), Ayala was hired to run the fly lab while Dobzhansky had a sort of “emeritus” status. (I had also gone to Rockefeller to become Dobzhansky’s student, but his retirement ended that plan.)

Ayala gained renown for his work on genetic variation revealed via electrophoresis in Drosophila: the same project that brought fame to my own advisor Dick Lewontin.  Lewontin got there first, and he and Ayala hated each other. That wasn’t because of competititiveness (at least on Dick’s part), but because Dick found Ayala’s work shoddy and despised the man’s careerism.

I remember one evening around 1980 when Lewontin was invited to give a big science talk at UC Davis, where I was then a postdoc. Ayala gave the introduction—the most insulting introduction I’ve ever heard. He made several snide remarks about Dick, and wound up saying that Dick was “most famous for attacking other people’s work.” We all cringed: Ayala’s words were nasty and reprehensible.

Dick didn’t miss a beat. He stood up and told a story of the famous baseball umpire Bill Klem. (That story is probably apocryphal.)  When someone who didn’t like Klem’s calls said that “he called them as he saw them,” Klem replied, “No, I called them as they WAS!” Lewontin’s point, of course, was that he was critical only of those who were truly wrong. Having seen the correspondence between them about electrophoresis (Dick showed it to us, and wouldn’t go public with criticism until he’d given the person every chance to correct their errors), I saw that Dick was right about Ayala. I won’t go into details of their scientific fracas here, but I remember them well.

Ayala became rich (I believe that, besides running a vineyard in California bearing his name, he had family money and also married a hotel heiress) and very powerful, but was not widely liked in the population genetics community nor at UC Davis, where most of the faculty I knew couldn’t abide the man. (I hasten to add that some people did like him.) As I recall, when Ayala moved to the University of California at Irvine, already well known, the department at Davis was so happy to be rid of him that they didn’t make a counteroffer (I am going from memory here and may be wrong.)

I found Ayala snobbish, arrogant, and above all a rampant careerist, who would do anything to become famous and promote his name. Eventually he donated $10 million to the biology section of UC Irvine, which renamed the biology school the Ayala School of Biological Sciences (it’s already been renamed on its website). A library was also named after him. He continued to accrue power, having a huge influence about which evolutionary biologists got into the National Academy of Sciences. Ayala also won the million-pound Templeton Prize in 2010 (he was always soft on religion, and refused to say whether he believed in God).

An example of his accommodationism is this book, which maintains that evolution was a “gift to religion” because it solved theological problems. If evolution, for example, produced imperfect design and nasty things like parasites, we need not wonder why God would create these things—supposedly solving the problem of evil. It didn’t, of course, because one could counterargue that a powerful God could have tweaked evolution to leave out the evil bits.

At Davis Ayala had the reputation of being a letcher, or at least of having a “keen eye for the ladies.” I remember well one of his graduate students, an attractive woman, telling me that when she met with Ayala and wanted to ask him for something, she’d always wear a very short skirt to curry his favor. I don’t recall any direct accusations of sexual harassment, but of course those were the days (early 1980s) before that kind of behavior was widely recognized as destructive and demeaning to women, and when the climate was just “boys will be boys.”

I must say that I was, surprised, though, to see this headline in the L.A. Times (click to read the article):

An excerpt:

Acclaimed UC Irvine geneticist Francisco J. Ayala has resigned after a university investigation found he sexually harassed four faculty members and graduate students, the university announced Thursday.

. . . In 2011, Ayala donated $10 million to the School of Biological Sciences, which then bore his name. It was the largest gift from a faculty member at the time.

The university said Ayala’s name has been removed from that school, and is also being removed from its central science library, graduate fellowships, scholar programs and endowed chairs. The biology school will now be known as the UCI School of Biological Sciences. 

“I thank and commend our colleagues who reported this misconduct,” Chancellor Howard Gillman said in a statement. “Coming forward with this information was extremely courageous. Professor Ayala’s behavior defied our core beliefs and was inconsistent with our policies, guidelines and required training.”

