The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Rich Puchalsky:

Jeremy Leader, thank you. The main disagreement that I have with what you wrote is that I don't really care whether the people here personally wouldn't force their theism on me, as long as they support church hierarchies that would. Does it matter what well-meaning liberal Catholics think as long as they still fall in line for, and give their money to, the Church? In some senses it does, but they can't pretend that they aren't part of what's being done in their name.

mythago, I don't excuse a liberal tradition of anti-religiousity because I expect it. I excuse it because there are very good reasons for it. I think that liberals should always be suspicious of the dominant religion in their country, because there isn't a single religious tradition that hasn't used its local dominance to force itself on others. Too bad if some people are surprised that you don't eat shrimp. Without the liberal tradition that produced those people, we'd be living in an officially Christian nation and your problems would be a lot worse.

I should add that I fully agree with Atrios when he writes (on his blog):

"Left-leaning people with strongly held religious views need to stop worrying about what some comedian says on some radio show and need to start worrying that the public faces of their religion are people who, if they had their way, would establish their own flavor of theocracy and revoke our right to worship as we please (or not at all)."

All right, I'll creep up on what I got disemvowelled for before:

I previously wrote that only a Christian in a Christian-dominated culture could have written Theresa Nielsen Hayden's "You are not obliged to believe in, or counterfeit a belief in, any religion at all. That is not at issue. You're grownups. No one's going to impose any kind of theism on you. No one's trying, either. I acknowledge that most of you have had the dignity to notice that."

Of course people are trying. Catholics are trying, when they try to apply leverage to the Democratic Presidential candidate that we have chosen, after the primaries. The only reason that they haven't been able to impose their theism on us is because we have continually fought to keep them from doing so. And yes, throughout history, we have been told that we lack dignity because we notice this.

But mentioning history is probably the wrong thing to do, because it makes it sound like the problem is in the past. The problem is just as current as all the people here who got righteously offended at jokes about Christians and were the souls of tolerance and apathy when someone called a declaration of Judaism during Easter "gratuitous". You see, this is why the complaint we hear is about liberals beings "anti-religion" -- because you're trying to play those of us who are religious but not Christian for suckers.

Avram points out that Jews have a secular/religious divide, to which I can only respond "So what?" -- the conflict between secular and religious Jews in the U.S. is not really about the secular Jews being anti-religious, it's about assimilation. And really, the point was that Maron was not making jokes about Christianity from some generic leftist position -- he announced that he was a Jew first. His jokes can't be characterized as generically anti-religious.

To continue with what I was saying before, there are reasons why liberals are often anti-religious. Liberalism originated in Enlightenment thought, and Enlightenment thought is deeply anti-religious, because organized religion of the day was a tool of perpetuation of an unjust social order. And guess what -- the *dominant* religion in each country still is. Catholicism in the U.S. is, to take one current example, trying to deny Kerry communion over pro-choice views (while ignoring the death penalty favoring views of other Catholics) and the larger strands of U.S. Protestantism are driving anti-gay legal action. Judaism in Israel, Islam in Saudi Arabia, Hinduism in India -- each is exactly as oppressive as it is permitted to be.

So Christians in America have to expect anti-Christian language from liberals. Yes, this will include jokes. Because some Christians in the U.S. really are doing their best to control both other religions in the U.S. and the atheists or agnostics who make up the bulk of liberal activism. I don't make these jokes myself, but I'm not willing to come down like a ton of bricks on those who do.

So why aren't liberals careful to distinguish between liberal and conservative Christians? Gee, why wasn't Patrick Nielsen Hayden careful to distinguish between anti-religious and non-anti-relgious liberals when he wrote about self-inflicted wounds, and how this was a problem for us, a problem of our own making? I'll let you think about that one for a bit while I check for disemvowelment again.

Theresa Nielsen Hayden writes: "Mr. Puchalsky, please feel free -- encouraged, even -- to try that one again with different word choices."

I don't think I'll try, thanks. The word choices in the disemvowelled post were, I think, appropriate for what was being said. So I'll say something else.

I am a Jew by descent, Unitarian Universalist by practice, and married to a minister -- so I think that I can speak as well as anyone about the experience of being religious and on the left. And I disagree with the original post and many of the comments here.

There's a reason that Jews and other religious minorities in the U.S. don't tend to get too concerned about people who are anti-religion. They have more important things to worry about, like prejudice against their particular religion. So Jews will obsess about anti-Semitism, Muslims about anti-Muslim prejudice, but only Christians, in general, tend to be offended by people who are anti-religion. And most people tacitly know this; "anti-religion" tends to be a euphemism for "anti-Christian".

Take Marc Maron's comments, for example. I've seen at least one commenter here inform everyone that his comments were directed equally against Christians, Jews, Hindus ... any religious believers. But, according to the Air America review, Marc Maron ("gratuitously") announced that he was a Jew before making his Easter comments. And the comments that were cited as being of concern in the review were all explicitly Christian. So the contention that the concern is general anti-religiousness doesn't seem to hold up.

So now we're getting into the same area that the Republicans exploit when they say that black stereotyping of whites is just as bad as white racism against blacks -- the idea that racism is racism, whether it's by a minority group reacting to a dominant one, or whether it's by a dominant group against a minority. And please, let's not have the claim that Christianity is not religiously dominant in the United States.

