Motivated by Janet Heimlich’s post and the discussion of it here, I’m reading Nicholas Humphrey’s 1997 Amnesty lecture published at Edge. Its subject is childhood teaching and indoctrination. One major theme is the difference between the two; between open and closed.

Donald Kraybill, an anthropologist who made a close study of an Amish community in Pennsylvania, was well placed to observe how this works out in practice. “Groups threatened by cultural extinction,” he writes, “must indoctrinate their offspring if they want to preserve their unique heritage. Socialization of the very young is one of the most potent forms of social control. As cultural values slip into the child’s mind, they become personal values—embedded in conscience and governed by emotions. . . The Amish contend that the Bible commissions parents to train their children in religious matters as well as the Amish way of life. . . An ethnic nursery, staffed by extended family and church members, moulds the Amish world view in the child’s mind from the earliest moments of consciousness.”⁽⁷⁾

The question is…is the preservation of a “unique heritage” worth imprisoning children in a closed system?

I think it’s not, but then I have the benefit (if I’m right that it is a benefit) of having been raised in an open one. I wasn’t raised on a single book, nor was I raised to preserve a unique heritage. I was raised a mutt.

Then perhaps I am, after all, being too alarmist about what all this means. For sure therisks are real enough. We do live—even in our advanced, democratic, Western nations—in an environment of spiritual oppression, where many little children—our neighbours’ children if not actually ours—are daily exposed to the attempts of adults to annexE their minds. Yet, you may still want to point out that there’s a big difference between what the adults want and what actually transpires. All right, so children do frequently get saddled with adult nonsense. But so what. Maybe it’s just something the child has to put up with until he or she is able to leave home and learn better. In which case I would have to admit that the issue is certainly nothing like so serious as I have been making out. After all there are surely lots of things that are done to children either accidentally or by design that—though they may not be ideal for the child at the time—have no lasting ill effects.

But the ability to leave home – including the heritage, the culture, the dogma – is what’s at issue. As Humphrey goes on to say.

Yes, I agree therefore we should not be too alarmist—or too prissy—about the effects of early learning. But, No, we should certainly not be too sanguine about it either. True, it may not be so difficult for a person to unlearn or replace factual knowledge later in life: someone who once thought the world was flat, for example, may, when faced by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, grudgingly come round to accepting that the world is round. It will, however, often be very much more difficult for a person to unlearn established procedures or habits of thought: someone who has grown used, for example, to taking everything on trust from Biblical authority may find it very hard indeed to adopt a more critical and questioning attitude. And it may be nigh impossible for a person to unlearn attitudes and emotional reactions: someone who has learned as a child, for example, to think of sex as sinful may never again be able to be relaxed about making love.

But there is another even more pressing reason not to be too sanguine, or sanguine in the least. Research has shown that given the opportunity individuals can go on learning and can recover from poor childhood environments. However, what we should be worrying about are precisely those cases where such opportunities do not—indeed are not allowed to—occur.

Suppose, as I began to describe above, children are in effect locked out by their families from access to any alternative ideas. Or, worse, that they are so effectively immunised against foreign influences that they do the locking out themselves.

Think of those cases, not so uncommon, when it has become a central plank of someone’s belief system that they must not let themselves be defiled by mixing with others. When, because of their faith, all they want to hear is one voice, and all they want to read is one text. When they treat new ideas as if they carry infection. When, later, as they grow more sophisticated, they come to deride reason as an instrument of Satan. When they regard the humility of unquestioning obedience as a virtue. When they identify ignorance of worldly affairs with spiritual grace. . . In such case, it hardly matters what their minds may still remain capable of learning, because they themselves will have made certain they never again use this capacity.

There it is again – defilement, mixing. It’s the purity concern that Jonathan Haidt tells us liberals don’t have and conservatives do – tells us with a good deal too much sympathy for the concern, in my book.

Mixing, defilement, mutts, mongrels. Hybrids, borders – leaving home to go to Oz.

It’s better. The liberal way is better. Having one way of life, one view, one holy book; that’s not just different, it’s worse.

So now have the passage about the Inca girl “sacrificed” by priests.

