"Correct me if I read that wrong?"

Your read wrong. The statement was in quotes. Is is one of the theses of the article. It is defended in the article. I put it there so people might be curious and read the article.

I find the article interesting. I think it parallels a lot of the behaviors I see here. Politically, my beliefs, Joe Offer's beliefs, Little Hawk's beliefs are no threat to science or the beliefs of any other person. Why are we mocked? Why are we taunted? Why are childish tantrums thrown when we express them.

Why do apparently otherwise sane people give themselves license to throw any any semblance of self-restraint and civility.

Could this be why? From the article. ....

"All I get out of such exchanges is the confirmation that believers will say anything to defend their faith and that some atheists have turned evangelical. Nothing new about the first, but atheists' zeal keeps surprising me. Why "sleep furiously" unless there are inner demons to be kept at bay? In the same way that firefighters are sometimes stealth arsonists and homophobes closet homosexuals, do some atheists secretly long for the certitude of religion? Take Christopher Hitchens, the late British author of "God Is Not Great." Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an "antitheist" stance that blamed all of the world's troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti–Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa."