The Supremes have given us a surprise, in a good way for once.

In a move that may signal the inevitability of a nationwide right to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court on Monday let stand appeals court rulings allowing such unions in five states.

The development, a major surprise, cleared the way for same-sex marriages in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Officials in Virginia announced that marriages would start at 1 p.m. on Monday.

The decision to let the appeals court rulings stand, which came without explanation in a series of brief orders, will almost immediately increase the number of states allowing same-sex marriage from 19 to 24, along with the District of Columbia.

They’re doing it this … Read the rest

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More of that view.

The skyscrapers on the far side of the lake are Bellevue. I’ve never understood why a suburb like Bellevue needs skyscrapers, but there they are, looking silly. The neighborhood these houses are in is called Madrona.

And there again, with the Cascades – and, apparently, a bunch of smog. If the picture had been taken in winter or spring, there would be a lot more snow in those mountains.

And here is the shy local celebrity:

That there is a volcano. Also the tallest mountain in the lower 48.… Read the rest

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This is something I looked at this afternoon.

That’s Lake Washington in the background, and what we call the East Side, which is suburbs like Bellevue and Kirkland and, farther east, Redmond, where Microsoft is. Beyond that are the Cascades.… Read the rest

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Continuing with Reza Aslan is wrong about Islam and this is why –

 

• Malaysia has a dual-system of law which mandates sharia law for Muslims. These allow men to have multiple wives (polygyny) and discriminate against women in inheritance (as mandated by Islamic scripture). It also prohibits wives from disobeying the “lawful orders” of their husbands.
• Bangladesh, which according to feminist Tahmima Anam made real advancements towards equality in its inception, also “created a barrier to women’s advancement.” This barrier? An article in the otherwise progressive constitution which states that “women shall have equal rights with men in all spheres of the state and of the public life” but in the realm of private affairs (marriage, divorce, inheritance,

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A great guest post on Hemant’s blog by Muhammad Syed and Sarah Haider on how and why Reza Aslan is wrong about Islam.

A video clip of Aslan responding to Bill Maher’s comments on Islam went viral last week.

Maher stated (among other things) that “if vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe, and they do, that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea or drawing a cartoon or writing a book or eloping with the wrong person, not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS.” Maher implied a connection between FGM and violence against women with the Islamic faith, to which the charming

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Sara Khan wants an Islam that is about mercy and compassion rather than an Islam that is about murdering people who have mercy and compassion, such as Alan Henning. Sara is heartbroken about the murder of Alan Henning.

It is well documented that it was the plight of young Syrian children that moved him to take that dangerous journey back to the country. As his family, friends, colleagues and local community testify, he was a man of integrity and of humanity and yet, tragically, it was these virtues that led to his death. I cannot find the will or the heart to take part in Eid festivities as I know those same friends, and indeed the nation, will be mourning

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Dan Linford started a Facebook discussion with this reminder, which he gave me permission to quote:

Here is your daily reminder that the following two statements are not consistent with each other and that I can imagine no reason for holding both to be true other than prejudice:

1. Religions are more about their official doctrines or statements in their holy books than what the adherents actually believe;

2. The reason religion is worth criticizing is the danger posed by its adherents in virtue of their belief in holy books.

The first statement is not just inconsistent with the second, it also doesn’t make much sense on its own. Religions are about both – official doctrines and what adherents believe … Read the rest

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Houzan Mahmoud linked to an article about the 7,500 Kurdish women who fight ISIS in Syria.

“We have to be free from the Syrian government,” says YPJ member, Evin Ahmed, 26, (pictured above). She continues, “We need to control the area ourselves without depending on them. They can’t protect us from [ISIS], we have to protect us [and] we defend everyone…no matter what race or religion they are.”

Ahmed, like many of the YPJ, is fiercely loyal to her fellow-soldiers. She insists, “I love being a YPJ soldier, I love the other soldiers, we are closer than sisters. This is the only life for me. I can’t imagine living any other way.”

This sentiment, says Trieb, is echoed by all

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Terry Pratchett gave a talk in 1985 titled Why Gandalf Never Married.

(Well first of all because Tolkienland is almost entirely male. Tolkien clearly didn’t want no stinkin’ women cluttering up his myth. Women are downers; everybody hates them.)

While I was plundering the fantasy world for the next cliche to pull a few laughs from, I found one which was so deeply ingrained that you hardly notice it is there at all. In fact it struck me so vividly that I actually began to look at it seriously.

That’s the generally very clear division between magic done by women and magic done by men.

*waves from the back row*

I notice it. I notice things like that. Feminists … Read the rest

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Another uh oh atheism has a dudebro problem article, this time from Amanda Marcotte.

She points out that you would think atheism would be a natural for women, given the way religions view women. (Spoiler: as inferior, and not fully human.) She points out that feminism has had a long tradition of outspoken atheists and religious skeptics.

Suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton preferred “rational ideas based on scientific facts” to “religious superstition.”  Major feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that belief in God exists in part to “repress any impulse toward revolt in the downtrodden female.” Modern feminist writer Katha Pollitt received the “Emperor Has No Clothes” award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2001, where she said that

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There’s a compilation of scathing reviews of the new “Left Behind” [shudder] movie.

There’s one funny line.