As we saw, there are several factors that might be considered counter-balancing. And of these the one that seems to many people weightiest, or at least is often mentioned first, is our interest as a society in maintaining cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so it’s tough on a child of the Amish, or the Hasidim or the Gypsies to be shaped up by their parents in the ways they are—but at least the result is that these fascianting cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole civilisation be impoverished if they were to go? It’s a shame, maybe, when individuals have to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But there it is: it’s the price we pay as a society.

Except, I would feel bound to remind you, we do not pay it, they do.

Let me give a telling example. In 1995, in the high mountains of Peru, some climbers came across the frozen mummified body of a young Inca girl. She was dressed as a princess. She was thirteen years old. About five hundred years ago, this little girl had, it seems, been taken alive up the mountain by a party of priests, and then ritually killed—a sacrifice to the mountain’s Gods in the hope that they would look kindly on the people below.

The discovery was described by the anthropologist, Johan Reinhard, in an article for the National Geographic magazine.⁽¹⁴⁾ He was clearly elated both as a scientist and as a human being by the romance of finding this “ice maiden”, as he called her. Even so, he did express some reservations about how she had come to be there: “we can’t help but shudder,” he wrote, “at [the Incas'] practice of performing human sacrifice.”

The discovery was also made the subject of a documentary film shown on American television. Here, however, no one expressed any reservation whatsoever. Instead, viewers were simply invited to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the Tv programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention—another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.

Yet, how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us—in our sitting rooms, watching television—to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?

Immoral? By Inca standards? No, that’s not what matters. Immoral by ours—and in particular by just the standard of free-choice that I was enunciating earlier. The plain fact is that none of us, knowing what we do about the way the world works, would freely choose to be sacrificed as she was. And however “proud” the Inca girl may or may not have been to have had the choice made for her by her family (and for all we know she may actually have felt betrayed and terrified), we can still be pretty sure that she, if she had known what we now know, would not have chosen this fate for herself either.

No, this girl was used by others as a means for achieving their ends. The elders of her community valued their collective security above her life, and decided for her that she must die in order that their crops might grow and they might live. Now, five hundred years later, we ourselves must not, in a lesser way, do the same: by thinking of her death as something that enriches our collective culture.

We must not do it here, nor in any other case where we are invited to celebrate other people’s subjection to quaint and backward traditions as evidence of what a rich world we live in. We mustn’t do it even when it can be argued, as I’d agree it sometimes can be, that the maintenance of these minority traditions is potentially of benefit to all of us because they keep alive ways of thinking that might one day serve as a valuable counterpoint to the majority culture.

That’s what I think. Decline all invitations to celebrate other people’s subjection to quaint and backward traditions as evidence of what a rich world we live in.

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

Janet Heimlich would like to get Richard Dawkins to withdraw a comment he made about how we should view people who abused children a few generations ago. She explains in a post at her blog at Religious Child Mistreatment.

Dr. Dawkins made the comment after he was asked about his downplaying of having been fondled by a teacher at his boarding school in Salisbury, England. Calling the molestation “mild pedophilia,” Dr. Dawkins said that he didn’t think that he, nor other boys who experienced the same molestation by the teacher, suffered “lasting harm.” Then Dr. Dawkins stated,

I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

I am surprised that Dr. Dawkins holds this view, especially as someone who often chides religious people for being nonsensical, irrational, and sometimes, unethical. The Bible talks about such crimes against children as mass killings, cannibalism, incest, starvation, rape, and sacrifice with little condemnation of those actions. Are we to look back on those abuses and not condemn them, simply because they happened a long time ago? Can we not even say that what happened to those children was wrong?

It’s tricky. I think I know what he’s getting at. There can be too much of a “gotcha” game about pointing out how wicked people were in the past, combined with a smug feeling of self-cuddling for being so much better than that. It can be too quick, too glib, too unaware of what people could or couldn’t know, and the like.

But at the same time…there’s a problem with avoiding all that and charging off too far in the opposite direction, too. Think of the way the Irish church ran the industrial “schools” for example. I was re-reading a bit of the Ryan report this morning, the part about the punishments, with the long cold frightening waits on the landing for the nun to come up the stairs and beat them; the part about the punishments for bed-wetting; the prevarications of the nuns testifying. Reading it gives you such a sense of duration. Years and years, decades and decades, children isolated, miserable, frightened – made to stand on a landing for hours awaiting a beating, forbidden to sit, freezing cold, the urine running down their legs from fear.

