652: Dobson of a B.... Edition

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Warning, Noah and I brought new profanities back as souvenirs like paquik and ping ping.

This week's episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by BetterHelp and by the old and ex-proved Cracker Barrel.

We've learned our lesson and we promise to never change a goddamn thing about your gravy if I gave you again.

We promise.

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Cracker than ever.

And now.

The Scathing Atheist.

This one goes out to all of my fellow survivors of Dr.

James Dobson and his abusive teachings that hurt so many millions of children.

Y'all, if you are within sound of my voice, we made it.

We now no longer live in a world that includes Dr.

James Dobson.

A world where, despite everything he tried to teach us, we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men.

It's Thursday.

It's August 28th.

And it's race your mouse around icons.

I'm doing it so much faster than you.

I have no illusions.

I'm Eli Batvik.

I'm Heath Henry Faster.

And from Aaron Burrs, New Jersey, Anover, Michigan, and Wake Russ, Georgia, this is Skatin Atheist.

On this week's episode, Noah cuts out the long pauses while Heath and I race mouses.

Eli eats my goddamn dust.

And I will attempt to do an atheist podcast, I promise.

Fast.

But first the die tribe win.

So watch.

When I was a kid, I was inundated by the myth of common sense politics.

It was most prevalent in comedy, right?

Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, Mad Magazine, Dave Berry columns.

But the idea that there was this common sense middle ground that the politicians couldn't land on was just ubiquitous.

You'd find it in comedy, but you'd also find it in like everyday conversations and even in the news media.

Right, when Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather would break neutral character long enough to do opinion stuff, they'd adopt this common sense air and pretend that they weren't expressing their opinions or just one side of the political aisle here.

They were just, they were expressing everybody's opinion.

They were just expressing common sense.

And as a kid, this seemed like a problem with a super obvious solution, right?

We just fire all the politicians and replace them with regular Joes.

And as childishly naive as this is, it actually stuck.

It was and is an espoused political viewpoint all over this stupid ass fucking country.

Because of course, common sense politics never existed.

It was an illusion created by privilege.

The people writing, producing, greenlighting, and presenting these nuggets of common sense were upper-income, white, cisgendered, straight Christian men.

The people they were consulting with and conversing with and comparing themselves to, they were all in that same demographic as well.

So what seemed like common sense was just the insular beliefs of 75% of their 25% of the country.

But that, you know, it seemed like an overwhelming majority opinion because it was three out of every four people you meet.

And sure, the people buying into this illusion did have to encounter contrary opinions from large groups of people here and there in their everyday life, but those people were minorities, right?

And they already had kind of prepackaged ways of dismissing those people's opinions.

After all, when you deprive somebody of equal education long enough, you get to withhold equal opportunity to succeed.

Yes, obviously, but you also get to dismiss them as uneducated as a bonus.

Now, eventually I woke up to that, right?

Or I guess that's taking too much agency there for myself.

Eventually, I was woken up to that.

I was forced to reckon with the fact that my early beliefs were shaped by an environment that, despite looking an awful lot like all the shit that I saw on the TV shows, right, was not the universal experience.

And what seemed like common sense to me, you know, ideas like everybody should have to take the same test the same way.

No group should be more protected than another.

And if we just ignored race, racism would go away.

Those were, in fact, naive bullshit.

Because a kid with a motor disability should have longer to take the fucking test.

And groups like Sishat White Christian Guy don't need protection.

And even if we could somehow ignore race, the centuries of historical oppression would still disadvantage everybody who isn't white.

But unfortunately, as the American electorate is so desperate to remind us, not everybody woke up to that shit.

A lot of people have the same bullshit notion of common sense politics that Ronald Reagan sold them in the 80s, and they don't see no damn reason to update it.

And I was reminded of that last night when I saw one of these dumbass copy and paste outrage lists that my brother-in-law shared on Facebook.

Now, I've long since cleansed my Facebook feed of Trump supporting fascists, but my wife still has a profile she maintains for family shit.

So she sees this crap constantly.

And mostly she lets me ignore it, but this one was too fucking dumb for her to keep to herself.

So she showed it to me.

And it's just this list of conservative talking points preceded by a self-aggrandizing sense of burden.

This is the fucking woe-is-me monologue about, I just can't believe it's fallen upon him to remind everybody of all these common sense points that the body politics seems to have forgotten.

And the various bullet points that follow range from nonsense that nobody is advocating for, as in, we shouldn't open our borders to rapists and drug dealers, to gross and intentional misstatements of reality, as in, men shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sports, to just made-up bullshit, as in, schools shouldn't have litter boxes for kids who identify as cats.

There were some fucking 25 points on the bullshit list, and not a single fucking one of them could be honestly correlated with anything that's happening in the universe or that any significant portion of people are advocating for.

And when they do vaguely intersect with real policies and real goals, they've been translated into some fact-averse bigotspeak that distorts them to the point of caricature.

But because he's been sold this myth of the elusive common sense politics, he can convince himself that his opinions aren't competing in an arena against other opinions, generally more informed than his own.

No, his ideas are competing against the perpetual lack of common sense that's been plaguing our nation since, you know, enter whatever mythical era they think America was great again in.

Now, you divorce this guy of that illusion, and suddenly he's got to look at this list and say, well, this is fucking nonsense.

It can't possibly be that these are the policies that 50% of the country are fighting for.

Perhaps I should go ask my brother-in-law, who I know to advocate liberal political policies for a fucking living, and ask him if these actually accurately represent the other side of the argument that I'm having, right?

Because if we start from the place of, let's assume that we're all dealing with the same amount of common sense, you can't land on, and that side wants kids to shit in kiddie litter boxes.

But of course, clinging to this common sense illusion isn't just a mistake born of bad judgment and insufficient reflection.

It's a defense mechanism.

Because if you accept that people actually do have common sense, you have to entertain the idea that you could be wrong.

