Author: Ophelia Benson

So where were we – oh yes – there’s a post at RDF about the Women in Secularism conference, with a particular mention of Elisabeth Cornwell, who is president of RDF US.

Dr. R. Elisabeth Cornwell and many other leading women speaking at Women in Secularism Conference

Naturally we can’t have that kind of thing without at least one anonymous [cough] turning up to sneer, so someone calling himself “The Ghost of Mr Emmeline Pankhurst” (hawhaw, geddit – the poor bastard was pussy-whipped! hawhaw) turned up to sneer, at great and tedious length, thus totally derailing the thread. I replied to him briefly, and he replied to me at great length. After one of his long and insulting (insulting among other things to all the speakers, including Dr. R. Elisabeth Cornwell, president of RDF US) (and by the way me), a mod said

OK, this is enough now, thank you.

Further sparring posts from either side will be removed.

Wrong! False equivalence. Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Update: The people at RDF have (in response to an indignant email from me) added a note saying the discussion can be continued here. That helps with the false equivalence problem.

Paul Fidalgo has a very cogent note to anonymous sneery opponents of the Women in Secularism conference on his (highly recommended) Morning Heresy CFI blog:

Look, people, and yes guys, I’m talking to you specifically. This conference is not about “separating” women from men, it’s about having the spine as a movement to say that women deal with prejudices and oppression that are unique to them, thanks to religion, and at the same time recognizing that our own community has a LOT of work to do in how we treat, acknowledge, and highlight our female half. It’s not a conference exclusively FOR women, but yes, about them. Our boss Ron Lindsay says men absolutely should attend. PZ Myers says men should attend. And I’m telling you, too. If you think it’s a problem to have a conference like this, I challenge you to buy a ticket, show your face, and talk about it like a grownup. No more nameless Internet thuggery.

Well quite. If you have something to say, show your face and talk about it like a grownup. You’re safe. We don’t deliver fatwas. We don’t throw acid. We don’t poison the water supply.

In Afghanistan, of course.

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned on Tuesday after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country’s north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education.

…

Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said.

They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated.

“This is not a natural illness. It’s an intentional act to poison schoolgirls,” said Haffizullah Safi, head of Takhar’s public health department.

None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named.

I’ve said this before, but it remains cogent – what a disgusting god these guys imagine. It not only wants girls to remain ignorant, it wants them to be poisoned if they try to learn.

RDF has a plug for the Women in Secularism conference. Elisabeth Cornwell of RDF is one of the speakers.

Naturally the page has filled up with jeering comments from an anonymous bully. Of course it has. It wouldn’t do to miss such an opportunity to express hostility and contempt for women and feminism.

Ho hum.

It’s too bad for him that not all organizations and groups and even conferences are like that. If they were we really might shut up, just to escape the thugs. But they’re not, so we don’t.

Oh noes! Trusted Vatican janitor has been raping popes for decades.

The widely publicized trial revealed that Falduto, well regarded and affectionately referred to as “Beppe” by Vatican City residents, had over a period of six decades frequently exploited his position to compel Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI to engage in unwanted sexual activity.

“The crimes committed by Mr. Falduto are of course shocking and deplorable,” said Dean of the College of Cardinals Angelo Sodano, adding that he had never previously suspected “kindly old Beppe” of any wrongdoing. “But perhaps most upsetting is the fact that this man gained the trust of high-ranking church authorities and then betrayed that trust by secretly defiling innocent popes.”

“These appalling acts caused tremendous psychological trauma for his victims, and we are currently reexamining our internal policies to safeguard the current and future papacy,” Sodano continued. “Even one pope molested is one too many.”

H/t The Onion.

More on Sadakat Kadri on sharia, this time in the New York Times.

Today the confusion, Mr. Kadri makes plain in “Heaven on Earth,” is how to interpret this wide-ranging series of edicts, some from the Koran and many others based on hadiths, which are reports about the Prophet Muhammad written more than a century after his death. Scholars have sets of interpretations; increasingly freelance jihadists have their own.

Of course they do, and that’s why questions about ”how to interpret this wide-ranging series of edicts” are otiose. That was then, this is now, we have to come up with our own “edicts” based on reasons and subject to review and reform.

In his reading of the Shariah, he finds rationality and flexibility. His argument is with recent hard-liners who, he writes, “have turned Islamic penal history on its head.”

He is furious that fundamentalists “have associated the Shariah in many people’s minds with some of the deadliest legal systems on the planet.” He calls them traditionalists who ignore tradition. He is disgusted that warped opinions “are mouthed today to validate murder after murder in Islam’s name.”

It can be dangerous work for journalists and scholars to single out aspects of Islam for criticism. At times in this book you sense the author going well out of his way to lay down extravagant praise, like palm fronds, before proceeding with mild cavils.

Well you know what? If he’s afraid of the danger, he should have left the subject alone. It’s dangerous work for Maryam and Anne-Marie, too, but they do it anyway, without handing out any palm fronds of praise. If the only way Kadri felt he could do the book was by offering lots of flattery to protect himself, he should have chosen a different subject.

He was inspired to write this book, he says, by Sept. 11 and by the London bombings of July 7, 2005. (He was a commuter in London that morning.)

In the aftermaths he longed for answers to simple questions: “Where was the Shariah written down? To what extent was it accepted that its rules had been crafted by human beings? And what gave the men who were so loudly invoking it the right to speak in God’s name?”

Nothing. Nothing gives anyone that right. It’s a form of blackmail, and it’s bad. Turn your back on it.

A lawyer called Sadakat Kadri was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about his new book on the history of sharia. He’s very critical of the idea that sharia courts are a bad thing. He’s of the “it’s all a matter of interpretation” school, as if that by itself solves the problem of goddy law.

“It’s a huge oral tradition, which was set down in the 9th century and which was then, by some people, transformed into compulsion and rules,” Kadri tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “It would be literally impossible to follow all of them, because plenty of them directly contradict each other. So you have to make choices, and Muslims have been making choices for … the last 1,400 years. And what’s happened over the past 40 years is that in certain places, the hard-liners have come to the forefront.”

No, you don’t “have to” make choices. You don’t “have to” pay any attention to it at all. Who cares what people “set down” in the 9th century? This isn’t the 9th century.

We may find wisdom and insight in writing from previous centuries, but we don’t “have to” and we shouldn’t treat any of it as mandatory, much less as orders from god. (If god really wanted to give us instructions it ought to find a more reliable method of saying so. Then we could still decide whether to obey or not.) There is simply no good reason to treat one particular book or collection of sayings from the distant past as any more binding than any other such book or collection of sayings. We should treat them all as what they are: things that human beings have said and written.

If we’re making choices, then we’re making them according to our own secular values. (If we make no choices but obey everything blindly, including when they’re contradictory, we’re making a huge mistake.) Forget the holy books and do your best with secular reasoning.

But of course people don’t, so they’re at the mercy of those hard-liners that Kadri mentions.

People just seemed to be arguing about Islam, Islamic law, the Shariah, without actually getting to the substance of what it was all about. So because I come from a Muslim background, I certainly had plenty of people I could ask. I started with my father. My father’s also a lawyer. I asked him, ‘So what is the Shariah? What does it say? Where is it written down?’ And he didn’t really have an adequate answer, as far as I am concerned. He said, ‘It’s what’s regarded as God’s law.’ And I knew that. I didn’t need to be told that. And the more I asked, the more I realized people just seemed to be ignorant. Muslims seemed to be ignorant, let alone the people who were attacking it without knowing what they were talking about.

But why try to defend sharia then? Why try to defend goddy law at all? It’s not defensible, because the whole idea of “God’s law” is indefensible, because God is not around for appeals.

Another episode of human inhumanity to other humans.

Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian police have detained a couple over the alleged murder of a Cambodian maid after the 24-year-old woman died of possible prolonged starvation, police said on Thursday.

Mey Sichan’s employers telephoned for an ambulance on March 31 but paramedics found her dead on arrival, Nasir Salleh, police chief of the northern state of Penang, told AFP. She also had bruises to her body.

A post-mortem revealed that she died from acute gastritis and ulcers likely due to lack of food over a long period, he said. The maid had been working for the family, who manage a hardware shop, for eight months.

“Definitely what happened to Sichan is inhumane. It is a shock to us,” the police chief said.

Sichan’s body weight had shrunk to 26 kilos, almost half that of a healthy woman, he said.

It took eight months.

The surprise move came after activists highlighted dozens of cases of sexual abuse, overwork and exploitation among the estimated 50,000 Cambodian women employed as domestic helpers in Malaysia.

Reports of abuse in Malaysia have frequently surfaced in recent years and led Indonesia to stop sending domestic helpers to the country in 2009, prompting a rise in demand for Cambodians.

Last August a Malaysian was sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing his Indonesian maid, three months after his wife was jailed for scalding the woman with a hot iron.

About 170,000 women, mostly from poor neighboring Southeast Asian countries, work as maids in Malaysia.

And this isn’t unusual.

Orn Eak’s body is covered in scars from beatings by a Kuala Lumpur woman who employed her through a Cambodia employment agency in early 2010. Single with a  five-year-old son, Orn Eak says she joined 30,000 other young Cambodian women and girls working as maids in Malaysia because her mother was struggling to survive in their village in  Kompong Thom province.

In Kuala Lumpur, Orn Eak had no days off and worked from dawn into the early  hours of the next morning caring for her employer’s disabled mother.  She  says she was frequently beaten  and often hungry.

…

Social workers have verified her claims of abuse. Nine Cambodian domestic workers died in Malaysia in 2011, according to human rights organisations.

Malaysian opposition MP Charles Santiago has accused the Malaysian government and police of ”totally disrespecting” laws by conducting only cursory investigations into the deaths.

Human Rights Watch says common abuses include excessive work hours with no rest days, lack of food and irregular or non-payment of salaries.

Many have reported sexual abuse, restrictions of movements and bans on contact with other maids.

A long way from the sentimental fairy tale of Downton Abbey, where the aristos just dote on the servants and treat them like favorite guests.

Don’t be in too much of a hurry to point and laugh. This could be a brilliant idea: Cornwall Council has told its schools

that pagan beliefs, which include witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor, should be taught alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

…

And an accompanying guide says that pupils should ‘understand  the basic beliefs’ of paganism and suggests children could discuss the difficulties a practising pagan pupil might face in school.

But the council’s initiative has dismayed some Christian campaigners, who are alarmed that a religion once regarded as a fringe eccentricity is increasingly gaining official recognition.

While at the same time a religion once regarded as entirely mainstream and Normal and right is increasingly questioned and disputed by people who thinks it makes just as much sense as the worship of Thor.

Go for it!

The BBC does some investigating in Uzbekistan. It finds a nasty habit of sterilizing women without their knowledge or consent.

Sterilisation is not, officially, the law in Uzbekistan.

But evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that the Uzbek authorities have run a programme over the last two years to sterilise women across the country, often without their knowledge.

Foreign journalists are not welcome in Uzbekistan, and in late February of this year the authorities deported me from the country. I met Adolat and many other Uzbek women in the relative safety of neighbouring Kazakhstan. I also gathered testimony by telephone and email, and in recordings brought out of the country by courier.

None of the women wanted to give their real names but they come from different parts of Uzbekistan and their stories are consistent with those of doctors and medical professionals inside the country.

“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised,” says a gynaecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

One suggested reason is flabbergasting – it’s a way to improve the maternal/infant mortality stats.

Several doctors and medical professionals said forced sterilisation is not only a means of population control but also a bizarre short-cut to lowering maternal and infant mortality rates.

“It’s a simple formula – less women give birth, less of them die,” said one surgeon.

The result is that this helps the country to improve its ranking in international league tables for maternal and infant mortality.

“Uzbekistan seems to be obsessed with numbers and international rankings,” says Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

“I think it’s typical of dictatorships that need to construct a narrative built on something other than the truth.”

And, of course, it’s only women, so…