#1264: Pamela Winnick

Pamela R. Winnick is, or at least used to be, a trained lawyer and staff writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She rose to fame, however, by being one of the main characters of the pseudo-documentary Expelled, where she was portrayed as having been persecuted for her creationist sympathies. That is, though she vehemently denies that she is a creationist (though the records rather suggest otherwise), she complains about how the scientific elite tries to “stifle” a “meaningful debate” about evolution – meaning that people with expertise in the field don’t take seriously misguided complaints made by people with absolutely no knowledge of the topic but with a religious axe to grind. And that’s persecution, according to Winnick, apparently mostly since she is among those religious fundies, and she happens to think that she knows a lot about the subject.

The claims about persecution and blacklisting merely on the grounds of briefly mentioning Intelligent Design without taking a position that she made in Expelled are discussed here. Note that Winnick has for years not only mentioned Intelligent Design but ardently championed creationism, including in her book A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion (complete shit, by the way). Her claims to being “blacklisted” and persecuted are apparently based on the fact that the book received a negative review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Who still publishes her work.

Diagnosis: A good example of what morons mean when they say they are persecuted, namely that someone has the audacity to disagree with them. Clearly, that’s a violation of their right to free speech. Otherwise (heck, partially in virtue of that idea) Winnick is your typical, religiously motivated, staunch denialist.