And that's a tough thing to do no matter what, right?

Like even for skeptics who pride themselves on changing their mind, it's a tough thing to do.

But now think about how much harder it has to be to admit you're wrong when you look at the country burning down around you and you realize that if you're wrong, your wrongness was the match.

They're talking about your Jesus.

We interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news, Mulletin.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Juno and Fairbanks to my Anchorage, Heath End Wright, and Eli Posnick.

Fellas, are you ready to chill?

You know it.

Absolutely.

Oil spill.

Yeah.

Oh, well, yeah.

Well, an oil spill in Alaska means we need to get some shit taken care of eventually.

Not now, maybe, someday.

But it leaves us plenty of time for a word from this week's sponsor, BetterHelp.

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I feel like if I really got there on my sidewalk, like for the last time, no.

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Oh,

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All right, guys.

Thanks.

Oh, what about a switch 2, though?

Do you think maybe?

No, yeah, no, a a switch 2 would definitely help.

Dude, what?

It's a great system.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick blurted out a wildly illegal demand for active Christianity during a session of the state Senate last week.

During his tirade, he admonished people for failing to stand while Ken Paxton's acts was loving Jesus into a microphone and threatened to have them removed from the chamber if he caught them failing to sufficiently love Jesus in the future, which, of course, he can't fucking do.

And I don't mean he can't have them removed.

I mean he can't threaten to have them removed.

That is the very definition of religious coercement.

It's like a shitty gym teacher who doesn't know it's illegal to invite kids to underage drink in his basement is the lieutenant governor of Texas.

Yes.

And you know what?

A track sleeve this.

All nerds who aren't drinking, take a fucking lap.

Take a lap.

Suicide.

And be Christian now.

Do a suicide.

Right.

So yes.

That's what I'm going to do.

Last Friday.

Dogging it.

Jesus Christ, dude.

So last Friday, the Texas Senate opened up with a prayer by Senator Angela Paxton, former wife of National Embarrassment and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And during her sales pitch for her religion, a few of the observers in the gallery ignored the request to stand for the prayer.

So afterwards, Patrick let them have it, saying, quote, for those of you who didn't stand, next time you come to the gallery, you stand for the invocation.

It's respected the Senate.

If you don't stand for the invocation, I'll have you removed.

End quote.

Now, he said this despite the fact that, you know, they have a constitutional right to choose which religious rituals to participate in.

That's three days' detention.

Wait, what do you mean we don't have that?

Well, then why am I acting like the bad guy in the breakfast club if I don't have the parents of the guy in the breakfast club?

Okay, I feel like this is a great setup for Texas Democrats to do shenanigans.

They're all in one district next year anyway.

Yeah, that's true.

You might as well get some in there, right?

He's doing like flash mob dances, getting dragged down by Dan Patrick's bouncer that he thinks he has.

Fuck yeah, I like it.

And it's worth noting here that Patrick is well aware of and has exercised his right to not participate in religious invocations in the state house.

Right.

So in 2007, when Patrick was a state senator, a Muslim cleric was invited to give an invocation by a fucking Republican.

And not only did Patrick fail to stand for it, he left the fucking chamber.

He later said that he, quote, didn't want my attendance on the floor to appear that I was endorsing that, end quote.

Oh, close one.

Close one.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right.

So just to review, simply being in the room with a Muslim prayer is an endorsement in his mind.

But standing for and thereby participating in a Christian prayer, well, that's just respecting the Senate.

That's the level of irony we've reached without ripping open an irony singularity that sucks the world in.

Oh, we've actually already done that.

It's the thing on the back of Trump's hand he keeps covering with makeup.

Oh,

what is happening there?

It's crazy.

It's like he forgot to use the painting and his hand got Dorian Gray.

No, there's a lot of stuff.

There's the painting looking fucking amazing somewhere.

And in Jehovah's Witless News, when you're an atheist, one of the things that's most surprising about religions from the outside is why so many people stay in a thing that sucks.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, even if you buy the eternal promises, the day-to-day of being a religious person most of the time means not getting to fuck who you want or wear what you want or not wear a magic hat.

And perhaps there is no culty corner of religions cupboard that better exemplifies this than the Jehovah's Witnesses who don't get Halloween, who don't get fucking birthdays or secular higher education.

That is until this week when they changed their minds about that last thing because it turns out it's way easier to tithe with a high-paying job.

Okay, you can work for Palantir to end the human race if you fucking tithe.

But if there's a fucking cake on Friday before your birthday that weekend at Palantir, you are out of the cult.

Y'all, we've been making ourselves intentionally dumber for so many generations now that we can't remember why we was doing that.

So what we're going to need is for some of y'all to go to college long enough to get smart enough to figure out why we weren't letting y'all to go to college.

And then

stop.

Yeah.

So first off, big thanks to Hemet Meta over at the Friendly Atheist blog for calling me up on the phone last night and after a long talk about our hopes, our dreams, and the deep affection we hold for each other, giving me an inside scoop on this story.

Or I'm on his email list, which you can join at friendlyatheost.com.

By all means, follow whichever head cannon you prefer.

Oh, so okay.

I just want to point out that me and Hemet actually were friends until you started all this creepy fucking shit about him on the show.

Just tell him to show me his feet.

Now, I want to say that J-Dubb's rejection of higher education goes way further than the usual religious anti-intellectualism, right?

As Hemet points out in his article about this decision, in the past, Jehovah's Witnesses have produced training videos on how to delete people from church leadership if they send their kids to college.

And church leadership has compared higher education to swimming with sharks.

So this week, when governing body member David Splain called further education, quote, a matter for personal decision, end quote, current and ex-JW members were a little bit taken aback, to say the least.

What the fuck is a personal decision?

We've been literally talking, man.

What are you talking?

It doesn't even make sense.

Also, what the fuck is a matter?

You haven't let us learn stuff in quite a while.

Yeah.

