Jackson Free Press

I used to like Richard Dawkins. You've heard of him: brilliant evolutionary biologist; bestselling author of "The Selfish Gene" (1976) and "The Blind Watchmaker" (1986); former Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; and, in the eyes of much of the international media, the "atheist pope."

Although I'm neither an atheist nor a pope, I grew up enjoying his work. Then, in the past 10 years or so, something changed.

In the South, we call it getting too big for your britches. With the publication of "The God Delusion" in 2006, Dawkins was described—and, tragically, has come to see himself--as the leader of the New Atheism movement. But that's not the problem. The problem is that this has made him stop seeing himself as the product of natural selection and start seeing himself as some sort of vessel for the scientific method—a living instrument in the fight against religion, on which he blames the 9/11 attacks and countless other things. And he has become so important in his own eyes that he can no longer afford to be publicly wrong about anything.

So when he said that religious instruction is more harmful than "mild" child sexual abuse and was called out on it, he couldn't backtrack.

When he compared an incident of sexual harassment in an elevator to a man chewing gum in an elevator ("I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out") and was called out on it, he couldn't backtrack.

These aren't mere scandals; they're contributing to the problem of misogyny in the atheist-skeptic movement, which causes considerable harm to the small but growing number of women who identify with it, or who would otherwise be inclined to identify with it. Dawkins is stuck—a prisoner of his own credibility. And the more he says, the worse it gets.

I'm singling Dawkins out not because he's especially unusual (this sort of thing seems to happen to celebrity public intellectuals on a fairly regular basis), but because he has spent his entire career advocating reason, objectivity and the scientific method—and even he couldn't escape the inertia of his own words.

So I have to wonder about politicians—local, state, national—and the reputations they've built, and the way those reputations prevent them from revising their old positions even when it is absolutely necessary that they do so. Earlier this month, Gov. Phil Bryant asked state legislators to "immediately pass legislation that would make any unconstitutional order by the President illegal to enforce in Mississippi by state or local law enforcement"--claiming the power of interposition, a legal doctrine frequently cited by segregationists that has been consistently rejected by the Supreme Court since 1809. Bryant doesn't have a legal leg to stand on, and he must know it, but—like Dawkins—he's been backed into a corner by his own rhetoric.

For similar reasons, our governor can't politically afford to accept $9.9 billion in federal grants under the Affordable Care Act—because his opposition to President Obama's policies has acquired, for his supporters, the character of religious doctrine.

Bryant has lost the ability to choose. He has been paralyzed by his own decisions. He can't turn back the plow, even when he runs it into a ditch. He, like Richard Dawkins and so many others, is trapped.

In his essay "Self-Reliance" (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present and live ever in a new day." A few sentences later, he went on to say that "[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Unfortunately, the big statesmen, philosophers and divines adore their foolish consistencies, too—and we all pay the price for their inflexibility.

Freelance writer Tom Head is a Jackson native. He has written or co-written 24 nonfiction books, is a civil liberties writer for About.com and is a grassroots progressive activist.