To our wonderful listeners: regrettably, backups on Jon’s editing PC stopped working last week and while logging in on Tuesday, the computer decided it no longer wanted to be a computer. Jon is actively praying to Odin to resolve the issue but this unfortunately means there will be no Wayward Willis episode this week. We will be back next week with our best episode yet (probably edited on a Mac)!
In the meantime, we’d like to urge you to help Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts by donating to Foundation Beyond Belief’s Humanist Disaster Recovery team. Thank you for your support!
OK, this is going to be a little bit controversial but I want to assure everyone that my opinion wouldn’t change even if the subject of the story were a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Martian. It has less to do with being an atheist and more to do with being an American and a human.
That’s Wachs, yo!
Ellenbeth Wachs is weird. However, she has the right to be. She had apparently just come home from having chemotherapy and was trying to rest while a neighborhood boy (10) was playing basketball outside of her house. She asked the boy to stop. When the boy refused to quit, Wachs allegedly made moaning noises simulating sex, calling out, “Oh John!” from inside her home and was arrested on a charge of simulating a sex act in front of a child.
Now, I’m no expert but noises from inside a person’s home – even if the windows are open – shouldn’t count as a sex offense. What gets me about this is the precedent it sets. If Wachs can be convicted on this charge, then virtually every parent in the world could be arrested as sex offenders and have their children taken away for the same thing. I know my kids have heard my wife and me having sex before. Think about it, you put them to bed and tuck them in and you close their door. They don’t really want to go to sleep so they lie awake for a while. You close your door, get naked and it’s business time (I mean, come on, when you’re married you have to seize opportunity by the gonads)! I don’t care of what material your doors and walls are made – if you make a peep or your bed frame squeaks, you’ve just become an offender. Hell, a large portion of kids have walked in on their parents having sex. Not only is that traumatic to everyone involved but it raises the bar on the type of offense!
Mommy, daddy, make it stop!
Secondly, bringing this back to atheism, I feel that things like this are a setback in our campaign for acceptance. A lot of religious people already think atheists eat babies, dance naked in the woods, are addicted to pr0n, do lots of drugs and might be child molesters since we don’t have that Moral Compass™ their deities give them. A story like this only gives these people more fuel for their fire, allowing them to wag their fingers at us and say, “See? We told you so!” I don’t like it. The problem with prominent atheists being involved with something like this as compared to prominent Christians is that there are relatively so few outspoken, prominent, public atheists that one of them getting nabbed represents a significant percentage. When a Christian trips up, there are 4 billion more to minimize the effect.
Watch that first step!
What do you think? Do charges like this make sense? Is Wachs a sex offender now? Should you be able to do whatever you want in your own home?
A lot of scary language was thrown around leading up to the most recent winter storm. Some said that it was going to be the worst winter storm on record since 1912. While I tried to do as much preparation as I saw fit, I really wasn’t sweating a blizzard of epic proportions. The weather people are rarely balls-on accurate so I usually take these things with a grain of salt. I’m sure someday that’ll bite me in the ass.
As it turns out (so far) there wasn’t too much to it. A definite accumulation of snow but I could dig my car out from under that in no time and be on my way. I hate it when the media gets us all paranoid and scared, just to be proven wrong time after time.
