That was fast – reactions to the Law Society advice on Sharia wills already.

Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, cautioned against legislation on the issue but called for a joint investigation by the Commons Justice and Home Affairs Committees into how widespread the use of Sharia law now is in Britain.

“We need a serious look at this through the select committee system,” he said.

“I think it would be harmful to make it a party-political issue.

“This should be dragged out into the open and be discussed.”

Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the Commons Justice Committee said it was “very likely” the issue would now come up.

Louise Mensch, the former Tory MP, described the guide

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It turns out the US isn’t even the worst places for young girls aspiring to be models in worryingly large numbers. In Brazil it’s not 30% of girls, it’s all girls, at least according to Lourdes Garcia-Navarro at NPR.

I recently spent some time at a leading international modeling agency in Sao Paulo. During the afternoon, waif-thin models came in with their amateur portfolios and big dreams. The girls were all in their early to mid-teens.

The main headhunter told me confidently that all young boys in Brazil wanted to be soccer stars, and all young women aspired to be models.

You can go to schools here and quickly learn that little girls are not encouraged to become the next

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Facebook can be so random. Usually you see posts from people whose posts you’ve commented on or liked or yadda yadda but then once in awhile there’s a spanner in the works, someone you didn’t even know you were friends with, or someone you’ve forgotten you were friends with and haven’t had any interactions with in generations.

Thus with a pop and a whiff of sulfur I found an update by Lee Moore at the top of the stack just now. And what a ridiculous update it is.

I have read too many articles as of late calling for the censor of certain types of speech. I cannot express how much I am disgusted by this concept. I get it,

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My friend Dave Richards composed a prayer in the style of CPAC on Facebook today. He gave me permission to quote it.

Dear God-

We thank you for the 4110 children who will starve to death today and every day. We know you want them to come to live with you in Heaven. Except for the ones who aren’t Christian; they can suck it. We know they did not get a chance to experience life, and that the life they did experience was probably miserable, but, hey, the little brats would doubtless grow up to be ingrates anyhow, as all children do. Or they might have just been a drain on society. You know: takers. If they didn’t want to

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The LSS has drawn up a petition. It has also issued a statement: LSS condemns Law Society’s practice note on “Sharia compliant” wills.

The LSS is very concerned to learn that the Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, has recently issued a practice note on “Sharia compliant” wills. See LSS member Sadikur Rahman’s blog post from last week about it.

This morning the Sunday Telegraph devoted their front page to this story. The Sunday Times (paywall) also covered it, specifically mentioning the LSS and Sadikur Rahman. The story has also been picked up by the Mail on Sunday and the Independent.

Practice notes are guidance issued by the Law Society for specific areas of law.

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The Telegraph and the Times today report on that guidance from the Law Society on how to draw up “Sharia-compliant” wills.

The Telegraph:

Islamic law is to be effectively enshrined in the British legal system for the first time under guidelines for solicitors on drawing up “Sharia compliant” wills.

Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.

The documents, which would be recognised by Britain’s courts, will also prevent children born out of wedlock – and even those who have been adopted – from being counted as legitimate heirs.

Frankly it just seems bizarre. Why are they … Read the rest

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A Republican state senator in Alaska really doesn’t think much of women.

He wants the state to provide free pregnancy tests in bars.

Kelly envisions the government contracting with a nonprofit to make the tests widely available at places that serve alcohol. As he explains, “So if you’re drinking, if you’re out at the big birthday celebration and you’re kind of like, ‘Gee, I wonder if I…?’ You can just go in the bathroom and there should be a plastic, Plexiglas bowl in there, and that’s part of the public relations campaign, too. You’re going to have some kind of card on there with a message.” 

The interviewer asked Kelly whether he would also support offering state-funded birth control

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Well, yes, but…

Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties.
Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety on the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centers, women’s refuges, reforms in the law.
If someone says, “Oh, I’m not a feminist,” I ask, “Why, what’s your problem?”
Dale Spender

Yes, but.

That’s not an exhaustive list. It’s a list of practical tangible things, but it omits the more fuzzy things. Feminism’s battles have also been for no or better stereotypes, a better culture, fewer belittling jokes, fewer sexist epithets, less harassment, less casual … Read the rest

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What about all those untested rape kits gathering dust in police departments around the US? 400,000 of them, we’re told. Is that “hysteria about rape culture”? (Thank you, American Enterprise Institute hack Caroline Kitchens.) It sounds more like bland indifference to rape, to this puzzled observer. But maybe the police just know all of them are false accusations, without checking?

