Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Protesters plan to destroy GM test site

    “Activist” group has pledged to carry out a “decontamination” at a test site where researchers are growing GM wheat that can repel insect pests with a smell. Hooray for crop failure!

  • Small world

    Surly Amy has a nice post about the women in secularism conference (cue squawks from agonized bores with facetious cod-Edwardian advice for zee laydeez). She’s made Surly-Ramics necklaces for people who donate to a scholarship fund to send students to the conference.

    It is important that we lend our support to conferences like this groundbreaking event so that we can pave the way for future events while encouraging future leaders in the movement to stand up and be counted. I support women in secularism and I hope you will too.

    I think that’s true. I think that’s true even if you accept the contemptuous premise that all the speakers at the conference were invited solely because they have the korrekt genitalia. I don’t accept that premise, of course; I think Susan Jacoby and Margaret Downey and the rest [bracketing me, of course] have more than that; but if I did, I would still think it was true that we should lend our support to conferences like this. I’ll tell you why. It’s because just representation, by itself, does something important, and lack of representation does too, but in the opposite direction. It has to do with that business of encouraging future leaders. It has to do with stereotype threat, with give me the colored doll, with implicit associations.

    On another note: while reading the post I noticed something I hadn’t known, which is that Skepchick is international, and there’s a Swedish Skepchick. Swedish! There’s a post up right now advertising a debate between Christer Sturmark and a guy called Marcus Birro. Google translate reveals that the Swedish Skepchick blogger considers Birro a bullshitter. But small world, hey, I know Christer Sturmark! Isn’t life funny.

    I’ve been seeing a lot of excitement about the conference, here and there. I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty good fun.

  • Houston and New York are spared

    One piece of slightly good news: Helen Ukpabio has canceled both her planned trips to the US. That doesn’t do the children of Nigeria any good, but it does throw a wrench into her plans to go global.

    Once Ukpabio’s travel plans emerged, campaigners against her activities in Africa began appealing to the US authorities to prevent her from preaching in that country. Prominent Nigerian humanist Leo Igwe, who has had many confrontations with Ukpabio and her Liberty Gospel Church, wrote that “efforts must be made to stop this evangelical throwback from spreading her diseased gospel in the US”, while online campaigners called for her exclusion from the US, and set about raising money for the UK-based charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, which campaigns to protect children threatened by witch hunts in the Niger Delta region of Africa.

    Now, four months after details of Ukpabio’s US trip first emerged, it seems the campaign against it has paid off, with Nigerian media reporting that she will no longer be visiting the country. In a report sympathetic towards Ukpabio, the Nigerian Voice website quotes the preacher’s attorney Victor Ukutt, who confirms that the trip has been cancelled, and makes a series of bizarre allegations against her opponents, including Stepping Stones, suggesting that the campaigns against her are a front for obtaining money through fraudulent means. This is a common tactic for Ukpabio, who has long dismissed the “child witch scam” as an atheist conspiracy.

    Actually, what that website says is that Ukpabio got death threats “on behalf of” Stepping Stones Nigeria.

    The President and founder of the Liberty Gospel Foundation Church, Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio says she has indefinitely cancelled her scheduled visits to the USA which where billed for March and May this year.

    Speaking through her attorney, Victor Ukutt, Esq., the Pentecostal Pastor and Nollywood actress, who has her church branches spread all over Africa, said her decision to cancel her trip was based on the series of death threat she received from organisations like Stepping Stones Nigeria a based in the United Kingdom which claimed to work as a charity to protect witch children in Nigeria.

    I don’t believe that for a second.

     

  • Dan Savage on the fairness of citing the Old Testament

    Is it just totes unfair to confront anti-gay Christian hypocrites with Leviticus 20:13? No.

  • Helen Ukpabio cancels 2 US trips

    Leo Igwe wrote that “efforts must be made to stop this evangelical throwback from spreading her diseased gospel in the US”, while online campaigners called for her exclusion from the US.

