His accusers argue that while it is permissible to make fun of politicians, you cannot make fun of the state.
Author: Ophelia Benson
-
Why the Theodosian Code is so hysterically bad
Skeptic lawyer went to a really nice reception last night at the Scottish Parliament building, which is apparently almost as ugly as the Experience Music Project here in Seattle, and in much the same style –
…a fellow lawyer suggested that it looked like someone had eaten a giant jigsaw and then thrown up on the Old Town.
Behold the EMP:
Very much as if someone had thrown up a huge jigsaw.
But that’s not the real subject. The real subject is that reception; what a jolly occasion it sounds.
it was a reception for equal marriage (same sex marriage) held at Holyrood and co-sponsored by all four parties currently represented in the parliament.
To quote from the linked article in the Scotsman:
Labour’s Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson of the Conservatives, Willie Rennie of the Lib Dems and the Greens’ Patrick Harvie signed a pledge expressing their backing for homosexual weddings.
The four opposition leaders signed a declaration saying that they would “campaign to beat the ban on same sex marriage”.
At an event in the Scottish Parliament organised by the Equality Network, they cut a wedding cake to symbolise their support for a change in the law. The cake-cutting ceremony was carried out before MSPs of all parties attended an evening reception co-sponsored by the openly gay SNP MSP Joe Fitzpatrick.
That makes me very wistful. Such an event couldn’t possibly happen here, in the land of paleolithic views married to relentless pandering.
It pissed off the right people, too. Guess who got all scowly.
Last night John Deighan, parliamentary officer for the Catholic Church in Scotland, said: “It is disappointing that party leaders have been so cavalier in joining the bandwagon for redefining marriage. We deserve a more reflective approach from those in a position of political leadership.
“Marriage is essentially linked with recognising and supporting the roles of mother and father. There is a lack of real tolerance when that view is sweepingly likened to a form of discrimination or bigotry. This is, of course, an attempt to win a political position by intimidation rather than by coherence of argument.”
Disgusting as always – the bullying Catholic church accusing elected politicians of intimidation.
But the party leaders were unrepentant, indicating their strong support for changing the law.
Oh that makes me so wistful. Here they would be falling all over themselves to apologize and mollify and attempt a compromise.
Skeptic lawyer has some wonderful commentary on Roman law and the Theodosian code.
Apparently, the reason the Theodosian Code is so hysterically bad is because it wasn’t drafted by lawyers, but by various Christian mates of the emperor. The Roman legal profession kept its paganism with great tenacity, only capitulating when — after repeated professional harassment — they were all threatened with the loss of their practicing certificates (ius respondendii) if they failed to convert. At the same time, women were driven from the Bar and shortly thereafter, the Greek schools of philosophy were closed.
In other words, the conservative Christian attempt to define marriage so that gays and lesbians can’t use it is intimately linked to misogyny and hostility to intellectual freedom. That’s worth keeping in mind.
That’s just a snippet; read it all.
-
This is really true
Jesus took a leaf from Jefferson’s book and did a condensed Koran.
Mo said “sheet.” That’s offensive!
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2012/02/01/dross/
-
Skeptic lawyer on equal marriage in Scotland
Labour’s Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson of the Conservatives, Willie Rennie of the Lib Dems and the Greens’ Patrick Harvie signed a pledge expressing their backing for gay marriage.
-
The ethics of offence at LSE
We firmly believe that the LSESU has no right to ban freedom of expression, and if anything is deserving of ridicule, satire, and contempt religion is a sure candidate.
-
Ideas that undermine received wisdom
This claim of “Froborr’s” is really appallingly hostile to a great many of the foundations of a liberal open thoughtful society or culture or world.
First, the move to make a truth claim about reality part of one’s identity (“a huge part of who I am”) is death to thinking. It’s the same move the shouters about “hurting religious sentiments” make: it turns one’s ideas into one’s Self in a move to make it taboo to question them. Making it taboo to question ideas is death to thinking.
Second, the move to equate public discussion with forcible conversion is, obviously, death to public discussion. If all argument that [X is better or more true or more evidence-based than Y] amounts to forcible conversion and thus is “evil in one of its purest forms” – well I don’t even need to say more: the upshot is obvious.
