Because I am new to conservatism and blogging, when I first saw Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs attacking dear, brave Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, whom I met at CPAC and came this close to asking her to autograph my … arm — so much do I admire her courage — I did not know what to make of his accusations except that I cannot bring myself to believe evil of her. People who want me to believe evil of her are playing with fire and running with scissors at the same time. However, by the time Charles got to denouncing Stacy McCain of The Other McCain (see below for his recent replies); Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit; and Pajamas Media, the group blog he co-founded with Roger Simon; THEN I knew I was on solid ground in questioning his judgment, and possibly his sanity.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a thoughtful post on “The Descent of Little Green Footballs” today that includes his reactions to Charles Johnson turning on his fellow anti-radical-Islam bloggers, starting with Pamela Geller:

At first, I noticed that Charles Johnson was getting into feuds with the other anti-radical Islam websites. Early on, as far as I could tell, it was all Charles attacking websites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Gates of Vienna over these European political parties that they supported because they were anti-radical Islam.

At the time, I didn’t know who was right and was wrong. In fact, I still don’t because Charles’ arguments were all very “Seven [Yo, John! It's six!] Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Some European political party I had never heard of was terrible because it had a high ranking member that I had never heard of who freely associated with some other people who were REALLY BAD that I never heard of and — all these bloggers were terrible, horrible, awful racists and fascists for liking these political parties.

I was sad when I saw Charles attacking Pamela and I didn’t know enough of the “who struck John” to spring to her defense. It appears I wasn’t alone. And maybe Charles was using the difficulty of checking his work as a cover so his mud would stick.

John continues:

Eventually, the bloggers Charles was picking fights with started firing back at him and I started to notice that Charles had a huge beef with Christians. At one point, I looked over at LGF and noticed that literally half the posts on his front page were edged pieces about creationism. This struck me as extremely odd given that creationism wasn’t a hot topic at the time. You could read through 30-40 blogs, not read one word about creationism, and get to LGF and there were 10 posts about it.

This, I found to be a very troubling sign. There are certainly plenty of atheists and agnostics who are good conservatives. However, inevitably in my experience, when you have someone who has a huge beef with Christians, they turn to the Left. That’s exactly how it happened with Andrew Sullivan and John Cole from Balloon Juice and it’s how it happened with Charles, too.

Now here I have to distinguish my position on Christianity, Creationism and Intelligent Design from Charles’s. First, I am spiritual but not religious. I do not have a problem with Christianity until it intrudes into government and education to appropriate the apparatus of the state to impose its dogmas as the law of the land — in the case of homosexual equality — or as facts — in the case of demanding that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design, which are religious dogmas, be taught in school.

My stake in the homosexual equality discussion is obvious — I support equality for homosexuals.

My stake in the Creationism/Intelligent Design argument is due to the work of my father, Hubert P. Yockey, because he has demonstrated that the orgin of life is unknowable, just as the origin of matter is, and that what should be taught about the origin of life in schools is WHY the origin of life unknowable. The sequence is: [unknowable origin of matter] > matter > [unknowable origin of life] > life. In addition, he has pointed out that objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution based on gaps in the fossil record became obsolete with the discovery of DNA because there are no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to the present and we can now look back through the genome and DNA, so that gaps in the fossil record are irrelevant.

I only want church and state, and church and science, to go to their respective corners.

Charles reports on the intrusions of religion into government in the form of people of various religions getting laws passed to require that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design be taught in schools. So I am keeping Little Green Footballs in my newsfeed. There is a delicious irony in this, though. My father’s work shows that ALL of the accepted theories on the origin of life are wrong since coding theory shows why it is unknowable, now and forever. So I consider Charles’s beliefs on the subject to be as faith-based as those of any Christian, even if the faith is based in dialectical materialism. The belief that it is possible to discover the origin of life in the laws of physics and chemistry — which do not contain sufficient information for the problem — is exactly like believing that if you study the physics and chemistry of ink, or pixels, you will be able to discover the origin of works of literature. Exercise-in-futility-wise, it is the modern-day version of trying to figure out how to turn base metals into gold.

Turning to Charles’s attacks on Stacy McCain, below I link the best of Stacy’s recent thoughts about Charles, who really, really should not have poked the bear:

“Andrew Jackson’s Mother Advises This Response to Charles Johnson:

Contrary to anything Mad King Charles may tell his dwindling pool of yet-to-be-banned readers in their “private” discussions, this engagement began when Johnson attacked my friend Pamela Geller for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels conference. Though I was not involved in that dispute, as I told Pamela in a brief phone conversation this morning, I now regret that I did not immediately leap to her defense.

