What is it with Christian nutjobs and bananas? You may recall that perhaps the most embarrassing creationist video of all time involved Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron’s musings on the perfect god-given design of the ‘atheist’s nightmare’ – the banana. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfucpGCm5hY[/youtube] And now, Nadine Dorries is running around […]

Another week, another bullshit story of the alleged persecution of Christians hits the headlines at the Daily Torygraph: Christian sacked after abortion leaflet row A Christian mental health worker has been sacked after passing colleagues a booklet warning of the physical and psychological damage some women suffer after […]

One of the finest indictments of the banality of artistic censorship of the last 20-30 years wasn’t written by a novelist or a playwright or an academic. It wasn’t presented in a lecture theatre and it wasn’t published by a broadsheet newspaper or an upmarket literary periodical. Strange […]

Westminster’s resident village idiot, Nadine Dorries is back with yet another prime example of the adage that its better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak  and remove all doubt. The object of Dorries’ ire, on this occasion, is Julian Fellowes who’s recently cast a […]

Attempts to defend Nadine Dorries in public are, for fairly obvious reasons, few and far between but even by the usual piss-poor standards of the DDA (Dorries Defence Association), Ed West’s recent missive at the Telegraph lowers the bar for drooling imbecility: If you ever wonder how human […]

There’s this one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, a talk show host, and she said this: “I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, but I know it’s full of terrorists, speaking as a mother.” So what is this “speaking as a mother” then? Is that a euphemism for “talking out of […]

Over the years, I written quite a few articles on abortion, more perhaps that most British-based male bloggers and as as result – and without ever intending to – I guess I’ve become something of a lay expert on the subject, particularly in regards to scientific evidence base […]

As most people should be aware, the Bailey Review into the ‘commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood’ was published today under the title ‘Letting Children Be Children‘ and it’s already spawned a few notable commentaries. If the review interests you at all then I’d suggest you start with Dr […]

I’m something of a collector of unpleasant euphemisms, the kind of thing that the late, great, George Carlin called ‘soft language’: I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with […]

There was time, not so very long ago, when a dreadful spectre stalked the land striking terror into the hearts of new mothers… …the District Nurse. [Da Da Daaaaaaah] Talk to women of my mother’s generation and the impression that quickly forms is The District Nurse came in […]