American Atheists fires David Silverman over sex assault claims

David Silverman

When news broke just a few days ago that American Atheists, the largest godless advocacy group in the US, had suspended their president and spokesman David Silverman over as-of-then unrevealed allegations, we knew something big was going down. And now, the bombshell has detonated, as yet another luminary of the organized atheist movement stands accused of sexual misconduct.

David Silverman, a firebrand atheist with a knack for generating publicity for his cause, has been abruptly fired as president of American Atheists, one of the leading secular organizations in the US.

The group’s board held an emergency meeting on Thursday evening and unanimously voted to fire 51-year-old Silverman, based on explosive written allegations of sexual assault and undisclosed conflicts of interest, BuzzFeed News has learned.

“Last night, the American Atheists Board of Directors voted to terminate David Silverman as President of American Atheists,” the group said in a statement released on Friday. The board made its decision after reviewing “allegations raised regarding Mr. Silverman’s conduct,” the statement said. The board also said it intends to cooperate with any future investigations.

Go read the accusations. They’re damning. For his part, Silverman, though his lawyer, denies any wrongdoing and says the encounters were consensual. Bizarrely, his lawyer also mentions that Silverman was in an open marriage at the time the incidents allegedly took place, as if that were some sort of defense. He does realize that having your partner’s consent to fool around with other people doesn’t give you permission to force sex upon those people against their will, right?

Good on the accusers for bravely coming forward, even though it’ll inevitably trigger an absurd shitstorm of hateful idiocy from large swathes of the movement. Good also on the board of American Atheists for taking all the right measures – suspending Silverman pending an internal investigation into his possible alleged conflicts, and then canning him without delay once they heard the far worse sexual misconduct accusations. That’s exactly how you want an organization to respond to such a situation. (Of course, I’m assuming here that they weren’t aware of the alleged incidents until recently.)

Incidentally, this report was published by the same outlet, BuzzFeed News, that broke the Lawrence Krauss scandal. Defenders and apologists were quick to come out of the woodwork to attack the Krauss story for being published by an “unreliable” outlet – which makes no sense, given that BuzzFeed’s news division has one of the finest investigative teams in the business and has broken numerous heavy-hitting stories in the last few years. Expect the same ridiculous and empty attacks this time around as well.

As a sidenote, the irony – or is it poetic justice? – that Silverman’s most famous photo (above) comes from his appearance on a TV show hosted by a man who was also fired for sexual misconduct is not lost on me.

(via @steve_shives)

Daily Links #110: Seriously, please sign that petition to prevent censorship of Canada’s Internet

Oy, Canadians! Have you signed that petition to save our Internet from censorship yet? The deadline is tonight.

Once you’ve done that, here’s your news dump.

• US Supreme Court refuses to review a lower court ruling blocking Trump’s attempt to end DACA.

• More good judicial news: A federal court rules that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination, rebuking the Trump admin. which argued the contrary.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• In reaction to the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal, Michigan lawmakers want to greatly extend the statute of limitations for sex crime victims. For some reason, the Catholic Church isn’t happy with this.

• Florida Republicans advance two bills to put more guns in classrooms, because when you reject all sensible solutions, cartoonish ones are all that’s left.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars addresses the terrible, tribalistic defenses of Lawrence Krauss against his sexual harassment allegations. You know it’s bad when the pro-Krauss arguments are the same used by Roy Moore’s supporters.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Watson on Krauss and the future of organized atheism

Rebecca Watson gives some background to BuzzFeed’s thoroughly researched exposé on Lawrence Krauss’s history of sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, PZ Myers at Pharyngula takes apart some of the usual roaches leaping out of the woodwork to Krauss’s defense. Skeptics, these people are in name only. The ongoing attacks against Melody Hensley are particularly repugnant – but this is from the same assholes who drove her out of the movement in the first place, so that’s only to be expected.

Organized atheism continues to crumble with each passing day, and its stalwarts stick their fingers in their ears and screech that all is well even as sensible people flee in droves. I agree with Watson – there’s no reason to believe anything will seriously change at this point, not until the old guard is thrown out or, more likely, sinks into an irrelevance of their own making. I’m hoping whatever is built upon the ashes will be a stronger, more vibrant movement … ideally, one that chooses to keep out the dead weight that caused the original to founder.