One last thing about this story.

Whenever religion does something like this, like when the Mormons allowed brides to have shoulders this year, or when the JWs allowed missionaries to wear short sleeves because they were literally dying of heat exhaustion, there's this laudable impulse to praise any kind of reform towards modernity as a good thing.

And it is, right?

I'm glad a generation of young people won't have to choose between higher education and being literally shunned by their families.

But we cannot and should not praise the good without acknowledging the bad, the harm, the loss, and the damage done by these policies up until the second a dying old white guy decided to call Baxis.

And when a church acknowledges that,

that's when I'm personally going to start handing out pats on the back.

Fair.

And in testing to the teach news,

We have yet another story about Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, and his cum stained office.

Sorry, allegedly cum stained office.

There you go.

Can't be sure if he finishes two Jackie Chan movies.

As we mentioned last month, Walters teamed up with Prager University to create a Christian nationalist anti-woke exam for out-of-state teachers who apply for a job in Oklahoma.

Then a week later, Walters had a meeting in his office with two Board of Education people and he showed them full frontal nudity on his TV, possibly a Jackie Chan movie.

So it's easy for the rest of his dumb and evil shit to fly under the radar, but we put the radar low.

Not sure why everyone doesn't do that.

And

we have some new details about the anti-woke exam that includes some sample questions.

And we learned that he's targeting two states in particular, New York and California.

Kind of like a Muslim immigration ban, but for wokeism with teachers going to Oklahoma.

Yeah.

Question one.

Does my state live off the surplus tax delivered to our nation by your state?

Yes.

Get the fuck out of here.

I'm sorry.

Is this a big problem?

Fucking woke people from California and New York deciding they'd rather work for Ryan Walters and live in Oklahoma?

I can't imagine that's a big problem.

You guys need to watch more Hallmark movies.

It happens to high-quality business lawyer ladies all the time.

Honestly, Heath, I would be worried.

I would be worried.

Okay.

And a big thanks to Kenny for sending a link to skatingnews at gmail.com.

Hi, Kenny.

So you'd assume that anytime an idiot starts using material from Prager U in the public school system, the Board of Education would just fire that person, or at the very least, get rid of the stupid material.

But apparently, the Oklahoma Board of Education will not have a chance to review the material before the exam requirement goes into effect, which is already, it already is in effect.

Walters quietly implemented the new requirement last week, telling any California and New York applicants about the

very tricky test they'll need to pass at some point.

And he announced, quote, it's a very America-first approach.

We're not bringing in woke indoctrinators into the classroom.

Yeah, maybe bring somebody in who explains that putting in on both sides of the clause is unnecessary and makes you sound like a fucking idiot, but nothing woke.

Got it.

Imagine the insane amount of willpower it would take to hear someone say that and not punch them in the face.

It's Herculean.

It's Herculean.

I wouldn't know.

So here's what we know about the exam.

It has 50 questions and it's multiple choice.

So already lazy.

In addition to basic questions about the government, there's going to be a section about gender.

Read, there's a transphobia section, and of course a religion section.

And based on some of the sample questions, I'm getting the impression the religion section and the government section are the same fucking thing.

For example, one question says, why is freedom of religion important to America's identity?

A.

It makes Christianity the national religion.

B.

It bans all forms of public worship.

C, it limits religious teaching in public life.

D, it protects religious choice from government control.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

I see he's using the citation-needed model and hoping for a secret answer.

So is this the fucking format throughout then?

So what's one plus one?

A 100, B a pony, C two, or D, two, and also a marriages between one man and one woman as God intended.

It is going to be like that.

That is the impression I use.

And I'm genuinely not sure how Ryan Walters would have answered that sample question.

Oh, D.

It's absolutely D.

The whole idea is to root out anybody who would say C, which is fucking correct.

We get you with the trick question because it's the thing everyone knows to be true.

Yeah.

I feel like he thinks it's also maybe A, it makes Christianity the national religion.

But yeah.

Yeah.

Here's another sample question that we got.

What are the first three words of the Constitution?

A.

No, it doesn't matter.

This doesn't matter, but A, in God we trust.

That's not even the right number of words.

No, no, it's literally four.

That's four.

Get some math in there.

B,

life, liberty, happiness.

No.

So that's three, but that's not the beginning of a

knew it needed to be three words.

Eventually, he knew.

Yeah.

He thought the Constitution began with life, liberty, happiness okay now that i have your attention you know we're doing a thing called the united states think about what those two answers implies that two answers implies that he went life liberty and the pursuit of happy well that's too many words i've got to make that three words moving on nothing else to correct here in my question

all right well that was a and b c was the united states and d was we the people okay at this point i think answering these questions without punching someone should disqualify you from teaching in the state.

Right.

Also, we the people is the beginning of the preamble, which is not really part of the fucking constitution.

I think Article 1 starts with just like the legislative branch is blah, blah, blah.

So that's what that is in terms of mattering.

And the rest of the exam is made of secret questions that Ryan Walters hasn't perfected yet.

He said he needs a bit more time to finish.

And, you know, heard that from his office before.

So naturally, in response to the news about the exam, teachers unions blasted the policy and called it a stupid political stunt that's going to discourage applicants while Oklahoma is in the middle of a big teacher shortage.

And I get the point they're making.

It's definitely a stunt, but this exam is not the reason teachers in California and New York don't want to move to Oklahoma.

Right.

Yeah.

Ryan Walters is a human being.

That's a reason.

But also.

California and New York are literally number one and number two in the country for average public school teacher salary right now.

Oh, there you go.

Oklahoma is number 35, and Oklahoma is number 45 in terms of starting salary.

And crucially, Oklahoma is in Oklahoma.

The whole damn thing.

They've got the wind whipping down the plane and the salary with the fringe on the

governor looks like Milk was a person and they have a senator named Mark Wayne, all one word.

All these people are Republicans.