Micha Liberty, an attorney who represents three of the women, said UCI ignored years of complaints from professors and graduate students that Ayala touched them and made sexual and sexist comments. She said one of the professors she’s representing reported Ayala’s conduct three years ago, but university officials failed to investigate or sanction him.

“They just told him, ‘Stay away from her,’” Liberty said. “Dr. Ayala has had a long and successful career and was clearly an asset to the UCI campus … and that in turn motivated UCI to look the other way when it came to complaints of sexual harassment.”

. . . Liberty said her clients are dissatisfied that UCI has not acknowledged its failure to act on previous complaints and protect women from Ayala. She said there are many more victims but most are scared to come forward because his stature in the field gives him the power to make or break careers.

I don’t think he has that stature any more.

Here’s the official announcement sent to the UC Irvine community:

Ayala’s behavior, combined with his immense power, wound up creating a horrible situation. Horrible for science, horrible for the community of scientists, and, above all, horrible for women. As far as I’m concerned, he’s now got what he deserved, but he got it too late.

Francisco J. Ayala

h/t: Mizrob

Title IX regulations for sexual misconduct and the huge mess they’ve created in American universities

June 6, 2018 • 11:30 am

In September of last year, I wrote a piece about the Obama-era changes in the Title IX laws. Rather than re-describe the situation, I’ll quote from that post:

In 2011, the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) of the U.S. Department of Education sent its famous “Dear Colleague” letter to American colleges and universities, suggesting how sexual harassment and assault cases should be handled. Before that, it was pretty much up to the colleges how to handle such in-house investigations, and different colleges used different standards of evidence.  There are three that could be used (see here for more explanation):

  • Conviction requires guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”, which of course means that the bar is very high for conviction.
  • Conviction requires “clear and convincing evidence”, that is, it must be “highly probable or reasonably certain” that harassment or assault occurred. This is conventionally interpreted to mean a likelihood of 75% or higher that the assault took place.
  • Conviction requires a “preponderance of the evidence” for assault or hasassment. This means that it is more likely that not (likelihood > 50 %) that the offense occurred.

Criminal courts in the U.S. use the first standard for conviction. The “clear and convincing” standard is used in some administrative court determinations and certain civil or criminal cases (a prisoner seeking habeas corpus relief from capital punishment, for instance, must prove his innocence using this standard). The “preponderance” standard is used in civil and family courts; it is, for instance, the reason why O. J. Simpson was found guilty of by a civil court for damages in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, thus owing them lots of money even though he was exonerated in his criminal trial.

I then took a poll among readers (you needn’t remind me that this is not a random sample or a “scientific” survey) to see how they felt about how colleges could handle sexual harassment and assault cases. Here are the results:

About 80% of readers thought—and I agree—that these behaviors—which are crimes, should be adjudicated by the courts rather than by the schools themselves. Indeed, universities have made a complete botch of it, not allowing students to hear the charges against them, confront their accusers, have legal representation, and so on.

If you want to see the draconian, Star-Chamber nature of how colleges screw up the process (often knowing exactly what they’re doing: trying to convict a male using a paucity of evidence) read Laura Kipnis’s book from last year, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. Kipnis, a feminist professor of communications at Northwestern University here in Chicago, reports the doings of two Title IX investigations at her university. You’ll  be horrified to learn how shoddy these “investigations” can be, how motivated they are by animus or personal beefs rather than a desire for justice, and how people’s lives have been ruined through tissue-thin allegations. Indeed, just by writing the book, Kipnis herself was subject to a Title IX investigation and a lawsuit from a student who (unnamed) had made Title IX allegations against a man in Kipnis’s narrative.

The problems go deeper than just the shoddy standards of evidence and incompetent proceedings. There is often a presumption that a male student is always guilty simply by virtue of being a male, as men are presumed to be the sexual aggressors.  Further, if a student is incapacitated or has lost inhibitions from alcohol, that student is often judged to have given up “affirmative consent”, and so can accuse her sexual partner of having committed rape.

