I never thought I would have anything good to say about Narendra Modi, but I guess I have to. In his first major address he spoke out about rape and violence against women.

In speaking out, Modi challenged citizens and government alike to change the way that rape is thought about. “Today as we hear about the incidents of rapes, our head hangs in shame,” he said in his wide-ranging address. “I want to ask parents when your daughter turns 10 or 12 years old, you ask, ‘Where are you going? When will you return?’ Do the parents dare to ask their sons, ‘Where are you going? Why are you going? Who are your friends?’ After all, the rapist is also someone’s son. If only parents decide to put as many restrictions on their sons as they do on their own daughters.”

Wow. That’s the kind of thing that gets a person branded a “radical feminist” (and not in a good way) around here.

Though only time will tell whether the Modi government acts on the rhetoric seen in his speech, Tanvi Mandan, head of the Brookings Institution’s India Project told ThinkProgress in an email, the fact that they are even being talked about in this way is significant. “This is the first time that a prime minister has spoken about violence against women in this fashion, especially using such a prominent platform – the closest American equivalent of the Indian PM’s independence day speech would be the president’s State of the Union speech,” she wrote.

“Moreover, Mr. Modi spoke of an aspect of this that Indian civil society has helped highlight publicly over the last couple of years – that this is not just a legal issue, but a societal one; not just about having the right laws in place, but also about changing culture,” Madan continued.

That kind of thing. You can’t talk about “culture” over here in the US without getting a hail of obloquy and epithets and assorted insults.

Modi also used his speech to speak out against the practice of Indian family’s selectively aborting females in the woman or abandoning female babies once they’re born. Earlier this week, the Indian government announced that the sex ration among children 0-6 — standing at 927 girl children per 1,000 boys — is the lowest it’s been since India’s independence in 1947.

“Have we seen our sex ratio? Who is creating this imbalance?” Modi asked. “Not God. I appeal to the doctors not to kill the girl child in the mother’s womb. I request the parents not to kill daughters because they want a son. Don’t kill daughters in the womb, it is a blot on 21st century India. I have seen families where one daughter serves parents more than five sons.”

Modi of all people. It’s disorienting.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The nuns are still fighting back. Heidi Hall at RNS reports:

Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a theology professor at Fordham University, accepted the Leadership Conference of Women Religious’ top award and then lambasted bishops for criticism of her book “Quest for the Living God,” saying it appears they’ve never read it.

“To this day, no one, not myself or the theological community, the media or the general public knows what doctrinal issue is at stake,” she told the Nashville assembly of about about 900 sisters representing 80 percent of the nation’s nuns.

Omigod a room full of radical feminist nuns listening to a radical feminist nun. Be afraid.

In her 20-minute acceptance speech, followed by a standing ovation, Johnson suggested the conference’s support of her work prompted the investigation by the church’s top enforcer of orthodoxy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.

Johnson’s book includes chapters on black and feminist theology and interfaith engagement. She said book sales skyrocketed after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops criticized it.

Yeah. Anything the USCCB doesn’t like is bound to be good.

The LCWR has been undergoing a Vatican-ordered doctrinal investigation since 2009. In 2012, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ordered nun’s group to reform its statutes and appointed Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain to oversee changes, including a rewrite of the group’s charter and approval of all speakers at future assemblies.

In April, a top Vatican official warned the LCWR that in recognizing Johnson it would provoke the Holy See.

This from the band of brothers that has been covering up and protecting child-rape for decades, in fact probably centuries. What on earth gives them the idea that they have moral (or “spiritual”) authority over anyone?

It’s unlikely the sides can come to a solution, said Bruce Morrill, a Vanderbilt University professor of theological studies and a Jesuit priest.

At the conflict’s heart is a difference in approach to hierarchical chain of command: the top-down, morals-emphasizing Vatican versus the collegial, social-justice oriented nuns.

“As far as the U.S. bishops and Vatican officials are concerned, this is not a debate,” Morrill said. “The hierarchy expects the women religious to obey their directives.”

The nuns are social justice warriors!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Have a tv interview with Lt. General David Morrison, the head of the Australian army who last year made heads snap upright with an uncompromising talk on sexual harassment. “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”; remember that guy?

