‘Cartoon Church’ blog target of legal bullying

This post isn’t anything to do with Psychology, it’s just a quick note to help out a fellow blogger whose work I like. For those of you who haven’t realised, I’m one of those annoying God-botherers, of the quieter Quaker variety. Grumpier atheist readers may wish to restrict themselves to looking at the pretty picture – not much to do with the topic, just one of my favourites from Cartoon Church.

Dave Walker, Cartoon Church.

Dave Walker of the Cartoon Church has been sent legal threats by ‘St Stephen the Great Trust’, a rather unpleasant organisation which has overseen the sad and messy demise of the SPCK bookshops. Basically, SPCK used to sell the more interesting, argumentative, thoughtful, and controversial sort of Christian books. What with the Internet and everything, such a specialist resource wasn’t getting so many sales. SPCK bookshops were brought up by SSGT, an American organisation with a much more evangelical leaning and a tendency to say stupid things about Muslims, and to get UK Orthodox Christians quite annoyed. SSGT screwed around with the staff in a variety of unpleasant ways, which were described on Cartoon Church ’till SSGT threatened Cartoon Church.

I would stick up some links on the background to this, but Cartoon Church has already been bullied into taking their stuff down, and they have provided the most through and detailed coverage so far. Anyway, have a look at this forum thread where several of those involved have posted.

As regular readers will know, I do not approve of using legal threats to shut down an argument, particularly as in this case when it’s just the fact of legal action rather than the merits of the case which appear to be deciding things. It’s a sign of a weak argument if you can’t defend it by arguing back better, and if SSGT would rather what they were doing wasn’t common knowledge then they shouldn’t have been doing it. Going for lawyers is just ducking the issue in a rather pathetic manner.