  • Missing

    Teresa MacBain is another one of those ministers – the ones who lose their grip on god and then wonder how on earth they can deal with the situation.

    “I’m currently an active pastor and I’m also an atheist,” she says. “I live a double life. I feel pretty good on Monday, but by Thursday — when Sunday’s right around the corner — I start having stomachaches, headaches, just knowing that I got to stand up and say things that I no longer believe in and portray myself in a way that’s totally false.”

    MacBain glances nervously around the room. It’s a Sunday, and normally she would be preaching at her church in Tallahassee, Fla. But here she is, sneaking away to the American Atheists’ convention in Bethesda, Md.

    Her secret is taking a toll, eating at her conscience as she goes about her pastoral duties week after week — two sermons every Sunday, singing hymns, praying for the sick when she doesn’t believe in the God she’s praying to. She has had no one to talk to, at least not in her Christian community, so her iPhone has become her confessor, where she records her private fears and frustrations.

    I can’t think of any other job that has exactly that problem. Even various woo-based jobs like homeopath aren’t exactly the same, because homeopathy isn’t a person, or a Person. It’s that that makes it a matter of conscience, I think.

    She was raised a conservative Southern Baptist. She had questions about conflicts in the Bible and the role of women.

    She says she sometimes felt she was serving a taskmaster of a God, whose standards she never quite met.

    For years, MacBain set her concerns aside. But when she became a United Methodist pastor nine years ago, she started asking sharper questions. She thought they’d make her faith stronger.

    In reality,” she says, “as I worked through them, I found that religion had so many holes in it, that I just progressed through stages where I couldn’t believe it.”

    The questions haunted her: Is Jesus the only way to God? Would a loving God torment people for eternity? Is there any evidence of God at all?

    And another, key question: would a loving God make the evidence so hard (we, being atheists, would say impossible) to find and then punish us for not believing without evidence? Would a loving God give us useful capacities to seek out the truth and test for falsehood yet demand that we ignore all that and have faith that there is a loving God?

    I say no. That’s not a loving god. I am completely unable to believe in god, and I’m unable to countermand the aspects of my mind that make me unable to believe. That’s not something a loving god could or should or would punish me (or anyone) for.

    MacBain misses the relationships, and she misses the music. But she doesn’t miss God.

  • An edge in his voice

    It sounds like an awkward time at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature panel on the life and works of Christopher Hitchens last night. Apparently it was billed as a tribute but it was also a discussion, and the result is that it wasn’t an unadulterated tribute.

    Mr. Hitchens’s erudition, wit and prolificacy were taken for granted by the five participants: Katha Pollitt and Victor Navasky, his erstwhile colleagues at The Nation magazine; Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair; and George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker. The question initially posed by the writer Ian Buruma, the event’s moderator, was whether Mr. Hitchens’s work and ideas would stand the test of time.

    Well I’ll tell you what I would have said if I’d been on that panel. Yes. Absolutely yes; very much yes. I think he had huge flaws – or, more to the point, that there were huge flaws in some of his ideas and work – but I also think the quality of his work was of the kind that stands the test of time. I think he wrote far too well and too shrewdly on too large a range of subjects with too much wit and insight not to stand the test of time.

    Mr. Navasky said Mr. Hitchens didn’t have “original theories,” but rather offered “original takes” on things. Ms. Pollitt said that no magazine writer who “weighs in” so regularly on the issues of the day can expect their work to age well. She went further — since, she claimed, it was probably “the reason” she was invited to be on the panel — and called Mr. Hitchens a “tremendous misogynist” who didn’t have “a lot of serious, professional respect for women writers.” She also chided his habit of greeting her with a kiss on the hand, a habit she called “grotesque.”

    That was one of the huge flaws – although I’m not sure I would call it misogyny (but then Katha knows a lot more about it than I do, having been a colleague for many years) – the failure to take women seriously. (Although there were exceptions. That Jefferson scholar who wrote about him shortly after he left the scene, for instance.)

