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 #115: Homeland Security separates refugee families

Whoops – I’m so out of it today I almost forgot to give y’all your links.

• Last year, Homeland Security threatened to punish families that cross the border illegally by separating them. They’re now doing just that to refugees fleeing violence – only now they deny it’s meant as punishment. Because there must be a perfectly reasonable basis for wrenching a crying child out of their parents’ arms and detaining them in different states.
  (via @hiattf; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Baton Rouge, Louisiana officer goes 94 MPH on a 50 MPH road and plows into a woman’s car, killing her 1-year-old infant. So naturally, police arrest the mother and charge her with “negligent homicide”.

• Death meets Stephen Hawking at the edge of the Dark Desert over half a century later than expected.

• My guess is Trump heard about the sci-fi trope of space marines and decided, “I want that.” Includes a name only Trump (or a child) could come up with.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: Jesus jailed for saying he’d bomb the gays. (I’m so sorry.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

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

Daily Links #111: House passes bad anti-sex-trafficking bill

• US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.

• As Trump ^[pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
  (via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)

• New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
  (via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)

• Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.

• Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
  (via @radleybalko)

Source: The Hill

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

Daily Links #107: Texas school district threatens to suspend students who protest gun violence

• Thanks to this Texas school district, colleges may soon see “I got suspended for protesting against kids being shot in school” on applications they receive.
  (via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

• The Pennsylvania district map saga continues: As predicted, Republicans are suing over the new, non-gerrymandered map released by the State Supreme Court, likely hoping to keep their advantage until after the midterms.

• Aurora, Illinois cop secretly installed surveillance cameras in his ex-wife’s home so that he could spy on her during and after their divorce. The city and police chief both want him fired. The arbitrator and police union argue a suspension is good enough. The only reason he’s not going to jail is because the ex-wife refused to press charges.
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @Popehat)

• More than half of US states are taking it upon themselves to protect net neutrality.
  (via Techdirt)

• Germany’s speech laws continue to be a raging dumpster fire of censorial stupidity.

• Speaking of terrible laws, Swedish politicians want to set the prison penalty for copyright infringement on par with manslaughter.
  (via Privacy News Online)

• Finally, what’s more predictable: That Twitter would ban thousands of bot accounts, that this would impact the follower counts of far-Right tweeps in particular, or that they’d scream “censorship!” over it?

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

Revelations from the Baltimore police corruption trial

It’s hard to think of the police these days without picturing militarized goons who care little for the people (and pets) they harm, and it’s increasingly clear why. Let’s just take a look at Baltimore, where an ongoing trial has revealed some truly amazing goings-on within the city’s police department:

Baltimore cops on trial (left to right): Marcus Taylor, Momodu Gando, Daniel Hersl, Wayne Jenkins, Maurice Ward, Evodio Hendrix & Jemell Rayam

According to the Baltimore Sun, it started when a 19-year-old woman from New Jersey overdosed in 2011 and authorities began tracing the origin of the drugs. It led them to a Baltimore drug crew and the discovery that a Baltimore police officer was involved. By the time they finished investigating, eight members of the elite Gun Trace Task Force had been charged with crimes ranging from racketeering to robbery.

You want robbery? How about the story of the corrupt squad stopping a drug dealer during a traffic stop and robbing him of $6,500, then going to the man’s home without a warrant and taking another $100,000 out of a safe? Sgt. Wayne Jenkins would ask suspected drug dealers, “If you could put together a crew of guys and rob the biggest drug dealer in town, who would it be?”

If you’re interested in police targeting regular citizens, maybe you should read about how the Maurice Ward had a technique of driving fast at groups of people, slamming on the brakes and chasing whoever ran. Perhaps you hear how Jenkins believed that all young men with backpacks were dope boys. Or people who drove Honda Accords with tinted windows.

And then there’s the revelation that the supervisor of the unit instructed officers to carry a toy gun just in case they found themselves “in a jam” and needed to plant one. When one of the officers, Marcus Tayor, was arrested, officials couldn’t figure out why he had a toy gun in his glove compartment.

It’s like these cops saw Training Day and thought it was an instructional video, only they figured they could outdo it in every way. And then they did, and got away with it for years. It’s impossible to know how many people may be in jail or in the ground whose names are saddled with accusations that were never true, bolstered by evidence these cops pulled out of their ass – or their glove box, as it were. These rotten cops are (hopefully) going to jail for a long time, but their legacy will live on for longer still.

Just another example to point to whenever someone asks why it is so many people, especially minorities, distrust or outright hate the police, and why police reform movements are gaining steam across the country.

(via @radleybalko)

Another Republican official convicted of voter fraud

Steve Curtis

The only thing Republicans harp on more than “illegals” and “unborn babies” is all that voter fraud that Leftists supposedly get up to. Which is a little ironic, considering the vast majority of people who get arrested for voter fraud are Republican officials. Today’s example:

The former chair of the Colorado Republican Party was sentenced to four years of probation and 300 hours of community service on Friday for committing voter fraud and forging his ex-wife’s signature on her 2016 ballot.

Steve Curtis, who chaired the state’s Republican Party from 1997 to 1999, has said in his defense that he filled out the ballot — and certified it with his ex-wife’s forged signature — during a diabetic blackout.

He added at his sentencing hearing Friday, as quoted by the Greeley Tribune, that “[i]t was a normal and customary thing in my house with my prior wife and with Kelly (Curtis), to fill out their ballots. … I didn’t know that was illegal.”

Funny, for some reason I don’t imagine he’d go easy on any Democratic voters who’d present that excuse:

In 2016, before charges were filed against him, Curtis notably argued on a talk radio show he hosted that “virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats.”

It’s too bad Trump’s voter fraud commission ended before it could determine which party actually breaks the law at the ballots more often, isn’t it? Oh, wait – that was an obvious sham intended to bolster Trump’s lies and justify Republicans’ efforts to discourage Democratic voters around the country. It takes remarkable chutzpah to pull every sleazy trick in the book to block your opponents from voting, from drawing ridiculously gerrymandered electoral maps to requiring unnecessary IDs to eliminating early voting to outright purging eligible voters from state databases – curiously, all moves pushed by Republican-controlled legislatures and that impact predominately Democratic voters – and then turn around and accuse them of cheating at the ballot box. But then, chutzpah is all Republicans have in lieu of actual policy.

(via Joe.My.God.)

2017 statistics debunk Trump & Sessions’s crime fear-mongering

One way Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have tried to defend their tough-on-crime posturing is by pointing to (when not lying about) a supposed massive wave of violence sweeping through America’s cities. Their evidence: Some large cities saw an abnormal increase in violent crime in 2016, ignoring every other statistic that shows the overall crime rate has been dropping for decades across the country.

Now the 2017 numbers are in, and they show that trend is still going strong:

New analysis from the Brennan Center:

All measures of crime in the 30 largest American cities — the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate — are estimated to decline in 2017 according to a year-end analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis directly undercuts any claims of a nationwide crime wave.

Key findings from the analysis include:

• The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from [2016], falling by 2.7 percent.

• The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable.

• The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago [down 11.9 percent] and Detroit [down 9.8 percent], as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. … New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.

[…]

This is all very good news. The question now is if Trump and Sessions will continue to lie about the crime rate in America, or now that they’ve been in office for a year, if they’ll try to take credit for it.

It’s disheartening, in a jaded way, how difficult it is to tell which it’ll be. In fact, the only uncertainty revolves around whether Trump and Sessions’ policies, governed by their law-and-order shtick and unconstrained by facts, may slow or even reverse this trend. Given Trump & co.’s penchant for tainting absolutely everything, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.