Daily Links #108: Krauss accused of sexual misconduct

Lawrence Krauss

• Several women come forward to accuse noted physicist and famous atheist Lawrence Krauss ^[pictured] of sexual misconduct. More at Pharyngula and Friendly Atheist.

• You knew it was only a matter of time before some idiot – this time Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) – blamed the Parkland school shooting on videogames.

• Speaking of idiots who blame games, Trump says there ought to be a rating system for them and movies. This will come as a surprise to the ESRB and the MPAA, which have respectively rated games and movies for decades.

• Quirky corporate Twitter accounts are not your friends.

• Finally, your tweet of the day:

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Shives explains why we need (a lot more) secular social justice

It’s not often I watch a video of someone excoriating the organized atheist movement and find myself agreeing with every word of it, but such is the case here.

Transcript:

(Click to open/close:) [−]

STEVE SHIVES: One of the most positive experiences I ever had as an atheist was back in 2012, at the first Reason Rally. I was born and raised, and continued to live, in an area where religious faith, almost always in the form of some flavor or another of Christianity, is taken for granted. Being an atheist surrounded by religious folks, many of whom are quite outspoken about their faith, can be an alienating experience.

So when I found myself standing on the National Mall in 2012 – God look at my fat, bare baby face – anyway, when I found myself standing there, surrounded by thousands of other people who shared my lack of religious faith, it left an impression: I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t isolated. I was part of a community, a growing, energetic, enthusiastic community.

I’ve long believed that a crucial step in leading a happy and fulfilling life is finding your people. That day at the Reason Rally in 2012, I felt as though I had found my people.

Didn’t turn out to be true, but still … nice memory.

Since the rise of the New Atheists, personified most prominently by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris – the so-called Four Horsemen – the organized atheist movement has become as closely associated with bigotry and sexual misconduct as with reason and enlightenment. It’s a shame, but the real shame of it is that such associations are completely justified.

Atheist spaces both in real life and online have been dominated by cis-hetero White men for as long as I’ve been an active participant, and efforts by women, people of color, LGBTQ people and members of other marginalized groups to push back against that domination have always been met with responses ranging from indifference to outright hostility. That reluctance to embrace and prioritize the task of making atheist spaces more inclusive would be bad enough, were it not present alongside a stubborn tolerance of sexual misconduct. Numerous prominent atheist men, most notably Richard carrier and Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer, have been credibly accused of committing acts of sexual harassment and abuse, and made to face little to no professional consequences as a result. They still published books, they still appear in high-profile speaking slots at conferences, and they are still zealously defended from such accusations by their devoted admirers.

Given these conditions, it’s no wonder that many activists who might otherwise wish to work within the movement have chosen instead to distance themselves from organized atheism. For those of us who still cling to the naive hope that organized atheism can still be salvaged and put to some good productive use, one of the greatest challenges we face is convincing our fellow atheists that there’s even a problem.

Oh, it’s not that difficult to get someone to acknowledge the existence of, say, misogyny, or racism, or xenophobia within atheist circles. But that acknowledgment is almost always swiftly followed by an attempted dismissal. “Oh sure, there are atheists who are racist or sexist or whatever,” I’ve heard I-don’t-know-how-many people in the community say, “but you can’t let a few bad apples spoil the bushel! Most atheists aren’t like!”

This apathetic, baseless optimism about the state of organized atheism is as corrosive as the problems it ignores, and rarely has it been on more conspicuous display than in the months surrounding Mythicist Milwaukee’s Mythinformation conference last year. I’ve talked about Mythcon in previous videos, so I won’t go into any more detail here than absolutely necessary. If you want a more in-depth perspective of what Mythcon was, why it was a problem, and why it was a problem that more people in the atheist community didn’t have a problem with it, I recommend you check out the channel of my pal chrisiousity. She recently produced two videos on the lead-up to and fallout from Mythcon. They’re both linked in the description of this video, they’re excellent, I highly recommend them.