You can’t just not see that as immoral. You can’t – that is, you mustn’t – let yourself be callous about all that needless misery inflicted on children for the crime of being poor or born to an unmarried mother or some other accident. You have to judge. You can say “maybe I would have done the same thing in that situation” if you want to, but you have to judge. If you don’t know that’s wrong, how will you prevent yourself from doing something similar if chance puts you in a situation where you’re expected to?

Janet puts it this way:

Ethically speaking, we are a more evolved people than those who came before us. It would be a travesty not to apply the standards of today in judging abusers of the past. Sure, we can give reasons why people have acted unethically, yet we should not hold back on clearly stating that child abuse, as well as racism, homophobia, and other such actions are—regardless of the era—immoral. And the same holds true to what happened to Dr. Dawkins as a boy. I’m glad that he was not adversely affected by having been molested. Yet, regardless of the fact that, back in his day, sexual abuse was not discussed as a violation of children’s rights, I have no problem saying that the teacher who molested those boys (among other things) acted immorally.

To underline the point, and to persuade Dawkins, she cites and quotes from a lecture by Nicholas Humphrey.

The lecture dealt with the immorality of indoctrinating children with religious teachings and failing to criticize cultures that abuse children. To illustrate his point, Dr. Humphrey talked about a American television program that featured the discovery of the body of a young Inca girl who had been sacrificed about 500 years ago.

Dr. Humphrey was infuriated by the way the individuals interviewed on the program discussed the ritualistic killing:

No one expressed any reservation, whatsoever. Instead, viewers were simply invited to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the TV programme was, in effect, that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention—another jewel  in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.

Dr. Humphrey found the program’s glorification of the sacrifice of the Inca girl to be unconscionable, even though the killing took place hundreds of years ago: “How dare they invite us—in our sitting rooms, watching television—to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder?” said Dr. Humphrey. “How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?”

Indeed.

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

Maryam interviews Marieme Helie Lucas. Right at the start MHL makes an important point:

As long as all these attempts by Muslim fundamentalists – whether in the form of different rights for different categories of citizens, veiling, sex segregation and so on – is not analysed in political terms – as the expression of an anti-democratic programme, but rather in terms of religion or culture, the British government will not limit the rise of this extreme-Right movement, which will be increasingly difficult to control.

That’s a very good point, all the more so in a time when both religion and culture are treated like fragile much-loved babies, while political concerns are supposed to be robust enough to take care of themselves.

Those of us who clearly see the rise of a new form of fascism – mostly because we come from situations in which we have had to live under the boot of fundamentalists – are left to our own devices to struggle against it. It is not very different from the situation of anti-Nazi Germans who were not listened to, for far too long, until a bloody war was inevitable.

MHL is Algerian. That boot, those fundamentalists.

Universities have no business pandering to such requests, and if they do, what’s next? Fundamentalist speakers will only address audiences where females are fully covered?

It seems we are already witnessing some of the next steps. According to media reports, in one instance at a UK university, women were not only segregated but had to give their questions in writing to the speaker, whilst men could raise theirs. As one knows, their voices are sexually attractive and fundamentalists plug their ears against temptation – hence the ban on singing in the areas the Taliban control…

What is sure is that fundamentalists will not stop here and will produce more and more demands, since the aim is not to get satisfaction for a specific demand, but to gain political ground.

Wouldn’t you think people who run things would be shrewd enough to realize that? I would, but maybe that’s naïve of me.

Are racial and gender segregation incomparable? Why is it that everyone can see the distinction between a black university and racial apartheid but when it comes to gender, it’s not as obvious?

Marieme Helie Lucas: This is a very crucial question that I have debated a lot, including more than twenty years ago with feminist friends in the USA. While sex segregation was rapidly expanding in Algeria under the heavy weight of the first fundamentalist preachers and religious groups, I was trying to warn them about the potential backlash of their gender segregation policy in the name of feminism.

Many of our feminist weapons have been turned against us along the years… and I have come to this very sad conclusion that we were not smart enough to think, as thinkers and philosophers should, about all the facets of the concepts we were grappling with. Just think of our feminist praise for diversity, whilst all along we knew that difference was used to legitimise the racist South African apartheid regime, or the segregationist states of the USA. This concept is now used to legitimise the imposition of differences on women that make them unequal in the name of religion, ethnicity or culture.

Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (The answer is yes.) Diversity is only as good as it is. Not ever difference is something to celebrate. The murderer is different; not in a good way.

There is a relativist culture of non commitment and neutrality that has been expanding – certainly in the West, under the influence of liberalism, of human rights organisations and of political correctness and the fear of appearing racist. Accordingly, everything is equal; everything has to be respected on par – the right of the capitalist and the right of the worker, the right of the one who holds the gun and the right of the one who runs for his life away from the gun… It is high time to admit that there are conflicting rights, antagonistic rights.

It seems to me that progressive people have forgotten the virtues of being partisan. I want to stand for the right of the worker, not that of the capitalist, for the right of the man who runs for his life, not for the right of the man who holds the gun, and for the right of women to live their lives without interference from extreme-Right religious people.

Ah, that’s a great line. Progressive people have forgotten the virtues of being partisan. Ima stop there but there’s lots more; go read the whole thing.

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

Laurie Penny amended her article slightly in response to the comments she got on Twitter.

Her second paragraph as she first wrote it:

The recent blanket coverage of the “gender segregation on campus” story was a textbook case. This month Student Rights, a pressure group not run by students, released a report vastly exaggerating a suggestion by Universities UK that male and female students might be asked to sit separately in some lectures led by Islamic guest speakers. The tabloids went bananas. Extremists were taking over the academy.

The amended version:

The recent blanket coverage of the “gender segregation on campus” story was a textbook case. This month Student Rights, a pressure group not run by students, released a report vastly exaggerating a suggestion by Universities UK that male and female students might be asked to sit separately in some lectures led by Islamic guest speakers. Many Asian women’s groups and individual Muslim feminists joined the subsequent protests, sometimes taking personal risks to do so. Unfortunately, rightwing commentators and tabloids seized upon the issue to imply that Islamic extremists are taking over the British academy.

That’s really not much of an improvement. As @CEMB_forum just pointed out on Twitter, it paints the “Asian women’s groups and individual Muslim feminists” as useful idiots, which is all the more galling since it still relies on grossly mistaken factual claims. To repeat: the Student Rights report on gender segregation was released last May, not this month, and the protest had nothing to do with Student Rights. Dog’s breakfast, dog’s dinner, dog’s midnight snack.

Also, Maryam for example did not “join” the protest, she fucking organized it. Also…Penny just can’t figure out the right way to label people. “Asian” is useless; there are non-Asians involved (who yet are not “white,” to use Penny’s catch-all word). “Muslim” is worse than useless because there are ex-Muslims and non-Muslims from Muslim-majority areas involved. Penny is too much in a hurry to label and docket everyone to take the time to grasp the fact that the protest was internationalist in nature. It wasn’t “white” and it wasn’t “black” either; it wasn’t “Asian” nor was it “European” (to use an equally meaningless label). It wasn’t “Muslim” nor was it atheist. It was based in solidarity, not in warring identities.

There’s an editorial note at the end:

This article was amended to draw attention to the fact that many Muslim and Asian women were involved in the “gender segregation” protests

Sigh. Point missed again.

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

Alom Shaha alerted me to a tumblr post by King of Dawah.

Jemima Cheltenham – We Betray Our Principles By Supporting Them

As white liberal feminists we must oppose misogyny in all its forms.

Especially when we get scared by requests from Muslim feminists that we stand side by side with them in the face of angry reactionaries and passive aggressive sulking community leaders.

Yes, the Muslim liberals and feminists who are fighting for equal rights and against the dictates of clerics are very brave. But as white liberals we have to be even braver, by ignoring them, so we don’t get scared by scary men with beards demanding reactionary things who may call us racist for supporting women who struggle for the same rights as everyone else.

Yeah.

Read the whole thing.

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

Oh christ, not again. This time it’s Laurie Penny getting it all wrong.

This isn’t ‘feminism’, says the title, It’s Islamophobia. The title isn’t directly the fault of the author, since editors write the titles, but that one does reflect what the article says, and it’s the same old crock of shit.

