Sometimes people manage to crystallize a thought or a notion into a wonderful passage that is explicit, yet concise all at the same time.  The Cynical Romantic from an older discussion thread on Pharyngula manages to capture much about what Atheism plus is and why it has been formed.

[fixed formatting from the original post]

 

I totally dislike the idea of leaving the battleground on the sexism topic to the minority of offenders.

If there were a minority of offenders, that would indeed be a bad strategy.

Unfortunately, we have multiple stripes of “offenders.” The hardcore misogynist rape-threat-spewing hate-driven trolls are a minority. And if the rest of the community were against them, we might be able to drive them out.

However, regular old run-of-the-mill “I don’t hate women; that would require paying attention to them, and I’d rather spend my time talking about how smart I am” moderate sexists who don’t really give a shit about doing anything about the trolls… we appear to have a metric fuckton of those. They are really, really not a minority in the movement. They are likely the New Atheist base. And that sort of bullshit enables the really serious MRAs and trolls. Finding out that those people don’t care about us and don’t have our back in the face of mistreatment is disheartening. The oblivious, genteelly sexist types go all the way up to the “leaders” of the movement, to the degree that we have leaders (see: Dawkins mocking Rebecca Watson for pointing out that atheist men can do stupid shit too).

We cannot kick the hateful trolls out of the movement because not enough people in the movement give a shit. And we cannot kick the regular sexists out of the movement because they make up too much of the movement.

Hence the attempt to explicitly create a separate space within the movement where we all will have each other’s backs.