Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The pledge is in court again

    The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has agreed to hear an appeal challenging a state law mandating the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

    The plaintiffs claim daily classroom affirmation that the nation is “under God” violates state constitutional prohibitions against religious discrimination.

    Which it is. It absolutely is. It’s revolting. It not only shouldn’t be mandated, it shouldn’t be allowed. Forcing children to make a daily god-assertion in public schools is outrageously coercive.

    The plaintiffs brought the case through the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center. The SJC on Thursday approved the petition for direct appellate review of the case, which means a lower court will not have to first consider the appeal.

    “Public schools are defining patriotism and loyalty on a daily basis by exalting one religious group and stigmatizing humanists and other non-theists. Of course that’s discrimination,” said American Humanist Association Executive Director Roy Speckhardt. “We feel confident that a fair hearing will result in a finding that the state law requiring this discriminatory practice violates the state’s equal rights amendment.”

    Public schools are also telling students that the US is “under god,” which is a nonsensical, impertinent, intrusive thing for schools – especially but not exclusively public schools – to tell children. The US isn’t “under god.” There is no god for the US to be under, and if there were a god, who is to say we should agree to be under it? What if the god is evil?

    And then, announcing that the US is “under god” risks implying that other countries are not. This is the “god is on our side” idea and it’s a bad, dangerous one.

    Massachusetts law requires public school teachers to begin each day with a classroom recitation of the Pledge. The suit claims that daily affirmation that the nation is “under God” in the context of an exercise designed to promote national loyalty “directly contradicts the religious beliefs and principles of the plaintiffs” and effectively defines patriotism in terms of God-belief, thereby marginalizing plaintiffs and contributing to existing prejudices against nonbelievers.

    Forcibly promoting national loyalty is a crappy idea anyway. The loyalty should be reasoned and freely adopted, not instilled via daily forced repetition.

    Religious interest groups have intervened in the case to defend the daily “under God” recitation. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represents the Knights of Columbus and a family that supports the “under God” wording.

    For religious liberty? How do they have the face? Liberty is the very opposite of what this is. It’s mandated. That’s not liberty. How can it be a matter of religious liberty to have the state forcing students to say “under God” every day?

    It can’t.

     

  • Good news on Malala

    Wow. I’ve been checking the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for updates on Malala every day, and the update has always said just that she continues to make progress. It now seems that they were understating it a little. She’s been able to talk since Wednesday, and they seem much more confident now that there’s no brain damage. All signs of infection are gone, she’s walking with very little help, and her short term memory is fine. Dr Dave Rosser talks to the press:

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

    Her parents and brothers arrived in Birmingham today, and her father also talks to the press:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A81td5xRv0s

  • Malala is making great progress

    Dr Dave Rosser gives a press conference, and so does her father Ziauddin Yousufzai. “Can she sit her exams?” “Yes, probably.”

  • Malala is speaking; no signs of brain damage

    Her parents are now in Birmingham to be with her.

  • Mass. Supreme Court will hear “under God” pledge case

    The plaintiffs claim daily classroom affirmation that the nation is “under God” violates state constitutional prohibitions against religious discrimination.

  • Defining misogyny

    Comment is Free held a little discussion of “what is misogyny?” the other day.

    An Australian dictionary has changed its definition of misogyny to reflect the fact that it is now used to mean ‘entrenched prejudice against women’, not just hatred of them. Six feminists tell us what the term means to them.

    Ok wait a minute. Is “entrenched prejudice against” really all that different from hatred of? Isn’t entrenched prejudice against one way of saying “hatred”? It’s not clear to me that the two are completely different.

    I’ve been seeing people trying to claim that misogyny is hatred of all women, so that being married to a woman demonstrates freedom from misogyny. That’s not right. It’s never meant that as far as I can remember (and that’s well into the 14th century). One, married people can hate their spouses, but two, misogyny can encompass men who have one or a few exceptions.

    Misogyny is contempt, dismissal, hostility, disregard. It’s not just shouting “I hate all women!”

    Naomi Wolf said sexism is not misogyny and we need both words. But.

    Julia Gillard used “misogyny’ perfectly accurately. She said that Tony Abbott described abortion as “the easy way out” and cited his political campaign against Gillard involving posters asking voters to “ditch the witch”. The latter, especially, is a time-honoured tradition of true misogyny – stirring up atavistic hatred of the feminine – that goes back to witch-hunts against powerful women in the New World. Her critics, for their part, are asking us to water down our awareness of real woman-hating and accept it as normal in political discourse.

    “Misogyny” often surfaces in political struggles over women’s role, and you can tell because the control of women becomes personalised, intrusive and often sexualised. Misogyny has the amygdala involved – the part of the brain involved in processing emotional responses – there is contempt and violence in it. A public figure who tolerates the systemic under-prosecuting of rape is guilty of serious and unforgivable sexism; making rape jokes or explaining away the damage of rape in public as Congressman Todd Akin did recently in the US, or legislating, as over a dozen US states are now doing, transvaginal probes that are medically unnecessary, simply to sexually punish women for choosing abortion – well, that is misogyny.

    Martin Pribble wrote a piece on the subject.

    “Misogynist” is a term which is thrown about these days as a synonym for “sexist” or “social conservative” in many cases, and I must say, often I have found it to be used almost too freely when describing people, policy or situations…

    The new “misogyny” is any act or attitude that doesn’t take into account women in their lives, in society and in cultures. The usage of the word has become so common in its new guise that it has taken on this meaning, while the linguistic pedants are waving their hands about claiming the destruction of the English language. If the new meaning has done anything, it has taken a once powerful and very succinct word and expanded the meaning to include any act against the well-being of women. It has lessened the power of the word, for what word do we now use for the real “hatred of women”, and not the ingrained sexist attitudes that pervade modern society?

    I don’t think I’ve heard (or read) the word used that way. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard (and read) it used to name hatred, hostility, contempt toward women as a class. I certainly don’t think it should be used to mean “social conservative” – that would be very confusing. Maybe this is some special Australian thing that I’m not aware of.

  • The power of ignorance

    Shehrbano Taseer – daughter of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab who was shot to death by his own bodyguard because he supported a Christian woman accused of blasphemy – on Malala Yousafzai.

    (By the way the daily update from the hospital says what it’s said every day for a week – she continues to make progress.)

    For months a team of Taliban sharpshooters studied the daily route that Malala took to school, and, once the attack was done, the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan gleefully claimed responsibility, saying Malala was an American spy who idolized the “black devil Obama.” She had spoken against the Taliban, they falsely said, and vowed to shoot her again, should she survive.

    I don’t think it is falsely – didn’t she say she liked to fantasize about being challenged by them and responding by smacking them in the faces with her sandal? – and her doing so is what makes her so heroic. If anybody deserves to be spoken against, it’s the Taliban. The Taliban is evil.

    And what’s with the black devil nonsense? They dislike Obama’s race on top of everything else?

    The power of ignorance is frightening. My father, Salmaan Taseer, was murdered last January after he stood up for Aasia Noreen, a voiceless, forgotten Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for allegedly committing blasphemy. My father, the governor of Punjab province at the time, believed that our country’s blasphemy laws had been misused; that far too frequently, they were taken advantage of to settle scores and personal vendettas.

    In the days before my father’s murder, fanatics had called for a fatwa against him and had burned him in effigy at large demonstrations. His confessed shooter, a 26-year-old man named Mumtaz Qadri, said he had been encouraged to kill my father after hearing a sermon by a cleric, who, frothing at the mouth, screeched to 150 swaying men to kill my father, the “blasphemer.” Qadri, a police guard, had been assigned to protect my father. Instead, on the afternoon of Jan. 4, my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday, he killed my father, firing 27 bullets into his back as he walked home.

    They can do that. All it takes is a gun and the opportunity. Ignorant, stupid, unthinking people can kill thoughtful people if they decide to. Ignorant vicious clerics can work them up to do so.

    What the attack on Malala makes clear is that this is really a battle over education. A repressive mindset has been allowed to flourish in Pakistan because of the madrassa system set up by power-hungry clerics. It’s a deeply rooted indoctrination, and it sickens me to see ancient religious traditions undermined by a harsher form of religion barely a generation old. These madrassa, or religious schools headed by clerics, are the breeding ground of Islamic radicalism. The clerics don’t teach critical thinking. Instead, they disseminate hate. These clerics are raising merchants of hatred who believe in a very right-wing and radical Islam, to hail people like Osama bin Laden and Mumtaz Qadri as heroes. They train children how to use guns and bombs, and how not to live but to die.

    That’s all it takes. There’s such a thin membrane between relatively normal life and children taught to be suicide bombs.

    Encouraged by her father, Ziauddin, a schoolmaster, Malala quickly became known as she spoke out on the right to an education. Ziauddin had two sons also, but he told friends it was his daughter who had a unique spark. She wanted to study medicine, but he persuaded her that when the time came she should enter politics so she might help create a more progressive society—at the heart of which was education for all. In Pakistan, 25 million children are out of school, and the country has the lowest youth literacy rate in the world.

    …

    As Ziauddin explained his motivation at one point: “Islam teaches us that getting an education is compulsory for every girl and wife, for every woman and man. This is the teaching of the holy Prophet,” he said. “Education is a light and ignorance is a darkness, and we must go from darkness into light.”

    Ziauddin “has given Malala a love, strength, and confidence that’s rare,” agrees Samar Minallah Khan, a Pakistani journalist and filmmaker who knows the family. “She has an incredible spirit and a mind of her own because of the confidence he has given her.”

    In three short years, Malala became the chairperson of the District Child Assembly in Swat, was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu, was the runner-up of the International Children’s Peace Prize, and won Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize. More recently she started to organize the Malala Education Foundation, a fund to ensure poor girls from Swat could go to school.

    Now that’s a genuine tall poppy.

     

  • Your Wiki back

    In another part of the forest – weirdness at Wikipedia. Susan Gerbic has been monitoring Paul Kurtz’s Wikipedia page since his death was announced, and sure enough, there has been weirdness.

    So when I learned about Paul Kurtz’s death yesterday I went over to his Wikipedia page to make sure there was no vandalism, and to make sure it was in great shape so that when the media started to access the page to find out more about this amazing man, they would find something worth looking at.  In the back of my mind I was worried about someone with a agenda saying that he had converted to XYZ religion on his deathbed, then the media picking up on that and the next thing you know it is on the front page of some newspaper. 

    First thing I noticed was that two people had spent a couple hours taking up a big chunk of the page to showcase his last project, The Institute for Secular Human Values.  Personally I don’t think that an organization that has only existed for 2 years should get more prominence on the page than CSICOP which has been around for 30+ years.

    Another objection, on the Talk page, is that the ISHV is just a website. It’s a notional sort of institute, as opposed to a bricks and mortar one.

    The second thing that concerned me was this sentence.  “Upon being forced out of the Center for Inquiry, by the board and management for power and control of the vast network and holdings he had envisioned, developed, managed and maintained for decades, he launched the Institute for Science and Human Values as a separate entity.”

    Jim Lippard commented on that.

    While this sentence is essentially true, it is somewhat tendentious and incomplete in its description of the facts. The “forced out” part was a democratic process, for example, and the person left in charge as Kurtz’s successor, Ron Lindsay, is someone Kurtz had supported to be his successor.

    What a world, what a world.

     

     

  • Shehrbano Taseer on Malala Yousafzai

    A repressive mindset has been allowed to flourish in Pakistan because of the madrassa system set up by power-hungry clerics.

  • With anger, he killed his sister

    Life in a remote corner of Pakistan. Two women killed in “honor” killings.

    On the condition of anonymity, one villager confirmed the news that the girl was attacked by her brother and killed – the brother believed that his sister had developed an illicit relation with another man, and the brother caught them in an ‘objectionable situation’. With anger, he killed his sister while the man succeeded in running away.

    …

    In a second incident of honor killing in another remote location of same Kachho area – Taluka Johi, district Dadu, an uncle (Mama) killed his niece in the pretext of [h]onor killing. Sources closed to victim family revealed this story but never shared name of the woman. They described the woman as married and alleged that she was also caught in an ‘objectionable stiuation’.

    Well there you go. Two sluts, both found in an ‘objectionable stiuation,’ both killed by heroic male relatives; honor restored. That’s that then.

     

     

  • Pusillanimous and unprincipled

    Popehat has definitely decided not to take Mo the Rutabaga to the UK. It’s sad for Mo, but it just wouldn’t be safe, not under present conditions.

    Here’s the pusillanimous and unprincipled attitude of the RUSU and its sad ilk, offered in their own words:  modern university students should not do anything to give offense, and if anyone claims offense, they should stop whatever they are doing immediately.

    Kara Swift, Kath Davey, Richard Silcock, and Ceri Jones are heir to great ideas forged in mighty minds.  They are heirs to Shaw:  “all great truths begin as blasphemies.”  They are heirs to Burke: “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.”  They are heirs to Orwell:  “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”  But they reject that inheritance, choosing instead a life of petty bureaucratism and insipid, infantilizing “civility.”  Offered an opportunity to treat both speakers and listeners as adults, they treat them as children instead — children whose words must be curtailed until they do not offend even the most intolerant and overly sensitive child in the class.

