Dear CfI Board of Directors:

I’ve spent the day attempting to determine what I could compare your moral courage to. However, each and every candidate has turned out to have more moral courage than you, up to and including John McCain and William Dembski. Even Enron showed more sense. I’ve seen corporations deny responsibility. I’ve seen not-pologies that require a dictionary of corporate-speak to decipher. I’ve seen organizations run from mistakes. But this is the first time I have ever witnessed a statement written by people too oblivious to even mention what interested parties told them repeatedly had caused distress, and then have the audacity to blame the injured parties for the injury dealt them. That’s private-health-insurance-quality fuckery, that.

You couldn’t even muster a “We’re sorry you were offended.” There’s weak tea, and then there’s water some ratfuckers are attempting to pass off as Earl Grey. In case you really are that bloody stupid, I shall inform you that your concoction is the latter. As esteemed Pharyngula commenter Tom Foss said, “It’s a homeopathic statement. So little content as to be nonexistent, diluted among so many words.” Not even a single molecule of apology remained when you were done.

I have to say, I’m impressed. I expected you to weasel out of doing anything more than playfully smack Ron’s hand and say, “He’s very outspoken, isn’t he? We’re sorry you were offended. Perhaps you should try not being offended in the future.” What I didn’t expect was for you to go full-metal-fuck-you. I mean, really. You expected “The CFI Board wishes to express its unhappiness with the controversy surrounding the recent Women in Secularism Conference 2” to pass muster with several conferences’ worth of outraged feminist skeptics? Were you banking on all of us suffering an acute onset of gullibility? Did you think we spent our weekend getting beaten with the Credulous Stick? Because it didn’t happen.

You had one simple task: say sorry. Say, “We apologize. In retrospect, we realize this could have been handled better. We support WiS and the women in our community, and commit to WiS3.” That’s it. If you wanted to avoid plastering Ron’s name to this apology, you could have done. We’d have remained angry, and many of us would have walked, but at least a few wavering supporters would have swallowed that semi-apology whole. With time and no further fuckups, even those of us who had walked might have moseyed back.

What you chose instead was the equivalent of a country dropping a tactical nuke on the upset nation next door, preferring years of radioactive fallout to a simple sorry. In what universe does this possibly make sense? Is it a universe in which love is expressed with a sharp knife in the back? Because I felt the distinct sting of cold steel when I read your statement. And I toasted some s’mores in the flames from the bridges you burnt.

I now know what sort of organization you are. You are the kind of organization that will ignore years of determined harassment in the interests of some mythical unity. You are the kind of people that will pay lip service to women while embracing their abusers. You would rather blame everything that happened on the people who were offended and the conference they attended rather than admit for one instant that your CEO did the slightest thing wrong. You are the kind of people who believe the Supreme Leader must never sully his lips with an apology. And you are the kind of people who either believe skeptic women are stupid enough to accept your statement as a proper close to this painful chapter, and if we turn out to be smarter than that, you figure you can do without us.

We’ll be happy to watch you try.

I do hope you enjoy the fickle support of your new best friends. One set of backstabbing fuckwads deserves another, I always say. As for those brilliant and dedicated CfI employees caught in this crossfire, I do hope they find more welcoming shores very soon. It would be a shame watching them waste their talent trying to save an organization that will soon represent only the oblivious and the reprehensible.

I look forward to seeing Secular Woman, American Atheists, the Secular Student Alliance, and the American Humanist Association, among a plethora of others, benefit hugely from CfI’s failure to display even minimal decency and astounding inability to display even the slightest sense of self-preservation. I know where my dollars shall be going. I also know which organization I will never, ever support in the slightest.

You had your chance. You failed.

Adios,

Dana Hunter

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