In this interview he talks to Annette Young of France 24. He starts off by talking about the necessity of empathy, which is not something I usually expect from military brass. Young asks him if he calls himself a feminist and he says, with speed and emphasis, “Yes. Proudly.”

I wish we had generals like him in the US military.

H/t Stewart

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Christie Aschwanden in the NY Times a few days ago on sexual harassment in science.

She and some colleagues sent an online questionnaire to science writers.

We received responses from 502 writers, mostly women, and presented our results at M.I.T. in June during Solutions Summit 2014: Women in Science Writing, a conference funded by the National Association of Science Writers.

More than half of the female respondents said they weren’t taken seriously because of their gender, one in three had experienced delayed career advancement, and nearly half said they had not received credit for their ideas. Almost half said they had encountered flirtatious or sexual remarks, and one in five had experienced uninvited physical contact.

Obstacles, handicaps, impediments.

…our survey of writers grew out of well-publicized harassment accusations against a prominent male editor who was a mentor to many female writers. Those incidents led women to come forward with their stories of discrimination throughout the profession.

In academia, accusations of sexual harassment or assault are usually handled internally, Dr. Clancy says, and this can create powerful incentives to cover up bad behavior, especially among perpetrators with tenure and power. “I’ve heard too many stories about the professor who isn’t allowed to be in a room with X, Y and Z anymore,” she said. Sometimes perpetrators even benefit by getting out of dreaded teaching assignments while keeping their jobs.

Harassment among science writers spawned a hashtag, #ripplesofdoubt, to describe how harassment undermines women. Some women who had been passed over for jobs wondered if they had been rejected for their looks rather than their work. Others worried that they might not have attained their positions on merit.

You see that’s not the way to achieve equality. Creating extra obstacles for one kind of person doesn’t promote equality.

Whether harassment or discrimination takes place at a field site in Costa Rica or in a conference room, the problem will not be solved with new rules archived on unread websites. The responsibility for pushing back should not rest solely with the victims. Solutions require a change of culture that can happen only from within.

It will take chief executives, department heads, laboratory directors, professors, publishers and editors in chief to take a stand and say: Not on my watch. I don’t care if you’re my friend or my favorite colleague; we don’t treat women like that.

I would like to see that happen more, and then more again.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Jessica Valenti talked to Rebecca Solnit a few weeks ago. She asked Solnit how she felt about being seen as the coiner of “mansplaining.”

A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn’t have language for.

And that’s something I’m really interested in: naming experience and how what has no name cannot be acknowledged or shared. Words are power. So if this word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then I’m really glad it exists and slightly amazed that not only have I contributed about a million published words to the conversation but maybe, indirectly, one new word.

(Note that the fact that every woman has the experience does not mean that every man provides the experience. Yesallwomen but notallmen.) (That’s me tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, because there is already some notallmenning in the comments on an earlier post about Solnit.)

So does it still go on? Why yes, yes it does.

Social media are to mansplainers what dogs are to fleas, and this recent feminist conversation has brought them out in droves. I mean, guys explain ridiculous things to me like that the Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a Pacific Coast. But more than anything since I wrote Men Explain Things to Me, they’ve explained women’s experience to me and other women. With this explosive new conversation since the Isla Vista murders, there’s been a dramatic uptick in guys mansplaining feminism and women’s experience or just denying that we need feminism and we actually had those experiences.

If there were awards to be handed out, one might go to the man who told me and a woman friend that 1) women actually like all those catcalls 2) as a man who’s spent time in men’s-only locker rooms, he knows men don’t actually speak to women that way. So we like street harassment, but that doesn’t actually exist, because we’re just crazy that way, us subjective, imaginative, unreliable ladies. Just ask an expert. Who is not a lady.

Isla Vista, yes…and there were so many people, including some women, saying that was nothing to do with misogyny no nothing at all. Solnit is optimistic though.

Right now I think that a lot of people get it and a lot of people are getting more engaged with the ideas, with the issues, and with the urgency of the situation. I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life for women to be talking the way we are right now, and that many men have joined in the conversation or support from the sidelines or get it is magnificent and inspiriting. (And then, yeah, those other guys. “Not all men”.)

