I don’t receive many comments on my posts. I ‘m not complaining about it, I’m not a player in the blogosphere like so many others. I do seem to have a somewhat regular readership though, and occasionally one of them will comment on a post that sets me to thinking.
A few days ago, I wrote this rant and actually received a couple of interesting comments. I was lamenting in the post the lack of strong voices, especially among atheists to stand up to the SJW bullies and call them out. I received the following comment from my friend Damion Reinhardt from the blog network SkepticInk that had me stop and think a bit more about what I was really attempting to say in the post.
Damion commented:
I cannot think of any major victories they have scored within organized atheism, other than very occasionally getting a blogger or public speaker blackballed.
That’s true but the idea that these bullies can even get away with that, rankles me.
I responded:
What bothers me most is that the major atheist/skeptic organizations will not denounce them: Lindsay, Silverman in particular. They have been roundly trashed multiple times by these people as well as their organizations and missions (remember Jamila Bey at CPAC? She hasn’t blogged at FtB since 3 March) and they remain mostly silent instead of calling them out for what they are: hateful bigots.
What I said is also true. These awful people have smeared many people over the last few years and have had a special animus toward anyone that happens to have a higher profile within atheism than the rest of us. Damion well knows this, not being one of the “big” names, they have smeared him on multiple occasions.
Why do these organizations continue to coddle these smear merchants? Why can’t they place them on the do not invite list to any of their events? That’s a question for the ages, I think. It’s perplexing to many of us that when wrongfully attacked, none of those on the wrong end of the SJW spearpoint will take any effective action.
Without some sort of sanction, event organizers only empower these dogmatists to continue their agenda of maligning otherwise good people. This needs to stop. Atheists need to take a careful look at the organizations they support and ask themselves if they want to support skeptical and atheist groups that do nothing to discourage this kind of behavior.
Conservative Skeptic 
While I can sympathize with the idea of “sanctions” of one sort or another, I think it can be a bit of a slippery slope. You might want to reflect on these quotes:
JS Mill:
Thomas Jefferson:
Christopher Hitchens on Thomas More, something that Dick Strawkins quoted recently in the Pit:
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I’m not calling for silencing or restricting their freedom to say whatever they want whenever they want. What I’m calling for is for organizations they regurlarly slime to not invite them to events. That doesn’t mean they can’t blog, tweet, put on their own events (Like FtB has in the past), just that orgs that many of us pay to belong to don’t line their pockets and continue to make them believe they are empowered to be jerks whenever they so desire.
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If some of the things the usual suspects have said in the past weren’t the end of FtB, it is difficult to imagine that this will be. Then again, being attacked from within is a very different thing than being attacked from without. Pass the popcorn.
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The orgs are in a tough spot in that they are undoubtedly trying to grow their membership. If they thought that continuing to invite divisive bloggers would hurt them more than help them, I suspect they’d be less likely to do so.
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