(snip)

Say what you will about Pamela Geller, she is not afraid of a fight. And what the conservative movement needs now — far more than we need ideological unity among intellectuals or would-be intellectuals — is people who are not afraid of a fight.

“LGF Boycott HQ” — too funny!:

We know you’re dying to know what’s going on in Lizard Land, so here are recent LGF headlines and summaries:

No Racism at the Tea Party?

Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:59:05 pm PDT

Photos of anti-Obama posters at DC 9/12 rally which proves “racism” because anybody who doesn’t like Obama is racist, just like anybody who hated Bill Clinton was anti-oral sex.

(snip)

In other words, you’re not missing anything at LGF you couldn’t get from Amanda Marcotte or Firedoglake.

“Charles Johnson exposes yet another scary neo-Nazi: CHARLES JOHNSON”

God told an angel I’ll call “Lydia” to send me an e-mail:

After reading about the dust-up, it occurred to me that Charles could be exposed as a hypocrite by using his own methods. CJ uses what I call a “Six Degrees of Extremism” (or Six Degrees of Racism/Euro Fascism, etc) political parlor game.

He condemns Robert Spencer [of Jihad Watch, linked above] for “associations” with “extremists”* and you for “connections” to white supremacists, yet he adds Daily Kos to his blogroll and approvingly links their posts, which contain the exact kind of material and links to people that CJ uses to excoriate his new targets.

Based on his own criteria, CJ himself is now a racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi fascist. Here’s how: [click here].

My headline would be MUCH better if I could have created urgency to click on this post by leaving out the “(NOT!).” But I know better than to trust the Left, having so recently resided there. I do not want anyone to have an excuse to put my name to a phrase saying Stacy is a racist or a bigot because he is not. The reason I can call him a “lousy racist” and “a terrible bigot” is that he completely and totally sucks at both, again, in the sense that he is neither.

This morning I see that my blog pals Dan Collins and Dan Riehl are springing to the defense of my dear friend and fairy blogfather, Robert Stacy McCain, who goes by “Stacy” and blogs at The Other McCain. I must add my voice to theirs, but with more authority, because Stacy writes in opposition to homosexual equality and I am lesbian and I support the cause of homosexual equality — for example, federal protection from discrimination in access to jobs, housing and public accommodations (e.g., restaurants, stores, sporting events, concerts, parks); same-sex marriage; repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” so that gays and lesbians can be openly gay or lesbian while serving in the military; and adoption.

One of the things I have marveled at and loved about joining the conservative movement is that it embodies the ideal of embracing diversity. My experience of diversity on the Left was that, sure, there’s a rainbow of races and a sort-of rainbow of religions and homosexuals believe they are welcome (which is not the same as actually being welcome), but there was a strict uniformity of beliefs that were imposed top-down and woe betide the useful idiot — like me — who tried to cash in any of those checks, especially if they then went all activist on the asses of the Lefties breaking the promises — again, like me — for passing worthless promises in the belief that that neighborhood of the Left was just ignorant and only needed activism and education so that it would keep the promises it had made of equality, inclusion, yada-yada-yada.

Even after being run out of the lesbian and gay community in the pages of The Washington Blade in 1996 for my advocacy for the rights of people in wheelchairs, including my late life partner, it was not until the spring of 2008 when I found out about Barack Obama’s 20-year allegiance to Rev. Jeremiah Wright that I began to realize that the Left is where the most vicious racism and bigotry now resides in the U.S. Over the last year, with access to a fuller statement of facts from bloggers and online magazines than I ever got from the mainstream media, I have come to see the Left as the modern embodiment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. My perception now is that the Left espouses ideals to gain followers, but only to gain power over them, seldom, if ever, to deliver on policies in line with their stated ideals. It’s all “say one thing, do another” over there.

In contrast, on the Right, there are a few common principles holding conservatives and Republicans — who are not the same — and libertarians together in common cause — mainly, that there is a tipping point of taxation beyond which people no longer have the means of true liberty; that capitalism is the highest and best economic system to allow individuals to make the most of their lives and create a better world; and that the ideals on which the United States of America was founded are worthy of defending and passing on intact to the next generation.

Beyond those few common principles, I find enormous diversity of belief and opinion in the Right, as well as a diversity of sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, race and what have you. Plus, I find women in positions of power and authority. People on the Right are able to have opposite and mutually exclusive opinions on various matters. Put together, that is real diversity.

So, yes, Stacy and I are at daggers drawn over homosexual equality, especially gay marriage equality. But he states his reasons — and his feelings. I state mine. And we remain staunch and loyal friends.

In addition, Stacy is NOT a racist — there’s just no way.

