Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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1. 

   You get drivel about aliens, abduction etc from all sorts of people, not just Christians – there are atheists, agnostics…

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   […] last time I had had occasion to write about Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, above, was three years ago…

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   Whatever is presented on the BBC, and I must admit I do not watch the TV, the fact is that…

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   “The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…

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   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

WHEN I learned this week that Edinburgh had acquired a Museum of Magic, Fortune-telling and Witchcraft, created to cast light light on a grisly period in Scottish history when nearly 4,000 people were accused and 2,500 executed for witchcraft, I immediately made a connection between past religious moral panics and recent reports centred on hysterical demands by pastors for gay and trans people to be executed.

For example, earlier this year, in Spokane, Washington, Sure Foundation Baptist Church pastor Jason Graber, above, called for the execution the parents of transgender children. He said in a video:

They need to be convicted in trial and immediately shot in the back of the head, and then we can string them up above a bridge so the public can see the consequences of that kind of wickedness. There should be no excuse to not put these people to death.

Despite his clear incitement to violence, the language was not necessarily criminal, Spokane Police Department spokeswoman Julie Humphreys said in response to the outrage expressed by many.

We had a number of citizens reach out to us and brought to it our attention. At this point, we don’t see any evidence of a criminal violation. It appears that speech is protected under the Constitution.

Addressing the question of moral panics—in this instance with regard to Satanism—The Other Folk pointed out that “fundamentalist religious groups among nearly all of the world’s major religions have long histories of fearmongering, spreading false accusations of evil behaviour, and wrongful (often knowingly wrongful) persecution.”

In the case of Christianity, this has meant disseminating rumors of evil sabbaths. In punishment, the Church would manifest God’s wrath in whatever torture or ostracism or imprisonment they deemed appropriate, as jury, judge, and persecutor …. this ‘violence for the sake of our God’ mindset isn’t new.

In fact, these are constant, recycled narratives that rear their ugly heads in different ways depending on time, place, and whatever pious madness has wormed its way into society’s collective brain.

My own brush with moral panics

I was born in the midst of a Bible-based moral panic over race-mixing in Apartheid South Africa. The Calvinist Christian regime—and a vast number of whites—were convinced at the time that there was a communist plot to turn the country coffee-coloured.

Segregation was enforced by means of two draconian laws: the Immorality Act and The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. The first was introduced to prohibit, amongst other things, sexual relations between whites and people of other races.

Between 1950 and the repeal of the law in 1985, at least 19,000 people were fully prosecuted for violating the law, whereas thousands more were arrested without a trial.

The Immorality Act proved to be one of the one of the regime’s biggest embarrassments when, in 1971, five white men—one a Nationalist Party apparatchik and another a local councillor—and 14 black women were scheduled to be put on trial in a dusty rural village called Excelsior for contravening the Act.

I was among hundred of journalists from around the world who converged on the village to cover proceeding. But before the trial commenced all charges were dropped. The official reason was that witnesses refused to testify.

The real reason, of course, was that the state couldn’t stomach yet another international exposé of its horrendous Apartheid laws.

HIV/AIDS

Later, I found myself caught up in the moral panic that engulfed the U.K. over the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Image via Pink News

In “17 Famous Moral Panic Examples” Chris Drew, PhD, in a July, 2023, post, wrote:

Members of the LGBTQI+ community have always been subject of moral panic related to sex and sexuality. Their activities are often framed as uncouth and corrupting. When HIV was linked to homosexuality in the 1980s, media picked up on the idea that gay people were spreading HIV around the world.

Here, a folk devil was created. Gay people’s part in spreading HIV to the general population was generally exaggerated by the media. As the 1990s came along and the moral panic died down, there was a pivot to instead blaming HIV on generally morally deviant behavior of youth …

Once the war on transgender people fizzles out, who next, I wonder, will find themselves targeted by Christian hatemongers like Jason Graber.

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