    A nation run by the Swifts, Daveys, Silcocks,and Joneses of the world will be weak and dull-witted and crabbed and pointless.  Such people exist in every place; it’s up to us whether we will put up with them or call them out.  I prefer calling them out.  So write about things like this.

    Yes do!

  • Popehat won’t be taking Mo the Rutabaga to the UK

    Don’t let your home become a place where the petty and the wicked use “blasphemy” and “offense” as an excuse to silence dissent.  Fight back.

  • Two “honor” killings in Pakistan

    In one, a brother killed his sister; in the other, an uncle killed his niece. Both were said to have been in an “objectionable situation.”

  • Heeeeeere’s NSC

    Remember I’ve been dropping all those tantalizing hints about the new blogger in our future?

    Well allow me to introduce –

    Non Stamp Collector

    Booyah!

     

  • Rebecca’s article at Slate

    Rebecca has an article in Slate about misogyny among the skeptics. That should blow some windows out.

    When I first got involved with the skeptics, I thought I had found my people—a community that enjoyed educating the public about science and critical thinking. The sense of belonging I felt was akin, I imagine, to what other people feel at church. (I wouldn’t exactly know—like most skeptics, I’m an atheist.) I felt we were doing important work: making a better, more rational world and protecting people from being taken advantage of. At conventions, skeptic speakers and the audience were mostly male, but I figured that was something we could balance out with a bit of hard work and good PR.

    Then women started telling me stories about sexism at skeptic events, experiences that made them uncomfortable enough to never return. At first, I wasn’t able to fully understand their feelings as I had never had a problem existing in male-dominated spaces. But after a few years of blogging, podcasting, and speaking at skeptics’ conferences, I began to get emails from strangers who detailed their sexual fantasies about me. I was occasionally grabbed and groped without consent at events. And then I made the grave mistake of responding to a fellow skeptic’s YouTube video in which he stated that male circumcision was just as harmful as female genital mutilation (FGM). I replied to say that while I personally am opposed to any non-medical genital mutilation, FGM is often much, much more damaging than male circumcision.

    The response from male atheists was overwhelming.

    And not in a good way. That was June 2010.

    Thinking the solution was to educate the community, I started giving talks about the areas where feminism and skepticism overlap. I encouraged audiences to get involved with issues like ending FGM, fighting the anti-woman pseudoscience of the religious right, and aiding those branded as “witches” in rural African villages.

    Then it was June 2011. Dublin. Her talk; the hotel bar; that guy, that elevator, that invitation to his room for “coffee” at 4 a.m.

    That video.

    What I said in my video, exactly, was, “Guys, don’t do that,” with a bit of a laugh and a shrug. What legions of angry atheists apparently heard was, “Guys, I won’t stop hating men until I get 2 million YouTube comments calling me a ‘cunt.’ ” The skeptics boldly rose to the imagined challenge.

    Even Dawkins weighed in. He hadn’t said anything while sitting next to me in Dublin as I described the treatment I got, but a month later he left this sarcastic comment on a friend’s blog…

    And by doing so, emboldened countless shits to come pouring out of the woodwork.

    Dawkins’ seal of approval only encouraged the haters. My YouTube page and many of my videos were flooded with rape “jokes,” threats, objectifying insults, and slurs. A few individuals sent me hundreds of messages, promising to never leave me alone. My Wikipedia page was vandalized. Graphic photos of dead bodies were posted to my Facebook page.

    Twitter accounts were made in my name and used to tweet horrible things to celebrities and my friends. (The worst accounts were deleted by Twitter, but some, such as this one, are allowed to remain so long as they remove my name.) Entire blogs were created about me, obsessively cataloging everything I’ve ever said and (quite pathetically) attempting to dig up dirt in my past.

    And you know what? They’re still doing it! Notice the present tense – the Twitter accounts are allowed to remain, and to continue harassing Rebecca and others still today now, a year and a half after that world-shaking “guys, don’t do that.”

    One creep tweeted that if he encountered Rebecca in an elevator at TAM he was “totally copping a feel” – which is a cute way of saying “sexually assaulting.” (That’s interesting, isn’t it. “Copping a feel” doesn’t sound like “sexually assaulting,” does it. Why is that? I suppose because it’s from the pov of the copper/assaulter. It’s just boys will be boys, hahaha.)