As a person who writes about women’s issues, I am constantly being told that Islam is the greatest threat to gender equality in this or any other country – mostly by white men, who always know best.

Well that can happen, yes. (Dear Muslima? Yes. It can happen.) But that doesn’t mean that there is no problem with conservative Islam and Islamism when it comes to gender equality, just as there are problems with conservative Christianity, the Vatican, conservative Judaism – you get the idea. Liberal, secular versions of religion are mostly benign, epistemology apart, but it doesn’t follow that all versions of religion are.

…from the Rochdale grooming case to interminable debates over whether traditional Islamic dress is “empowering” or otherwise, the rhetoric and language of feminism has been co-opted by Islamophobes, who could not care less about women of any creed or colour.

The recent blanket coverage of the “gender segregation on campus” story was a textbook case. This month Student Rights, a pressure group not run by students, released a report vastly exaggerating a suggestion by Universities UK that male and female students might be asked to sit separately in some lectures led by Islamic guest speakers. The tabloids went bananas. Extremists were taking over the academy.

Never mind that it wasn’t strictly true, the non-controversy spread to every level of government. Labour MP Chuka Umunna declared: “A future Labour government would not allow or tolerate segregation in our universities.” Even the prime minister stepped into the debate, saying the proposed guidelines, which have since been withdrawn, were “not the right approach”. The elite all-male Oxford club of which both he and the chancellor were members was presumably the perfect approach.

Sigh. Notice how completely she ignores the December 10 protest. Notice how wrong she gets the facts – the Student Rights report was not released this month, it was released last May. Naturally it said nothing about the UUK guidance, because the UUK guidance didn’t exist at the time. Notice how she jumps from that to the spread of the controversy, thus getting the whole thing completely wrong.

(I should say that people are arguing with her on Twitter right now, as I type this, and she is admitting some omissions. Fair dues. [But I wish people would get this right before writing about it instead of after.] But she persists in saying she supports “Muslim feminists.” I’ve asked her about six times now, what about ex-Muslim, Muslim background, allies? And she’s ignoring me. Ok, I’m a nobody, and I’m not a “Muslim”…but then that’s my point, which is that she’s excluding allies, and that’s…neither progressive nor helpful.)

I have spent weary weeks being asked to condemn this “policy of gender segregation” by “Islamic extremists”, despite the fact that no such policy exists.

Yes it does.

I am not writing here on behalf of Muslim women, who can and do speak for themselves, and not all in one voice. I am writing this as a white feminist infuriated by white men using dog-whistle Islamophobia to derail any discussion of structural sexism; as someone who has heard too many reactionaries tell me to shut up about rape culture and the pay gap and just be grateful I’m not in Saudi Arabia; as someone angered that so many Muslim feminists fighting for gender justice are forced to watch their truth, to paraphrase that fusty old racist Rudyard Kipling, “twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”.

In short, by the whole genre of “Dear Muslima.” Fine, but that’s not what happened in this case.

For decades, western men have hijacked the language of women’s liberation to justify their Islamophobia. If we care about the future of feminism, we cannot let them set the agenda.

We’re not. That’s not what happened in this case. Start over.

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

Is Anjem Choudary a joke or not? Maybe not, according to Sunder Katwala in the New Statesman blog (the Staggers blog called the Staggers).

Choudary backed out of a Panorama interview, apparently because he didn’t want to be pressed on his lack of truthfulness about how well he knew Michael Adebolajo, one of the accused in the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

Normal service was resumed this morning – as Choudary was given the prestige 8:10am slot on the Today programme. Choudary refused, as usual, to condemn a murder that he has previously been willing to condone and justify. But he was not asked the questions that he pulled out of thePanorama interview to avoid, or about whether his links with Adebolajo went deeper than he claims. Nor was any other British Muslim voice offered the opportunity to counter him, though the government’s anti-terror coordinator Alex Carlile was invited to offer context afterwards.

Doesn’t sound like a mere joke, being interviewed on the Today programme. Anyway even jokes can commit mass murder or organize others to do so.