When people like Kristi Winters, Dan Arel and myself began speaking out against the organizers of Mythcon for choosing to associate themselves and their event with some of the most toxic voices in the atheist community, including several YouTubers who built their followings by promoting rape apology and inciting abuse and harassment against feminists and racial equality activists, we were met, not only by attacks from the people we were protesting, which was to be expected, but also by a worried disapproval from people we assumed would have been on our side of things. People who had presented themselves as progressive, tolerant and socially conscious.

what I realized as a result of the Mythcon debacle, and what many people knew already, was that for a lot of folks, supporting equality and justice is about theory rather than practice. It’s performative. It’s about talking the talk, expressing disapproval of the right wrong things, and it’s almost always directed outward: Look over there, look at what those people are doing, isn’t that terrible?

We atheists are accustomed to behaving this way. Many of us who came to the movement as a result of the popularity of New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens first encountered skepticism in the form of a critique of religion, or a debunking of Creationism, or a debate where our favorite atheist trounced some pompous apologist. It was about exposing how wrong they were, and reveling and how right we were. We’re good at that. We enjoy that. It makes us feel superior, whether or not we choose to characterize it that way. It’s satisfying. It’s comfortable.

Maybe that’s why, as eager as we are to direct our skepticism toward external targets, we’re equally reluctant to turn it inward. Because skeptically examining our own communities, our organizations, our heroes, ourselves, is not satisfying, at least not at first. And it’s not comfortable. Pointing out the shortcomings of others is easy. Listening while others point out your shortcomings is hard. And harder still is taking it in, giving those criticisms a fair hearing, acknowledging those shortcomings. And hardest of all is taking that acknowledgement of your own shortcomings and translating it into productive action. Hardest of all is trying to change.

It’s not just the presence of racists, misogynists, sexual harasser and other abusive or intolerant people that’s the problem. It’s the tolerance of their presence and, in some cases, even the defense of their presence by people who claim to be on the side of justice and equality. It’s the constant attempts to change the subject when the issues of abuse and harassment and intolerance within atheist circles are raised. It’s referring to people who try to talk about these problems as “divisive” or an “outrage brigade” or “fear pimps”. It’s a popular respected voice within the community telling his audience, “Yes, these problems exist; yes, those people are bad; but this isn’t really all that important, and I’m not going to do anything about it.” And it’s treating issues of importance to Black atheists, trans atheists, atheist women as distractions or niche concerns, which only serves to reinforce a status quo where the voices of the marginalized are silenced or belittled with tokenism while White cis het men continue to dominate the discourse.

The problem is so many of us atheists who fancy ourselves as open-minded, tolerant, progressive, socially-conscious-type guys fail to see or are too cowardly to face is that Mythcon was not an aberration. The attitudes that created and sustained it, and compelled people to defend it and make excuses for it, are not rare in our community. They are pervasive.

This state of affairs goes well beyond the atheist community, of course. One of the most difficult realizations I had to come to following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was that he was not an aberration, either. He was not an alien. He was a product of our society. He was of us. To focus exclusively, on him and not the factors that elevated him to the presidency, would be to treat the symptom while ignoring the disease.

It’s less daunting to regard people like Trump or events like Mythcon as aberrations, because then the fix is relatively simple: Just win the next election. And that’s if you decide that it’s a problem even worth worrying about in the first place. Maybe you should just let them have their shitlord conference next time! I mean, what do you care? Sure, it was embarrassing when all those people applauded for the guy who publicly taunted a woman about her sexual assault, but don’t blow it out of proportion. Don’t you know that trying to stop intolerant people from spreading their intolerance makes you just as bad as they are?

Sincere Kirabo, the Social Justice Coordinator at the American Humanist Association, recently wrote about how common the attitudes of the organizers of Mythcon and those who supported it are within atheist and secular humanist movement circles, and how the pervasiveness of these attitudes have caused him to disassociate with organized atheism. He writes: “It’s too common to meet those involved in this movement who not only don’t prioritize matters of social change for collective liberation, but also regard those who value these ambitions with contempt.” He goes on to say, “Those aren’t my people[.]”