Yes but…I could have sworn women had already been talking the way we are right now, and that many men had joined in. So I don’t really find it magnificent and inspiriting, because we seem to keep having to talk this way over and over and over again forever. We don’t seem to get to move on to a new, better stage.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

From Rebecca Solnit’s essay (which later became a book) “Men Explain Things to Me”:

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the trajectory of American politics since 2001 was shaped by, say, the inability to hear Coleen Rowley, the FBI woman who issued those early warnings about al-Qaeda, and it was certainly shaped by a Bush administration to which you couldn’t tell anything, including that Iraq had no links to al-Qaeda and no WMDs, or that the war was not going to be a “cakewalk.” (Even male experts couldn’t penetrate the fortress of their smugness.)

Arrogance might have had something to do with the war, but this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence, one from which a fairly nice career as a writer (with a lot of research and facts correctly deployed) has not entirely freed me. After all, there was a moment there when I was willing to let Mr. Important and his overweening confidence bowl over my more shaky certainty.

Never be a person you can’t tell anything. Never be that person.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Georgia school district is letting coaches use the football program to promote religion to the students, so the American Humanist Association very properly told the district that’s a violation of the Establishment clause. Result? Accusations that the American Humanist Association is bullying the students. Oh yeah? What about the coaches?

Acting on behalf of an unnamed Hall County citizen, the AHA accused the county of violating the First Amendment by allowing Gainesville’s Chestatee High School football coaches to organize team prayers and promote biblical messages on team documents and pre-game banners.

“At times, the head coach has led the prayers, which is an egregious violation of the Establishment Clause,” the AHA alleged in a letter to school officials Tuesday. “This involvement in prayer as a ‘participant, an organizer, and a leader’ would unquestionably ‘lead a reasonable observer to conclude that he was endorsing religion.’”

In response to the complaint, hundreds of Gainesville community members gathered in the middle of the CHS football field for an impromptu prayer rally on Wednesday and Thursday.

[Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.)], a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and a former Baptist pastor, defended the school’s religious practices in a statement Wednesday, accusing the AHA of bullying students.

It’s the coaches and the district who are bullying. They’re the ones with the power in this situation.

“The liberal atheist interest groups trying to bully Chestatee High School kids say they have a reason to believe that expressions of religious freedom are ‘not an isolated event’ in Northeast Georgia,” Collins said. “They’re right. In Hall County and throughout Georgia’s 9th district, we understand and respect the Constitution and cherish our right to worship in our own way.”

Oh but that’s just what they’re not doing. Of course they have the right to worship in their own way; what they don’t have is the right to impose that on all students in their control in school hours on school property.

AHA legal director David Niose criticized Collins for “name-calling” and accused the conservative lawmaker of “grandstanding” in a statement to The Huffington Post Friday.

“Collins apparently doesn’t need to investigate facts or consider the legitimacy of complaints from religious minorities — he just dismisses them,” Niose said. “Obviously, he is pandering to the worst emotions and fears of his constituents. True leadership would step up and show genuine concern for everyone, including religious minorities.”

Since the AHA filed its complaint on Tuesday, the group has “received numerous communications” from other residents expressing concern over “the religious domination of the culture” in Hall County schools, according to Niose.

See? That’s the bullying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Two UN officials have condemned the avalanche of sexual violence that IS is perpetrating on Iraqi minorities.

13 August 2014 – Two senior United Nations officials today condemned in the strongest terms the “barbaric acts” of sexual violence and “savage rapes” the armed group Islamic State (IS) has perpetrated on minorities in areas under its control.

In a joint statement from Baghdad, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence (SRSG) in Conflict, Zainab Hawa Bangura and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov urged the immediate protection of civilians.

“We are gravely concerned by continued reports of acts of violence, including sexual violence against women and teenage girls and boys belonging to Iraqi minorities,” Ms. Bangura and Mr. Mladenov said.

“Atrocious accounts of abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkomen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner,” Ms. Bangura and Mr. Mladenov stated, pointing out that some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian persons may have been forced into sexual slavery.

