Author: Ophelia Benson

Maryam reports that there’s growing evidence that very young girls are being “married” to much older men in Sharia courts in the UK. Girls as young as five.

A recent undercover investigation by the Sunday Times found imams in Britain willing to “marry” young girls, provided this was carried out in secret. The imams had been approached by an undercover reporter posing as a father who said he wanted his 12 year old daughter married, to prevent her from being tempted in to a “western lifestyle”.

Imam Mohammed Kassamali, of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, sanctioned the marriage, but stressed the need for total secrecy. He stated: “I would love the girl to go to her husband’s houses (sic) as soon as possible, the younger the better. Under sharia (Islamic law) there is no problem. It is said she should see her first sign of puberty at the house of her husband. The problem is that we cannot explain such things (the marriage) if the girl went tomorrow (to the authorities).”

Clearly “married” means “imprisoned” and “prevented from ever having adult autonomy and freedom.” It means being cut off from adulthood before it starts.

Maryam’s One Law for All is helping to stop this; you can help One Law for All.

One important way to tackle this matter is to galvanise support for the Arbitration and Mediation (Equality) Bill introduced to the House of Lords last year by crossbench peer, Baroness Caroline Cox. The Bill is due for a second reading in October.

The Government has so far declined to support Cox’s Bill. They do not believe there is a parallel legal system in operation. They also insist that everyone has full right of access to the British courts. This is simply not the case. There are many with little or no English language skills, trapped by community pressure, who believe Sharia courts operate as real courts and who regard their decisions as legally binding. The idea that they can easily instruct a high street solicitor to help them access their full rights under UK law is far from reality.

The Government must be pressured into taking immediate action, including by supporting Cox’s Bill, and shutting down Sharia and religious courts. If child welfare takes precedence then the Government is duty-bound to take action.

Sign our new petition in support of Baroness Cox’s Bill; tell the Government that enough is enough! Please sign it now.

Help Us

Baroness Cox has said in the past that her Bill was inspired by One Law for All. To donate to our important work, please either send a cheque made payable to One Law for All to BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK or pay via Paypal. We need regular support and also for supporters to commit to giving at least £5-10 a month via direct debit. You can find out more about how to join the 100 Club here.

If you have donation funds, that’s a very good destination for them.

I often find Sam Harris irritating, but he can be very good at hitting the right nail on the head. He is in his new piece on the freedom to offend.

I’ll just give a few examples of nail-hitting.

Whether over a film, a cartoon, a novel, a beauty pageant, or an inauspiciously named teddy bear, the coming eruption of pious rage is now as predictable as the dawn. This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas.

…

The contagion of moral cowardice followed its usual course, wherein liberal journalists and pundits began to reconsider our most basic freedoms in light of the sadomasochistic fury known as “religious sensitivity” among Muslims. Contributors to The New York Times and NPR spoke of the need to find a balance between free speech and freedom of religion—as though the latter could possibly be infringed by a YouTube video. As predictable as Muslim bullying has become, the moral confusion of secular liberals appears to be part of the same clockwork.

…

Unlike the founders of most religions, about whom very little is known, Mormonism is the product of the plagiarisms and confabulations of an obvious con man, Joseph Smith, whose adventures among the credulous were consummated (in every sense) in the full, unsentimental glare of history. Given how much we know about Smith, it is harder to be a Mormon than it is to be a Christian. A firmer embrace of the preposterous is required—and the fact that Romney can manage it says something about him, just as it would if he were a Scientologist proposing to park his E-meter in the Oval Office.

…

The moment one adds seer stones, sacred underpants, the planet Kolob, and a secret handshake required to win admittance into the highest heaven, Mormonism stands revealed for what it is: the religious equivalent of rhythmic gymnastics.

The point, however, is that I can say all these things about Mormonism, and disparage Joseph Smith to my heart’s content, without fearing that I will be murdered for it. Secular liberals ignore this distinction at every opportunity and to everyone’s peril.

…

The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost. And the only forces on earth that can recover it are strong, secular governments that will face down charges of blasphemy with scorn. No apologies necessary.

He’s right you know.

Faith healing doesn’t work; would interfaith healing do better?

No. So why is interfaith such a good thing again? Why is faith a good thing?

It’s not.

Consider Randi and Russel Bellew for instance. (No, I don’t know why Russel spells his own name wrong.)

A Creswell,  Ore., husband and wife have pleaded guilty to negligent homicide charges in the faith healing death of their 16-year-old son.

KVAL-TV reports that the teen, Austin Sprout, died at home last December after his appendix  burst. Lane County sheriff’s Capt. Byron  Trapp says medical professionals believe the boy’s condition was treatable had he been provided medical care.

