Easy there, Zombie Zoo. I didn't think my prediction that a distinguished professor and public intellectual will leave a bigger mark on history than a nameless Jezebel commenter would be very controversial. Apologies all around, particularly to the notable feminist philosopher, Hypatia Hilton.

His ardent atheism came about as a response to the religious discussion regarding biology and his writing.

He just thinks differently. He knows what his intention is, so all the furor is irrational thick-headedness to him.

It started off when he made comments regarding the relative severity of various acts of pedophilia, using his own molestation as an example.

Someone comfortable with nuance.

He's trying to illustrate a fundamental logical syllogism by using a terrible, tone deaf example. He could have used "getting your car stolen" v. "getting your bike stolen", but he decided to use rape. The point he was trying to make was only ever tangentially about rape at all.

You have missed (or ignored) the distinction between the statement Dawkins represented as "logic" and the statement he represented as "opinion." Your response confuses the two.

The Dawkins phase usually comes after the Ayn Rand phase. If you make it through, you get to the NdGT phase, where the cookies are delicious.

Well, technically he is correct that under the rules of symbolic logic, the statement "X is worse than Y" (or "Y is worse than X") does not require approval of X or Y. And to be fair, he is an internationally renowned tenured professor at the University of Oxford. But on the other hand, you have access to Daria gifs…

Call me an ass or an over simplifier but I think his point is that he's not endorsing /in favor of/encouraging a bad thing/event and everyone missed the point and started talking about how there are several degrees of badness of said thing, which he doesn't endorse at all.

That's not the point he made in that tweet, though. He said that 'date rape' wasn't as bad as 'stranger rape'. Both are rape. Your example describes two different types of assault, so it's a false equivalence.

The fact that you say "as a man who has not been raped" is so, so comical. You just said in this very article that he was sexually assaulted as a child. This is a post about there being no degrees of sexual assault in which you imply that there are, in fact, degrees of sexual assault when it is convenient for you.…

No, he is explaining basic logic using a terribly bad example.

Many of those diseases are just STD's, yes you can contract STD's through anal sex, but you can get them through vaginal sex just the same, it's hardly some unique risk of gay intercourse.

God put the Gspot up there. This proves you wrong.

I guess neither you nor the person you're quoting from has ever heard of the prostate gland? (Link to Wikipedia got Kinja'd, so here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostate_…) Also, after almost fifteen years I have yet to develop any sphincter weakness or fecal leakage. How much longer would you say I have…

While this may be physiologically accurate, it's really not the point. The candidate's statement is (almost) completely wrong (see discussion above for the little bit he got right), and is obviously an attempt to couch a "social values" argument in the cloak of (bad) science.

Yet human physiology makes it clear that the body was not designed to accommodate this activity.

Though even that was a little shouty/preachy for me. "Oh, the Woman of Science learns that she just has to have faith in her mystical experience! She has learned about the problems inherent to a system based on looking for truth through inductive reasoning."

Though that, when attempted in fiction, often results in cheesy, cheep, watered down faith and really really bad science.