But yeah, the Orwellian teacher exam full of lies doesn't really help.

Right.

All right.

Well, the next 43 pages of Heath's notes are other ways that Oklahoma is inferior to New York and California.

So we're going to let him go through that, get out of his system while we hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucitha.

A man wrote the Bible, a horse was smart.

If it's a legitimate race, you're a slut, right?

Cooking can be fun.

Hey, I'm proud of a man.

This weekend, Missogy.

Y'all, I missed so much misogyny since the last time I talked to you.

And I'm kind of glad that I did.

Sorry, but when the building's on fire, the least you can do for yourself is step outside and cool off here and there.

But I'm back.

And holy shit, are the sexism stories just lining right up for my return?

So, let me start with a man who loves push-ups so much he sleeps on the floor, Pete Hegseth.

He took a break from losing pull-up contest to 71-year-olds and being a worthless drunk to attend a church associated with Doug Wilson.

Wilson is a notorious hate hate preacher from Moscow, Idaho.

We've talked about him before, but there are a lot of assholes to keep track of.

So let me just emphasize that this is one of the most dangerous gun fetish we're going to need to rise up against the liberals, Christian leaders we've ever covered.

And among his many disgusting beliefs is the subordination of women.

Well, that dude just opened a branch of his Guns in Jesus Church in Washington, D.C.

And among his early adherents is our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

This is a church that openly advocates for Christian theocracy at the point of a gun, run by a man who has described women as, quote, the kind of people that people come out of, end quote, and preaches all about female submission and male headship.

He doesn't think women should be allowed to vote.

He advocates for the criminalization of homosexuality.

And he doesn't think atheists, Muslims, or Hindus should be allowed to hold office.

That's our Secretary of War's new pastor.

So with that warning out of the way, we'll head to, where else?

Georgia, where a damning report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just outed a pastor named Bradley Reynolds.

This guy, who is the vice president of Truitt McConnell University, apparently used his position as a school and spiritual leader to groom and abuse a student there for years, even long after she left the school.

And look, the details are in the story, which will be linked in the show notes, but it's not the kind of shit I want to lay on you unaware.

That being said, they're not the kind of allegations he can be arrested over.

I mean, the story contains emails from him, so we know for a fact that he's a creepy fuck that used his authority as a spiritual leader to coerce her into a physical relationship that she did not want.

But that's legal because she was an adult when they met.

A student at his school, sure, but an adult one.

So instead of going after him legally, she's going after his reputation.

She does, after all, have the emails.

So it's not like she can't prove that he's a deeply fucked up individual.

But there's also pretty strong evidence that the school's president actively actively ignored her situation.

And a former staffer says they brought up their suspicion to that president, so it's not like that he can pretend he was completely unaware.

So it is possible that there's still some punishment coming his way beyond the ruined reputation.

And while we're on the subject of victims taking control and seeking their own justice, I have one more story I want to share with you.

The victim here is Heather Jones, who took a job as a dancer when she was a neglected 17-year-old.

At that job, she meets a guy named Bob Sullivan, who says he's a doctor and promises to take care of her.

So for years, she has this sugar daddy relationship with the guy.

But along the way, she learns that he's not a doctor.

He's a fucking Catholic priest.

And when she sort of gets herself together and does rehab and shit, she realizes what a fucked up thing it is for a 30-something priest to start a relationship like that with a 17-year-old kid.

So she threatens to go public.

He offers her over a quarter of a million dollars to sign an NDA.

But, and here's my favorite part, she's been going to law school.

She looks at the NDA, realizes there's no fucking way it'll hold up in court, takes the money, and then outs the predator anyway.

Now, in Alabama, the age of consent is 16, so he didn't technically break any laws, but he broke Catholic rules by fucking anybody at all.

And they've committed to at least publicly taking this shit super serious.

So Sullivan has been placed on an indefinite leave, and Heather is presumably lying around in a bathtub full of his money.

And on that unusually happy note, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli.

Thank you, Lucinda.

And in wall-be-damned news tonight, U.S.

District Judge Nancy Brassel thinks Minnesota has too damn much church-state separation and not enough anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

But luckily, she had a chance to do something about it when she struck down a Minnesota law that would bar public funds from going to private colleges that insist on bigotry as a prerequisite for education.

Or I'm sorry.

The law didn't go that far, actually.

So the law barred private colleges that insist on bigotry as a prerequisite for education to pause doing that for a minute while receiving public funds.

But they'll suffer no such oppression anymore, thanks to her.

Yeah, they didn't even make them wear armbands.

It was a sticker on an armband, and I think that matters.

Okay, if you guys murder every banker because you think they're Jewish, we can't give you money for your thing.

You get that, right?

Right.

So first, a quick thanks to at fly on the wall13 on blue sky for sending me this story.

Still better to send the news to scathing news at gmail.com, an email inbox that now that we've given Tim access to it has approximately the same number of users as Blue Sky.

But fuck it.

Yeah, man.

Go not Twitter.

You see that fly on the wall 13?

No prizes.

Respect the format.

You don't get anything out of the prize box.

Anyway, so

the law that this judge just struck down was a provision that affects the state's post-secondary enrollment options or PSEO program.

So basically, this is the state-run version of the advanced placement program.

And it goes like this.

A college-bound high school student attends classes on a college campus instead of the high school classes.

The state reimburses the school for the cost so that the high-achieving student gets college credits for free and the state gets the best possible education for them without wasting a seat in an algebra class that wouldn't have challenged them in the first place.

But of course, some of the colleges participating in this program are private Christian schools.

And some of those require their students to sign a statement of faith in order to attend.

And some of those include shit like, I'm not gay, I don't support gay marriage, and I think trans people are a figment of their own imaginations.

So the state passed a law that said those colleges couldn't require PSEO students to sign those statements as a prerequisite to taking classes there.

And so the schools sued.

Look, we're not sure what if P not Q means, but if we can't make kids sign a pledge not to tell us, we cannot teach them this price.