Stacy has his own pertinent remarks for Charles Johnson as folows:

• Point One — Charles Johnson doesn’t know me from Adam’s housecat

His attack on me at LGF is a classic “ransom note method” attack — the assembling of this, that and the other to create a collage, like a kidnapper glueing together words clipped from magazines.

• Point Two — Charles Johnson is prejudiced, and subscribes to stereotypes

No Southerner should ever think he will be allowed to defend his homeland and her people without being insulted for it. If you’re going to defend the South, you must be prepared to defend it down to the last boll weevil on the scraggliest cotton patch in front of the most decrepit tar-paper shack in Mississippi.

So widespread is anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite, that the man who presumes to defend the South might as well begin by foreswearing any further ambition in life. Assume at the outset that you will be denounced and castigated and exiled to outer darkness, and resolve that this daunting prospect will not deter you from your duty.

(Note: the last two paragraphs of this post are rated ROTFLOL.)

(I should mention at this point that I was born in the South and raised in Tennessee, California and Maryland. My mother’s side of the family are Southerners. I take a dim view of stereotyping Southerners.)

• Point Three: Charles Johnson will regret it but once, and that will be continuously

All this background on the issue was never reported by the New York Times, and the people who have condemned me as a “neo-Confederate” know nothing about how I gained that descriptor.

Did I write some things that were . . . intemperate? Hey, we’re talking about Stacy McCain here, OK? When I go to fight, I go to war, and it’s war to the knife, knife to the hilt.

I love Stacy McCain. He is my friend, a valued mentor, and he is in no way, shape or form a bigot or racist.

P.S.

I believe this is only the first or second time since I started my blog that I have used the word “bigot.” I do not find it helpful in discussions aimed at illuminating how society and groups within it should set boundaries.

The link to Charles Johnson’s blog, Little Green Footballs, is in my newsfeed so I can keep an eye on him. I support Charles in his fight against Creationism, and its re-branded version, Intelligent Design, which came into being using deliberately distorted points from my father’s work. (I have the correspondence!) I do this because my father is Hubert P. Yockey and he has published a number of papers and two books from Cambridge University Press on the origin of life and evolution. Both my father and I oppose Creationism and Intelligent Design. My father’s work demonstrates that what we should be teaching in schools about the origin of life is that it unknowable by any current or future method, and why. (Dad supports the theory of evolution, in case anyone is wondering.)

By the way, I do not necessarily agree with all the bloggers who are in my newsfeed. It is a selection of people whose blogs I read, except for Shakey Pete’s Shootin’ Shack — I can’t get Peter’s RSS feed to work with my newsfeed.

Update, 9/13/09: Stogie at Saberpoint also came to Stacy’s defense today — please go read his entire post because it has additional important information (emphasis mine):

Stacy and I were involved in online discussions (aka “the great listserv debates”) with a large group of interested people and, of course, the issue of race and race relations came up and was hotly debated. Should blacks, Jews and others be allowed into our fold? Stacy, I and others said, “absolutely!” There were some bigots in the group who wanted to add a racial component to our movement but Stacy (and I and others) strenuously opposed it. Stacy was an outspoken leader of the non-racist faction; he denounced racism as dishonorable and wrong. We fought the bigots together and took a lot of heat for our stand. Nevertheless, a New York Press reporter named Michaelangelo Signorile misattributed another’s comments on interracial marriage to McCain. These errors were subsequently picked up by other bloggers (as well as the SPLC) and spread. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is the most recent purveyor of these falsehoods.

In addition, Prof. William Jacobson picked up the cudgel on Stacy’s behalf today and also noted that how false accusations of racism are now used to damage enemies in the search engines:

Fourth, the LGF attack appeared to be payback for McCain’s defense of Pam Geller when LGF attacked her. Payback attacks always are suspicious.

… being tagged a racist is about as damaging a tag as exists because the damage is caused once the accusation is made.And that is the point. If you want to ruin someone’s reputation, just keep posting the words “racist” in close proximity to their name on the internet so that web search engines associate the person and the accusation. That is what some people tried to do to Glenn Beck recently by making accusations of past criminal conduct in the form of a question for the very purpose of influencing Google and other search engines.

The false accusation of racism is a despicable tactic. It damages the person against whom it is made and the victims of true racism.

And that is why I felt it necessary to speak up this time.

Carol of Carol’s Closet calls for “Truth in Labeling: Stacy McCain is NOT a Racist but Charles Johnson is an Asshole“:

Stacy McCain is not a racist. He is a proud son of the South and as an adopted southerner myself, I believe there is much to be proud of. Mr. Johnson dilutes the word “racist” by using it as a stick to swing at his latest intended target (apparently Johnson is one of those people who is always targeting someone).