    But they also pointed to some of his vital work, both serious and comic, like the time he was voluntarily waterboarded, or his series about self-improvement, for which he had a seaweed body wrap and dabbled in yoga. Mr. Packer singled out Mr. Hitchens’s performance in a debate with Tony Blair about whether religion is a force for good, and he also praised Mr. Hitchens for speaking out strongly and often about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie when no one else was willing to “stick out their neck.”

    Mr. Rushdie, the festival’s founder, was sitting front and center in the crowd. During the time allotted for audience participation, he approached a microphone and said he wanted to pay tribute to Mr. Hitchens, “which is what I thought we were doing tonight,” he added, with an edge in his voice. He championed his friend’s best works as “masterpieces of style,” called his book “God is Not Great” an “extraordinary polemic,” and said he fit comfortably in the tradition of great essayists going back to the 18th century and his work would undoubtedly endure.

    That’s what I think. It’s exactly what I think. I said much the same thing almost ten years ago, when B&W was new.

  • The joke’s on them

    For awhile there it looked as if Mali were going to have a new and better Family Code to improve the rights of women.

    Its provisions included raising the minimum legal age of marriage for girls, improving women’s inheritance and property rights and removing the clause demanding a wife’s obedience to her husband. The law was adopted by the National Assembly in August 2009 but was withdrawn following uproar from conservative Muslim groups.

    Provocative headlines in newspapers warned that women would no longer have to obey their husbands and thousands took to the streets in protest. A task group formed by Mali’s top Islamic council called it an “open road to debauchery” and the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations said the law reflected the wishes of a tiny minority of women. When the Family Code was finally enshrined in law in January this year, it was substantially watered down. Campaigners say that far from protecting women’s rights, the code perpetuates discrimination.

    Religion trumped women’s rights, as it so often does. Religion equated equal rights for women with “debauchery” – as if women weren’t people at all but just walking genitalia; as if all equality and rights could possibly mean to women would be fucking any man they could find; as if all women ever want to do is just fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck and therefore they can’t ever have rights.

    According to Safiatou Doumbia, a member of the Malian Association for Care and Assistance to Women and Children, the new law has set women back. “The new law brings women’s rights back to more than 50 years ago because some rights women had in the former law have been banned. Before, a woman would automatically keep her children if her husband died. This is not the case with the new law, which allows a family counsel to decide who should keep the children.”

    Under the new Family Code, as in the original 1962 law, a woman must obey her husband, men are considered the head of the family and the legal age for marriage is 16 for girls, and 18 for boys.

    In short, women (including girls) are on a par with livestock. They are wholly owned by men; a woman without an owner is as nature-defying as a feral Bichon Frise.

     

  • Women in Mali: no rights for you!

    Under the new Family Code, a woman must obey her husband, men are considered the head of the family, and the legal age for marriage is 16 for girls and 18 for boys.

  • PEN Festival panel discusses life and work of Hitchens

    Salman Rushdie said he fit comfortably in the tradition of great essayists going back to the 18th century and his work would undoubtedly endure.

  • Surly Amy says support women in secularism

    She made limited edition Surly-Ramics necklaces as gifts for people who donate to student scholarships to the Women in Secularism conference.

  • From minister to atheist: questions haunted her

    Is Jesus the only way to God? Would a loving God torment people for eternity? Is there any evidence of God at all? And one day, she realized: “I’m an atheist.”

  • Adele Wilde-Blavatsky responds

    I’ve just published Adele Wilde-Blavatsky’s response to The Feminist Wire’s “Collective Response” to her article (also for The Feminist Wire) on the hijab and the hoodie. Don’t miss it. The “Collective Response” and the actions of The Feminist Wire – especially in summarily booting Wilde-Blavatsky from TFW – are a stinking outrage.