Phil, is modus ponens gay?

I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like it might be gay, right?

It sounds like it's, is that, I think that's the fat above your dick.

There's a lot of dangly parts on them words and stuff.

Yeah.

So no.

Phil is this the fat above your dick gay?

Now, consider how generous the state is being there, right?

Like they're still willing to pay these bigot fucking schools to teach, you know, fucking like secular math courses or whatever they're teaching to high school students.

They're not teaching religious shit.

They're still teaching secular shit.

They're just saying you can't insist on a minimal level of bigotry or Christianity for people who still pretend those words have different meanings for those students, right?

But that was too damn much to ask, apparently.

So they sued and they won.

The dumbass judge offered up this bullshit analogy about how a school asking for a similar statement, you know, of a secular nature wouldn't be excluded.

So that makes this unconstitutional.

And no, yeah, she was not able to imagine what a secular version of I promise to be this specific religion and not gay would look like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just remember when you think it's hard to be an American, I'll remind you that some people have to write future law textbooks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So bad for those

AI bots.

Yeah.

Writing books for themselves.

It's going to be exhausting for them.

That's tough.

Yeah.

So, so, of course, the end result of this is no shit.

There are now publicly funded Christian-only, straight-only, and cis-only classes for public high schools in Minnesota that Minnesota taxpayers will be paying for.

Now, there is an option where the state legislature creates a revised version of the program that excludes all private colleges, but doing that would cut off a lot of rural students from any access to the program at all, which is, of course, a price that Christians are willing to pay to protect their bigotry.

And in LGBTQ news christians are burning books again

more or at the very least they're stealing them from the library in the hopes that the gayness contained in said books will not infect their children and when anybody has an ideology that stupid you know we're going to talk about it yeah okay so i'm guessing we don't have too many christian right listeners but why not if you run into any of those people let them know that our super gay Patreon only podcasts can be downloaded for just a dollar an episode and then burned in a pyre.

You can burn the MP3s and we would have streamed powerless at the

staff to let you.

Yeah, nothing hurts an author's bottom line.

Like their books constantly needing to be replaced at libraries.

Go, you go, guys.

That's exactly right.

So, first off, a big thanks to Greg, who is from Shelbyville, Kentucky, the town at the center of our story who sent us this.

First, to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Greg, I'm going to heavily imply what you should do as i unfold my word talent in a moment here and if you do it you get one million heath points can't offer that redeemable as always at scathing news at gmail dude you're inflating the economy yep this is a problem

we have to pick tariffs we have to put tariffs on greg now i'm so sorry the opposite of the intended effect right so the villain of our story is pastor austin keeler who in june of 2024 released an insane video accusing the library of turning kids trance on facebook and look podcast listener, I know we don't usually play clips on this show.

We read the quotes and then we joke about them, but I need you spiritually to hear this man's voice.

Morgan?

These books are written for children.

And if you have the Holy Spirit of God in you, you ought to be filled with righteous indignation that books like these are being pushed through your library.

Books containing stories of six-year-olds performing oral sex.

Books encouraging young people to embrace the art of drag.

In this book, it is admitted on page 23 that subversion, that is, the attempt to overthrow or undermine the image of God in man is their goal.

And like the cross-dressing stage actors of old, laughter and humor makes it easier to fly under the radar.

Also contained in this book is the glorification of incest in rosary-strewn sex toys.

Stop selling, man.

I'm so

I want to be clear.

This isn't one of those like AI generated voices that doesn't really get inflection just yet.

That's a duce.

You sure?

No,

I watched the fucking video.

His whole fucking video is like that.

Is there an edit between each of you?

No, there's not an edit.

That's the other thing.

It sounds like it's badly edited.

There ain't no

one to do it.

Well, that's one take.

That was all one take.

One beautiful take.

Now, podcast listener.

If you were tuned into a higher brow atheist podcast, Seth Andrews would tell you in his milk chocolatey voice that accusing homophobes of being secretly gay is, in fact, a deeply problematic and lazy trope that does very little to discourage their bad behavior while doing very real damage to the closeted and openly gay people who might hear what you say.

But you're not listening to that smart motherfucker.

So fuck Austin Keiller is the gayest sounding dude I have ever heard.

I have heard a dude give enthusiastic consent to getting fucked in the ass while he was blowing another dude, and it was nowhere near as gay as Austin Keillor sounded in that clip if austin keeler read a calendar every month would be pride month also his opinions are bad yes and while we're at it he looks like john ritter's corpse was reanimated by a haunted carnival barker mustache yeah it's the tiny he has the twirly mustache but it's too small for his face it doesn't go no it's like

it doesn't seem like it originated on his face no no it looks like he stole it from a child's halloween costume like several times a day it's like my eye yes exactly.

Very pokey mustache.

But gayest voice in the world aside, his plea seems to have worked.

And this week, one of his congregants confirmed that they have checked out and not returned the offending books in spite of acquiring tremendous late fees.

Because, as Pastor Jerry Dorris puts it, quote, We reject the idea that civil rebellion is only legitimate when it's done with rainbow flags or Marxist slogans.

Civil disobedience is a biblical category when when obedience to God and love for neighbor demand it.

Okay.

End quote.

If we convince these people that dollars are gay, I think we could solve the inflation.

We could two.

We get a twofer.

Yeah.

There you go.

And have their money.

Right.

So as my co-hosts have already pointed out, the library is

just going to buy new copies of those books.

I mean, look, I guess there's a chance that they wouldn't have if they hadn't made national news.

But now that Christian idiots are bragging about what they did to the media, they pretty much have to buy new copies of these books.

So what these bigots have done by stealing gay books is give these gay books more sales, library sales, which are significantly more valuable.

And they now have to fund the libraries that buy them with their late fees.

I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes, some days, Christians are so fucking evil, they loop all the way back around to good again.

Yeah, don't they, though?

