Because of The Implication
There's no small amount of irony in the fact that I published this article about how the atheist movement dovetails with other social justice movements this particular week. I was actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing, because I was writing it while traveling to CONvergence to speak at the invitation of Skepchick about the feminist depths of this issue, on a panel called "Women vs. God", where we discussed fighting the religious right. Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind---religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history. Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it's naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there's a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa. I'm thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists.