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Walking down the street in my neighborhood a few years ago I was warmly greeted by the president of my synagogue, who cheerily introduced me to her new male companion. “You’ll like Rebecca,” she said. “She’s the one who gives those baseball sermons on Yom Kippur…”

By the time The Amazing Meeting rolled into Vegas, nerves were raw. It seemed like everyone was both sick of hearing about Elevatorgate and still nursing at least a little irritation toward what they perceived as either the sexism and insensitivity, or the political correctness, of their fellow atheists. Those of us in attendance dealt with it the best way we knew how—by joking about it. When that got old, we resorted to jokes about how bad our jokes were. Underneath the layers of meta-humor, however, it was clear that the heated argument had taken a toll on the atheist and skeptic community.

For Bachmann, submission means respect.

Responses to these events that ignore the underlying issues they express—that would see soccer-related violence, like the uprisings this week, simply as ferociously bad manners that can be corrected by cutting off social media access—invite more of the same. Absent religious institutions, soccer grounds, or other outlets as sites for organized repression and/or expression of the powerlessness and hopelessness that characterizes youth culture in places that simmer like East London all over the economically floundering developed world, more such outrage is always just one blind, stupid authoritarian action away.

Obama campaign promises not to use dog-whistle politics on Romney.

Self-loathing is no joking matter.

A roundup of the week’s religion stories.

Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized is arguably even more relevant now than when it was published last year. Even then, the United States economy had collapsed in on itself. Barack Obama’s role had fully shifted from community organizer to Beltway compromiser, and the grassroots was being overgrown by Tea Party “astroturf.” But now—as politicians wrestle our economy even lower to the ground at the behest of organized elites, and the voice of the majority seems to grow ever fainter in their ears—the kind of real grassroots organizing Stout writes about seems all the more to be what we need.

The message of General Comment No. 34 is not only a clear condemnation of the blasphemy laws of countries such as Pakistan, which despite having ratified the ICCPR in 2008, continues to impose the death sentence for blasphemy and “defiling” the name of Prophet Muhammad. The Comment equally repudiates the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.”