That’s Not Her Name

February 1, 2010 By 31 Comments

I know FOX News doesn’t like the Freedom From Religion Foundation… or the GLBT community.

But this is ridiculous.

FFRF’s co-president’s name is Annie Laurie Gaylor. It takes 0.04 seconds of Google-time to figure that out.

But who needs research when you can do this?

You can see the full video clip below (the part in question appears at the 1:14 mark):

(video via Atheist Media Blog)

Filed Under: FFRF, General, Politics 31 Comments
  • ScholarlyActor

    That’s complete bull…that’s for sure. People’s names should be respected and represented properly in the media. Is it too much to ask to have a unbiased presentation of the news?

  • Valdyr

    Typical childishness from Fox, but what’s the big deal about Mother Teresa being on a stamp? Everybody gets a fuckin’ stamp, it seems like. I think there’s even a Knute Rockne stamp. At least people have heard of Mother Teresa. Now, if they were objecting to her getting a stamp because she was a bitch and therefore doesn’t deserve one, that’s different… but if the objection is, “she was religious”, I have to say “So what?”

  • littlejohn

    Fox News has a history of this sort of thing. Most notably, whenever a Republican politician gets caught in some sort of scandal, his name is invariably followed by a “D.” They generally take a week to correct the “mistake.”
    I wonder how many Mother Teresa fans are aware that she had, according to her own journal, become a skeptic? Add that to the fact that she never actually did anything to help the poor and sick, except urge them to convert in exchange for a cot to die on, and one wonders why anyone respects that utterly useless woman.
    With the millions she brought in, who knows how many actual hospitals she could have built and staffed? In the unlikely event there’s a hell, she belongs there.

  • Neon Genesis

    But isn’t Fox News is completely contradicting themselves? One of the arguments I’ve always heard from Christians who are against the separation of church and state is that it’s impossible for them to separate their religious beliefs from anything else they do in their life, but now Fox News is admitting you can do it with the Mother Theresa stamps, so Fox News just disproved this argument.

  • Steve

    I find their comment about Dr. King to be quite off base. Yes he was a religious man but he is not remembered for his faith (predominantly). He is remembered for the civil rights movement. Under this logic they would say that President Washington could not be on a stamp because he went to church……. as a (hopefully) logical person I’m willing to overlook a small (however massively flawed) mistake when it comes to being honored on a stamp. Should we condemn Einstein for being a poor mathematical student when he was younger or look at the totality of his work. Way to be fair, balanced and consistently stupid FOX!

  • medussa

    Valdyr, besides objecting because I don’t like christian icons being celebrated by our government, I also object because Mother Teresa has a lot to answer for. She did a lot of good, but she also did a lot of harm, and that is severely under-reported. She was judgmental and hateful and promulgated all the bigotries of her faith.
    When in Ireland, she was asked what she believed was the biggest sin in the world. Her answer? Surrounded by bombs, and hunger, and religion based misery, having seen all the orphans, the murder and mayhem in the world, having personally witnessed the fallout of disease and violence, she said the biggest sin in the world was abortion, WHICH ISN’T EVEN MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE.
    Was she a bitch as you put it? No, I don’t think of her that way, at least she walked the walk and lived up to the standards of her faith which many other bigots won’t do, but she ain’t no saint and I object to her being sanctified by my secular government.

    End Rant. Sorry. I am so tired of her sanctimonious celebrity status, I tend to get a little excited.

  • Pseudonym

    Steve:

    Yes he was a religious man but he is not remembered for his faith (predominantly).

    Really? Doesn’t everyone know that he was a “Rev”?

    Similarly, don’t most people think of Mother Theresa primarily as a carer of the sick and poor of Calcutta first? I know I did.

    I personally think the comparison is a pretty good one. Unusually good for Fox News, in fact.

    Of course, the misspelling of the name is inexcusable.

  • http://sa.mu/el samuel

    Mother Teresa on P&T Bullshit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZMmAhsAcA

  • Philbert

    Was that FFRF quote taken out of context? Are they seriously complaining about a stamp?

  • Pseudonym

    Philbert, the specific quote may or may not be taken out of context (I can’t find a citation for it), but the complaint about a stamp is real. The Freedom From Reason Foundation strikes again.

  • Neon Genesis

    “Similarly, don’t most people think of Mother Theresa primarily as a carer of the sick and poor of Calcutta first? I know I did.”

    But Jesus also did non-religious things like giving to the poor and healing the sick, but is Jesus an acceptable figure to be on a stamp?

  • Pseudonym

    Neon:

    IIRC, Jesus was not awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian deeds.

  • http://zackfordblogs.com ZackFord

    “Baptist minister” is definitely the first thing I think when I hear “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  • Philbert

    @pseudonym – thanks. Following your links, apparently USPS has a rule

    9. Stamps or stationery items shall not be issued to honor religious institutions or individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings or beliefs.

