And About The Biggest of Atheist Assholes Are The Ones In The Anti-AA Industry

Taking the occasion of yesterday's mention of my alternative blog Not Atheists Are Assholes (But This Blog Is About The Ones Who Are) I had to wonder what became someone I wrote about five years back,  Barry A. Hazle, Jr., the drug addict who became a temporary cause célèbre among blog and rag atheists.  He was a inmate serving  a sentence for drugs who wanted to be paroled and who had agreed to the condition that he attend a 12-step group as one of the conditions of parole.  He claimed that as an atheist it was some kind of big-fat violation of his 1st Amendment Rights to be made to attend a meeting which he claimed had religious content to it.  I was surprised to find out that apparently many people and, as things turned out, courts held that there was a right to not only parole but that prospective parolees could set the terms of their own get-out-of-jail-early agreements.  Where, I wondered, were the rights of all of those people who were denied parole over and over again, some of whom would presumably have abided by the terms they agreed to but which Mr. Hazle violated and was returned to jail for breaking his parole.

At the time I wrote about the case, or, rather, the claims of the atheist media about the case, it hadn't been decided by a court, so I went back and looked at what came of it.

Well, the courts sided with Hazel and gave him close to two-million dollars to compensate him for the massive violation of his right to parole on his own terms - how that ruling figures in other cases where parole is denied, I'd be curious to know, I wonder if any lawyers have made that kind of use of it.  The same media, rag and blog, touted the ruling as a great victory in the cause of anti-religion, it was being cited as recently as last year on a website of some 2-bit Hollywood producer-director who made an anti-AA movie and has been peddling herself on slamming AA.

I wondered, though, if Barry Hazle jr. had managed to stay off of the substances he was abusing, what got him landed in jail to start with, and how, if he managed to break his addiction cycle he'd managed to do it.  I spent a half hour searching online this morning and couldn't find anything past his getting the award.  I didn't find that the government appealed the ruling or any subsequent disposition of the case or issue.  But what I'm most interested in knowing is if he managed to get clean and how he did.   If anyone knows, tell me and I'll write it up.

At the time I wrote about it I had a brother who was a victim of severe alcoholism, who died of it (now I have another who may as well have) who refused to go to AA (the only affordable treatment available after they lost their insurance) on the basis of its alleged religious content.  The very same slogans and phrases and tropes I heard from them are the ones that the "secularists" use to encourage alcoholics to go looking for largely non-existent alternatives, there are a number of such potemkin village outfits that don't really exist or exist only in a few large cities.  The atheist alternatives are mostly a fraud.   A lot of them seem to act as fronts for for-profit rehabs, many of which, being fabulously expensive, are out of reach for addicts who have lost their jobs, lost their insurance and who would never be admitted - not to mention in a lot of states those are total scams which are more likely to kill you than get you clean.  And by now you could probably use the John Oliver version of telling the hard truth about that with humor.

Re-reading that piece I wrote, looking at the atheist-"secularist" attacks on AA, looking at the still fraudulent nature of their "alternatives" knowing that one of the strongest characteristics of addiction is that addicts will latch on to any excuse to not try to get cleaned up,  yeah, lots and lots and lots of atheists are total assholes.  The ones in the anti-AA industry are some of the biggest and filthiest of such assholes.