The officials condemned, in the strongest terms, the explicit targeting of women and children and the barbaric acts IS has perpetrated on minorities. Acts of sexual violence are grave human rights violations that can be considered as war crimes and crimes against humanity, they warned.

There seems little chance that it will end anytime soon.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I got permission to quote a brilliantly shrewd Facebook comment on a long thread on Martin Wagner’s wall that was full of guys explaining at great length what’s wrong with feminism today. You already know what they said, because you’ve seen it many times before.

Here is that comment, by Justin Connelly:

1907: “Feminism? Bunch of men-hating women that don’t know their place. They don’t want equality, they want to be men”

1930s: “Feminism?! Pft. Ugly lesbians that just want to do men’s work if you ask me”

1960s: “Feminism? Bunch of ugly, man hating, bra burning hippies. Who needs it”

1990s: “Feminism? Radical man-hating liberal PC Police. Nothing more”

Today: “I just hate how feminism has been hijacked by radicals to be anti-man, rather than for equality the way it used to be. Feminists should abandon the label because it doesn’t mean equality anymore”

If you think your “observation” that the feminist movement is polluted by “man hating radicals” is some new, nuanced critique of a movement that has abandoned the cause of promoting social equality….you’d be wrong. You are, in fact, repeating the exact same tired slander and accusations that have been leveled at the movement since before women had the legal right to vote.

I find this nostalgic harkening back to the “good ol days” of feminism, before the radicals “ruined it” to be as disingenuous as it is historically ignorant. Feminism has ALWAYS been a movement aimed at addressing long-standing gender inequity, from the vantage point of the underprivileged class. And it has ALWAYS been marginalized or dismissed as the crazed ravings of radicals, lunatics, and misandrists. This. Isn’t. New…. You. Aren’t. Clever.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s not just Kenya that has nasty new legislation in the pipeline; we do too. (Well of course we do. Congress is full of terrible people.)

…a newly proposed bill from two GOP Senators would allow faith-based adoption agencies opposed to marriage equality to deny service to gay and lesbian couples.

The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014 was introduced last week by Republican Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania because, apparently “some people in positions of power are essentially discriminating against people of faith.”

By “discriminating against” of course they mean “expecting to follow the law like everyone else.” But this is Hobby Lobby America, where the whole point is that People of Faith don’t have to follow the law like everyone else.

This is no doubt in reference to several Catholic-based agencies in states where marriage equality exists shutting down their adoption and foster care programs rather than place children with married gay couples, despite the fact that in many of these cases the programs were supported directly by state funds. According to a statement from Senator Enzi, it seems like he would like to get around this separation of church and state by providing federally sanctioned exemptions for religious organisations.

Faith-based charities and organisations do an amazing job of administering adoption, foster care and a host of other services. Limiting their work because someone might disagree with what they believe only ends up hurting the families they could be bringing together.

No no no it’s not because “someone might disagree with what they believe” – it’s because they refuse to serve people for bad, rights-denying reasons. It’s not about what they believe, it’s about what they do.

Well it’s partly about what they believe, but only after it’s about what they do. People who run adoption agencies are allowed to refuse to let people adopt if the reasons are relevant and valid: if there are good reasons to think the people in question will be bad parents who will do harm to the adopted child or children. They’re not allowed to refuse for bad reasons, such as No Gayz, so to that extent it’s about what they believe. But it wouldn’t be about what they believe if it weren’t about what they do, first.

If passed into law (assuming it would be constitutional, and it might not be), it sets a very dangerous precedent. Like corporations before it, these adoption agencies would now be able to claim that they as agencies have religious beliefs:

Child welfare service providers, both individuals and organisations, have the inherent, fundamental, and inalienable right to free exercise of religion protected by the United States Constitution.

Nah, they don’t. I know what the Hobby Lobby ruling said, but I disagree with it, and I get to say that organizations, not being persons, have no rights. I’ll just quote from Ginsburg’s dissent in Hobby Lobby here:

Until this litigation, no decision of this Court recognized a for-profit corporation’s qualification for a religious exemption from a generally applicable law, whether under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA. The absence of such precedent is just what one would expect, for the exercise of religion is characteristic of natural persons, not artificial legal entities.