No broadcast organisation has offered a clear account of how they make these choices – or whether they accept that there is any tension between the journalistic job of scrutinising extremism, the shock entertainment value of platforming the most outlandish and least representative views, and the role of contextualising those views too. Instead, they too often speak with forked tongues. Take Daybreak’s Jonathan Swain’s tweet last summer after Choudary popped up on the sofa to make the case for murder. “Just interviewed Anjem Choudary on @Daybreak who claimed the murder of Lee Rigby was justified. What a Disgusting and offensive view”. As Claude Rains might have said in Casablanca, how shocking it must have been for the programme to discover that they had booked such an extremist voice to express his well known and frequently repeated views.

Very well known. I’ve been following reportage on him for years. That’s why I’ve heard so often that he’s a joke.

It is difficult for the media to resist the temptation of platforming a man who often thinks like a newsdesk, and is willing to provide a cartoonish story, as with his recent protests against alcohol. But, as Hope Not Hate’sinvestigation into the Al Maharajoun hate group shows, there is a strong accumulation of evidence to support the view that Choudary is considerably more dangerous than his clownish media persona may imply. As Nick Lowles and Joe Mulhall write: “Behind his media-grabbing and provocative stunts lies a group that is a gateway to terrorism, at home and abroad. While Choudary might not have been directly involved in terror plots, he helped shape the mindset of many of those behind them”.

Perhaps he was doing a Hamlet, a Claudius, a Columbo – pretending to be a lot more of a joke than he really is, so that he can do the serious shit under the noses of the spies and journalists.

The important question again arising out of the Woolwich murder for Anjem Choudary is whether he may deserve somewhat more of the moral responsibility for the killing of Lee Rigby than he has sought to claim publicly. It is, as Hope Not Hate set out clearly, a recurring question across several attempts at violence and terrorism. That was probably a question to be scrutinised in a reported package, rather than letting Choudary tap-dance around John Humphrey’s questions in the style of a cabinet minister.

But would it have been good radio?

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

Ah, Texas. Texas, Texas.

The Gay Star News (geddit? Lone Star state?) reports on a Texas Republican who hopes to be elected governor.

Texas Republican Larry SECEDE Kilgore hopes to win the support of LGBTI voters in his bid to become governor of the state – but then plans to secede from the United States and introduce Biblically based laws, including the death penalty for homosexuality.

Sounds like a winner. “Support my campaign for governor, then when elected, I will do my best to get laws passed that will make your existence a crime punishable by death.” Who could resist such an offer?

Kilgore, who legally changed his middle name to SECEDE last year, hopes that gay voters will support him and his bid to make Texas its own country to avoid what he says are the US Federal Government’s oppressive taxes and promises that he won’t try to introduce anything like the death penalty until Texas is independent.

‘The only position I have is secession,’ Kilgore told Lone Star Q on Monday.

‘I am a Christian, and I have lots of Christian beliefs. However, I am trying to build a coalition of all different types of people. I look at the lesbians and the homosexual folks and I say, “Hey, DC is stealing my money just like they’re stealing your money.” After we get our freedom, then we can decide all that stuff — hopefully at a county level.”

Cool. First the state secedes, then it starts executing teh gayz at a county level. Nothing to object to in that. If one county gets unpleasant, there’s always another county, unless there isn’t.

to woo more progressive voters who would like to see Texas become a country, he has promised to step down after achieving that goal and stay out of power for at least a year before running for office again – at which point he would then seek biblical punishments for homosexuals.

‘I would very much approve of a biblical law that prevented homosexual behavior in the new nation,’ Kilgore said.

‘According to the Bible, it should be execution, if anyone participates in that activity.’

However Kilgore said he was open to the idea of different areas of Texas having different laws on homosexuality and would support candidates who were gay as long as they wanted to make Texas its own country.

Well he’s really quite a tolerant and liberal guy, if you look closely. Right now he wants teh gayz killed, but he’s open to alternatives. I’m impressed.

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

The Fish Slapping Dance. It’s an important accessory for revenge fantasies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E

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

Very well.

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

Taslima is Finally, Banned.

The drama series or mega serial are banned.

The story of three sisters who are struggling to live with dignity and honour is banned.

The truth is banned.

Lies won. Insanity won. Fatwas won. Threats won. Barbarism won.

A bunch of faith-heads, hate mongers, anti-freespeech, filthy misogynist fanatics won.

The government of West Bengal in India made them win. On the 19th of December, 2013.