This makes me shudder, for virtually everyone my age has had one or more sexual encounters when both partners were inebriated, and I don’t remember any of these that were followed by accusations of malfeasance. But now things have changed, and if both sex partners are drunk or tipsy, what happens? Can there be mutual rape?

In fact, as described in a new article in The Atlantic, “Mutually nonconsensual sex,” Caitlin Flanagan answers “yes,” but shows what happens: mutually drunken (and therefore mutually “nonconsensual”) sex can lead to a race in which both participants in a drunken hookup suddenly realize that their partner might file a Title IX rape complaint, and so they try to be first to inform the authorities that they were raped. The first complainant, apparently, wins. Something like this happened at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, and the first responder was the man, so the woman was suspended from college until her male partner graduated—a common judgment in these cases. But she’s suing, and she has a pretty good case. As Flanagan notes:

It is Jane Roe’s [JAC: the pseudonym of the woman student] good fortune to have as her attorney Josh Engel, whose practice is largely centered on suing universities—including, on five occasions, the University of Cincinnati—on behalf of plaintiffs who faced discipline for sexual misconduct by campus disciplinary proceedings—all of whom, until now have been men. In the lawsuit, he cites a recent and underreported ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which has significant relevance to the large number of campus sexual-assault proceedings involving two drunk students. Doe vs. Miami University found that a school acts in a discriminatory manner when it finds that both a male and a female student are intoxicated and engage in sexual activity yet chooses only to discipline one of the students. As Engel told me, “From a constitutional standpoint a public school violates the equal-protection rights of their students when there is no rational basis to differentiate between male and female students. The court found that even if only one student makes a report, if the school possesses knowledge that both were intoxicated, “the school has an affirmative obligation to investigate both students for misconduct without waiting for a ‘report,’” Engel said.

In other words—college students and administrators take note—the days of blaming one person (almost always the man) for a no-harm, no foul, mutually drunken hook up may be coming to an end. It was a ridiculous standard, one that that infantilized college women, demonized male sexuality, and was responsible for harsh punishment meted out to an unknown number of college students, almost all of them male. It trivialized something grave: sex crime. And because it poured all of these experiences through an interpretive system that forced women into the role of passive victims and men in that of aggressive predators, it has helped stoke understandable resentment among young men on campuses across the country.

Flanagan concludes that it’s time for colleges to stop micromanaging the sex lives of their students. Yes, I think they can give them “education” about what’s permissible and legal, and what is not, but these Star Chambers are a recipe for lawsuits, and colleges will eventually realize it. In fact, one of the very few good things that happened under the Trump administration might be Betsy DeVos’s rolling back of the “Dear Colleague” standards of the Obama administration, and the publication by the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education of recommendations for dealing with accusations of sexual misconduct (see them here). The standards seem quite reasonable.

A climate in which men are deemed guilty from the outset by having a Y chromosome, in which a 50.1% judgement that an assault was likely leads to ruining someone’s life (and face it—that standard is basically a judgment call), and in which when both partners are intoxicated the male must be the rapist, is a climate that begs for lawsuits. This new one is not the first: there are several others—including the case of Emma Sulkowicz (“Mattress Girl”) at Columbia—in which the new rush to judgment has led to injustices.

I think that if someone has committed a real crime on campus, and that includes sexual harassment and sexual assault, it should be left to the legal system rather than to colleges for disposition. If there is a conviction, then the colleges should act.  Colleges simply aren’t equipped to dispense justice, and they may have ideological agendas not held by juries and judges.

Obama’s revision of Title IX was a mistake, and we’re beginning to see the consequences. But even given that, colleges aren’t required to abide by the newer standards, and I suspect most of them will retain the “preponderance of evidence” mistake promulgated by Obama’s administration. But Lord only knows how they’ll deal with the common cases of two inebriated students having sex.

