The fact is that if the Pope were a leader of a secular group that advocated the same positions it would correctly by derided as the second most misogynist, homophobic, anti-science, anti-human life organizations in the first world (the first, is, of course, the Republican Party). There would not even be talk of a visit to the White House, and there is no way that a former Hitler Youth would be greeted with the sort of gushing press coverage Cardinal Ratzinger has enjoyed.

So I’m going to do something incredibly unpopular. Blame liberal (and moderate) lay Catholics. Why in [insert deity of choice]‘s name do these people support an organization that so blatantly rejects their values? I’ve seen people argue that their faith lies in the Church, not in the hierarchy. I have news for them. The hierarchy is the church. It is perfectly possible to believe in Christ’s resurrection, and whatever else you need to believe in, without a priest telling you to. Trust me, I did it for the first 16 years of my life when I was an unaffiliated Christian. The Church has long allowed lay people to perform the duties of the priesthood in times of emergency, and if ever there was an emergency for thinking Catholics, it is a hierarchy that ignores them, that patronizes them, and that prefers to kill people rather than compromise on their position that no latex is to touch the penis.

No, the real reason that liberal and moderate Catholics will not abandon the hierarchy is that they are afraid. They are not just afraid of going to Hell because they didn’t get Supreme Unction, they’re afraid that society will condemn them for their apostasy, and that is a very real fear. Some of my ex-Catholic friends have told me of how their family still pressures them to go to Mass, despite the fact that they are avowed atheists, and despite the fact that the Church believes them to be “objectively disordered.” Some have even been ostracized by their communities. (Thankfully I have yet to meet a recovering Catholic whose families have abandoned them.)

But why would you want to be a member of such a community? A community that labels you second class, or a community that would condemn you to eternal suffering for thinking that maybe, just maybe, people didn’t know everything there was to know about embryology two millennia ago, that attitudes towards women should change, and that calling 15% of the population “objectively disordered” is accusing God of sloppy workmanship at best, and sadism at worst.

There are much friendlier communities out there, and we have cookies and better sex!

*Seriously, even the Romans thought that transubstantiation was fucked up, and churches should never have any doctrines that you can write dirty limericks about.

He was a video game addict. His nickname at school was “Mullah Atari”.

It makes perfect evolutionary sense that men want more sex than women. Men don’t get pregnant, so as long as they keep having sex with different people, they can continue producing more offspring.

It might make sense, but only because that’s what’s been taught for so long. In fact, that theory is a little dated. More scientists now believe that both sexes of nearly all species are promiscuous. Females get the advantage of multiple mates vying for their affection and better genes for their offspring, and males get to cuckold other males.

It’s kind of bizarre to me that the only interpretation of this behavior by evolutionary psychologists is that males are “exchanging resources for sex.” I give my boyfriend gifts all the time, and it’s not because I’m exchanging goods for sex. It’s because I’m expressing affection and bonding with my partner.

This is one of the most common misconceptions about EP that I’ve seen, and somewhat understandable. It comes largely from the fact that scientists are lousy communicators. When an scientist says that “such and such a gene makes us want to have sex with someone that gives us diamonds,” she is not saying that our mental image of the perfect mate involves giving diamonds. Genes that control our behavior work through general drives.

In the case of gift giving and sex, we are attracted to people that give us gifts, and we have sex with the people we are attracted to. Our thought processes are less “x gave me an expensive present, therefore he/she is the person I want to share genes with” than “x is so generous, I’m head-over-heels in love for him/her.”

Big surveys show that men want more sex, more quickly, with more people, in every society tested.

This one’s sort of true. Yes, studies have shown that men have greater sex drives than women. However, with the normalization of promiscuity, the rates have been approaching that of our closest relatives, the Bonobo. That is, equal between males and females, and absolutely astronomical. Studies in France and Italy have actually shown that women have finally reached the equality that our biology seems to dictate.

