Richard Dawkins was honored in 1996 by the AHA as Humanist of the Year for his significant contributions in this area.
Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.
Featured, News, “American Humanist Association Board Statement Withdrawing Honor from Richard Dawkins” at American Humanist Association (April 19, 2021)
As reader Ken Francis puts it: From anti-God hero to trans-racist zero…
You blinked, you missed it. That’s Cancel Culture for ya.
Here’s a Twitter thread where he attempts to defend himself: “I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .”
Discuss? Well, the Woke don’t “do” discussion but they famously devour their own. The victim does get to select slow, medium, or high grill.
What sealed Dawkins’s fate was a reference to Rachel Dolezal, an American woman who is presumably now in Progressive hell for pretending to be a Black American.
As Charles C.W. Cooke puts it at National Review Online:
Dawkins’s crime was to have suggested on Twitter that transgender people are not, in a scientific sense, members of the sex with which they identify. “In 2015,” Dawkins wrote recently, “Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.” In response, the AHA said that Dawkins was “making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” and took away an award that it had given Dawkins in 1996, thereby confirming his initial hypothesis.
Dawkins is not, however, immolating himself. The Times of London reports, “Dawkins, 80, claimed that the loss of the award would have little practical effect on him because he had never used it. ‘Apparently the honour hadn’t meant enough to me to be worth recording in my CV,’ he said.”
Also from The Times: “Voting to withdraw a 1996 “humanist of the year award”, the AHA said that the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” after his tweets appeared to question whether people can choose their gender.” Guess that’s another of the multitude of things no good Humanist can question.
All this is a step up from the row over the elevator he wasn’t even in. Remember that? It was 2011. And the Woke are much Woker now.
But the thing is, who cares about the American Humanist Association without people like Dawkins?
Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd