Oops, no freedom from hijab for you, little girl.

St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, hit the headlines at the weekend after the Sunday Times reported it had banned Muslim girls under the age of eight from wearing headscarves, to the delight of campaigners who argued it enforces religious conformity on children.

That decision, along with curbs on children fasting on school days during Ramadan, upset many parents, who said they had not been consulted.

Consulted about starving and dehydrating their children? Consulted about treating little girls as sexual vampires who have to be muffled up in cloth to keep them from Tempting males? Parental rights stop where child abuse begins.

On Friday, the school’s chair of

As you may have seen, Trump and Co want to force people to work to qualify for Medicaid.

Under the planned new Health and Human Services regulations announced last week, waivers will be granted to states willing to restructure their programs to force individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid to work—generally for about 20 hours a week—to qualify for coverage.

What if they’re not well enough to work? What if they can’t find work? What if they have small children at home and no one else to take care of them?

They should have thought of that before they became poor.

The plan purports to help the poor economically and health-wise, but its almost certain to make

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Great respect but it’s time to step aside.

I’m afraid my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”

That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The … Read the rest

Oh this again,  or rather, still. Always. Never not. Woman interviews an idol of the right, woman is target of a torrent of abuse. The woman is Cathy Newman of Channel 4 (the UK one), the idol of the right is Jordan Peterson.

Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, said Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse”. Having to calling in security specialists was a “terrible indictment of the times we live in”, he said.

Newman interviewed the psychologist, Jordan Peterson, about gender on Tuesday. A video of the full 30-minute interview has been watched more than 1.6m times on the Channel 4 News YouTube page and has attracted more than 36,000 comments.

I’ve watched … Read the rest

Guest post by James Garnett.

I see a lot of people cheering on a government shutdown. You need to consider what this means. It’s not just parks closing. During a shutdown, the National Science Foundation stops payments, which can rapidly result in research coming to a halt. For time-sensitive studies, this can mean the loss of data collection that can destroy a study completely. Research projects that have been funded to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, which have been ongoing for years, can come to an abrupt end without results. That can cripple careers.

Also, remember that we are in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous flu outbreaks in recent years. … Read the rest

Thought for the day:

I have great respect for the contributions that many older women made to the feminist movement, at times when it was harder than I have ever experienced. It is also time for them to listen, to learn, to step aside

— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) January 17, 2018

Nope.

Not stepping aside.

Shocking and astonishing fact: young people are not always automatically right, and old people are not always automatically wrong. It’s a little more complicated than that.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on The right to refuse to do your job.

I nearly lost my mother when I was 9 because a Catholic doctor had refused her any contraceptive care – then bawled her out when she got pregnant again. I suppose he felt my mother, a married woman in her mid-30s, had no right to have sexual relations anymore because getting pregnant was dangerous.

For the record, my mother was not, and never had been, Catholic. She was a member of a religion that didn’t go around poking its nose into married people’s bedrooms, though they could be fierce if someone got pregnant outside of marriage.

My mother had five children at the time, ranging … Read the rest

Barbara Kingsolver pulls no punches:

Patriarchy persists because power does not willingly cede its clout; and also, frankly, because women are widely complicit in the assumption that we’re separate and not quite equal. If we’re woke, we inspect ourselves and others for implicit racial bias, while mostly failing to recognise explicit gender bias, which still runs rampant. Religious faiths that subordinate women flourish on every continent. Nearly every American educational institution pours the lion’s share of its athletics budget into the one sport that still excludes women – American football.

Most progressives wouldn’t hesitate to attend a football game, or to praise the enlightened new pope – the one who says he’s sorry, but women still can’t lead

Guest post by Raymond Dickey.

There was a certain rich man who had a doctor, and an accusation was brought to him that this doctor was making him look bad. So he called him and said to him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of my physical, for you can no longer be my doctor.’

Then the doctor said within himself, ‘What shall I do? For my master is taking the position away from me. I cannot diagnose; I am ashamed to plug pharmaceuticals. I have resolved what to do, that when I am put out of medicine, they may receive me into their party.’

So he reviewed every one of his master’s medical measurements, … Read the rest

In other “pesky brown foreigners wanting to come here” news, it turns out you have to pass a test to be a humanist.

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

Uh…what? Who says Plato and Aristotle even are humanist philosophers? Especially in any modern sense that an ex-Muslim would have in mind? Aristotle is a largely secular philosopher perhaps; Plato isn’t even that. They’re considered part of a broad … Read the rest

It looks as if Trump’s Fake News Awards aren’t today after all.

Trump will name “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” on Wednesday, according to a Jan. 7 tweet, but he appears to have done little preparation for the event — if there even is an event.

“We’ll keep you posted on any details around that potential event and what that would look like,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday when asked about the awards.

Posted? Potential? Would look like? But the awards are supposed to be today. Has he not prepared? No shopping for medals or tiny statues? No combing through the entries? No secret ballots?

What happened to the

The racism blowup isn’t going away.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday, while testifying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the president used “tough language” during a conversation on immigration policy in an Oval Office meeting last week. But Nielsen said she did not hear Trump describe some African countries and Haiti as “shithole countries,” as has been reported.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) found that impossible to believe. He preceded to express his frustration with why Nielsen — and Republican lawmakers Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) — seemed unable to recall what the president said in an Oval Office meeting.

Maybe they Repressed the Memory.

Booker also shared some of his recent

She’s not wrong.

This is worth 8 minutes of your time. @CoryBooker’s entire statement. pic.twitter.com/C4X9BHbg4X

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) January 16, 2018

… Read the rest

An anonymous woman who works at the BBC on being the collective BBC Women:

The plural, BBC Women, is the collective name we have given ourselves in choosing to highlight a very simple principle: equal pay for equal work. It is a matter of the law, the Equality Act of 2010.

And the group of BBC women I am a part of now numbers more than 200, including some of the most high-profile at the corporation. We are women who support our colleague Carrie Gracie in her public and eloquent pursuit of that principle of parity. Women who may have specific pay grievances or none, but, above all, have become involved in this issue because it is the right