    The ”Collective Response” said, among other things,

    What we do find deeply problematic, however, is the questioning of women’s choice to wear the niqab and the presumption that this decision is rooted in a “false consciousness.”

    Wilde-Blavastky replied (but the Feminist Wire booted her out instead of publishing it, so I have the privilege of publishing it instead)

    This is not a presumption, there is significant empirical evidence from Muslim women bearing witness to a deeply oppressive patriarchal culture and religious practice which entails being brainwashed and forced to wear the hijab and burqa from a young age and being severely punished for not doing so.  Women have been tortured and murdered for not wearing these clothes.  However, you only refer to the Muslim women who have the freedom to exercise choice. What about the millions of Muslim women who don’t? Are their voices and experiences not relevant in this debate at all? Is the fear of Islamaphobia so intense that it cannot accommodate the voices of Muslim and non-Muslim women who want to see the hijab banned?

    In some circles, yes it clearly is.

  • The Feminist Wire censorship: An unpublished response

    Here is my unpublished response to a collective response (signed by over 70 feminists) that was published on The Feminist Wire website opposing my article: ‘To be Anti-Racist is to be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab are not Equals’. I sent this response to TFW editorial collective for publication, prior to their removing both my article and their collective response.

    Thank you for this collective response to my article. I absolutely accept and welcome the effort by The Feminist Wire Collective to challenge hierarchies of privilege and build solidarity. I have listened to your concerns and taken them to heart as well. We can all learn something from this debate. I also welcome any initiative for an honest conversation about privilege, racism, and Islamophobia within feminist collectives and movements. If my article has in any way helped to kickstart that initiative, then I welcome that.  I would also like to express my gratitude to the founder, Tamura Lomax, for inviting me to join The Feminist Wire collective last year. I am proud and honoured to be part of such a writers’ collective.

    For the record, and in my defence, prior to publication, I actively sought out the opinion and feedback of four Collective members. The feedback I received from two members was complimentary and positive. No-one offered any objections to it or suggested any significant editorial changes. Although, that is not to say that they agreed with the content either. That said, some of my comments have clearly been distorted, and at times, misrepresented in your letter.  I have also been accused of holding views that I do not. I will address these matters below.

    First, I was upset by, and strongly object to, the accusation or suggestion that I am ‘racist’. The views that have been expressed in relation to me and my family members on Facebook and The Feminist Wire website, were not only offensive and but also denied us our basic humanity.  To claim, as one woman did, that I used the ‘ties’ of ‘non-white bodies’ to ‘obfsucate my whiteness’  not only reduces me and my family to the level of our skin colour but also categorically ignores our intimate connections and unique personal experiences and cultural and religious backgrounds. Most importantly, it denies us the experience we share as human beings in terms of genuine love, care and compassion.  The very thing you accuse me of doing in relation to Muslim women.

    Then there are the misrepresentations and distortions. You state:

    For her (the author), Trayvon Martin’s hoodie signifies a history of racism, whereas Shaima Alawadi’s hijab signifies only male domination and female oppression.

    I never stated that the hoodie ‘signifies a history of racism’.  I stated that the history of the hijab and the hoodie were not comparable or ‘equals’. The hoodie is an item of commercial sports wear, produced by sports clothing companies, in the name of comfortable clothes freely worn by men and women alike. The hijab is not comparable to the hoodie in that respect.  That is not to deny that some  people may seek to highlight the racial aspects of both items of clothing, what I am denying is their equality in terms of their origin, purpose and the general freedom to wear them.

    I also never stated that the hijab ‘signifies only male domination and female oppression’. Yes, I quoted Muslim feminists who support the ban of the hijab in French schools and who find the hijab representative of male domination and female oppression.  I agree with their viewpoint but that’s not the same as claiming that myself. In fact, later on I concede that a minority of Muslim women (who have the freedom of choice) may exercise that choice freely, without the constraints of force or punishment.