Ya think?

That’s one hell of a painful death those two damn fools inflicted on their kid.

Another piece on women in tech fields. The takeaway:

It was always the ones that said they didn’t see gender or color who did the most damage. “They’re just words,” they would say, “Why do you let them hurt you?” And with that, my pain was made as invisible as me. “They’re just words.” Indeed, just the verbal incantations of power, like law and code and everything else that made the world. I decided to leave tech for words.

❧

But now I’m all shouty. Now people are angry at me because I have a stage, and they can’t make me invisible and ignore me, because the truth is you can’t ignore words, and I have the words. So now they really hate me. The others, the majority, sit uncomfortably with the conflict. No one is quite sure what to do, they want things to be abstractly better, but they don’t want anyone to be loudly upset, either. One side is considerably louder than all the others.

That “just words” thing is so ridiculous. People who say that – how do they think we got here? We humans? Do they think language is just incidental? A minor ornament that makes no difference to anything?

And I love the second para, because it applies to so many of us, us shouty women, us women who are all shouty. We have a stage, so now they really hate us – but it doesn’t do them any good because they can’t make people stop reading us or listening to us. They try and try and try but it just doesn’t work.

H/t Chris Lawson

There’s a dreadfully wrong-headed article by Eboo Patel in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. You can probably guess the gist if you remember that he’s one of Chris Stedman’s favorite interfaithy types. The gist is that faith is great, it doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s faith, and it’s a kind of identity like race so let’s start making sure there’s lots of diversity of it, because faith.

Part of the rationale for 1990s-era campus multiculturalism was to remedy the racial bias in the broader society: to lift up underrepresented narratives, to remind people that many communities have contributed to the American project, to ensure that our perceptions of race were not driven by the crime reports on the evening news. Gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity all got some airtime, but mostly we talked about race. And one form of identity was almost totally excluded: faith.

Now that the evening news is full of stories of faith-based violence, and our public discourse has a constant undercurrent of religious prejudice (Barack Obama is a Muslim! Mitt Romney isn’t a Christian!) colleges can no longer ignore faith identity. For many of the same reasons that they actively engaged race, so should they now actively and positively engage faith identity.

That’s how he gets the toe in the doorway: treating “faith” as identity rather than a set of beliefs and claims, and then treating identity as something that has to be “engaged.” But that’s a bad idea. Religion does operate like an identity in a lot of ways but it’s bad to treat it like one because it makes it less open. It shouldn’t be hard to leave one’s religion just because it feels like an identity.

What if campuses took religious diversity as seriously as they took race? What if recruiting a religiously diverse student body, creating a welcoming environment for people of different faith and philosophical identities, and offering classes in interfaith studies and co-curricular opportunities in interfaith leadership became the norm? What if university presidents expected their graduates to acquire interfaith literacy, build interfaith relationships, and have opportunities to run interfaith programs during their four years on campus? What impact might a critical mass of interfaith leaders have on America over the course of the next generation?

I have one word to offer as an alternative to Patel’s nightmare vision: secularism.

H/t to Christopher Moyer, via Jessica Moyer.

I know it’s obvious, I know it’s too easy, I know everybody and its dog is all over it, but can I just point and laugh at Romney a little all the same? Because it’s too perfect.

That is how they think. I know some, and that’s how they think. They think everybody who isn’t rich is contemptible, and out to steal their stuff.

At the fundraiser, Romney was asked how he could win in November, and he replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

You have to love the way it ticks all the boxes, and the way it ignores reality. He seems to think that 47 percent of the population is on welfare, which is never cut off. That’s Romney’s America! Almost half of us are beneath contempt and not his job to worry about.

Class war. Booya.

This is funny. I got a tweet from Linky ‏@LinkyGray saying

putting on an event celebrating & supporting women in science and media, called LogicGrrrl in Edinburgh, cld you spread word?

So I said sure and asked if she had any useful links and in the meantime I tried Google, which turned up nothing relevant but did turn up something from a Christian apologetics site explaining “Girl Logic.” It’s chapter 4 of something (a book? a manifesto?) called What does a Woman Want? A Real Man.

“Girl logic” is the label given to describe that series of semi-consecutive feminine thoughts that favored “cute things,” “soft things,” and cuddly little kittens and puppies. It causes girls to act in such strange displays of behavior that the average man is stupefied in useless attempts to comprehend. The smart man quickly abandons such ventures as he soon realizes severe head pain and vertigo follow.

Each and every man has encountered this highly illusive mental game of matching wits with a woman, most often to his confusion and demise. The average male thinks too clearly, too linearly, and, therefore, can’t figure women out at all. The strange marvel is that girl logic makes sense to all women.