Well, and remember what P.T.

Barnum said, Christians, there's such thing as bad publicity.

That's right.

And finally, tonight, in the Iceman Cometh News,

Christy Noam killed a puppy.

Yeah.

I'm going to do a story, but I've been seeing Christy Noam's name all over the news for a while, and nobody started their article with, she killed a puppy

and is also the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

And here's the story.

Anyway, Christy dome who killed a puppy is now running the dhs after having killed a puppy and in order to recruit people to join ice and become colleagues with dean kane

they've been using their official government accounts the dhs official government accounts on social media to release promotional videos full of bible quotes and christian nationalism themes

and turning their violent abduction department into a literal holy crusade.

That's happening.

Yeah, they're the contemplars, if you will.

And a big thanks to StormyD for sending a link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Stormy gets, let's give Stormy an ooh-ooh triad.

Ooh.

Nice.

Okay, so I'll start with a video posted last month showing Christy Noam, the puppy killer, in a helicopter with border patrol agents.

And the VO says, here's a Bible verse I think about sometimes, many times.

I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send?

And who will go for us?

I said, here am I, send me.

That's from Isaiah 6, 8.

To be clear, that was Isaiah volunteering to be just like an obnoxious prophet who goes around scolding people, but nothing about masked abductions.

I mean, what's more thief in the night than stealing someone's grandma when she shows up for her legal green card?

Well, there you go.

Yeah.

Well, and again, we're faced with the no Bible quotes are actually profound problem here, right?

She's desperate to find something wise here that could guide her or whatever.

The best she can do is Isaiah waving his arm back and forth in the back of the class like a fucking bootlicker, yelling, pick me, pick me.

That's the quote that verse is about.

Yes.

And not that it really matters.

Nothing in the Bible fucking matters.

But Isaiah warned against idolatry, like, you know, worshiping some guy and acting like he's infallible.

Isaiah said, don't do that.

Oh.

He also said things like, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor.

But apparently the DHS thinks Isaiah was volunteering to do some ethnic cleansing.

Speaking of which, they also posted videos about manifest destiny.

Back in the westward expansion times, white colonists would say, hey, Native Native Americans, we're killing you and taking all your land.

Be cool, though.

God said we have a divine mandate.

But that got kind of like long and clunky.

So we made a new term for it.

It's manifest destiny.

And the 1872 painting by John Gast called American Progress was an iconic symbol of that idea.

It shows a white lady holding a book and floating over a prairie.

She could fly, apparently, and she's leading some pioneers as they all run after a group of fleeing Native American people.

The DHS put that in a promo video, that painting.

They did.

Podcast listener, Heath has included this picture in our notes, and it would make a problematic state flag go, Y!

Yep.

Yeah, no, there are Rudyard Kipling poems that would like to distance themselves from this painting.

Louise, it's all black skies over the Native Americans and sunny skies over the white people.

Yeah.

So here's when the DHS

really went off the rails.

Oh, okay.

The puppy killer acting like the prophet Isaiah in the attack helicopter and the lying angel of ethnic cleansing were more of an even-handed message.

But sure, sure.

Who hasn't been there?

Then they released a Batman video.

Fucking what?

Yep.

That's what happened.

It's 40 seconds long, and there's a link in the notes if you really want to check it out.

It shows the Border Patrol getting ready for another abduction, putting on their sweet night vision goggles and their tactical whatever bullshit.

And then we see a verse from the book of Proverbs come onto the screen.

It says, the wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous are bold as a lion.

And then we hear Robert Pattinson doing the opening monologue from the Batman.

He says, they think I'm hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows.

You hear that, Robert Pattinson?

You have the opportunity opportunity to sue a lady who kills dogs and kidnaps people.

This is the second most beloved you could ever be in this nation.

Okay, so here's my theory.

Here's what I think happened.

The DHS was definitely feeling stupid after letting Dean Kane become a member of ICE and, of course, accidentally releasing a video of Dean's obstacle course training at a kennel club, it appeared.

And they wanted to distance themselves from Superman as much as possible.

So they were like, Batman?

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

Also, Christy Noam killed a puppy.

She did and bragged about it.

All right.

Well, it sounds like somebody needs to go yell Martha at Christy Noam to save the day or whatever.

So we're going to wrap the headlines up, get on that.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Giumanni.

And when we come back, we'll set our DJ booth up at another graveyard.

We first debuted the Son of Obituary segment on episode 263 when Billy Graham graced us with his silksongianly overdue death in 2018.

And there it lay, dormant, ignored, and eventually forgotten.

But then Duck Dynasty Patriarch Phil Robertson's death got us giddy enough to dust it off back in May.

And since then, old Christian fuckers have just been dropping like flies.

It makes me fear that part of the reason they weren't dying was that they thought we'd retired this bit.

It's Rascal's wager.

Exactly, yeah.

Oh, I'm looking forward to the Prager eulogy that's going to be

a bad thing.

Yes, yes.

So I want to make it super clear that we are open for business as we mark the death of James Dobson on this installment of

Son of Obituary.

Now, without resorting to genocidal world leaders, it would be hard to point to a person who brought more harm into the world than Dr.

James Clayton Dobson Jr.

This is a man who rose to prominence advocating for child abuse, shifted gears to purity culture, became a leading voice in the opposition to LGBTQ rights, and started three hate groups, one of which spawned at least two more hate groups.

And also, he made the otherwise promising city of Colorado Springs, Colorado into a conservative hellhole.

Just had to work in that he ruined your hike.

Didn't he?

Such a good hike.

I feel like Noah ruined hikes for bigots in fun, creative ways, if I'm guessing.

Yeah, it makes him a little more tolerable.

So Jimmy Lee, as he was called as a kid, was born to James C.

and Myrtle, Georgia Dobson on April 21st of 1936.

And if you're thinking to yourself, hey, Noah, isn't Myrtle, Georgia, an unincorporated municipality just southeast of Macon, Georgia?