    You then state:

    What we do find deeply problematic, however, is the questioning of women’s choice to wear the niqab and the presumption that this decision is rooted in a “false consciousness.”

    This is not a presumption, there is significant empirical evidence from Muslim women bearing witness to a deeply oppressive patriarchal culture and religious practice which entails being brainwashed and forced to wear the hijab and burqa from a young age and being severely punished for not doing so.  Women have been tortured and murdered for not wearing these clothes.  However, you only refer to the Muslim women who have the freedom to exercise choice. What about the millions of Muslim women who don’t? Are their voices and experiences not relevant in this debate at all? Is the fear of Islamaphobia so intense that it cannot accommodate the voices of Muslim and non-Muslim women who want to see the hijab banned?

    In terms of the subtle issue of ‘false consciousness’, my article clearly stresses that we should not conflate two issues here a) the freedom to choose and b) the choice itself. You have conflated the two issues in your response. I accept that there may be women (outside of Islamic states where women and girls do not have a choice) who freely choose to wear the hijab, but argue that this choice could still be critiqued. In the same way that women who choose to have cosmetic plastic surgery, as a result of patriarchal norms  and pressure, are criticised by women of all races and backgrounds. In fact, the picture (below) that I chose to be published along with my article, clearly demonstrates the parallels I  seek to draw between patriarchal control of female bodies and physical appearance in both secular and religious countries:

    There are some double standards at work here too. On the one hand you attack me for using my ‘ white privilege’ to suggest that some Muslim women, who can freely choose to wear the hijab, may be doing so as a result of ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, you accuse me of the ‘false consciousness’ of (i.e. unintentionally) propagating the views of white privilege and racism. If you can accuse me of not fully understanding the impact of my words on some Muslim women, then by the same token, why is my accusation that some women similarly suffer from that same lack of empathy/understanding in respect of the impact their choices have on myself and other females? And I would argue that the choice Muslim women make to wear the veil in secular countries, to impose that choice on the their daughters whether by force or by social pressure, most definitely does have the potential to cause a negative impact on myself, other women, men and children. For example, what message does it send to young schoolboys and girls when they see a Muslim schoolgirl covering her hair in the name of patriarchal religion, while Muslim boys’ heads go uncovered?

    You also portray my view as if it lacks any support from Muslim or Arab women. As I stated in my article, I agree with Fadela Amara who explained her support for France’s ban:

    The veil is the visible symbol of the subjugation of women, and therefore has no place in the mixed, secular spaces of France’s public school system.

    When some feminists began defending the headscarf on the grounds of “tradition”, Amara vehemently disagreed:

    They define liberty and equality according to what colour your skin is. They won’t denounce forced marriages or female genital mutilation, because, they say, it’s tradition. It’s nothing more than neocolonialism. It’s not tradition, it’s archaic. French feminists are totally contradictory. When Algerian women fought against wearing the headscarf in Algeria, French feminists supported them. But when it’s some young girl in a French suburb school, they don’t.

    If we take Amara seriously, and I do, there appears to be a no-win situation for a white feminist in this debate. If we support, defend and promote your viewpoint, we will be accused by Muslim feminists like Amara of neo-colonialism. If we support feminists like Amara, we face condemnation and accusations of racism and privilege. Are you suggesting that neither I nor Muslim feminists (if my skin colour and religion offends you) can condemn this choice at all?   Are you seriously suggesting that we can only debate an issue if we have first-hand experience of it? Do I have to be a porn star to critique pornography?

    You also then claim that I reduce Muslim women and women of colour

    to a piece of cloth and the experiences of people of colour and practioners of an increasingly racialized and demonized religion are repeatedly questioned and denied.

    Again, this completely ignores and glosses over the quotes in my article from Muslim and Arab feminists. In fact, ironically, I and others would argue that it is the very people who defend and promote the veil that reduce Muslim women to a piece of cloth.

