Hey, I’ve got a fun new game for you to play. It’s the Bigotry Game!

Here’s how it goes. You’re sitting with your friends at the table in the den, and you’re spinning dials on a board game. One dial has different groups of people printed on it: Hispanics, Slavs, Muslim, Canadians, Christians, atheists, humanists, and so on. The other dial points to various negative, strong criticisms: ignorant, smelly, putrid skunks, stupid, racist, drunkards, war-mongers, and more.

To play, all you have to do now is spin the spinners to fill in the blanks here:

“This doesn’t mean that _____ are automatically ______, but — .”

(You can fill in the rest of the sentence any way you’d like.)

So you take your turn, and the pointers lead you (just randomly, you know), to say, “This doesn’t mean that atheists are automatically stupid, but —”

See why I call it the “Bigotry Game”?

‘Humanist’ Wins Without Even Noticing He Was Playing

Now suppose you came across someone who wasn’t playing games, but said this anyway: “That doesn’t mean … evangelicals are automatically bigoted, but — .” In this case I’d say Roy Speckhardt just won the bigotry game — without even realizing he was playing.

Speckhardt has been the executive director of the American Humanist Association since 2005. You almost get the sense here that he’s trying hard not to sound intolerant. “I’m not really stereotyping, because, you know, maybe — theoretically, that is — there could possibly be some exceptions somewhere to my rule that all evangelicals are bigots.” Do you suppose he even realizes that’s what he’s doing?

But a game needs a way to keep score. This one uses “Scorn Points,” with “Sneer Cards” thrown in for bonus value on the side. There’s at least one Scorn Point, for example, in his saying, “evangelicals aren’t automatically bigoted.” It’s dripping with contempt. Give him a Sneer Card, too, for trying so hard to fake tolerance in the process.

I wonder if he’s proud of racking up all those points.

But hey, that’s nothing for Mr. Speckhardt. He’s a past master of the Bigotry Game. Just look at the points he piles up in the one short phrase, “They accept their outdated religious prohibitions literally.”

Just count ’em: “Accept” here implies “to imbibe unthinkingly.” (There’s one.) “Outdated” means we’re clinging to an obsolete past. (Two.) “Religious,” for atheists at least, generally means unthinking, too. (Three.) “Prohibitions” implies Christians are mostly out to keep people from having any fun. (Four.) And “literally,” here, means unthinking again. (Five.)

Wow — five Scorn Points in just seven words! Give him a Sneer Card to boot, for working “unthinking” in there three different ways. This guy’s good at this!

How Could Anyone Think That About Christians?

But why stop there? Speckhardt sure doesn’t: He’s right up again, ready for another round. “Leaders among the religious right,” he says, “have sharpened their faith into a weapon against those whose presence is a threat to their narrow-minded beliefs.“

Here he’s made us the belligerents in this battle, which is comical, historically speaking. Score him another Scorn Point for that. Fact is, we didn’t start this battle in the culture war. We’re not the aggressors. We’re standing on defense, holding fort for a worldwide, centuries-old moral position against a strong gay activist insurgency.

He’s also making us look scared and insecure over the mere “presence” of people different from us. That makes seven Scorn Points. Look at this guy go!

How could anyone think that? Christianity has had centuries of going out to live with people different from us. It’s called world missions. No other group throughout the ages has taken so much initiative to meet, live with, do medical service with, educate, learn with, suffer with, laugh with, and otherwise love people different from themselves.

And how about “narrow-minded”? Give the man another Scorn Point! He’s up to at least eight now.

I could keep going, but you get the point. This man knows Scorn. He’s well on his way to being a champion at the Bigotry Game.

Scorn Points of My Own?

But maybe you’ll say I’ve scored some Scorn Points of my own here. I’ll admit it: I’m calling out one man’s specific behavior. I’m naming it for what it is; and what it is ain’t pretty. Granted, too, I’m using a sharply pointed metaphor to drive my message home. So yes, I’ve hit him hard on it. From what he wrote here, he deserves it.

Yet there’s a huge difference between what he’s doing and what I’m doing. I’m not tarring and feathering an entire population — stereotyping — the way he does in his article. I’m just dealing with the words he himself put on the page. Which means I’m not globalizing falsely.

I do have to wonder about the American Humanist Association’s allowing a man like him to lead them all these years, but let’s just deal with the facts that are right here for all to see. The idea is to avoid getting things so obviously wrong as he did here, with his apparent ignorance of what he thinks he’s criticizing. (“Ignorance” is a strong word, but it’s better than the alternative, which is that he knew the truth but chose to lie instead.)

So it’s obvious that he holds Christians in contempt. It should be just as obvious that I’m calling his article bigoted and hypocritical. I’ll stand up and admit that freely. Would he stand up just as freely and admit to his factually unsupported, stereotyped contempt toward evangelical Christians as a group?

Tuns out he doesn’t need to. He’s got all the Scorn Points he needs to say it for him — and a Sneer Card to boot. The Bigotry Game is a great game to play — if a bigot is what you want to be.