There is, most probably, a genetic something that unites all females this way. I have seen groups of them act in behavioristic unison — as if driven by some common cosmic feminine force — when they encounter a jewelry department, a sale on clothes, or choosing the color of their shoes. This is all fine and dandy as long as men are excluded. But we aren’t!

Every man knows the unmerited agony of being dragged into a clothes store only to have his aesthetic senses crushed into ridiculed oblivion when he says that blue blouse goes well with that green sweater. I’ve seen girls almost lose their lunch and stare in pathetic disbelief at some poor shlup who got cornered in the women’s department and made the inexcusable blunder of commenting on how yellow and pink polka-dots go together.

There’s lots more. I think it comes from deep experience of watching tv sitcoms. What it has to do with Christian apologetics is anyone’s guess, but I’m not going to research any further.

Oh and spread the word about the event called LogicGrrrl in Edinburgh!

Hey hurry up today is the last day for Early Bird pricing for the American Atheists 50th Anniversary National Convention. You want to go to that! It’s in Austin. You can see the bats from it.

I’ll be there. Anthony Grayling is the keynote speaker. Who else is there? Jessica Ahlquist – Jamila Bey – Greta – Elisabeth Cornwell – Jerry De Witt – Matt Dillahunty – Margaret Downey – J.T. Eberhard – Janet Heimlich – Linda LaScola – Teresa McBain – Dale McGowan – and Dave Silverman of course. Along with many others. It should be fuuuuuuun.

Roy Brown told the UN Human Rights Council what’s what last week.

States which fail to punish faith-based violence against religious and non-religious minorities, or which legitimize faith-based violence through laws against ‘blasphemy’ or ‘apostasy’, should have no seat on the UN Human Rights Council. This was the view presented by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) delegation to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday.

And quite right too.

The 21^st session of the UN Human Rights Council (Geneva, 10 September 2012) opened with a report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. Speaking in response to her report, IHEU Main Representative Roy Brown thanked her for her recognition of the problem of violence against religious minorities, however, reading a text drafted by team member Leo Igwe, [he] pointed out the wider problem of discrimination, oppression and violence against the non-religious.

Which Leo has very up close and personal experience with.

Amanda Marcotte at Slate discusses Susan Jacoby’s article based on her Women in Secularism talk.

Jacoby argues that secularism really should embrace feminism, especially considering that feminism (and I’ll add, gay rights, which is intertwined with feminism) is the most secular social justice movement in history. Maintaining male dominance has been one of the primary functions of religion throughout history…

As it has been one of the primary functions of culture throughout history, as Susan Moller Okin argued in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? It’s central. Make sure women are dominated so that there won’t be any scary doubts about paternity or any scary possibility of being pussy-whipped.

Jacoby doesn’t mention it, but the problem has grown beyond the casual sexism behind marginalizing women’s issues or even male atheists ignorantly deploying negative stereotypes about women in their arguments. As more women have joined with the movement, more voices have been making these connections between feminism and secularism, which awakened a previously unknown contingent of angry misogynist atheists. Atheist activists who make overtly feminist arguments have been targeted by vicious harassment campaigns, often for no other reason than trying to reduce the amount of sexual harassment women encounter at conventions. One blogger who started a forum for atheists who want to focus more on social justice than trying to get “under God” out of the Pledge received so much abuse that she quit blogging. While most secularists are agreeable to incorporating feminist worldviews into the agenda, the few who oppose feminism have been so dogged that female atheists can’t be faulted if they decide to put their time and attention elsewhere. Casual sexists can be persuaded to take a more female-inclusive approach through education, but unfortunately, education doesn’t work on dogged misogynists. As long as the harassment and abuse of atheists who speak out about feminism [doesn’t] stop, the low numbers of female participation in secularist events will likely continue.

It’s true you know. For the first time, yesterday and today, I’m feeling something like what Jen felt – wanting to get out. Everything seems dirty and polluted, including me.

No wonder Naomi Wolf’s book is so silly, if Zoe Heller gets her right.

For those familiar with Wolf’s career as a polemicist and memoirist, it will not come as a complete surprise to find her attributing occult properties to the female anatomy. Wolf, who has always understood feminism to be a spiritual cause as much as a civil rights movement, has made several moony allusions over the years to the numinous character of female sexuality. In Promiscuities, her memoir of growing up in 1970s San Francisco, she proposed that “female sexuality participates in the divine image.”

Feminism as a spiritual cause – ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.

If it’s a spiritual cause there’s no need or place for it to begin with. Nobody minds if women are “spiritual” all over the place, as long as they don’t go demanding unspiritual things like serious work and freedom to wander and equal rights.