I'm going to wait and see whether this is disemvowelled before bothering to write more.

OK, since Lis Carey proved that she couldn't pass of the details of this incident reliably, I went back to check the original Air America review that seems to have been the source of the complaints. In addition to some mild anti-Christian humor, I saw the following complaint:

"Two of the hosts gratuitously announced that they're Jewish"

Lis Carey writes "It has strengthened my impression that most people commenting on this are completely unaware of the very nasty remarks that sparked this discussion originally, and that consequently they're finding it much easier to believe that it's just those Christians being oversensitive, or passive-aggressive, again."

There's a lot more going on here than Christian passive-aggressive behavior. *No one* seemed to find it at all odd that this reviewer thought that Jews should stay hidden. Lis Carey didn't. I'm really, really pissed off at the hypocrites who I trusted to represent this incident adequately and who, it turns out, really were just oversensitive Christian partisans after all.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: "What I really want to know is when "Fuck you, not my problem, I've got mine, Jack" became a reasonable response to mildly-phrased criticism of left/liberal/progressive culture and behavior by people inside that culture."

What I really want to know is how an objection that I've never engaged in the behavior under criticism and aren't responsible for those who do became "Fuck you, not my problem, I've got mine, Jack". Am I supposed to be walking away from helpless victims who can't defend themselves, or something?

"If you think this amounts to a demand that anyone "police" anyone, I suggest that you might want to take a step back and ask whether this remarkably nasty charge is really appropriate."

Yes, I think it is completely appropriate. I previously wrote that "some commenters" in this thread wanted us to police people. If you look back just a few comments, you'll see Anticorium suggesting that "You're wrong, and you don't speak for me" is a good response that I should be using whenever I encounter anti-religious liberal statements. For instance, I presumably should have posted that in response to the Kevin Drum comments, should have sent that off to the DJ, and said it every time I heard something that I disagreed with, in an attempt to publicly shame and discredit those holding that opinion. If that isn't policing opinion, what is?

Antocorium responds: "Cancer won't cure itself, after all. (Actually, I'm curious, what do you have to do that will go undone if you actually say "You're wrong, and you don't speak for me" when someone says that all Christians are schizophrenic fascists?)"

What better do I have to do? Just about anything. I guess I'm just not the kind of person who enjoys snapping "You're wrong, and you don't speak for me" off whenever any one of a nationwide group of other liberals writes or says something crazy. I assure you that if anyone prioritized this activity above a few others, they could easily find themselves engaging in full-time unpaid employment as a public scold. And the worst kind of public scold; one who is most offended by deviations from purity by those on their own side.

Antocorium adds:
"But if you want to consider this as some sort of election strategy or police action instead of respect for some of your fellow human beings, fine."

I was unaware that I showed respect for other human beings by looking out for people expressing opinions in order to say "You're wrong, and you don't speak for me" even when the person in question made no claim to speak for me.

Patrick Neilsen Hayden quotes me as being reprepresentative, and then writes:
"It's an understandable sentiment, but I'm not sure what on earth I said to bring it on."

Well, here's what brought it on. I've added emphasis:

"Self-inflicted wounds. Allen Brill and Kevin Drum discuss one of the biggest political problems facing those of us opposed to the modern right wing—a problem largely of our own making."

Why are all of us suddenly responsible for Marc Moron? I've never dissed religious people as a group, and neither have most of the liberals I know. Why was this directed to all of us rather than to the specific subset of us, or to the individuals, who are responsible? Why are we supposed to believe that this is a problem that affects all of us because someone chose to write something in Kevin Drum's comments?

The answer, according to some commenters here, appears to be that it is a problem for all of us because those of us who do not diss religion are supposed to police those who do. Sorry, but I have better things to do than to call on people to change what they say so that a group of people who they do not speak for will look good. It is futile, because you can't control everyone and it only needs a few contrarians to exist anywhere in the U.S. to provide examples that the right wing will seize on.

A lot of the thread has been about comments because the original post said "If you don’t believe that, try reading the comments following Kevin’s post—starting with the very first one."

Mark asks "If they [the radio Djs] don't speak for us, why are they on Air America?" I was unaware that I had voted for Marc Moron to be my official liberal representative. I thought that he was, you know, an entertainer hired by a private company. And what exactly am I supposed to do about this? Denounce him? Isn't that kind of a bad joke in a world where the Bush Administration is killing hundreds of Iraqis a week?

I'm a bit tired of having liberalism called to account for every comment left on a popular blog. The urge to contradict being what it is, I would think it very likely that the first comment after an article saying "we should not criticize X" will be one that harshly criticizes X.

After all, the people most highly motivated to respond are not those in agreement, but those who want to call attention to their views (or themselves) by disagreement. With enough people reading the blog, the chances of finding people to disagree with any issue go up.

Is it really necessary for me, as a liberal, to dutifully respond to each of these predictable outbursts and assure everyone that no, liberals really don't believe that? I'm sure that conservatives would like nothing better than that we spend our time policing ourselves in this way.

Every national Fascism has to have its own language for dehumanizing the enemies that it creates. Most fascisms preferred "vermin" or "disease". Bush, since he's appealing to Christofascists, prefers "no soul". Objecting that real Christianity does not consider anyone to have no soul is about the same as objecting that real people are not vermin or diseases. It's true -- but that's not the point.

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