The whole thing is an alarming ploy to make all existing world-views indistinguishable from people’s identities and therefore sacrosanct and not to be challenged. That’s simply a recipe for mental stagnation.
Russell Blackford made a related point the other day, in connection with Elaine Ecklund.
An important component of the role of universities is the creation of a space where what seem like commonsense ideas – handed down through socialisation and tradition – can be held up to the light and challenged. One thing that we want from academics, especially in fields such as philosophy, is the capacity and courage to attack popular ideas, including popular ideas of morality. This kind of intellectual critique, which may involve the development of unpopular critiques of how ordinary people think, is one way that we make progress as a society.
Accommodationist thinkers in the style of Ecklund or, say, Chris Mooney, want to reverse this. The idea is to market a product, such as science, by showing how it is safe for people to consume without it challenging their existing worldviews (which may be based on religion or traditional morality). People with various existing worldviews are taken as demographics, and the idea is to market science to them.
But science and scholarship are dangerous – not necessarily in the sense of creating physical risks, but in the sense that they can lead to ideas that undermine received wisdom. Universities are places where dangerous ideas, in this sense, are created, refined, and tested in debate. To suggest otherwise, and adopt the marketing strategy favoured by accommodationists, is profoundly ignorant and anti-intellectual.
I think that’s absolutely spot-on, and crucial.
It’s really not a good idea to try to persuade everyone that only safe ideas are permissible, much less that potentially unnerving ones are pure evil. It’s a blow for ignorance and anti-intellectualism and against learning, change, growth, surprise, development – and freedom.
-
“Evil in one of its purest forms”
Are we seeing a new trend? A new variety of passive-aggressive accommodationist mendacious gnu-bashing?
Ray Moscow alerted me to a new* entry in the genre at something called The Slacktiverse by someone called “Froborr.” It starts with: I’m an atheist. That’s my identity. It would be traumatic to change that. It’s just as traumatic to change the other way around. It ends with: Therefore, Greta Christina and other overt atheists are evil.
There’s a lot in between, of course, but that’s where it ends up.
Greta Christina posted last month[1] that, “For many atheists, our main goal is persuading the world out of religion.” She goes on in the same post to establish herself in favor of that position:
We don’t want to see this happen by law or violence or any kind of force, of course. But we think religion isn’t just mistaken. We think it’s harmful. Some of think it’s appallingly harmful. Some of us think it’s inherently harmful: that the very qualities that make religion unique are exactly what make it capable of doing terrible harm. What’s more, we see religion as not just hurting atheists. We see it as hurting billions of believers. So we’re working towards a world where it no longer exists.
So, according to Greta Christina, her primary goal as an atheist is to make most of the world’s population suffer the trauma of losing their faith, so that they can then be better (read: more Greta Christina-like) people with truer (read: more similar to Greta Christina’s) beliefs. And I should be okay with this, because she promises not to use legal coercion or violence to bring it about.
I am not okay with this.
The post in question is What Are The Goals of the Atheist Movement? (Why is there a footnote instead of a hyperlink? What’s that about? The hyperlink is a convention for a reason: it’s much easier. What on earth is the point of reverting to the print convention?)
Now, notice that Froborr misrepresents what Greta said, immediately below the passage where she said it. She said “we’re working towards a world where it no longer exists” and Froborr misrepresents that as “mak[ing] most of the world’s population suffer the trauma of losing their faith.” Here’s the mistake: working towards a world where religion no longer exists means just that, not working towards a world where everyone has been converted from theism to atheism. There’s a whole spectrum of ways that can happen. One is that atheism becomes more visible and available, and people who are lukewarm or doubtful or closeted feel more free to become atheist or secular or humanist (or all three). Another is that as that happens, more children grow up without pressure to be theist. Another is that many people are persuaded by atheist arguments but the process is not traumatic or an experience of “losing” something, but a liberation or a revelation of vast possibilities. And then over all, there is no actual missionary activity. There is public discussion; there is not knocking on the front door with a tract. There are books; there are not atheist gangs invading churches and mosques.