Apparently not.

It's a fuck, it's a lady.

Jimmy's dad.

granddad and great-granddad were all ministers with the church of the nazarene and religion was so central to his life that, according to Dobson, he learned to pray before he learned to talk.

But since praying is a kind of talking, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Okay, yeah, but the mental picture of a baby speaking in tongues is adorable.

I'd be like that.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's fair.

Also, look, I'm not saying that these son of obituaries are getting similar, but it's remarkable how starting out dirt poor really drives one into for-profit religion, huh?

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Also, starting out medium or rich.

Yeah, no, it actually doesn't either way.

So Jimmy turned his life over to Jesus at the age of three, a decision he came to, no doubt, after weighing the pros and cons of all the world's major faith traditions and deciding that Baptist Christianity had the superior theological foundation.

Yeah, we need a Sesame Street epistemologist.

Really, yeah.

Now, at the risk of fostering empathy with one of the worst people to share contemporary air with any of us, I should point out that little Jimmy had terrible parents.

They were gone a lot of the time.

The wiki said it was because they were traveling evangelists, but a lot of parents were traveling evangelists and didn't just leave their kids with whatever relative was nearest by while they traveled.

But little Jimmy probably loved their absence since when they were around, they hit him a lot.

And with shit, they also forbade things like dancing, watching movies, and experiencing happiness.

The moment the parents leave,

baby Jimmy slides in the frame like risky business.

Right.

And that noises him speaking in tongues.

So bucking the family tradition, little Jimmy decided not to become an ordained minister, and he never was.

Instead, he studied psychology.

Eventually, he would earn a doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California.

So weird that they're not more public about their association with this famous alum of theirs, huh?

James Dobson.

He missed a lot of classes.

He didn't pay to have his degree shipped flat.

He didn't do the thing.

I mean,

is it really counting?

Anyway, Rob Kardashian went here, huh?

Yeah, right?

Bobby Kardashian.

Bobby Kardashian.

So Dobson got his degree, and then he set out for a career as a Christian psychologist.

But his real passion was beating children.

Not his children, mind you, though he did have two kids and he doubtless beat the hell out of them.

But what's the physical mistreatment of two little kids compared to the abuse of an entire nation?

Nancy Mace's campaign platform.

Now, it's important to note that as Dobson is beginning his career, the rest of the country is having the 60s.

And that's a time when people raised in very repressive Christian households were forced to question a lot of the assumptions that they were raised on.

Some chose to break free of them.

Others chose to double down.

Still others chose to double down while saying, I bet the problem with these hippies is that their mobs didn't hit them with enough belts and shoes and hairbrushes and shit.

So he wrote a book in 1970 called Dare to Discipline, in which he encouraged parents to hit their kids.

Spoiler alert, beating up on people who deserve your love and protection, something of a theme for James Dobson.

Yeah.

I heard about a new book that says empathy leads to sin, though.

So

let's check it out.

The writer has a podcast.

So during this time, Dobson was working as an assistant to a counselor named Paul Popineau.

And if you know that name at all, the first thought that came to your mind when I said it was probably the eugenicist.

And yes, yes, that's the one.

Popineau ran a marriage counseling center in LA that emphasized the importance of same-race marriages and adherence to traditional gender roles because otherwise you'd fuck up the sacred Aryan bloodline, I guess.

I'd love to know how he counseled people with the problem of being the wrong race.

Right?

Yeah.

All right, you got to work out those thought distortions.

How racially delightsome are you, would you say?

So it was while he was working for this racist that Dobson started to really lay into the evils of feminism.

And when the American Psychological Association decided in 1973 to remove homosexuality from their officially recognized list of mental disorders, Dobson quit the organization in protest.

Shortly after that, he took a sabbatical from the children's hospital he was working for and never came back.

Oh, cool.

Yes.

Sabbatical.

Jordan Peterson did the same thing.

He has a long sabbatical he's been on.

Chercy Toronto.

Do we know what coma Dobson had to put himself in to get off his meat-only diet?

Or is that not in the...

Just spoilers, it's later in the.

Yeah.

I took a sabbatical from a World Series of poker satellite tournament, too.

Like, come on.

I was out of chips.

Took a sabbatical from my acting career.

Yeah, right, right.

Bud Dwyer took a sabbatical.

A sabbatical from being the mayor.

And look, I get why that hospital didn't want this professional racist, bigot, child abuse advocate on their payroll.

But the argument could be made that he'd have done a lot less damage if they'd just given him seven or eight kids to hit.

Because instead of that, he used his newfound free time to start broadcasting his ideas.

Those ideas being, of course, that all of America's problems are the result of feminists, gays, and insufficiently tortured children.

This would lead to the creation of the Joe Rogan experience.

Later that, yes, eventually, but first, Focus on the family in 1977.

If only he'd used the words target the family.

Target goals would have been so much clearer.

Sure.

But I get why he went with the alliteration, right?

Yeah, you know, it's all about branding.

Now, so, okay, so over the next 20 years, Dobson would turn Focus on the Family into a media empire that included 10 radio shows and 11 magazines.

Now, I guess in a world where like...

We've got six shows between us, that doesn't probably seem that impressive, but those were pretty good numbers for the 90s, right?

It was enough to influence a hobnob with presidents, even as was the case with Jimmy Carter, presidents who really didn't want to hobnob with you.

Dobson actually led a successful letter-writing campaign against Carter's White House when Carter failed to include him in a summit about families.

Jimmy Carter was the best, man.

I fucking missed this, right?

He's like, no, you're not coming, man.

You told a kid at the Easter egg roll to go get you a switch when he was too slow rolling the eggs or whatever.

Kid comes back a different gender.

Fuck not loud back.

Oh, damn it.

So by 1981, he would spin off two more hate groups: the Family Research Council and the Family Policy Council.

