Richard Dawkins is dragged into America’s tedious free-speech war

Jul 23, 2017 by

by Douglas Murray, Spectator:

Anyone who has followed the free-speech wars in America over recent years will know that by now, basically, nobody can speak anywhere. Especially at centres like that one-time home of free speech, Berkeley, California, you now cannot speak in public if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re gay or straight and if your skin is white or not. Now to the great list of categories of people who should not be allowed to speak in America we can add scientists.

Richard Dawkins is, by any standards, one of the most famous scientists on the planet. His books have brought writing about science to a world-wide audience. One recognition of this achievement is that just this week his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ was voted the most inspiring science book of all time in a public poll commissioned by the Royal Society.

However it is important that the gentle denizens of a city like Berkeley be prevented from hearing from such a person. There were to have an opportunity next month, when KPFA in Berkeley were due to host an evening centred around Professor Dawkins’s new book ‘Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. But people who had booked tickets for this event have just received the following email:

Read here

Read also: Now that Richard Dawkins is attacking Muslims and feminists, the atheist Left suddenly discover he’s a bigot by Damian Thompson (£)

[clip]  But Dawkins was just as offensive when his target was Christianity; it’s just that the Left didn’t have a problem with his description of Pope Benedict XVI as a ‘leering old villain in the frock’ who ran ‘a profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution … amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.’

 

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