Froborr ends up with:
You do not have a right to make others suffer for your beliefs.
No one has that right. Ever.
If Greta Christina’s assessment of religion were correct–if all religious belief is both false and inherently harmful–then religion would be not only a mental illness, but the most widespread mental illness in history. But even if that were true (and I do not believe it is), you do not have a right to cure people by force unless they are demonstrably an immediate danger to themselves or others.
I cannot reiterate this enough: Proselytizing is yet another word for making people suffer in order to transform them into what you think they should be, for no other reason than because they are not what you think they should be.
What Greta Christina advocates–what any atheist advocates when they suggest “increasing the numbers of atheists” as a laudable goal, what any adherent of any religion advocates when they suggest “increasing the number of members of my religion”–is evil in one of its purest forms.
Evil in one of its purest forms.
Extraordinary.
*New but brand-new; it’s dated January 16 thus pre-dates Be Scofield’s similar piece.
-
ASA Adjudication on Healing on the Streets-Bath
ASA told HOTS not to make claims which stated or implied that, by receiving prayer from their volunteers, people could be healed of medical conditions.
-
Theocracy flexing its muscles in Indiana
First a bill allowing creationism to be taught in public schools; now a bill to allow public schools to start the day with a Christian prayer.
-
We are all Jay Leno, or at least Craig Ferguson
Can I play too?
Want to see Arianna Huffington’s garage?
Want to see where bankers go camping?
Want to see Barbra Streisand’s little house in Malibu?
That’s enough blaspheming and “hurting the sentiments” for one day.
The BBC is more sympathetic than I am. The BBC takes it all rather seriously, or pretends to.
The US has defended comedian Jay Leno’s right to free speech after India condemned a reference he made to the holiest Sikh shrine.
A Leno skit showed the Golden Temple of Amritsar as the summer home of Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
Mr Romney has faced questions over his wealth and many Sikhs are angry the temple has been depicted as a place for the rich.
But then the BBC says something predictable but incredibly idiotic.
The Sikh community has launched an online petition over the comment.
It has? The whole community? All Sikhs acting as one have launched a petition?
I don’t believe that for a second. Neither would the BBC if it thought about it. Why does it say things like that? Why does it treat certain perceived groups as if they acted as a bloc? Why does it do that so determinedly and predictably that it ends up saying something as imbecilic as “The Sikh community has launched an online petition”? Why is the BBC so allergic to the very possibility that Sikhs or Muslims or Christian can disagree with each other? Why does the BBC simply assume that all Sikhs take the same view of this ludicrous pseudo-outrage about a minor joke?
An Indian minister called Leno’s comments “objectionable” and said “freedom does not mean hurting the sentiments of others”.
Oh shut up. Just shut up, all of you. Just shut up about the babyish “hurting the sentiments” nonsense. You used that to drive Tasleema Nasrin out of India, you used it to keep Salman Rushdie out of Jaipur, you use it every time some godbotherer takes a deep breath – just cut it out. Shut up.
And by the way –
Take my Golden Temple, please.
I’m looking for a place to store old magazines, this looks about right.
I look forward to your letters.
Update:
First up, we have Dr. Randeep Dhillon! Dr. Dhillon is suing Jay Leno. Is he suing Jay Leno for being a trite, phone-it-in placeholder? NO! There’s no California cause of action for that! SAG would never allow it! No, Randeep Dhillon is suing Jay Leno for a lame joke about Mitt Romney suggesting that his vacation home was the Golden Temple of Amritsar, a holy site for Sikhs! …
Congrats, Dr. Dhillon! You win a date with California’s robust anti-SLAPP statute! You’re going to pay Jay Leno’s attorney fees in this case, which I will estimate to be $50,000! And because some people will generalize about Sikhs based on the act of one asshole — you — you’ve just done more to expose Sikhs to hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy than that threadbare hack Leno ever could! Way to go!
Exactly. That one stupid sentence of the BBC’s did more that way than Leno did or could.
-
An affront to principles of human rights
Al Jazeera reports on Baltasar Garzón defending his investigation of Franco-era crimes.