Yeah, it's like his Joni loves chachi and family members.

Exactly.

Cool.

Noah already said hate groups.

So apparently there used to be these rules, I guess, about what a media empire could and couldn't do vis-a-vis political lobbying.

So I guess he needed separate organizations to do all the evil shit he wanted to do.

In 1991, he moved his whole operation to Colorado Springs, which people in his circle started referring to as the American Vatican or the American Conservative Vatican, to which the actual Vatican was like,

fucking, that's obviously Salt Lake City.

Whatever, whatever.

Yeah, you wish you had the hidden Jew gold of the Vatican and the Mormons, you posers, right?

So in 1989, Dobson managed to secure an interview with notorious serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy.

During the interview, Dobson gave Bundy a bizarrely large amount of time to justify his crimes, which in the interview, he ultimately blamed on all the violent pornography he'd been exposed to.

So yes, Dobson successfully managed to co-opt the execution of a serial killer that he became an apologist for to promote his anti-porn activism.

Okay, if Ted Bundy was watching nothing but Sesame Street, the only major difference is a sillier costume and like a citation needed that we never air.

So in the 90s, Dobson's focus shifted heavily to anti-LGBTQ activism and the promotion of conversion therapy, that is torturing kids until they pretend to be straight.

In 2000, he was one of the primary drivers of the series of laws to ban gay marriage that are largely credited with delivering the White House to George W.

Bush.

Or sorry, delivering it to the Supreme Court that then went on to give it to George W.

Bush when they were done with it.

The point being that without reactionary conservatives rushing to the polls to vote for gay marriage bans, we'd have had a president Al Gore and saved the sacred timeline.

Sometimes I just randomly hop to the side in case there's a portal.

Yep.

Same.

I haven't gotten lucky yet.

Me too.

I just need to get lucky once.

Can we prune the people who voted for Nader anyway?

So in the early 2000s, Dobson was pushed out of focus on the family as its board believed his increasingly political stances were imperiling the organization's tax-exempt status.

Which sure as fuck seems quaint from a quarter centuries removed.

But once ousted from that leadership role, he was free to get even more bigoted and politically active.

He fought against gay rights.

He fought against AIDS relief in Africa.

He fought against women's rights.

He fought against comprehensive sex education.

He fought against contraception.

He fought against public education and he fought against abortion rights.

Okay, he's like some kind of primordial evil who seeded a time loop and now his work is done.

Yeah, it really is.

What the fuck?

Yeah.

Dobson was also a key figure in the rise of purity culture among evangelicals in the 90s.

He was one of the leaders in that.

This is the perverse thing where like grown men sexualize little girls by having them marry their dads and promise never to fuck anybody until their dad releases their vagina with a formal contract.

He was also one of the main promoters of the breed of Christian masculinity that makes it possible for congressional candidates to list guns right alongside Jesus and babies in terms of the things that a Christian voter should care about.

But to be fair, if you're going to take away everyone's rights, you're going to need a way to enforce it.

Right.

And unfortunately, the best I can offer you in terms of a happy ending here is the fact that he did eventually die.

But he died at the age of 89, surrounded by a nation controlled entirely by the particular breed of regressive bigotry that he helped to shape throughout his life.

The last thought that probably swirled to his fucking head was, well, honestly, it was probably something like, oh my God, did I poop again?

Or, or if we're lucky, oh, wow, this hurts way more than I thought it would.

But the last non-directly death-related thought that probably swirled to his head was, I won.

Fucking time loops.

Yeah.

And as much as I'd love to end this by asking Eli what's on deck, that could get complicated if he turns out to be right.

So all I'm going to say is that I hope we see you again real soon on another installment of Son of Obituary.

Before we shrivel back up, I want to let you know that if you want more me in your life and you're going to be anywhere near Orlando on September 21st, you can come watch me give a tarot reading.

That Sunday, September 21st, the Central Florida free thought community has invited me out to do a talk where I'm going to give the crowd a tarot reading.

And along the way, I'm going to expose some of the tricks so-called psychics use to trick people, including themselves, into thinking they're psychic.

There's a suggested donation of $10 and I promise to be worth way more than that.

Check the show notes for more information.

Anyway, that's all the blasphemy we've got for you tonight, but we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister Show's Hot Friend God Off a Movies Day being at Seven Eastern on Tuesday, and even a new episode of our Hapser Show Citation Needed Day being at Noon Eastern on Wednesday.

obviously i'm not done until i thank heath enrich for being my partner in crime i need to thank eli bosney for being accomplice number two in the indictment i need to thank the lovely and talented lucinda leusions for being my alibi and i also want to thank chad for providing this week's farnsworth quote and i want to raise a glass to all of you who outlived that font of child abuse and want to celebrate with us clink but most of all of course i want to thank this week's sweetest sapiens tom paul liz nora blake and softie tom and paul whose statues on our lawn can't be anatomically accurate without tipping over liz and nora who are so wise cartoon owls bring their sucker related questions to to them, and Blake and Safdi, who are so hot, they can't go on glacier cruises, which is a fucking shame because those are awesome.

Together, these six rowdy rationalists rounded out our religion-ravenishing revenue this week by giving us money.

Not everybody has the money it takes to do that, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation to patreon.com slash scathing atheists, whereby you'll earn early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingadeist.com.

And if you'd like to help, but you're hiding your money until the fascism blows over, I get it.

So you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show, and following us on social media.

And speaking to social media, Tim Rapperson handles that for us, and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission.

If you have questions, comments, or death returns, but the contact info on the contact page at scathingadeist.com.

Won't even let me start.

Name some names.

I was going to say, right?

Try it it out.

Yeah.

Keith.

Wow.

Okay, it's going to be pretty funny if that happens.

See why I didn't want to.

It's going to be pretty funny, though.

It's funny if it's me.

This content is canned-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm at their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountability network.org.

The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025.

2025, all rights reserved.

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