Anti-rape activists are quick to point out that, although one-third of women experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, only 3 in 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in jail. 

That doesn’t sound like some kind of hysterical over-reaction. It sounds more like no reaction at all.

But still we need to have a research assistant … Read the rest

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Ok this is big. The Salvation Army caved on a religious discrimination case it had been fighting for years. I first read about it in Michelle Goldberg’s great book Kingdom Coming. Dan Arel reports at the Huffington Post:

In 2004 a group of 19 plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Salvation Army. The group claimed that the organization, which is a registered evangelical church and charity organization in the United States, was using public taxpayer money to proselytize their evangelical religious beliefs, discriminate, and terminate employees based on religious beliefs.

Anne Lown, a former employee of the organization, felt that this alleged practice was wrong and complained to her management and was subsequently terminated. Lown, who is Jewish, along

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Science deniers don’t like the new Cosmos series, Chris Mooney reports in Mother Jones.

Well of course they don’t. That’s because it doesn’t go

God made this.

Then God made this.

Then God made this.

[Repeat until it's time for the commercials]

Mooney gives somewhat thicker detail, such as the reaction to the second episode’s account of natural selection.

Over at the pro-”intelligent design” Discovery Institute, they’re not happy. Senior fellow David Klinghoffer writes that the latest Cosmos episode “[extrapolated] shamelessly, promiscuously from artificial selection (dogs from wolves) to minor stuff like the color of a polar bear’s fur to the development of the human eye.” In a much more elaborate attempted takedown, meanwhile, the institute’s Casey Luskin

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One more for the files, via Iram Ramzan by way of Chris Moos on Facebook.

Why the fuck not?

Why the fuck would I want to cover my whole body while I’m still alive?

I wouldn’t, nor should I.

Brothers! Why is it only sisters you tell this bullshit to?… Read the rest

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Uh oh, did somebody somewhere disturb the conventional wisdom? Quick! Hurry! Get someone to repeat the consoling fictions, before there’s a tear in the space-time continuum and everything falls off.

To the rescue: Caroline Kitchens in Time, with all the clichés piled up next to her keyboard ready to go.

There is no rape culture, there is only rape culture hysteria.

There we go; everyone can go home now.

Recently, rape culture theory has migrated from the lonely corners of the feminist blogosphere into the mainstream. In January, the White House asserted that we need to combat campus rape by “[changing] a culture of passivity and tolerance in this country, which too often allows this type of violence to

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Dang…this is something I wouldn’t want to see if I were in the hospital, or visiting someone I liked who was in the hospital.

… Read the rest

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Isis reports on a colleague including sexist graphical abstracts with his papers.

The last one looks like this:

Haha. So funny. So science.

A woman who is a scientist – Professor and Graduate Program Director at Johns Hopkins type woman who is a scientist – tweeted a criticism and he replied with “I wonder if you have been trained in the Vatican.”

Oy.

Isis comments:

Why is this a problem? Because Professor Righetti is continuing to publish his hilarious graphical abstracts (see this month’s issue)  and I suspect it is but a matter of time before we get more titties. He is also on the editorial board of several journals (Electrophoresis, J. Chromatography, J. Capillary Electrophoresis, BioTechniques, Proteomics, Journal

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Update: Facebook finally took it down. Good. Now for all the rest of them.

Thanks to Udo for alerting us to this page.

_____________________

Just to be clear.

And trigger warning again, because this is a horrifying photo.

I reported this photo with the text to Facebook.

Facebook looked at it; I know this because the response wasn’t instantaneous, as it was when I reported the whole page. Facebook looked at it, and sent the usual reply:

Thank you for taking the time to report something that you feel may violate our Community Standards. Reports like yours are an important part of making Facebook a safe and welcoming environment. We reviewed the photo you reported for containing graphic violence

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Remember last fall Nick Cohen wrote about the appalling conditions for migrant workers in Qatar in the run-up to the World Cup? Like, How many more must die for Qatar’s World Cup?

Not all the fatalities are on construction sites. The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises. To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6am to 7pm. He would return to a hot, unventilated room he shared with 12 others. Because he died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked

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