“The amnesty law refers to crimes of a political nature, in no way can it be said that crimes against humanity of the kind that were alleged could have any political nature,” the 56-year-old judge said.
“As such it was not even necessary to make a reference to the amnesty law,” he said on the opening day of his testimony in Madrid.
Victims’ families who filed the case in 2006 had described disappearances, illegal detentions and killings, which amounted “in some cases to crimes against humanity, genocide,” he said.
The judge is being prosecuted for ordering the investigation in 2008 into the disappearance of 114,000 people during Spain’s 1936 to 1939 civil war and General Francisco Franco’s subsequent dictatorship.
Garzón is charged with exceeding his powers on the grounds that the alleged crimes were covered by an amnesty agreed in 1977 as Spain moved towards democracy two years after Franco’s death.
…
“Garzón showed today that his decision to take up the investigation of the crimes of the Franco era was fully supported by international law,” Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, who was in the court, said.
“But the spectacle of a judge as a criminal defendant, having to justify his investigation into torture, killings and ‘disappearances,’ was itself an affront to principles of human rights and judicial independence,” he said in a statement.
Remember when Musharraf fired all those judges? For that matter, remember when the Bush admin did the same thing? It’s an affront.
-
There’s an explanation
Tarek Fatah posted a photo on Facebook with the comment
Inside Islam’s holiest place of worship, The Kaabah in Mecca. For some a romantic stroll in the park, without the fear of Maya Khan.
Six comments in a guy said, in all seriousness –
Have a close careful look!
This man has only one leg, and is being helped by his wife.
Please think carefully a few times prior to commenting on religious locations and issues.Hahahahahahahahaha
-
“Unwise and untimely”
Frederick Sparks has an incisive post on Be Scofield on “new atheists” and racism.
In referring to Dr King and the civil rights movement, Scofield also falls into the trap of “the Civil Rights Movement, Brought To You By Black Church”…a bit of historical revisionism that ignores, as professor Anthony Pinn points out, the secular philosophical influences, and that King himself complained that most the black churches were not involved and were not supportive.
Didn’t he just. In the much-quoted Letter from Birmingham Jail for instance –
My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”…
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
…
I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
…
You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist.
And so on.
Frederick concludes with a stem-winder:
When the Scofields and Karen Armstrongs of the world talk about how the new atheists just aren’t aware of the liberal, tolerant, sativa smoking, feminist, genderqueer god concept, my response is “I don’t believe in that motherfucker, either.” She’s just as poorly evidenced as the old fashioned patriarchal god. She’s also not the predominant god concept impacting the African American community.
I don’t see an either or proposition between advocating for rational thought, where beliefs are based on evidence, and confronting issues of social justice. The idea that black people should be left alone in their clinging to Jesus due to their history of oppression smacks of just as much paternalism as what Scofield accuses the white new atheists of here.
More, actually.
-
Hanif Kureishi reviews Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book
What is crucial is that the quarrel is not closed; and to see that closing quarrels is what lifeless ideologies do.
-
Nick’s lunch with Salman
Rushdie did not become like his enemies. He never replicated the fanaticism they directed against him.
-
Bowing further, Symbiosis U dumps seminar on Kashmir
After several right-wing organisations opposed the event, alleging it was “separatist,” Symbiosis University has postponed its seminar, ‘Voices of Kashmir’, indefinitely.
-
Oslo: Motoon terrorists found guilty
Two of the three had – in liaison with al-Qaida – planned to use explosives against the offices of Jyllands-Posten and to murder Kurt Westergaard.
-
Some women have a hell of a nerve
Just in case you missed this – Afghan woman is killed ‘for giving birth to a girl’:
A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter.
The murdered woman’s husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has since fled.
…
Senior officials told the BBC that the mother-in-law, known as Wali Hazrata, tied the feet of the 22-year old woman, who was known as Stori, while Stori’s husband strangled her.
He is thought to be a fighter with an illegal armed militia which is is believed to have some political support. Local villagers say that Stori often urged her husband to lay down his arms.
“She lived in a hell not a house. But then she also asked her husband to stay home and avoid going out with these thugs,” one neighbour who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC.
Those three girls are in for a nice life.