Religious Followers - Ugly, Violent Moral Retards?

Whether or not religious followers are ugly, violent moral retards is a question for another post. But whether a professor should be denied a post for including such words in a manifesto directed at a small audience is.

Professor Timothy Shortell withdrew his name for consideration after a flap these comments and his atheism. Katha Pollitt had some choice words in her column about the stink over at The Nation:

Besides, so what if Shortell's essay is offensive? Brooklyn College is a public, secular institution, not a Bible college. The Sun claimed Shortell's disdain for religion would cloud his judgment of job candidates, but there was never any evidence that this would be the case. No student ever complained about his teaching; his colleagues trusted him enough to elect him to the post; the student work posted on his website is apolitical and bland. Predictions of bias, absent any evidence, are just a backhanded way of attacking his beliefs. You might as well say no Southern Baptist should be chair, since someone who believes that women should be subject to their husbands, homosexuality is evil and Jews are doomed to hell won't be fair to female, gay or Jewish job candidates. Or no Orthodox Jew or Muslim should be chair because religious restrictions on contact with the opposite sex would privilege some job candidates over others.

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The Tim Shortell case is not a blip, even at CUNY. Around the same time it went after Shortell, the Sun ran a front-page story accusing Priya Parmar, a young untenured professor in Brooklyn College's School of Education, of attacking standard English as "the language of oppressors," based on a reading assignment and complaints from two students accused of plagiarism. Under the guise of depoliticizing academia, David Horowitz is pushing the "Academic Bill of Rights," which would empower state legislatures to mandate "balance" in the classroom. His website invites students to report their teachers for such sins as "introduced controversial material," "mocked political/religious figures" and the ever-popular "biased grading." (What was the point of complaining, one student wrote sadly: "He has ten-year.")

It's difficult to tell whether people object purely on the grounds that he is an atheist or whether they object to the the statements in the "manifesto". While, as Pollitt pointed out, this is irrelevant, I'm just curious. Do they hate the atheism but love the atheist?