That sounds like a drama series or mega serial I would kill to see. Mind you it would have to be subtitled, but I’ve never minded that. I would so love to see a series about three sisters written by the mind that’s inside Taslima’s head.

Not a single episode was telecasted, but the government banned the TV drama series, the project that could continue for more than a decade.

Liberal intellectuals are silent about the banning of my serial in India. They protest when Hindu fundamentalists violate a writer’s freedom of expression. They even protest when Muslim fundamentalists attack on a writer’s free speech. But only when that writer is a male, macho, anti-feminist, Salman Rushdie.

We, the ordinary people protested on twitter against the banning of the mega serial. Many people criticized India’s vote bank politics. The politicians are accused of appeasing Muslim religious leaders in India in order to get Muslim votes. This vote bank politics is destroying the democratic principles of the world’s largest democracy.

India, “the world’s largest democracy.” It may be a democracy but it’s not a secular democracy. Theocratic democracies are scary.

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

The ACLU and MergerWatch have combined forces to put out a report on the growth of Catholic hospitals and the threat to reproductive health care [pdf]. There’s also a press release.

With the rise of Catholic hospitals has come the increasing danger that women’s reproductive health care will be compromised by religious restrictions. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (the Directives), issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), govern care at these facilities. The Directives prohibit a range of reproductive health services, including contraception, sterilization, many infertility treatments, and abortion care, even when a woman’s health or life is in danger. Moreover, they often restrict even the ability of hospital staff to provide patients with full information and referrals for care that conflict with religious teachings.

This can be lethal. Not figuratively or loosely, but literally: it can cause death.

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

Today for our lesson in pointless stupid unreasoned hatred, we go to the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, and its library, which rejected a donation of about $3,000 from Hemant Mehta, because atheism.

Hemant Mehta, a Naperville teacher who writes a blog called the Friendly Atheist, launched a fundraising campaign after a local veterans group, American Legion Post 134, pulled funding and volunteer resources from the Park District because of a park board member’s refusal to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Oh, there’s another item for the annals of pointless hatred. Let’s go to the Morton Grove Champion for more on that item.

Morton Grove Park Commissioner Dan Ashta was two minutes late to the Nov. 21 monthly board meeting, missing both the Pledge of Allegiance and a quarter of the meeting.

“If I had been on time, I still would have sat down during the pledge,” Ashta said after the eight-minute meeting. “No one has told me that my legal interpretation is wrong and I’ve pledged my allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. I see no reason to change my stance.”

Joseph Lampert, commander of American Legion Post 134, told the Park Board on Oct. 24 that $2,600 in donations will be withheld until all members of the board, specifically Ashta, stand for the Pledge of Allegiance out of respect for veterans and fallen servicemen.

What the hell?

Nobody has to stand for the bit of doggerel known as “the pledge of allegiance.” Nobody. It’s not a real thing. It’s not like a red light or a stop sign or passport control or someone’s front door. It’s just a bit of doggerel. It’s not like the oath people take when they become citizens of the US, or the one they take when they go into the military. It’s just a bit of doggerel. Nobody has to bend any knee to it. It actually should be ruled unconstitutional, since it was passed by Congress and has a knee-bend to god in it. Congress has no business telling us to bend any knees to god.

The American Legion can set any criteria for a donation it wants to, I suppose, but some criteria are a lot stupider and more bossy than others. This pledge one is very stupid and bossy. Not wanting to recite a dopy piece of doggerel has nothing to do with respect for veterans and people killed in wars.

Ashta maintains that he’s defending the public’s First Amendment right to not participate for whatever political, religious or physical reason a given person might have.

“It upsets me that veterans are upset, because I do appreciate everything they’ve done,” Ashta said.

I don’t even understand why they are upset; the “pledge” is nothing to do with respect for veterans and casualties.

So back to the Morton Grove library.

Library Board Treasurer Catherine Peters said she stopped library staff from depositing the check this month, calling it a matter that should be voted on by the board.

Board President Mark Albers, who voted to accept the donation, said he had no idea whether the money was from Mehta’s fundraising campaign or Mehta himself.

But many board members were more alarmed by the nature of Mehta’s blog and the ethical implications posed by accepting money from him.

Peters referred to the blog as a “hate group.”

Well, that’s wrong.

I blame Fox News.

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