I close with Flanagan’s conclusion:

Now, in many regards, universities monitor the sexuality of their students more intrusively than in the 1950s. There are fulltime employees of American universities whose job is to sit young people down and interrogate them about when and where and how they touched another person sexually, and how it felt, and what signs and sounds and words and gestures made them believe that consent had been granted. This was how homosexuals used to be thrown out of schools and sports teams and the military; this is how young women were punished for acting on their sexual impulses by a wide variety of American institutions in the past. This is beyond the overreach of the modern university; this is an affront to the most essential and irreducible of all of the American ideas: the freedom of the individual.

. . . That time [JAC: she’s referring to the Berkeley Free Speech movement and Mario Savio’s call to fix the broken system] is coming again on American campuses, as the strongest and smartest and bravest among the students are beginning to realize that the beliefs and practices that dominate these places are irrational and hugely political. These new students are waking up, resisting, fighting back, in all sorts of areas of college life. The administrators want to crush them, but the wind is at their back. The progressive left has all the power on campus, but this unfolding awareness on the part of these counter-revolutionaries has its own unassailable power: truth, logic, and reason.

What? I must be gay because I’m not worried about being #MeToo’d?

March 13, 2018 • 10:45 am

I don’t know who writes the Dark Buzz  physics blog, but it’s someone named Roger—someone whose latest post, “Krauss is being silenced“, made me chuckle. After noting that both Sam Harris and I have expressed our beliefs that Lawrence Krauss is in all likelihood guilty of sexual malfeasance, Roger speculates why. His conclusion? I have nothing to lose. Get a load of this logic:

Coyne has a popular blog, and probably most of his readers think that he is gay. He denies it, but he blogs a lot about his personal life, and it is obvious that he has no wife, no girlfriend, and no kids. Furthermore, he has stereotypical gay interests in music, arts, clothing, and pets. And his political views are mostly what you would expect from a gay atheist professor.

I am not saying this to criticize, but to give background for his opinions. He does not appear to have any worries that any woman is going to metoo him.

I have no way of knowing how he has flirted with women in the past, and I don’t see how it is anyone’s business.

No Roger, it’s not anyone’s business, NOR YOURS EITHER!

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. I’m just not—I’m one of those old, white, cis-het males who rank lowest on the oppression scale. I’m not worried about being #MeToo’d because I don’t have a history of abusing or harassing women. There are some of us, you know!

The rest, about the connection between one’s interests, one’s atheism, and one’s sexuality, you can judge for yourself.

If I could have imagined all the ways people would go after me for my stand, I would never have dreamed up this one. Thanks, Roger, for a long moment of amusement. You’re an idiot.

NOTE: This is not the place to debate Krauss’s guilt or innocence; if you want to do that, you can discuss it on the Dark Buzz post. Comments that violate this policy will be removed from the thread.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside”: Old versus Purified versions

January 30, 2018 • 11:15 am

Here’s the original version of the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. The first half shows Betty Grable and Ricardo “Corinthian Leather” Montalban; the second Red Skelton and Red Skelton and Betty Garrett. The song was written by Frank Loesser in 1944, was sung by him and his wife at parties, and first appeared in this movie: “Neptune’s Daughter” (1949):

As you probably know, this song has been strongly criticized for showing sexual malfeasance, though people apparently haven’t seen the role reversal that starts at 2:27. Well, women can be domineering too, but I can see why this song would raise a lot of hackles were it recorded today. (Lady Gaga is apparently complicit.) Given the symmetry of roles, and the fact that it’s older than I am, I can’t get very worked up about it, though.

The consent-friendly version below, however, is the response of 2018. Rather than just pointing out the difficulty of negotiating an acceptable sexual relationship in these fraught times, people go back and rewrite the past.  This rewrite makes me absolutely cringe, not because of the need for “affirmative consent”, with which I agree, but because it’s so heavy-handed with the virtue—and not humorous to boot. Yes, we get it! We don’t need to be beat over the head with a ball peen Virtue Hammer. (Note: the site says a portion of the proceeds will be donated to good causes; I think they should donate all the proceeds.)

My conclusion: These days, people under the age of 30 should not be allowed to have sex.