Iran has done the unthinkable. It bought off an atheist leader with sex. As announced on his blog today, Al Stefanelli, Georgia State Director for American Atheists, and fellow blogger here at FtB (A Voice of Reason), is leaving us. Because the Iranian parliament negotiated a deal to supply him with 29 Persian hookers. They had originally offered 72 virgins, but in our private backchannel, when I asked him why it ended up 29 hookers, Al told me (and I’m not making this up):

I did the math and realized, in my state of health, I could only handle 29, tops. And I didn’t want virgins. Yeah, the Iranian negotiators had a hard time understanding this, and I tried explaining to them. They thought for a while it must be a translation thing. But no, I wanted really sexually experienced women, not women who don’t know what they’re doing. And I didn’t want sex slaves, either. I wanted women working a fair trade contract for services that they freely negotiated. I mean, I’m only abandoning my activism for atheism, not feminism. They couldn’t understand why a man wouldn’t want virgins. They kept going on about it. In the end, I think they thought they were getting a great deal by letting me take a bunch of dirty sinners off their hands. But they still insisted on keeping the “swollen breasts” thing in the contract. Yeah, that was part of their original offer. They were weirdly persistent about it.

Apparently, the Iranian parliament has concocted a plan to buy off all the atheist leaders they can by offering them paradise, or “Janah,” as defined in the Koran. Supposedly the way would then be clear for Islam to convert the world. (Although when Al asked them how they planned to buy off women atheist leaders, they seemed confused by the idea.)

There were various parts to the deal they concluded with Al, including a garden, a bunch of ironwork, lifetime access to a free messenger service, a thousand bottles of non-alcoholic wine, free medical care, three fancy robes, some jewelry and perfume, a personal chef, a couch inlaid with gold and gems, a top-of-the-line refrigerator, a scented fountain, a packet of ginger root, a white horse and an albino camel, and a small tree. The key provision, though, was the offer of 72 virgins “with swollen breasts” (literally, it’s in the contract; I couldn’t believe it, so I had an Arabic specialist check it, after Al sent me a fax of the signed contract, because none of us here at FtB believed this was for real).

But the deal is done. Beginning May 1, Al has agreed to never represent or speak about atheism again. He will return to journalism, focusing on fluff pieces about lost kittens, and tending his garden. And, apparently, his 29 fair-labor sex workers.

How could this have happened? And who will be next? With such a tempting offer, and an unlimited secret slush fund (now held by the untouchable Nicaraguan drug cartels in alliance with the Iranian Secret Police, a fund established for Iran three decades ago by Oliver North at the behest of Ronald Reagan), we could be losing a lot of atheist heroes in the coming months. This may be a dark year for organized atheism.

Saddened, I looked into this, and discovered how this came about. It all started when one of the members of the Iranian parliament met a girl at a party. She told him she had abandoned Islam because “Al Stefanelli’s blog” told her to, and that he had corrupted her with the dark teachings of Western philosophy, making her cling to such immoral things as walking quickly in public and wearing stockings. After a half an hour of being sick over the toilet at the news of this, the parliamentarian called an emergency meeting of something called (the translation from the Arabic is a bit rough) the Ronald Reagan Committee for Aiming the Stinger Missiles He Sold Us and Converting the World to the Beautiful Teachings of the Holy Prophet Peace Be Upon Him. They concocted the plan then and there. The rest is history.

I asked Al how his dear wife of 21 years could possibly have agreed to this, and he says she was actually kind of jazzed about the idea, since with 29 women to hang out with she’d have more fun and a lot less work to do. And she really wants to ride the albino camel. No, Al assured me that is not a euphemism for something. She has always loved camels, and albino ones are apparently the best. But he really only swung it by arranging an adjunct deal to hire Hugh Jackman as her paramour for three months each year for the next nineteen years so their gains would be equal, which Al worked out by trading Hugh five hundred bottles of the non-alcoholic wine. I thought that seemed inequitable, but I asked my wife about it, and she said, “29 buxom Persian hookers for 1 Hugh Jackman? Yep. That’s about right.”

Anyway, if you don’t believe me, just read Al’s own blog post today (I’m Outa Here, Bitches!), where he spells out the whole sordid deal.

He will be missed.