Legitimate Rape = The Kind God Likes

Yesterday the Republican politician Richard Mourdock got real mad about them there uppity women wanting abortion rights and all. So he went on Facebook and wrote this:

‘Sovereign Citizen’ Runs for Sheriff

A ‘Soverign Citizen’ named Frank Szabo is running for Sheriff of Hillsborough County, NH.

The Sovereign Citizen movement is this pseudo-legal phenomenon popular among militia types and Alex Jones fans. Basically they think that laws don’t apply to them and they come up with some amusing ways of justifying that stance.

Bumping Uglies: The Church, The State, Science, and Fiction… between the sheets

Religion, like sex, should be consensual. But sometimes the Church sneaks into our beds unwanted and unannounced. All too often, it jumps under the covers with government, and government’s desperate enough to give it a sad, pathetic snuggle.

In the meantime, while science is always welcome in my bedroom, sometimes fake science tries to slip in––sometimes in hilarious ways, and other times more insidiously.

When religion and woo poke their determined junk at our sex lives, things can get a little ugly. Welcome to my column.

God’s PR Squad Lies Again! Alex Jones! Stoned Angels Ordering Pizza!

STOP THE PRESSES: Alex Jones is being stupid again, you guys! He has exposed the secret atheist agenda, and can you guess what it is? You get one guess. If your guess was a mishmash of Jonesian buzzwords like “New World Order,” “conspiracy,” “Luciferian,” and “occult,” then you win!

Alex Jones does this “research,” OK? He doesn’t ever cite any sources because usually his research involves just making shit up. But according to his research, everyone funding atheist groups are secretly occultist Luciferians, like pretty much everyone else who doesn’t believe everything published on InfoWars.

Melody Hensley Interview

Melody Hensley is the executive director of the Center for Inquiry in Washington, DC and is organizing the upcoming Women in Secularismconference. We talk about feminism, privilege, whether or not books should be left in the bathroom, and the conference. Also I try to coin a new term but then find out that it’s already been appropriated by racist immigrant-bashers.

Sarah Posner Interview

Sarah Posner is the author of  God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and senior editor at Religion Dispatches where she covers politics. We talk about Republicans, contraception, my gambling debts, religious code words, the possible problems Foster Friess had with girls in high school, and lots more.

Let’s Beat Up On Ron Paul

Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a segment on how the media’s been conspicuously avoiding coverage of the Quixotic Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His supporters loved it, probably hoping that more coverage of Paul would mean more people getting on board with his campaign. But more coverage means more coverage of his crazier positions too, and there are a lot of them.

5 Fundamentalist Movies You Should Watch

GATES OF HELL

I learned about this movie from Right Wing Watch, which is an organization that watches the right wing. And they watched the right wing pushing this movie, and it looks awesome.

You might have heard about how conservatives have been trying to sell African-Americans on the idea of being against legal abortion lately. They’re putting up these nutty billboards (some of which imply that blacks are a distinct species) and running goofy political ads on the radio. See, they’re not racist anymore! They’re really concerned about black babies and how letting black women have abortions is like genocide. And that breaks their hearts. They are very concerned about black people. That’s what they’re pushing. It reminds me of how neo-Nazis like David Duke will pretend to be so compassionate to the Palestinians, when in reality they’re clearly more motivated by hating Jews than anything else.

5 Religious Organizations You Should Hate

A common response to criticisms of religion is that its adherents can sometimes do good things, even if it’s for irrational reasons. That’s fair enough, but at the same time it’s useful to remember that while some good can be mixed in with the bad, sometimes religions create institutions of pure evil. Here are a few of them: