Thoughts About Barack Obama, Sean Faircloth, and Edwina Rogers

What up with this site these days, refusing to face facts, and twisting itself like a pretzel to defend the indefensible? Ms Rogers lied like, well, a Republican is every interview she has given since she was given the post, trying to whitewash her party’s well established track record on issues that matter to us. I think we have a right to insist that people who claim to represent our interests don’t lie about their past, and about the positions they have publicly embraced, no?

It isn’t that she’s a Republican. It’s that she’s acting exactly like a typical Republican politician: the truth doesn’t matter, only expediency, and erasing the past is a-ok as long as it allows you to continue doing every crooked thing you’ve been doing.

I’m not buying your defense, and I really believe you need to have your ethical sense checked: you are starting to become a knee-jerk tribalist, ready to defend every action and statement, however mendacious, however racist, as long as it comes out of the mouth of someone in the movement.

Unless that person is PZ, of course…

Well, I guess Ms. Rogers knew, when she took the job, that she would be working with… Skeptics.  While I didn’t like the interview, I know that I may not be the intended audience. Part of her strategy should be to make us seem less threatening to secularists within the Republican party. That may be good for us in the long run.  I agree with you, Hemant, I think we should see how well she represents us to others, and how well she supports our issues. We need to give her time.

Mitt Romney can’t be trusted with anything. He says whatever is politically convenient. He was for gay-rights in the 90s. Then became governor of MA and a rising star with higher ambitions and he was against same-sex marriage in his state. Now he wants to be president and he has become even more anti-gay because that’s what is required in the Republican party.

” So, I’ve been reading the conversations about Edwina Rogers and listening as everyone goes out of their way to find reasons to discredit her.”
———–

I really didn’t go out of my way.  I just googled her.  I find her dishonest statements regarding Valerie Plame and the Iraq War as well as her working for people who have actively sought to promote religious intrusion into laws, to be more than troubling.  I cannot imagine working for people like Trentt Lott and George Bush.  Can you?

It doesn’t really affect me honestly, but it shows poor decision making skills on the part of the SCA…to not see this coming and to not prepare Edwina to answer the questions of skeptics, who don’t accept answers reserved for policy wonks and such as was the case in Wash. D.C.  Skeptics won’t pretend to accept answers that contradict what we can easily research ourselves.

I am interested in her probably huge pay cut to work for the SCA…so there may be something.  But Edwina Rogers can be seen as someone who will work for people and support their stated goals, even if she doesn’t really believe them.  This might be an unfair characterization, but that is my default position until I see her in action.  I can only go by her positions and connections in her past.  

Regarding Sean Faircloth, it would concern me more if prior to being hired by the SCA, he worked for groups that were opposed to the goals of the SCA.  I haven’t heard that to be the case yet.

 You are absolutely right, Joe. It would have been far better to hire a secularist with a slightly weaker background/resume than to farm this important position out to someone who worked for and was, in fact, the enemy.

I really, really would like to give her the benefit for the doubt. I’m trying very hard to do so. But that is absolutely not easy when she’s claiming that there’s some mythical document she saw in the mid-90s that told her that 70% of Republicans were secular. That’s not just a lie, it’s an unforced one. 

There’s all of this focus on that she is a Republican, but that’s beside the point. In her introduction to us, here on your blog, she insisted that the people she’s been working for were totally behind gay rights, separation of church and state, etc. She’s either lying or so incredibly out of touch as to be useless. And she doesn’t have to say this, she is under no obligation to tell a largely progressive group that her associations are something they’re not. All she had to say was that it would be a struggle, but she thinks there are places where coalition building is possible.Hemant, please, stop engaging in apologetics for this woman. We’re stuck with her regardless, so we’ll see what she does, but so far what she “does” is tell us blatantly untrue things that make us think she’s a liar or an idiot. Potentially a combination of both.

I continue to be skeptical of this pick. It’s not that I think she’ll work against us by any means, it’s that I find her portrayal of the Republican party is either a deliberate fabrication or the result of a great dose of illusion, given the actual observable reality of the GOP’s disdain for our community. Whether it’s white-washing or delusion, I worry about how that will effect her ability to do her job.

Personal dedication to the cause of secularism is certainly a plus, but it’s not even entirely needed. I doubt the lobbyists for, say, corn syrup feel some impassioned dedication to the product. They advocate for it because that is their job as a lobbyist. We’ve been a small community for a long time, so we’re used to getting our people in combo-packs; speaker, leader, lobbyist and pundit all at once. However as we grow we will have to eventually accept that people will be working for our cause not so much because they share it, but because we pay well. I’m not saying Edwina fits this model. She may be very dedicated to the cause on a personal level, but the concern isn’t that so much as wondering about the competence of someone who views the GOP in a manner that seemingly contradicts reality.

Having said that, going all out take-my-ball-and-go-home is overkill. I’ll wait and see how she does.

So, should a Christian group be allowed to discriminate against hiring non-Christians, if they can do the job?

Can an atheist group be allowed to discriminate against hiring Republicans, if they can do the job?

I can’t help but feel that we are going into dodgy territory.

 
People who vote Republican value economic policy over the ethical treatment of women, secularists, and the LGBT community.  Anyone claiming otherwise is either an ignorant voter or a lair.

Honestly, I had nothing bad to say about her until she flat out lied. If she had acknowledged the problems with the party but said that for practical reasons having to do with her economic positions she stayed with the party, I could have lived with that. We all know there are a lot of “fiscally conservative” or libertarian atheists and secularists, and while I disagree with them about a lot of things, I could live with on in her position if she was the best person for the job. But not when she lies to us, and not only lies but does so in a way that suggests that she thinks we’re stupid enough to figure it out. It’s like she has no idea of the venn diagram of skepticism, atheism, secularism, and science. Doesn’t she realize that a huge number of supporters of the SCA are committed skeptics and extremely bright people who are going to check out her story rather than accept it at face value? I don’t like being lied to, especially when the lie is so transparent that it implies that the liar also thinks I’m a complete idiot.

Go away and pollute your own blog.

Jesus, you can’t get away from this guy.

Really? Are you new to the internet?

Since you’ve been reading the conversations, Hemant, then what is your reaction to her multiple claims about Republican positions which fly in the face of observable reality?

Is she genuinely that far out of touch with her own party, and simply hasn’t paid attention to politics for the past couple of decades, despite her political role? Or is she consciously being dishonest to the people she’s now supposed to be representing? Or do you believe there’s another explanation – and, if so, what is it?

You can be a Republican and dislike the candidates being put forth by the religious right, and therefore not vote for them. There are also those who do vote for economic policy, even if it’s against their own social progress, because to them basic necessity is more important than higher-level enjoyments (like freedom of conscience). I know several people who vote this way, even if I don’t agree that we are so desperate economically that we need to vote for economic policy over socially-important issues. I know it’s tempting to have an us vs them mentality, it makes things so much more simple, but try not to demonize people simply because they don’t agree with all of your political opinions. 

His tentacles are far reaching.

Dodgy territory? The question is not whether or not she can do the job, the question is whether she will. Just in the interview with Greta alone she prevaricates, obfuscates, and dodges questions like Vince Vaughn at a tournament.  She’s not some unknown quantity, she has a record. Of total bullshit. It’s not that she’s a Republican, it’s that she lives in a fantasy world so far divorced from reality that she may have arrived here while fleeing from the servants of the Nothing. Either that, or she lies like the truth is a dose of highly contagious and disfiguring herpes.

So, okay, then, Hemant, apologists, et. al.. I’ll say this right now. I hope I’m wrong, and will happily admit to being so as soon as I am convinced that I’m wrong. It happens all the time. But I don’t think this is one of those cases, based on the evidence.

That being the case, ten shades of O hell yes she should not have been hired. Hiring someone who was the enemy is generally considered to be a bad move. And make no mistake, she was the enemy. Judging from the interview alone, she still is. Those sounds that came out of her mouth in answer to some pretty simple questions have so little bearing on what is that they can’t be called words by anyone familiar with the concept. She didn’t apologize, admit to being mistaken, or even just say “Yeah, well, I lied. It’s what I was paid to do.” All of those are positions I could have made some peace with. So having someone who saw reality once as it flew by her window while she was riding her flying unicorn in “Republicans aren’t anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-choice, and pro-theocrat world” represent those of us who live here in reality seems like a piss poor decision to me.

she’s genuinely not seeing what the rest of us see

OK, but did she not, in the interview with Greta Christina, say that opposition to gay rights, opposition to secularism, and opposition to abortion could not be Republican positions because the  majority of Republicans did not agree with them? Is it possible that she doesn’t know that there is an official Republican Party platform that lays out the Republican position on these and many other issues? Is she not smart enough to not make claims about what is and isn’t a Republican position without first reading the party platform and finding that, yes, all those things are official Republican positions? I’m sorry, but her statements to Greta reveal her to be either lying or incredibly ignorant about her own professional field.

But even if she hadn’t said that, does what you are saying really make sense? She didn’t see the religious right taking over the Republican Party? She worked for George W. Bush! You would have to completely block out all political media to have not noticed, and even been told directly about, the religious right’s takeover of the Republican Party. There have been a huge number of stories about just that over the last 15 years. And again, she worked for George W. Bush. And we’re to believe that she didn’t sit in meetings where people talked about the importance of winning the religious right? At no point did it become clear who was holding W’s leash? I’m sorry, the claim that she honestly didn’t think the Republican Party had been largely taken over by the religious right and become anti-gay, anti-choice, and anti-secular, is just not credible.