The bill itself is quite clear on the purpose being proposed:

The Federal Government, and any State that receives federal funding for any program that provides child welfare services under part B or part E of title IV of theSocial Security Act (and any subdivision, office or department of such State) shall not discriminate or take an adverse action against a child welfare service provider on the basis that the provider has declined or will decline to provide, facilitate, or refer for a child welfare service that conflicts with, or under circumstances that conflict with, the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Catholic archbishop in Oklahoma City, with the church’s usual unerring nose for what’s important, is all in a lather about the blasphemous misuse of a thin biscuit for something called a “black mass.” Dude…it’s just a thin biscuit. None of the magic makes it anything else, neither your magic nor the satanists’.

The purported use of a consecrated Host at a planned satanic black mass at an Oklahoma City civic center would be a “terrible sacrilege” that requires a prayerful response, the local archbishop emphasized.

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City in an Aug. 4 message lamented that the city-run Civic Center Music Hall was selling tickets for the event “as if it were merely some sort of dark entertainment.”

Rather, he said, the ritual was “deadly serious” and “a blasphemous and obscene inversion of the Catholic Mass.”

Not to be all Dear Muslima about it, but seriously, if you’re going to fret, fret about something real.

In July, an official with the city music hall defended the decision, citing the hall’s neutrality policy. She told CNA that as long as no laws were broken during the event itself, the city hall was not concerned with whether laws may be broken in obtaining a consecrated host ahead of time. She said that similar events scheduled in previous years had poor or no attendance.

Archbishop Coakley said that there are no indications the city intends to prevent the event from taking place. He encouraged Oklahomans to contact the office of Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett.

“I am especially concerned about the dark powers that this Satanic worship invites into our community and the spiritual danger that this poses to all who are involved in it, directly or indirectly,” the archbishop said. “Since it seems this event will not be cancelled, I am calling on all Catholics of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to counteract this challenge to faith and decency through prayer and penance.”

Honestly I think there’s more “spiritual danger” from the Catholic church itself.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Pink News reports that a new bill to allow gays to be stoned to death is under discussion in Kenya.

A new Anti-Homosexuality Bill has been submitted by the Republican Liberty Party in the National Assembly.

It would introduce harsh punishments for homosexuality, with life imprisonment or the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality’.

The bill’s author, Edward Onwong’a Nyakeriga, said: “The petition aims at providing a comprehensive and enhanced legislation to protect the cherished culture of the people of Kenya, legal, religious and traditional family values against the attempts of sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual promiscuity on the people of Kenya.”

Damn I wish people would stop thinking it’s a cherished part of their cherished culture to ostracize and persecute and murder people. That’s not a culture to be proud of! And it’s not special to Kenya, either. Homophobia was part of the “culture” over here in the “West” until five minutes ago, and still is in big swaths of it. It’s not something to be proud of.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A Catholic religious order in Quebec has approved settling a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of abuse victims at a school it ran. It’s a large settlement. Very large.

It’s twenty million dollars.

“This is a landmark case,” said Robert Kugler, a Montreal lawyer who represents the victims. “This is the highest amount that has ever been paid by a religious congregation in Quebec to settle a class action dealing with sexual abuse.”

The suit was launched by former student Frank Tremblay against the school, the Redemptorist order, and priest Raymond-Marie Lavoie. Mr. Tremblay recounted that as a 13-year-old student, he sought out Mr. Lavoie after feeling anxious and unable to sleep one night; he ended up being assaulted three to five times a week for four months. (Mr. Lavoie, in a criminal trial, pleaded guilty in 2011 to sexually assaulting 13 boys at the school – the Séminaire Saint-Alphonse, subsequently named Collège Saint-Alphonse – while he was a dorm supervisor.)

Quebec Superior Court held the religious order responsible in a ruling in July. The court decision recounts a harrowing catalogue of abuse carried out by the Redemptorist priests against young boys entrusted to their care, from sexual touching to sodomy.

