Humanist group strips Richard Dawkins of award for questioning gender theory

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Apr 20, 2021 / 17:19 pm

The American Humanist Association on Monday withdrew an award from Richard Dawkins for his position against gender theory.

“Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA” an April 19 statement from the American Humanist Association read. The statement noted that Dawkins had won the award in 1996. 

“Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” the statement said. “His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.”

The AHA told CNA that its denouncement of Dawkins was because of a tweet in which he compared those with gender dysphoria to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who posed as a black woman for years. 

“In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss” the tweet read.

Responding to the incident, Richard Budd, Director of Marriage & Family for the Diocese of Lansing told CNA, "In recent months there have been an increasing number of voices, many from unexpected quarters, who are expressing serious misgivings about the 'transgender' lobby's approach to those with gender dysphoria, especially as it affects young people, and also to the wider proposition that our gender is but a social construct, a proposition that more and more people, upon scrutiny, are finding difficult to square with reason and science."

Budd affirmed the inseparability of body and soul as the basis of human nature. 

“As Pope Saint John Paul II said in his encyclical Veritatis splendor, only in reference to the human person in his ‘unified totality,’ that is, as ‘a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit,’ can the specifically human meaning of the body be grasped.”

 

"I think we are ever more realizing the great wisdom of Pope John Paul's prophetic maxim that we should never accept truth without love nor love without truth as one without the other becomes a destructive lie,” Budd said.