They aren’t my people, either. I used to think they were – some of them, at least. When we all stood together almost six years ago on the National Mall, I thought of all of them my people. But I was wrong. And I’m glad I was wrong. People who applauded the denigration of women are my people. People who vilify and belittle people of color and activists who fight against racial injustice aren’t my people. People who dehumanize and denigrate trans people aren’t my people. People who engage in sexual harassment and abuse, or defend those who, do aren’t my people. And people who know that all of those things happen all the time in their own community, and look the other way, aren’t my people either.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are many people besides myself and Sincere who have largely or entirely disassociated from the movement as a result of these issues I’ve been talking about. Many who stood in the crowd, or in a few cases onstage, at the first Reason Rally but have now walked away from organized atheism.

So who are my people? And if what I’ve spent this video complaining about is the problem, what is the solution?

I strongly suspect I will find elements of both at a conference I’m attending in Washington, DC the first Saturday in April. I’m talking about Secular Social Justice 2018, a conference hosted by the American Humanist Association dedicated to amplifying the voices of people of color, addressing issues related to racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and teaching activists and organizers what they need to know to help drive social progress forward, all from a secular humanist perspective. It’s a one-day conference from 9 to 5 on Saturday, April 7th, at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, DC. General admission is just 25 bucks, plus 10 bucks if you want to throw in lunch. I got my tickets a few weeks ago, best money I’ve spent all year. If this sounds like something that you’re interested in and you can make it to DC on Saturday, April 7th, then ssj2018.com is where you need to go.

I am so looking forward to listening to, learning from, and meeting some fantastic people, some of whom I’ve admired for years. Like Sikivu Hutchinson, who wrote Moral Combat, a fantastic book, and who is one of the driving forces behind secular social justice. People who care about building a better world, who care about lifting up those who have been pushed down, who care about making sure that people who have been unjustly ignored or erased have a chance to speak and be heard, and who are brave enough to apply the values of reason and humanism not just to others, but to themselves.

Those are my people. Those are the people I want to spend time with and be humbled and motivated and inspired by. Those are the people I want to fight alongside. Those are the people whose friendship and trust I strive to be worthy of. Those are the people I hope to be counted among.

A few short years ago, it seemed like my fellow atheists and I were all part of the winning team, in a sense – we may have been outnumbered by larger society, but we were the ones who were right, dangit, and if only the rest of the world could take off their religious blinkers they’d come to their senses. And to be fair, I do still feel that way about matters of religion – that stuff is a cancer that eats away at everything it touches. But on the whole, it’s been a sobering experience to realize that socially conscious atheists are only a minority within a movement that has largely been taken over by a coalition of obsessively hateful cranks and their gutless, equivocating enablers, both of whom go up in arms the moment someone suggests we should examine whether our attitudes keep us complicit in the silencing of those who don’t fit the majority mold.

The thing about sobering up, though: It’s deeply disheartening to realize things aren’t as rosy as you once thought, but the process of disillusionment also leaves you better prepared to face the real world. And as unpleasant as it is to accept that atheism is full of terrible people, I’d much rather have a smaller circle of friends and allies I can be proud to associate with than find myself in a larger crowd that rallies behind any dipshit who makes a crack about “feminazis”, or a YouTuber who tries to trigger a rape victim, or an influential magazine that defends a convicted serial child molester. It’s your basic quality-over-quantity affair, and one Steve Shives or Sikivu Hutchinson or PZ Myers or Anita Sarkeesian is worth more than the rest of the Four Horsemen and their collected apologists combined.

(via Pharyngula)

Survey: Slim majority of Americans support abortion rights

Pew Research Center has a survey out showing the attitudes of various religious (and nonreligious) groups in the US towards abortion rights, and I’m almost surprised by how predictable the results are.

I think both religious and nonreligious people could have predicted that atheists and agnostics would be high on that list, albeit for different reasons – religious folks because they see both atheists and abortion as immoral, nonreligious folks because they don’t have old men in silly hats telling them that giving women autonomy over their bodies makes baby Jesus cry. That said, I’m a little peeved at those Unitarian Universalists for beating us out – dang hippies with their inclusive liberal beliefs.