It was a respected school, with a reputation for high educational standards.

The abuse spread upward in the school hierarchy to include two school directors, who also turned a deaf ear to the students’ laments, according to the judge’s decision. When one complained about the predatory behaviour of two priests, the director retorted that the student should consider himself lucky to get so much attention and affection; he then reminded the boy that his mother had not paid his bill for three months.

Two other students who complained about abuse were threatened with expulsion.

Welllll, you see, it was different then. Morality was different. Priests were different, children were different, school directors were different. Nobody understood that raping children was wrong. Besides, this is the Catholic church we’re talking about, with its special relationship to God and its possession of Absolute Moral Truth.

The judge in the class action, Claude Bouchard, said the Redemptorist order could not have been unaware of the sexual predation by its priests.

“We are not talking about isolated acts committed by a few priests,” he said in addressing the order’s responsibility. He cited “repeated acts” by nine priests against more than 70 students during more than two decades. Six of the priests have since died.

“Whether it was in the dorm, the nearby priest’s bedroom … in his school office, infirmary, school hallway, in the refectory or in a cottage belonging to the school a few kilometres away, is it possible that sexual assaults perpetrated in these different places could have occurred without the Redemptorists being informed one way or the other?” Justice Bouchard asked.

“The court doesn’t believe it,” he concluded.

Well the court is damn lucky this isn’t the 15th century, isn’t it, or it would find itself standing on a bonfire right smart quick.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kaveh takes a look at the semiotics of Iran’s media coverage (or lack of coverage) of Maryam Mirzakhani’s winning of the Fields medal.

It’s all about the hijab.

The government paper uses a photo of her from when she was trapped in Iran and had to wear it.

Other papers retouch the photo so that the hijab disappears.

Rouhani used two photos, the one with hijab and another without.

Signs, signs, signs.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Amnesty International is sending a human rights delegation to Ferguson.

(FERGUSON, MO) – Today, Amnesty International USA announced that it has sent human rights delegation to Ferguson, MO to observe police and protester activity, gather testimony, seek meetings with officials and offer support to the community. The 12-person delegation also includes organizers who will train local activists on methods of non-violent protest.

“Law enforcement, from the FBI to state and local police, are obligated to respect and uphold the human rights of our communities. The U.S. cannot continue to allow those obligated and duty-bound to protect to become those who their community fears most,” said Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven W. Hawkins.

“Our delegation will remain in Missouri until we have a clear picture of what is taking place on the ground, and we are able to work effectively with local activists on how to defend human rights at home.”

On Wednesday, August 13, Mr. Hawkins wrote to the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri to express his deep concern over the shooting of Michael Brown and the use of tear gas and rubber bullets at a demonstration against his death.

In other news, the Missouri Highway Patrol is taking over security from the Ferguson police department.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Andrew Brown has an annoying piece about the Global Humanist Conference that wastes most of its space ruminating about how close the resemblance is between humanism and religion haw haw geddit no god but it’s still like a religion yawn.

The World Humanist Conference in Oxford at the weekend struck me as a completely religious gathering, even though it is predicated on atheism. If it hadn’t been for the words of the sermons, we might have been at any Protestant missionary society.

Part of this was the architecture. The old parts of Oxford University date from the time when there was no clear distinction between religion and society, and most of them now have a faintly sacerdotal air. Part of it was the people: lots of beards, formidable middle-aged women and younger gay men.

Everyone was united and sharing in a sense of relief at being in a safe space where what was important to them was no longer strange or dangerous.

Yes yes yes, Andrew, we get it; very droll.

However he did manage to spare one short paragraph to talk sensibly about Gulalai Ismail. He should have taken much more space to do that and less space to recycle the atheism-is-another-belief trope, but at least there’s the one short paragraph.

It is difficult to know who was the bravest, but my nomination would go toGululai Ismail, a young woman who has set up networks to spread ideas of human rights and peace in some of the most lawless and dangerous parts of Pakistan and who has, in consequence, had her family home shot up and death threats made against her.

Well that’s actually just one sentence. He gives it its own paragraph, but it’s still just one sentence.

