Sara Mayhew is a rare and wonderful person. She is a skeptic speaker, award-winning Manga artist, TED fellow, writer and illustrator. She also happens to be a woman!
One of the many things I admire about her is that she is one of the few high-profile skeptic speakers who are prepared to speak out against the bullying orchestrated by Rebecca Watson and co. As a result of this, she herself has been bullied and insulted by “Surly” Amy Davis Roth and Melody Hensley. The two ladies in question deleted their insulting tweets without a word to Sarah, clearly too proud of themselves to raise their maturities to a level of recognizing their wrongdoing and apologizing for it!
Now, Sara is having to put up with crap from the drama instigator-in-chief, one Rebecca Watson. From what I gather there is some history between the two, and I’m assuming that Rebecca is fine with the insulting tweets directed at Sara by Amy and Melody (she hasn’t said otherwise). The latest conflict involves Melody’s use of the term “ragging on” and whether it is sexist or not. However, the etymology of the phrase “to rag on” is not something I want to dwell on here, I want to concentrate on Rebecca’s treatment of Sara:
To scold 1739. Tampon 1930s. You're the dumbest person on Twitter. RT @saramayhew: From your OWN link j.mp/ViHWSy slang for "tampon—
Rebecca the Undead (@rebeccawatson) January 23, 2013
You made up a phrase origin to make someone look sexist. You're dumb. RT @saramayhew: And you're immature and ignorant to call me dumb.—
Rebecca the Undead (@rebeccawatson) January 23, 2013
Here, you have Rebecca twice calling Sara dumb, for a simple disagreement over the etymology of a phrase. Is that what we want to see from a “leader”?
Meanwhile, Melody still thinks that being at-ed on Twitter is “harassment”:
@saramayhew By tagging me, you are communicating w me. I've made it clear I want no communication with you. Yes, this is online harassment.—
Melody Hensley (@MelodyHensley) January 22, 2013
What we see here are a few traits that show how immature Rebecca Watson and her cohorts are:
- Insult at the first opportunity
- Never admit to wrongdoing
- Never apologize for wrongdoing
- Claim all criticism is “harassment”
I think Sara is very brave to speak out against it and stand up to it. If only more people were like her! 
I tweeted this link at the time which links to a post which I think does a very good job of describing the red herring:-
“Notice how @saramayhew can actually afford to be wrong” ~ http://bit.ly/XW2gGd
How true; since what Sarah said is only peripherally related to the whole matter, one should not miss that tiny teeny little fact of Watson’s intro being a cascade of jabs…
What I learned at some point is that, if your entire counter to somebody’s position can really be summed up with: “[CENSORED]” — then it is plainly worthless.
Reblogged this on The Critical Atheist.