“Women are less willing to assert their opinions in public.” Well if that’s true they should get over it!
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Stephen Green is a male supremacist
Surprise surprise; he’s a reactionary Christian who prates of “Christian values”; of course he thinks women are supposed to obey men.
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Pastor at Kato’s funeral tells gays to repent
Anglican pastor launched into a homophobic tirade, shocking the dozens of gay men and women as well as foreign diplomats in attendance.
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Pharmacy board to pharmacist: no need to do your job
So the woman was bleeding; big deal. The pharmacist “suspected” an abortion somewhere in the picture, and that’s what counts.
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One more for the road
I woke up early, so I have a little time to mutter things before I hit the road.
I’ll mutter about Sharon Rupp’s interview of wonderful me. I got a chance to name-check some atheist women:
She is part of that cadre of professional atheists that includes best-selling authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and a host of lesser known writers, none of whom seems to be a woman.”Oh there are women: Polly Toynbee, Katha Pollitt, Greta Christina…” Benson protests, noting that even the humanist-secularist-atheist crowd is subject to that old problem of blindness when it comes to women’s accomplishments. “I’ve asked conference organizers why there are no women speaking and some say it didn’t occur to them, others say they don’t know any.”
Actually I haven’t asked conference organizers, because I haven’t had the opportunity to ask them things, because they don’t organize me. Actually it was PZ who asked them, who asks them every time he speaks at one – “Will you please wake up and ask some women already?” And they tell him, “Uh……we couldn’t think of any.” And he smites his brow.
So props to Vancouver CFI, eh, they thought of one.
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Obama mourns David Kato
In Uganda, David was a powerful advocate for fairness and freedom. The United States mourns his murder, and we recommit ourselves to David’s work.
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Kristof v Olmsted
The bishop of Phoenix is getting some more glare of publicity, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. I hope more people will start to grasp just what it is that he and his Conference of catholic bishops are saying. They are saying that hospitals – all hospitals if they had their way, not just Catholic ones – should flatly refuse to save pregnant women’s lives by ending early pregnancies. They are saying that if ending an early pregnancy is the only way a particular woman’s life can be saved, then that woman must die. (They make an exception for something they call “indirect abortion,” which is enormously generous of them.)
Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.
Precisely. That’s the bit that needs to be emphasized, and repeated. Some people think the bishop simply doesn’t realize what he’s saying. Oh yes he does.
The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.
But the bishop remains a free man. He has not been arrested. There is no talk of arresting him (except for around here). He is using all the “authority” and influence he has in an effort to compel hospitals to let women die, yet no one tries to stop him. People defy him, but that’s as far as they go.
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Kristof on the bishop v hospitals and women
The hospital rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother. The bishop is still at large.
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Russell Blackford on Sam Harris and moral realism
Why, for example, should I not prefer my own well-being, or the well-being of the people I love, to overall, or global, well-being?
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UK deporting Brenda Namigadde back to Uganda
The British Foreign Office advises visitors to Uganda that ‘homosexuality is illegal and social tolerance of it is low.’
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Gay Uganda on David Kato
“Hang them”….! His was the face on the front page. Next to Bishop Ssenyonjo.
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A short break
As you may have seen (I think I’ve mentioned it), I’m doing a talk in Vancouver tomorrow, so I’m away for three days. Have a tranquil yet quietly thrilling weekend.
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No wisdom
It’s so horrible about David Kato.
A school teacher, he became a prominent campaigner in recent years, especially taking on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which called for the death sentence to be imposed for some homosexual acts…
Ms Kimani said he was one of the most visible gay campaigners in Uganda, serving as the litigation officer for the group Sexual Minorities Uganda (Smug)…
He often faced accusations that he was trying to groom children, which Ms Pepe, who worked with him at Smug, blamed on “religious propaganda”.
“These allegations were of course were false,” she said…
Rebecca McDowall, a student in London who met Mr Kato at an event recently, said he was aware that what he was doing was dangerous.
“He was so inspirational as a public speaker,” she told the BBC. “He looked like a small unassuming person but when he got up, you couldn’t help but sit up and listen.”
Ms Pepe said Mr Kato’s family and friends are still in shock.
“We spoke to Waswa yesterday, he’s equally devastated – he’s trying to hold it together but he’s shattered because of course they were really close,” she said.
She and Mr Kato were chatting on the phone about an hour before he was attacked – and he had been laughing and joking.
“I keep hearing his laughter in my head – it breaks my heart,” she said.
Horrible. I have nothing wiser to say.
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David Kato remembered as loud and proud
“He was so inspirational as a public speaker. He looked like a small unassuming person but when he got up, you couldn’t help but sit up and listen.”
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David Kato spoke to the BBC in 2010
“David Kato’s death is a tragic loss to the human rights community,” said HRW’s Maria Burnett.
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Uganda: gay rights activist killed
David Kato was the most outspoken gay rights advocate in Uganda. Yesterday he was beaten to death with a hammer.
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Most of the video is too graphic to broadcast
But you can see the grinning man clashing two stones together to celebrate after Siddiqa is killed.
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Is a kirpan a religious freedom or a weapon?
If a kirpan is allowed in schools, should it be allowed in the National Assembly?
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Hundreds of rocks are thrown at her head
As the Afghan Government continues its wooing overtures to the Taliban, and Karzai whines about “foreign interference” in his latest meddling in Afghan parliamentary democracy, the Taliban execute a couple by stoning them to death in Kunduz province in front of a crowd of hundreds.
The crime? The couple fell in love and attempted to elope, beyond a community where relationships based on mutual love and attraction, and not on money and perversion, might have a chance of fulfillment.
The BBC has short clips of the horrific murders, noting that “most of the video is too graphic to be shown.” The event is described as follows:
The video begins with Siddqa, a 25-year-old woman, standing waist-deep in a hole in the ground.
She is entirely hidden in a blue burka. Hundreds of men from the village are gathered as two mullahs pass sentence. As Taliban fighters look on, the sentence is passed and she is found guilty of adultery.
The stoning lasts two minutes. Hundreds of rocks – some larger than a man’s fist – are thrown at her head and body. She tries to crawl out of the hole, but is beaten back by the stones. A boulder is then thrown at her head, her burka is soaked in blood, and she collapses inside the hole.
Incredibly Siddqa was still alive. The mullahs are heard saying she should be left alone. But a Taliban fighter steps forward with a rifle and she is shot three times.
Then her lover, Khayyam, is brought to the crowd. His hands are tied behind his back. Before he is blindfolded he looks into the mobile phone camera. He appears defiant.
The attack on him is even more ferocious. His body, lying face down, jerks as the rocks meet their target. He is heard to be crying, but is soon silent.
In between the murders, a man is showing clacking two large stones together, deliriously excited at the prospect of participating in what amounts to a viciously drawn out execution. It’s a sunny day and hundreds are gathered to witness this crime, all of them undeniably complicit in it. It’s an almost unbelievable communal deficit of conscience, were it not preserved on film proving this scene devoid of humanity really did take place, in all of its grisly actuality.
A Taliban spokesperson defends the stoning, quipping about the dangers of “foreign thinking” in Afghanistan (in reference to people who call stoning to death inhuman). A spectator had used a mobile phone, one product of demonic “foreign thinking” to record this atrocity, standing idly by, gleefully filming the scene as if it were an amusing event he happened to pass by.
It’s an indefensible abomination, and nothing should signal more clearly that the Taliban have not reformed, that they will never reform. ‘Taliban’ and ‘reform’ are opposing forces in the 21st century, and the longer the Afghan Government takes to realize this, the more destructive their pandering to these degenerates will be for the citizens of Afghanistan. To even suggest power sharing or deal-making with the death-cult psychopaths that are the Taliban is a searing insult to the people of Afghanistan, and a signed death warrant to all of the country’s free thinkers, democrats, intellectuals, feminists and idealists.
Today is the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, an occasion that should perhaps inspire a solemn reminder to confront atrocities and crimes against humanity. Nearly 70 years have passed since the Holocaust and the declaration of “never again”, which set the stage for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. How is it that we continue to condone the barbaric treatment of human beings in other lands? How have we reached a point, in 2011, where we would contemplate allowing any place in the world for the ideology of the Taliban, and its ugly manifestations in the form of a bludgeoned young woman and her lover?
How very far we have yet to go.
About the Author
Lauryn Oates is a Canadian human rights activist, gender and education specialist who has been advocating for the rights of Afghan women since 1996. She is currently Projects Director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, as well as a founding member of the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.