I’m all for giving someone a chance, but I need to see evidence of promise and evidence of progress.

Regarding evidence of promise, so far there is plenty of unpromising evidence that she is not suitable.  Her responses to pointed questions about that evidence are disappointingly ambiguous, fuzzy, and laden with apparently naive ignorance about the party she still supports.  In other words, she doesn’t talk like a focused activist. She talks just like the obfuscating, equivocating, massage-your-mind sound bite-spewing politicians she’s been hanging around.

I’m hoping that joining the SCA will force Rogers to re-examine the party she pledges her allegiance to.

The SCA might be beneficial to Rogers in waking her up to reality, but in the meantime will she be beneficial to the SCA?  The central rationale that I’ve heard for hiring her is that she will have many doors open to her that someone without her Republican history would find closed.

I think those doors are slamming shut right now.

Republicans have no problem instantly abandoning and vilifying one of their own the moment they’re tainted with something antithetical to their ideology. Their loyalties quickly evaporate. They run away from atheism faster than Ricky Gervais runs away from a hand grenade tossed onto his sidewalk cafe table. Edwina Rogers is now officially and publicly an “activist atheist.” I’m afraid that when she calls on her old political affiliates, her phone calls will not be returned, her emails will be deleted, and receptionists will tell her that Senator so-in-so is regrettably unavailable.  The shunning might even be worse than what she’d face if she were known as a liberal Democrat, because her old Republican affiliates know that she knows things about them. The very same insider knowledge that she says will be an “in” will be seen as a reason to lock her out.

Regarding evidence of progress, I’d need to see some refreshingly unambiguous, powerful statements and actions to counteract both her past affiliations with a party that is deeply antithetical to secularist causes, and her troubling apparent obliviousness to that party’s dangerous dalliance with extremist religious groups and ideas.

Here’s a handful of suggested things she could do to gain more credibility:

Repudiate statements like Mike Huckabee’s 2008 remark that the Constitution should be rewritten to fit the Bible, a sentiment that he and others have repeated since in many forms.

Call out Mitt Romney for his 2007 speech where he tried to rally the evangelicals under his banner against the “religion of secularism.” This is one of the very few themes that Romney has remained constant on, and he’s recently escalating it, claiming that Obama is waging a “war on religion.” Romney is a shameless demagogic liar, and she should call him that, word-for-word.

Denounce the Republicans who affiliate with “The Foundation” aka “The Family,” aka “the C Street Group” for its many nefarious manipulations, not just limited to promoting barbaric anti-gay laws in Uganda.

Decry and specifically refute Rick Santorum’s repeated assertions that there is no, and should be no separation of church and state.

Publicly scold the Republican Party for being in bed with many  Dominionist individuals and groups who spout revisionist American history that claims the U.S. is a “Christian nation,” as an attempt to lay the ideological foundation for a Christian theocracy.

Now even just one of these would probably demolish whatever inroads Edwina has with the Republican Party, but it would certainly give her much more credibility among the people who hesitate to continue supporting the SCA while she remains working there. Do we want to be represented by someone who plays the same dishonest games as those we oppose, or do we want to be represented by someone who bravely tells it like it is?

”
Edwina Rogers is only different in that she’s coming from a party that actively opposes our values.”

Like Ms. Rogers, that isn’t honest. If you’ve read her interview with Greta Christina, you know that she denies the very nature of the Republican Party and its platform … she denies that it actively opposes our values. She’s a professional liar, a sleazy person who refers to “the Democrat Party” and wraps gifts with dollar bills.

” as everyone goes out of their way to find reasons to discredit her”

Why is Hemant telling such an offensive lie about us?

”
Still, she has said time and time again that she doesn’t align with the party on those fronts”

It’s not just that that’s not enough for us, it’s that Hemant is flat-out lying; she never said any such thing. What she has said, repeatedly, is that the Republican Party does not have the platform that it does in fact have.

 I think accusations of lying are a bit much. 

Yeah, everybody who disagrees with my politics is either stupid, or malicious.

Edwina Rogers is only different in that she’s coming from a party that actively opposes our values.

I agree with a lot of the other arguments that this is certainly not the only way she’s different. But… come on, isn’t this enough?! She worked for and ardently supported not only a party, but many individual politicians, who actively oppose our values.

”
she’s genuinely not seeing what the rest of us see — the GOP heading further to the right”

That right there means the SCA should not have hired her.  Such a  person does not have the intelligence to perform the stated requirements of the job.

Sorry but this whole thing is smelling like a book deal for Edwina Rogers.  You know, “My Year Undercover with the Atheists”.  You know, “Eat, Pray, Love” or “Julie and Julia”, but with Atheists. 

This really does go too far. Being accommodationist is one thing, bending over backward to deny reality is another.  Misrepresenting the arguments of those who disagree with you is just too much, Hemant.