Evolutionary psychology is basically untestable and thus is rife with bias and misinterpretation.

Of course there’s bias and misinterpretation in EP. There’s bias and interpretation in physics too. It’s the untestable part that really gets to me, though. The popular conception of science is that in order to test something, you have to be able to isolate it in the lab. If that were the case, evolution itself would be excluded from scientific discourse, as would geology, archaeology, and ecology. When approaching an historical science, researchers have to change their methods slightly, but the process is still the same. Data is collected (EP isn’t just coming up with just-so stories, as many people think), hypotheses are developed and revised, and the studies are peer-reviewed and critiqued. EP is a relatively new science, and has had a lot of rubbish and patriarchal baggage to clean out, but it’s done a good job.

Our arguments with ev-psych, on the other hand, are based on our own observations of our lives and society

Ah, good old personal experience. See, the problem with personal experience is that it’s, well, personal. That is, it’s not useful in determining what actually happens. If I based my view of the world on my personal experiences, I’d have to conclude that 10% of the world is Mormon, there are almost no people of color, and Panamanians are universally excellent piano and violin players. I’m pretty sure none of those are true, and if I rejected a scientific study based on those, I’d be naïve at best, and insane at worst.

If I have sex or seek a prostitute, it’s not because I want to oppress anyone – it’s because I really want to have sex and maybe I have no other way to do so consentually [sic].

I used to think that was true, and I wish it were true (it would reassure me that my gender isn’t composed of total asses), but it’s not true. Maybe a few men really do “patronize” prostitutes only as release, but the fact is that most Johns do so for the high they get off of controlling someone else. For example, did you know that a lot of men visit prostitutes for something other than sex, like to have a “conversation” that consists of them talking and the prostitute listening? It’s true, and it’s definitely because they want someone to control for a few hours. They could do it with their wife or girlfriend, but then they’d have to reciprocate, and listening just isn’t something “men” do. Also, when the Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, human trafficking increased because the Johns weren’t looking for sex as much as for someone to abuse. Prostitution is about control.

Animal societies are organized purely to ensure survival of the species. All behaviors develop as a result of their potential to maximize reproduction and maintain the species…. Humans, however, develop cultures whose goals are not always the maximization of reproduction and saving the species.

Not true either. First, animal societies are not “organized purely to ensure survival of the species.” If this were true, chimps would never attack other chimps. Evolution promotes behaviors that ensure a particular gene gets passed on. The species as a whole is irrelevant. More importantly, it is impossible to separate human society from our evolutionary past. For example, why did communism fail? We simply are not equipped by our genes to care enough about non-relatives to work for them without some gain for ourselves. Why have we never had a truly non-violent society, even when the dominant religion forbids violence (even Tibet has waged war in the past)? Because we are genetically programmed to consider violence as an option when dealing with a rival.

Clinton can’t get other Democrats elected.
This is a big one. A Democrat in the White House doesn’t matter much when congress is still controlled by fundies and neocons. Both of the Clintons have shown that they are unwilling and unable to help other Democrats in their campaigns. In 1994, Bill Clinton dropped the ball in several important Senate and House races, helping get Gingrich the Speakership. In 2000, they avoided Al Gore like the plague. At the time, people assumed that it was because they thought Bill’s presence would be toxic to Gore’s campaign and only remind people of the little blue dress, but it’s since been revealed that he was spending so much time on his wife’s Senate run that he didn’t have time or money to devote to the Democratic presidential candidate. Considering Bill’s popularity among Jews and the elderly, who could have swung Florida the other way, the Clintons share at least some of the blame for Bush’s eight-year reign. Obama, on the other hand, has already helped steal Denny Hastert’s seat away from the Republicans.

Clinton won’t create a new Democratic base.
Look at two candidates’ bases: Obama has young people, moderates, and people who have never been involved in politics before; Clinton has old white people and blue-dogs. Clinton’s base is steadily disappearing as half die and the other half becomes neo-con chickenhawks. Obama, on the other hand, has the ability to reinvigorate the party and bring new ideas and people into the fold.

