Jerry Coyne has written a post on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s extraordinary behavior and explanation of said behavior.

When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! 

Jolting, isn’t it. It seems they no sooner published it than they depublished it. Why bother? Why not just say no in the first place? But of course that would not be an improvement, just an avoidance of public absurdity. (That part really is a mystery.)

It gets worse, because of course it does.

When some readers pointed out yesterday that “Biology is not bigotry” was no longer online, I had no idea what happened, and assumed they had relocated the post. I was unable to believe that they would actually remove my post, especially because FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor had given me permission to write it and approved the final published version.

I emailed Annie Laurie inquiring what had happened to my piece. I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally.

That really shocks me. It probably shouldn’t, given how fast a lot of “friends” rushed to denounce me back in 2015, but it does. I’ve met Annie Laurie and Dan, I was at a dinner table next to them in Dublin at that Atheist Ireland conference before The Trans Wars got going, they were convivial and nice and all the rest of it – they were normal. They didn’t seem like the kind of stalinist shits who would watch in silence while the commissars rounded up the dissenters.

I never got a response—or rather, they didn’t have the human decency to write me back personally. They still have not done so, and now they shouldn’t bother. Instead, they sent out the following notice to all FFRF members (it’s also archived here):

They sent out the notice but they prefaced the long blathery impersonal notice with an offensively dishonest “Dear Jerry” – as if they were sending him a friendly reply as opposed to an insultingly impersonal bit of Party dogma.

I expect I’ll want to pick holes in their notice later, but for now I’ll just sample its crawling bureaucratic sludge.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is dedicated to protecting the constitutional principle of state/church separation, which ensures religious beliefs do not dictate public policy. While advocating for LGBTQIA-plus rights is an indirect component of our mission, we recognize that many attacks on these rights are rooted in attempts to impose religious doctrines on our secular government.

Blah blah blah, which of course has nothing to do with Jerry Coyne or the piece he wrote for them.

We are acutely aware that Christian nationalists have cynically manipulated the LGBTQIA-plus issues just as they have cynically done so with abortion rights. We are proud to have a diverse staff and membership, 13 percent of whom identify as LGBTQIA and 97 percent support civil rights for the LGBTQ community — far more than the general population.

Wait wait wait wait – are they saying the 97 percent don’t support the IA communniny??? I’ve never been so shocked in my entire life.

They go on to explain, in a note that starts with “Dear Jerry,” why they spiked Dear Jerry’s article a few minutes (or perhaps it was seconds) after posting it:

FFRF and its new legislative arm, FFRF Action Fund, will do everything we can to defeat President-elect Trump’s draconian vow that the official policy of the U.S. government will be that “there are only two genders, male and female.” We are already gearing up to fight his promise to end the “transgender lunacy” on day one of his administration.

However, advocacy is rarely perfect, and progress is not always linear. Recently, we published a guest blog post as part of an effort to provide a forum for various voices within the framework of our mission. Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such.

Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, we recognize mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth. Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

It takes the breath away. “Dear Jerry, publishing your post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles, love, FFRF.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation should change its name to The Imprisonment by Gender Ideology Foundation.