“The running time is spent avoiding religion to such a loony extent that no one explains that this mass vanishing is God’s work until the film is nearly over. It’s almost as though screenwriters Paul Lalonde and John Patus believe people might buy a ticket to Left Behind and not know the twist, like someone sitting down to watch Godzilla and being shocked by the entrance of a giant lizard.” —The Village Voice

That’s one movie I will not be seeing, not nohow.… Read the rest

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Robyn Pennacchia takes a look at sexism in gaming & atheism & similar as a matter of people in counter-cultural “communities” thinking they get a pass on little foibles like sexism precisely because they are counter-cultural. That’s a very important point that should get more attention and emphasis.

She found it in political activism when she was just a sprout. She got frustrated and pissed off and ended up leaving activism because of it. Then there was the “lit scene.”

There’s been a lot of attention, recently, paid towards sexism, sexual assault, harassment and misogyny in certain counter-cultural or non-mainstream groups. Specifically, the gaming community, the atheist community and, now, the alt-lit community.

One thing all of these

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Via Ghaffar Husain of Quilliam: The Islamic State puts price tags on women, literally, and sells them.

By the end of August, the Islamic State had abducted up to 2,500 Iraqi civilians, most of them women and children, according to a new United Nations report based on more than 450 interviews with witnesses.

Some have been awarded to fighters, others sold as slaves in markets in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.

There were several reports of an office in Mosul where women and girls are tagged with a price and offered for sale to buyers.

That’s done with Allah’s blessing, is it? That’s the kind of submission Allah has in mind?

One Yazidi girl told the U.N. she was

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Sarah Khan, director of Inspire, has a short outraged public post on Facebook.

I’m ‪#‎makingastand‬. I will not be celebrating Eid in remembrance of Alan Henning. There is nothing to celebrate. My faith has been hijacked by extremists. Wake up Muslims. Before more innocent people are murdered in the “name of our religion.” Reclaim our faith back from these monsters.

Sad, and right, and inspiring.… Read the rest

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At Patheos – on the Catholic Channel – there’s a blog called Headlines from the Catholic World. On that blog there’s a post with the teasing title “Catholic Church the only body ‘effectively acting to eradicate pedophilia’.” There really is; I’m not making it up.

A former Vatican spokesman has written, against the backdrop of the house arrest of a former nuncio being investigated for abuse of minors, that the Church is the only international body acting effectively against pedophilia.

In an op-ed published in the Italian daily “La Repubblica” Sept. 25, Joaquin Navarro-Valls commented on the house arrest in Vatican City of Jozef Wesolowski, the former apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic who was laicized earlier this year. He

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The bastards have killed Alan Henning.

Henning, a 47-year-old taxi driver from Salford in northern England, was part of an aid convoy taking medical supplies to a hospital in northwest Syria in December last year when it was stopped by gunmen and he was abducted.

Muslim groups across Britain, including some organizations that are highly critical of British foreign policy and blame Western interference for fanning the recent crisis in Iraq and Syria, had called in vain for his release.

His wife Barbara had called him a “a peaceful, selfless man” and appealed to Islamic State to release him.

But the murderers of Islamic State don’t release people, they butcher them.

Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council

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Gina Khan and Maajid Nawaz flagged up this post by Amjad Khan at Left Foot Forward on Facebook. (The post is at LFF, the flagging up was at FB. God language is hard to do.) It argues that it’s not good enough for Muslims to say that groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda don’t represent them.

The first reason is that it doesn’t stop them. Most Nigerians hate Boko Haram, but Boko Haram doesn’t give a shit, and goes right on murdering and enslaving people.

The second point to be made is that statements such ‘they don’t represent me’ are only useful if they are a precursor to a sustained effort to challenge and undermine jihadism. In my experience, this is

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Another big win for the Texas Taliban and another big loss for women of childbearing age in Texas.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday allowed Texas to begin enforcing tough new abortion restrictions that will effectively close all but eight abortion facilities in the nation’s second-largest state. Unless the Supreme Court steps in, the law is poised to have the most devastating impact on abortion access of any such restriction across the country.

Under the law’s force, which will close 13 clinics, one out of six Texan women seeking an abortion will now live more than 150 miles from the nearest clinic.

Texas is an enormous state. It’s bigger than a lot of countries. It also has a … Read the rest

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Sarah Posner raises an interesting question – is it ok for Tim Tebow to pray on one knee after scoring a touchdown, but not ok for Husain Abdullah to pray on two knees in the same situation?

Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah was penalized last night for praying in the end zone after returning an interception for a touchdown. Tim Tebow has similarly prayed — although, apparently, the two prayers aren’t “similar:” one is Christian, and one is Muslim.

The Kansas City Star reports Abdullah is a “devout Muslim” who promised himself that if he scored a touchdown, “I’m going to prostrate before God in the end zone.” Last night, he was penalized for apparently violating Rule 12, Section

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Amanda Marcotte (I belatedly see) has also written about Intel’s move to obey the anti-social justice campaigners and punish Gamasutra.

[A]ny lingering hope that GamerGate is about bringing integrity back to journalism were dashed this week, when GamerGate participants convinced Intel to pull its advertising from the gaming website Gamasutra in order to punish Gamasutra for publishing on opinion they don’t like, a piece criticizing GamerGate for making gamers look like misogynist idiots.

The purported concern of GamerGate is to end gaming journalism’s “increasing corruption by money and hype,” as Auerbach explained. If that’s true, it’s awfully fishy that GamerGate’s first major victory is to threaten journalists with lost revenue for writing about their honestly held views. That

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