Sigh.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Catching up with Taslima’s adventures via Twitter.

Her talk at the Global Humanist Conference, which was the last talk of the event:

Via Humanisterna

A standing ovation for that talk:

Taslima tweeted

World Humanist Congress honored me by standing ovation. I was so moved.

Taslima again:

After my speech Professor Richard Dawkins embraced me. It was a great honor for me.

There’s a picture with wonderful Gulalai Ismail:

And now she’s in Stockholm. Lots more photos on her Twitter.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Missouri state Senator asks the Ferguson cops if they’re going to gas her again. She just wants to know, like.

Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal confronted Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson during a press conference Wednesday, asking why she was tear-gassed during a nonviolent protest.

Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat, said she had been tear-gassed while peacefully protesting the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teenager shot to death by a police officer on Saturday.

“I just wanted to know if I was going to be gassed again, like I was on Monday night,” Chappelle-Nadal asked. “We couldn’t get out, and we were peacefully sitting. I Just wanted to know if I’m going to be gassed again?”

Jackson said he hoped not. I suppose the implication was that he hoped she wouldn’t…erm…ask for it.

Chappelle-Nadal offered The Huffington Post further details following Jackson’s press conference.

“We were in that neighborhood and we were tear-gassed,” she said. “I could not breathe, I could not speak, I could not focus, I could not think because I thought that I were going to die because we were shot at and tear gas was constantly thrown at us and the police officers.”

She continued: “I’m the senator for the area, and I felt threatened. Everyone felt threatened.”

Chapelle-Nadal said Jackson’s response was “bullshit.”

“He blew me off,” she said. “It was bullshit, and the thing is … I don’t tell people when I’m out with these kids, ‘Hey, I’m your senator.’ But I don’t care about that, I care about these kids.”

Careful – that borders on asking for it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery reports on his own arrest in Ferguson.

Reporters were using a MacDonald’s a few blocks from where Michael Brown was shot as a staging area, because it has WiFi and outlets. Lowery was there charging his phone and responding to people on Twitter yesterday when the cops came in. They told Lowery and another reporter to leave. Lowery started recording video on his phone.

An officer with a large weapon came up to me and said, “Stop recording.”

I said, “Officer, do I not have the right to record you?”

He backed off but told me to hurry up. So I gathered my notebook and pens with one hand while recording him with the other hand.

As I exited, I saw Ryan to my left, having a similar argument with two officers. I recorded him, too, and that angered the officer. As I made my way toward the door, the officers gave me conflicting information.

One instructed me to exit to my left. As I turned left, another officer emerged, blocking my path.

(more…)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Have you been wondering how it is that Ferguson, Missouri can send such heavily-armed cops into the streets to terrorize the citizens?

It’s thanks to the nauseatingly-named Department of Homeland Security. Alec MacGillis at The New Republic* explains.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the American taxpayer has been providing the funding for an eye-popping influx of money from the Department of Homeland Security to state and local law enforcement agencies.

The funding is all in the name of preventing “terrorism,” but funds are fungible, and so are heavily-armored vehicles and high-powered weaponry. As the Missouri Department of Homeland Security explains on its own website advertising one of the federal DHS grants it distributes to local agencies: “Activities implemented under [the State Homeland Security Program] must support terrorism preparedness by building or enhancing capabilities that relate to the prevention of, protection from, or response to, and recovery from terrorism in order to be considered eligible. However, many capabilities which support terrorism preparedness simultaneously support preparedness for other hazards.” [Emphasis mine.]

Other hazards—like the disturbances that can spring up in the event of a police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown.

Score another victory for Bin Laden. He succeeded in making the US a more fascist state than it was before he made his disaster movie.

And then there’s also all that second-hand war stuff.

As the New York Times has reported, state and local law enforcement agencies are getting armored up from another source as well: the U.S. military. With our troops withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, “the former tools of combat—M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more—are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice. During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” USA Today reported Wednesday night that Ferguson is among the countless towns that received some of the nearly $450 million in military surplus distributed in 2013—most recently, two unidentified vehicles, a trailer, and a generator last November. 

So, that’s how.

*Yes that surprises me too.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)