    The organizers of the conference, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF)—the organization started by the person who first introduced me to skepticism—allowed the man to attend the conference and did nothing to reassure me. I attended anyway and never went anywhere alone.

    That’s bad. I don’t remember if I knew that or not. I think I must have, because I was certainly following the subject closely at the time, but I don’t remember knowing it.

    Meanwhile, other skeptical women are being bullied out of the spotlight and even out of their homes. My fellow writer on Skepchick, Amy Davis Roth, moved after her home address was posted on a forum dedicated to hating feminist skeptics. In September, blogger Greta Christina wrote that “when I open my mouth to talk about anything more controversial than Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster recipes or Six More Atheists Who Are Totally Awesome, I can expect a barrage of hatred, abuse, humiliation, death threats, rape threats, and more.” And Jen McCreight stopped blogging and accepting speaking engagements altogether. “I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few),” she wrote. “I just can’t take it anymore.”

    This is how we live now.

    Rebecca says she expects a new torrent in response to this article, but she wrote it anyway

    because I strongly believe that the goals of skeptics are good ones, like strengthening science education, protecting consumers, and deepening our knowledge of human psychology. Those goals will never be met if we continue to fester as a middling subculture that not only ignores social issues but is actively antagonistic toward progressive thought.

    I also believe that old line about sunlight being the best disinfectant. Ignoring bullies does not make them go away. For the most part, the people harassing us aren’t just fishing for a reaction—they want our silence. They’re angry that feminist thought has a platform in “their community.” What they don’t get is that it’s also my community.

    And mine. And ours.

     

  • Nick Cohen reads Joseph Anton

    The honourable left-wing response was then and is now to fight back and support Muslims and ex-Muslims around the world who want to resist theocratic politics.

  • LSE student atheist society and ex-Muslims

    People of a Muslim background face unique difficulties in abandoning their religion, both in predominantly Muslim countries and in Europe.

  • A million gods

    Say hello to a new arrival at FTB: Avicenna.

    He tells us a little about himself.

    I am Avicenna (named after the islamic golden age Doctor) and I am terrifyingly weird and am a giant nerd. I am a british indian medical student doing my clinical rotations in India. I basically qualify in a year and a bit and then I plan to continue to work for charity here before I go back home and have a career. However to keep sane I started blogging. And it kind of got out of hand…

    I am (naturally) an Atheist (otherwise me joining here would probably win the “biggest misunderstanding” award) but Hinduism is the religion I don’t believe in. All my old gods are crazy as fuck. Good for stories or inspiration for metal bands but not so good for normal life.

    This is going to be good.

  • Slate: Rebecca Watson on speaking out and rape threats

    “It wasn’t until I started talking about feminism to skeptics that I realized I didn’t have a safe space.”

  • Ed Miliband supports the Libel Reform Campaign‏

    Catching up. From Sense About Science a few days ago –

    Dear Friends

    We told you yesterday that the Libel Reform Campaign would be meeting with the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, with Simon Singh, performer Dara Ó Briain and representatives from Index on Censorship, Sense About Science and English PEN.

    Ed Miliband, Dara and Simon: http://libelreform.org/images/eddara.jpg

    The meeting was a great success with Ed Miliband backing our call to add a new public interest defence to protect scientists and bloggers into the government’s Defamation Bill.

    Ed Miliband told us: “The key to a healthy democracy is the right to free speech. But to defend this we need a modernised defamation law that protects citizens and honest discussion from the stifling threat of legal action. That’s why it’s so important that we grasp this once in a generation opportunity to update our defamation laws. I commend the work of the Libel Reform Campaign who are fighting so hard for the reform of our outdated defamation laws and it’s crucial the government heeds their concerns. There’s still time to mould this into a successful Bill – and that includes a new public interest defence – otherwise this opportunity risks being wasted”

    Ed Miliband also said more needed to be done to stop corporations suing individuals for libel and asked his Justice Team in the House of Lords to investigate this.

    Your support has helped us achieve this. It’s now for the government to listen to the increasingly important voices calling for a strengthened public interest defence, and act.

    You can see photos from the meeting on our Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53777693@N04/sets/72157631792324529/

    Thank you to the more than 500 of you who generously donated following Simon Singh’s appeal and helped us reach our target. This and all further donations make a huge difference to what we can do at this crucial point for libel reform. Please do still donate if you haven’t yet: http://www.justgiving.com/libelreform2012

    Best wishes

    Mike and Sile