Clinton will kill the new DNC
It’s no secret that Clinton hates Howard Dean. In 2006 she and Bill set up a “shadow DNC” to take over the DNC’s functions if Democrats lost. Needless to say, they didn’t, but the shadow DNC is reportedly still functioning, and several sources have suggested that if Hilary is elected that the shadow DNC will effectively run the party, and the DNC will become obsolete. Why is this bad? Because the current DNC is revitalizing the party, and the shadow DNC, staffed with old hands like the disastrous Terry McAuliffe and Clinton partisans like Harold Ickes, is trying to return to the strategy that lost us the presidency.

The strategy promoted by these idiots has been rightly called the “insult forty states strategy.” Basically, we ignore strongholds like California and New York (which might not be strongholds any more if Dems don’t keep organizing there) and the red states (where we got most of the new seats that flipped the Senate in ’06) in favor of around ten swing states. The Republicans, on the other hand, have been focusing on worming their way into Dem strongholds, and ultra-blue states like California and New York have had to endure years of Republican leadership. Howard Dean’s shift to a fifty states strategy has already helped us win in districts everyone had thought impossible: Virginia and Missouri, to name just two. Hell, we even stole Illinois’s 14th, previously occupied by Jabba the Hutt’s second cousin once removed, Dennis Hastert. (Okay, that was a cheap shot.)

First of all, Archie Bunker would never vote for Obama, and neither will the severely bigoted Americans like him. The speech wasn’t addressed at them, and Democrats would be well advised to ignore them rather than court their vote and lose progressives’, feminists’, and minorities’ in the process. Second, I don’t think that Americans are as stupid as many pundits make them out to be.

The last 40 years, of course, has seen the rise of sound bites, press conferences, and sensational manufactured news at the expense of real journalism. This doesn’t reflect on the consumer, however. The fact that Anderson Cooper’s exposés on poverty in Africa, investigative reports on corruption in congress, and hard-hitting blogs like TPM Muckraker have been so popular shows that Americans do care about knowing what’s going on in the world, and can handle in depth news and analysis.

The responsibility for reducing journalism to 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith lies not on demand, but on supply. When deciding where to assign journalists, editors and producers have two choices. They can have them sit in a studio or outside a courtroom and deliver prefab news reports that are guaranteed to draw an audience. Or they can assign them to sifting through documents, interviewing witnesses, and jetting about the world to dangerous places, with no guarantee of a story. Naturally they pick the former.

So, the consumers end up getting a bad rap. Because they will settle for the cheap gossip they can get even though they would prefer the expensive journalism they can’t, pundits claim they want gossip and are so toddler-like that they can’t comprehend a sentence longer than 15 words.

Don’t get me wrong. Americans are still materialistic, selfish, shallow, and bigoted. But that has nothing to do with whether Obama’s speech will resonate.

Truth be told, Clinton and Obama don’t differ all that much—they’ve voted together 95% of the time, and where they do differ (NAFTA, health care), neither is stunningly brilliant. What we’re voting for in the primaries this year is not a policy platform, but a style of leadership. I admire Hilary’s ability to get stuff done and her political acumen. But those qualities dictate that she should stay right where she is—in the Senate. Obama, on the other hand, is a natural cheerleader (unlike Bush, who had to develop those skills at Andover), which, as Representative Kingston (I can’t believe I’m quoting a R-Georgia) said, is the essential function of the President.

The President can neither introduce nor pass legislation, nor can he/she/it approve or reject treaties or unilaterally deploy our military (no matter what Alberto Gonzalez may think). Aside from signing legislation, appointing the Cabinet, and commanding our military once Congress does declare war, he/she/it exists only to represent our government to us and to other nations.

So, which do you want to be our face to the world? This?

Or this?