The survey also shows how many members of conservative faiths break with their leaders’ anti-choice teachings. Sure, it’s hypocritical for almost half of Catholics to think abortion should be legal when their Church is one of the loudest opponents to a woman’s right to choose, but I’d rather have wishy-washy believers who support women’s reproductive rights than steadfast nonbelievers who fight against them.

(via retweet by @religionnews)

A righteous rant about organized skeptics defending Sandusky

It used to be a badge of pride to belong to the atheist and skeptic spheres, even if my involvement began and ended with blogging from my Canadian perch. Then came Elevatorgate, and the Slymepit, and the descent of YouTube atheism into a perverse punchline for shitlords, and a backlash against the idea that we should promote values beyond “gods and Bigfoot don’t exist”, and hyperskepticism aimed at victims of harassment and assault, and a hundred other indecencies that over the past decade gradually exposed the festering rot at the core of the movement.

So it’s with disgust but no real surprise that I find influential parts of the skeptic movement are now defending convicted serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky by attacking the credibility of the litany of victims and witnesses who denounced him. That’s horrifically typical of where the organized wing of skepticism is at.

I don’t quite have the words to express how fucked beyond belief this is. So I’ll let Steve Shives rage about it.

I believe, and stand with, the women and the children. Apparently that puts me at odds with much of the modern atheist and skeptic community.

I can live with that. I only wonder how they manage to live with themselves.

(via Pharyngula)

Daily Links: 01/07/18 – SWATting in a land of warrior cops

• Radley Balko writes about the deadly risks of “SWATting” hoaxes in a time when police are trained to feel constantly threatened by the populace they serve.

• Actual attorney Ken “Popehat” White breaks down the ramifications of Attorney General Sessions’s revocation of Justice Department memos meant to curb federal interference in states where marijuana has been legalized. In short: Nothing much changes, individual users aren’t more likely to be arrested, but it casts FUD on what the future holds.

• Skeptic Magazine: Dismissing sexual assault victims and defending convicted serial child molesters. It’s time to put the professional skeptic movement on the same moral pedestal as the Catholic Church.

• Knoxville News Sentinel columnist sees the Freedom From Religion Foundation sending polite letters warning about Establishment Clause violations, compares them to ISIS trying to kill Jesus.

• “Let me talk to you. Let me help you, please.” If we criticize, as we should, cops who jump the gun and cause needless bloodshed, so should we celebrate officers who put themselves at risk to try and deescalate situations.
  (via @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Egypt considering new law to ban atheism

Over the last few days, several outlets have reported that the Egyptian government may be about to outlaw atheism:

Following the 2013 overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on dissent that initially targeted the ousted president’s supporters but which later widened, targeting also liberal activists including many who had risen against Morsi: journalists, members of the LGBT community and now atheists.

The Egyptian parliament has in recent days discussed a proposed bill to criminalize atheism. The draft law was submitted by Amr Hamroush, the head of parliament’s Committee on Religion, who argues that lack of belief in God is a form of contempt of religion (something punishable by up to five years in prison under Egyptian law).

“Atheism rates are on the rise in Egypt. It is a dangerous trend that needs to be curtailed as it threatens the very fabric of our society,” he said, adding that religious institutions have a major role to play in countering the phenomenon.

It’s difficult to tell how likely the bill is to pass from the outside; we can only wait and see whether it does or doesn’t. But the fact that it’s entirely believable for this to happen illustrates everything that’s wrong with letting religion and state intertwine, and why it’s so crucially important to uphold strict secularism in government.

It also throws into sharp contrast all the deluded whinging from US Bible-thumpers who claim that criticism of their homophobia and preventing them from violating the Establishment Clause means the government is criminalizing Christianity. Once again, they only need look abroad to see what actual religious persecution looks like.

(via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

Daily Links: 12/27/17 – Trump admin. proposes axing offshore oil drilling safety regulations

• In which the Trump administration presumably looked at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill ^[pictured] and figured there’s really no need for any of the safety regulations implemented since then.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• FBI celebrates taking down a “terrorist” who told undercover agents he couldn’t go through with the attack they’d helped him prepare.