    I agree with you that it is absolutely essential to highlight the racism and Islamaphobia present when it comes to ‘the demonization, incarceration, and oppression of Muslim men, women, and children at home and abroad.’ However, let’s not forget that Muslim women and children are regularly demonised, incarcerated, and oppressed by Muslim men at home and abroad, the hijab being just one example. Yes, colonialism and Islamaphobia also play a key role in the oppression of Muslim men and women, but the real enemy here cannot be reduced to white men in suits and military clothing; and it certainly cannot be reduced to ‘white privileged’ feminists either.

    Reading through your response and the subsequent comments about it online, the main point of contention appears to be my skin colour. If a Muslim feminist had written the same piece I doubt very much it would have come under the same level of hostility or scrutiny.  You state you dislike women of colour being reduced to their skin colour but that is exactly what you have done to me. You gloss over and ignore any of my own intersections of race, culture, religion and ethnicity with very little knowledge about me on a personal level.  Had it ever occurred to my detractors that I might be challenging the hijab on the basis of my Buddhist viewpoint not my skin colour? Does the presumption always have to be viewed through the reductionary lense of a person’s skin colour?

    For example, the fact that one woman who posted on Facebook immediately assumed, when I was discussing immigration in the UK in a previous article for The Feminist Wire, that I was talking about non-white immigration, demonstrates the level of presumption and prejudice here. In addition, when I welcomed and agreed with another woman’s post, it was argued that I must have done so because she was white, further revealing an excessive level of paranoia and hostility towards whiteness. Whereas the truth was it had never even occurred to me, nor was I even aware, of the woman’s skin colour.  It is also a false accusation because I did thank and concur with the comments of a non-white woman on TFW website, who stated my article was ‘brilliant’. You can see how ridiculous my defence becomes when skin colour is deemed to be so important.

    In conclusion, I understand that emotions are running high in this debate and am very sorry for any offence or upset I may have caused. It is important to stay calm and rational though.  It is sad that my article, whose sole aim and purpose was to attack patriarchal religion and culture, was interpreted by many within TFW Collective as oppressing and violating the identity of Muslim women. This could not be further from my intention. I am listening and accept that there may have been issues I could have expressed differently or with greater sensitivity.  However, I believe you also need to be careful that you do not fall into the cultural relativist trap of defending and supporting misogynists and patriarchs.

    To end, I randomly read this quote today and thought it worth sharing:

    “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.” – Thomas Szasz

    Yours in learning, peace, love and solidarity

    Adele

  • Andrew Copson on state-funded “faith” schools

    The Catholic church promoted to all pupils in its secondary schools a petition against gay marriage in a way unacceptable for any publicly funded body.

  • Adele Wilde-Blavatsky: when anti-racism becomes anti-woman

    The ‘excuse-making of cultural relativism’ and the politically correct face of anti-racism is ugly and dangerous.

  • Philosophers and physicists duke it out

    Update: omigod – tricked again. I so nearly missed it…you just can’t ever be careful enough.

    I nearly missed it, and didn’t because one of the comments on An Explanation From Nothing? quoted Krauss saying “the nasty review in the Times by the templeton funded philosopher is bringing more people out of the woodwork…”

    Oh? thought I, so naturally I googled, and yes David Albert is Templeton funded, and furthermore, the Explanation From Nothing blog is part of the project, so it too is Templeton funded. I had no clue. I thought it was just a blog like any other blog.

    I’m not saying the people in the project are corrupted by Templeton, but I do think the Templeton role should be very visible. It shows if you get there via the project but it doesn’t if you don’t. That’s…dubious.

    Naïve pre-update post

    Here’s a change of pace for you – the relationship between physics and philosophy. Something you can get your teeth into.

    It’s a follow-up to An Explanation From Nothing? which was about David Albert’s review of Laurence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something rather than Nothing and drew comments from David Albert himself and from Sean Carroll and Lee Smolin.