    I am inclined to agree that Mother Theresa’s secular reputation is unduly favorable (cf Hitchens) but there’s no denying that it exists. She won a Nobel Peace prize, after all. Like it or not she has widespread notability and respect outside of her religious activities, just like MLK does.

    Seems to me like a poor fight to pick. There are plenty of alternative stamps. I guess this means we can finally make not collecting stamps into a hobby :-)

  • Neon Genesis

    “IIRC, Jesus was not awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian deeds.”

    But Mother Theresa isn’t remembered just for her humanitarian deeds. She’s often remembered because she’s as an outstanding Christian who did humanitarian deeds. But while immediately this issue is not high on my priority list of separation of church and state issues, it does raise the question of where does one draw the line between a famous person who’s remembered for their religion and a famous religion person who’s remembered also for both their good deeds and devout faith.

  • Claudia

    The headline itself is also flat wrong. It says “Atheist group blasts saint”. Mother Teresa is not a saint, not yet anyway. The Vatican is hard at work at its own BS rituals to demonstrate that she was and its almost a foregone conclusion she will become one, but that doesn’t change the fact that the headline is wrong.

  • WK

    I’m actually surprised that they took three letters away from her surname when they could have just added one and achieved the same effect.

    Seriously, what really gets me isn’t that they’d do something like this, but that by giving her a surname of “gay” that it would somehow villify her moreso.

  • http://3harpiesltd.org/ocb Judith Bandsma

    Time to go to metered mail.

  • Aj

    It’s quite simple to establish why “Mother Teresa” is on the stamp, given how many people have done far more good and are not recognised at all. Plenty of them don’t think it’s good to be poor, that it’s more important to convert people to Christianity than it is to heal the sick, or that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace”. If she wasn’t used as a propaganda symbol by the Roman Catholic Church no one would know or care, she’d be one of many who helped the poor but also have fucked up ideologies.

  • Pseudonym

    Incidentally, there’s one distinction between Mother Theresa and the others which may or may not be important: the others are American.

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  • Joffan

    I disagree with the idea that Martin Luther King is principally known as a minister. His repute as a leader of the civil rights movement far outweighs that.

    I was trying to think of a comparable foreign religious “celebrity” to Mother Teresa. The Dalai Lama is the head of his religion, so he is too high up the ladder, like the Pope. Gandhi would be a good choice. Desmond Tutu of South Africa (another Nobel winner) might also qualify. Choosing either of those two to depict on a stamp would not raise any objection from me.

  • Pseudonym

    Putting the Dalai Lama on a stamp might also be interpreted as taking a side in a foreign policy dispute (i.e. Tibet). That would probably be too contentious on several levels.

  • Twin-Skies

    @Pseudonym

    That reminds me…

    does Mao Zedong have his own stamp?

  • Kat

    Mother Theresa is depicted on Indian stamps. No real point to this comment…just trivia.

  • Pseudonym

    @Twin-Skies: Yes.

  • Ed-words

    Mother Theresa was primarily a religious celebrity who continually promoted
    her Catholic dogma.She turned what should
    have been a secular Nobel Prize acceptance
    speech into a dogmatic rant against
    contraception and abortion.
    She was sent by Pope John to Ireland
    to work against its legalizing divorce.

    MLK was not anything like that.

  • AxeGrrl

    Philbert wrote:

    “Seems to me like a poor fight to pick. There are plenty of alternative stamps. I guess this means we can finally make not collecting stamps into a hobby”

    *teehee*

    Kudos for the witticism:)

    (and i’m not just saying that because I have a dog with _precisely_ the same name as yours!)

  • http://universalheretic.wordpress.com/ Victor

    There’s plenty of reason MT shouldn’t be on a stamp. Unfortunately all of them are unknown to the general public, and probably to whoever picked her for the stamp. Ignorance of the masses wins out.

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was selected for a stamp while she’s being set up for saint hood anymore than it was a coincidence that RD-D2 was put on a stamp for the anniversary of the Star Wars films. Selling stamps that never get used is a big source of income.

  • muggle

    Please I utterly agree with FFRF’s fight. The only reason the lie that she was a humanitarian is spread is to publicize the Catholic church.

    If anyone else acted as she did — telling sick and dying people they deserved their fate, using the needles over and over, refusing to turn people and relieve them of their bed sores — they’d be villified, not honored.

    How does the Catholic Church get a pass on these things? MT, pervy preists (okay thank you SNAP they’re starting to be made to pay for that, and a Pope who’s an ex-Nazi) that any other organization would be called to task on?

    Um, and Pseudonym has a point too. Why are is the US Postal Service commemorating a non-American? Isn’t that in their criteria? Who next? Prince William?

    Oh, and I’ve been a member of FFRF for a long time and, for the record, they do protest the Virgin Mary et al.

    Go, FFRF, go!!!!