• A Minnesota prosecutor is the latest to think destroying a teenager’s life with child porn charges will somehow protect her from the evils of sexting.

• Arizona Republican lawmaker wants to force independent local officials to run with party labels in order to keep sneaky liberal sanitation workers and pothole-fixers out of office.
  (via @fark)

• Bangladeshi atheist blogger faces up to 14 years in prison because he “hurt religious feelings” by mocking Islam.

• Finally: Indonesian baker refuses to make a cake that would violate his religious beliefs. Clincher: Not for the usual reason.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Survey: Most Evangelicals are anti-trans, whilst most nonreligious are pro-trans

The Pew Research Center conducted a survey on the correlation between religious (specifically Christian) belief and acceptance of trans people, and the results are entire predictable: the more pious someone is, the less likely they are to accept their fellow trans man or woman. White evangelicals are particularly closed-minded on the issue.

63% of Christians, including 51% of Catholics and 84% of evangelicals, believe gender is determined at birth and immovable, versus only 37% of religiously unaffiliated people, including 29% of atheists and agnostics. (Of course, that number is still far too high to be ideal.)

Meanwhile, the majority of Christians (including 84% of evangelicals) think US society has gone too far or just far enough in accepting trans people (read: treating them like people deserving of the same rights and protections as everyone else). Conversely, 57% of religious ‘nones’, including 65% of atheists, think there’s still a ways to go.

This last chart is also unsurprising, and it helps explain the previous ones:

It’s long been clear that by far the best way for people to learn to accept other minority groups is to be exposed to them, especially if a friend or family member is part of one. Nothing changes a bigot’s mind about what trans folk (or gays, or Muslims, or atheists, etc.) are like faster than personally knowing one, especially if they interact on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to swallow the “transgenders want to rape kids in bathrooms” spiel when you can see that trans people are just regular people trying to get by like anyone else.

There’s also a bit of a self-fulfilling cycle going on – the more people meet trans folk, the more they come to accept them, which in turn means they’re less likely to avoid trans people in the future. The reverse also holds: the fewer people of different minorities you meet, the easier it is to believe hateful and divisive nonsense about them, which makes you less likely to want to interact with them. This is, of course, a large part of why urban areas, where tons of people from various backgrounds live in proximity, are typically far more liberal, whereas more rural regions where it’s easier to remain insular tend to lean conservative. It’s basic tribalism at work.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Daily Links: 10/04/17 – Trump’s personal lawyer scuttled fraud case against Ivanka & Don Jr. after large donation

Ivanka Trump (l) & Donald Trump Jr.

Got me some computer-related fiddling to do, so have a quick & dirty links dump.

• Bombshell from ProPublica: In 2012, NYC prosecutors were readying a federal fraud case against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Then came a hefty donation and a visit from Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz. The D.A. overruled his staff and dropped the case.
  (via @Yousefzadeh; RT: @Popehat)

• Ed Brayton explains the cold truth: The US Supreme Court is one inevitable retirement away from likely reversing Roe v Wade and axing 44 years of reproductive rights progress.

• Bell Canada, a major ISP and TV provider, is asking the Canadian government to blacklist piracy sites to stop people from “leaving the regulated [TV] system”.
  (via Privacy Online News)

• Today in stupid, from Fox News: Maybe the Las Vegas shooter just “didn’t believe in God”. Even her co-hosts look dubious.

• Today in stupid, from British Home Secretary Amber Rudd: “I don’t need to understand how encryption works” to know it’s helping baddies and that we need to stop that.

• It took the Georgia State Supreme Court to remind local law enforcement, by overturning a man’s conviction, that merely flipping someone off quietly, even in a church, is protected by the First Amendment.

• Follow-up: After declaring she’d rather go to jail than obey a court order to vaccinate her son, Michigan woman gets sentenced to seven days.
  (via @religionnews)

• Finally, the latest award for predictable “traditional family values” hypocrisy goes to … Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA). (No, he didn’t get caught with a male hooker. This time.)
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.