    Meanwhile in another part of the forest Krauss said in an interview that philosophers are big poopyheads who don’t know squat, and a number of philosophers disputed that claim, including Massimo Pigliucci and Brian Leiter.

    I’ll give Leiter the last word, because I can.

    My best guess is that the culture so celebrates physics, that physicists have come to believe the “PR” about them. Very good physicists tend to be very good at physics, and I, at least, am inclined to the view that if you want to know what really exists, it’s better to ask a scientist than a philosopher. But it’s not obvious that even talented physicsts are very smart about other matters, such as those that require conceptual clarity, subtle distinctions, reflectiveness about presuppositions, and the appreciation of logical and inferential entailments of particular propositions. More than anything, I hope Krauss’s tantrum and its aftermath will help disabuse the culture of the myth that being good at physics means being good at thought.

  • Loose morals

    Udate: note this is from the Washington Times, a very dubious source.

    Good old liberation struggles, like the liberation struggle of Chechnya from the brutal embrace of Russia.

    Chechnya’s government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

    In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages.

    Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

    Hmm. That’s nice. Imagine living in a country where the head of state announces that women who have Incorrect sex deserve to be murdered by their male relatives.

    “You hear about these cases almost every day,” said a local human rights defender, who asked that her name not be used out of fear for her safety. “It is hard for me to investigate this topic, yet I worked on it with [human rights activist] Natasha [Estemirova] for a while. But, I can’t anymore. I am too scared now. I’ve almost given up, really.”

    Estemirova, who angered Chechen authorities with reports of torture, abductions and extrajudicial killings, was found in the woods in 2009 in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Her killer or killers have not been found.

    Has anyone looked?

  • The pansy ass exodus

    Watching the Dan Savage video again.

    The first student walks out after Savage says let’s talk about the bible for a second, because people point out “that they can’t help with the anti-gay bullying because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans…that being gay is wrong.” Boom, she’s up.

    That’s very quick. That’s very quick.

    Why so quick?

    It’s true that people say that. Why is she leaving just because Savage says people say that? Why is she leaving so fast when he hasn’t even said “bullshit” yet?

    We can learn to ignore the bullshit about gay people in the bible, the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner

    And the second student is up and on his way out.

    about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

    Two more up and leaving.

    We ignore bullshit in the bible about all sorts of things.

    And now it’s a torrent and you can’t count any more.

    The bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slaveowners waved bibles over their heads during the Civil War.

    Bigger torrent. Lots of smirking.

    The shortest book in the bible is a letter from Paul to a man who owned slaves. And Paul doesn’t say, “Christians don’t own people.” Paul says how Christians own people.

    No more walkouts.

    We ignore what the bible says about slavery because the bible got slavery wrong.

    Two stragglers leave.

    It does look orchestrated. Or it looks as though that first one, who was on her feet after one sentence, inspired a bunch of others.

  • Regina Martínez Pérez

    Another journalist in Mexico murdered apparently for doing her job too well.

    New York, April 30, 2012–Authorities must immediately investigate the murder of Mexican journalist Regina Martínez Pérez, determine the motive, and ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    The body of Martínez was found in her home on Saturday evening in Xalapa, the capital of the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, according to news reports. She had been badly beaten around the face and ribs and had been strangled to death, news reports said. The state attorney general, Amadeo Flores Espinoza, said in a news briefing that it appeared her TV, cellphones, and computer had been stolen.

    Martínez had worked for the national magazine Proceso for more than 10 years and was known for her in-depth reporting on drug cartels and the links between organized crime and government officials. In the week before her murder, she covered the arrest of an allegedly high-ranking leader of the Zetas; the arrests of nine police officers charged with working for a cartel; and the story of a local mayor who was arrested with other alleged cartel gunmen after a shootout with the Mexican Army, according to news reports.

    Well she won’t be doing that any more.