As noted about a week ago, Dr. James and Shirley Dobson appeared on FoxNews’ The Kelly File, during which host Megyn Kelly described Michael “Mikey” Weinstein as an “atheist,” and Dr. Dobson said he was a well-paid “professional atheist.”

In response to the FoxNews characterization, MRFF researcher Chris Rodda went on the warpath, decrying the “atheist” label and stooping to personal attacks on Megyn Kelly [emphasis added]:

As a former attorney, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly should know full well what defamation is, and she should know full well that what she repeatedly said on last Thursday’s episode of her show The Kelly File was indeed defamation…

It seems “former attorney” Weinstein went out of his way to put out something attacking atheists — and suffered some significant backlash as a result.

After all, Rodda didn’t merely say that Kelly and Dobson were incorrect; she went out of her way to explicitly say Kelly was guilty of “defamation.”  Similarly, Weinstein had his lawyer send FoxNews a letter saying the characterization of Weinstein as an atheist was “defamatory.”

As many atheists realized — and the MRFF apparently did not — in order for something to be defamatory, it has to harm one’s reputation.

In other words, Rodda and Weinstein are saying that a statement that Weinstein is an atheist hurts his reputation. Naturally, many atheists took offense at the belittling of their religious beliefs.

Oddly, Rodda later undermined her own accusation, publishing emails to prove that many people know Weinstein is Jewish. In other words, Kelly’s words were unlikely to cause harm to Weinstein’s reputation because so many people already know Weinstein to be Jewish.

Even more oddly, Weinstein explicitly claimed that Kelly’s words had already caused harm [emphasis added]:

Weinstein says that the charges of FOX News and Megyn Kelly have produced harm including physical attacks.

“It’s well-known fact that, you know, we’ve had the windows shot out of our house twice,” he said. “We’ve had animals killed and left on the front porch of the house. We’ve had tires slashed. We’ve had beer bottles and feces thrown at the house… We get a large number of death threats via telephone and email. We publish those. They are all over our website. And other things I can’t go into right now.”

For a “former attorney,” Weinstein’s statement is moronically comical: First, the examples of harm he attributes to Kelly aren’t the result of defamation, which is restricted to harm to one’s reputation. Second, just like his lawsuit against former Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, Weinstein is again claiming that critics’ words caused events that occurred in the past. Weinstein’s dramatic account of shot windows and dead animals is the same line he’s been using for years — so how does Megyn Kelly’s show from last week have anything to do with that?

If you want to know the truth — it doesn’t, and Weinstein knows it.  But Weinstein is choosing his words intentionally, trading truth for publicity.

It would seem that in their effort to capitalize off the publicity of a FoxNews piece, Chris Rodda and Mikey Weinstein planted their feet well into their mouths. Rodda could have said Kelly was wrong, and Weinstein didn’t need a lawyer’s accusation. But they were keenly after the defamation accusation for reasons of shock value and attention — not truth.  Weinstein acolyte Paul Loebe admitted as much while explaining the MRFF’s ‘offensive’ wording to another atheist [emphasis added]:

The only way to fight back is in a combative style that will get noticed and picked up once again by Fox News…   It is impossible to fight a fair fight of words in such an environment. We must use strong words of rebuttal in order to be noticed.

Weinstein abandoned the truth because he wanted attention.

In other words, rather than sticking to principle, they were playing to the press — and stepped on their erstwhile supporters in the process.

As has been mentioned several times before, Weinstein is quick to give other people titles or labels without regard to the truth; for example, he frequently claims someone is a “dominionist” or “fundamentalist” Christian without even knowing if they have a religious faith at all (as he did at Fort Bragg). As is typical with Weinstein’s delicate disposition, however, his ego cannot stand it when someone else labels him.

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