Author: Ophelia Benson

Two of the ACLU attorneys who signed the letter to the feds did a blog post on it. The ACLU website has a whole section on Reproductive Freedom. Useful stuff.

I’ve been reading the bishop of Phoenix again. (I have my reasons. I’m doing a talk at CFI Vancouver in a couple of weeks, and I intend to draw on the bish.) I’ve been doing a close reading, as one might with a poem or a PR release. I noticed some things. Here’s one of them.

The decisions regarding life and death, morality and immorality as they relate to medical ethics are at the forefront of the Church’s mission today. As a result, the Church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in these discussions and debates.

Look at what he’s saying there. He’s saying that decisions regarding life and death are at the forefront of the church’s mission, meaning, decisions that women should die are at the forefront of the church’s mission. He’s saying it’s a central and urgent matter that the church should see to it that women who could be saved should instead be made to die. He’s saying that the church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in medical matters so that women who could be medically rescued will not be medically rescued. He’s saying his outfit and its hired guns have a moral responsibility to interfere with hospitals and doctors in order to force them to let women die when they could be rescued. He’s saying that decisions about life and death are his business and that he gets to decide them against pregnant women.

He never says that in so many words, of course, but that is exactly what he’s saying.

I have attempted to do my part in calling CHW and your hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life, and to embrace the fullness of what the Catholic Church teaches on the immorality of those actions that are an affront to the gift of human life and its inherent goodness from God.

He has done that by trying hard to coerce CHW and its hospitals to promise in writing to let all women die if an abortion is the only way to save them, even if the fetus can’t survive anyway. He calls that “calling hospitals to uphold the dignity of human life.” He calls refusing to save a woman’s life “upholding the dignity of human life.”

He pushes very hard on the noble-sounding bullshit about moral responsibility and the dignity of human life, in aid of a concerted effort to force hospitals to stop saving women’s lives.

He repays study.

Eww!

I was browsing Churchandstate.org, via a post on Eric’s blog, and what did I find but a fetid little abomination called “the stay-at-home-daughters movement.” As in “stay at home because you are inferior and subordinate and your Duty in life is to be a conduit for child production and a domestic servant.”

The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity—knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.

So women (and girls) are viewed as a kind of livestock – all women and girls. They’re all too weak and stupid to learn anything or do anything more than soap-making and child-rearing.

Vision Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning back the clock on gender equality. Its website offers a cornucopia of sex-segregated books and products designed to conform children to rigid gender 
stereotypes starting from an early age. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog shills an extensive selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns, swords, and tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the outdoors, and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls, cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes. There’s no room for doubt about the intended roles these girls will play later on in life.

Excellent. If the trend spreads, we have a pretty good chance of catching up to Pakistan in a decade or two.

Hitchens notes a difference between Mumtaz Qadri, and Paul Foot and Nelson Mandela.

A decision to resort to violence was not something to be undertaken without great care—and stated in terms that were addressed to reasonable people. From his prison cell, Nelson Mandela had joined the great tradition of the French philosophes, of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, of Marx and Engels in 1848, and of Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1930s—of men and women who felt the historic obligation to make a stand and to define it.

In other words, to give reasons.

Now look at the grinning face of Mumtaz Qadri, the man who last week destroyed a great human being. He did not explain. He boasted. As “a slave of the Prophet,” he had the natural right to murder Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, not even for committing “blasphemy” but for criticizing a law that forbade it for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And this sweeping new extension of the divine right to murder not only was not condemned by the country’s spiritual authorities; it was largely approved by them. No argument, no arraignment, no appeal—permission to kill anybody can merely be assumed by anybody, provided only that they mouth the correct incantations.

The incantations create the permission – it’s the ultimate speech act.

This is only one of the many things that go to make up the hideousness of Islamic jihadism, but I believe that it has received insufficient attention. Amid all our loose talk about Muslim “grievances,” have we even noticed that no such bill of grievances has ever been published, let alone argued and defended?

Well I’ve been paying attention to this. I paid attention to it in the aftermath of the London bombings, when there was indeed a good deal of vacant talk of “grievances.” I pointed out that a grievance is only as good as it is. Qadri had a “grievance,” and it was an absolutely shitty grievance. It was beneath contempt. He was aggrieved that Taseer would offer compassion to Aasia Bibi, and that he would urge reform of the blasphemy law. He was aggrieved that Taseer was less eager than he was to persecute or kill people for the crime of not being Muslim. His grievance was not legitimate.

Oh god…it’s the usual problem, the problem I’ve been having so often lately, especially in the last week. It’s the problem of reading about something that’s so disgusting it’s hard to keep reading. It’s the surge of fear and loathing at the malevolence and brute stupidity and more malevolence in fellow human beings. Like this:

is in jail, desperately praying that she won’t be executed. Her neighbours are hoping she will be.”Why hasn’t she been killed yet?” said Maafia Bibi , a 20-year-old woman standing at the gate of the house next door. Her eyes glitter behind a scarf that covered her face. “You journalists keep coming here asking questions but the issue is resolved. Why has she not been hanged?”

Maafia was one of a group of about four women who accused Bibi, also known as Aasia Noreen, who is Christian, of insulting the prophet Muhammad during a row in a field 18 months ago. But she will not specify what Bibi actually said, because to repeat the words would itself be blasphemy. And so Bibi was sentenced to hang on mere hearsay – a Kafkaesque twist that seems to bother few in Itanwali, a village 30 miles outside Lahore.

So I feel sick, and can hardly stand to read more (but there is more, and it’s even uglier). And there’s so much of that kind of thing.

And for refreshment I can come home and catch up on the news from Tucson, and Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party, and Glenn Beck.

You know Deeyah? She’s doing a great thing.

Now a project to recognise the contribution of some of the world’s most important protest singers has been pulled together by a woman who was forced to give up performing on stage because of threats made on her life. Listen To The Banned is an album including the work of 14 international artists, all of whom have experienced imprisonment, censorship, harassment or violence because of their music.

Deeyah, a classically trained singer born in Norway, of Pakistani and Afghan parents, had a burgeoning career in pop music when she had to leave Norway because of harassment and disapproval from hardline Islamic groups. She moved to the US and then the UK, but gave up the limelight when the threats and antagonism proved just as strong wherever she went.

She emailed me a few days ago to ask me to get the word out. Seriously! I’m all hero-worshippy.

Tiken Jah Fakoly, a singer from Ivory Coast who has been forced into exile, said: “Normally people get trophies for selling most records, but this CD highlights artists who fight for justice.”

Abazar Hamid, a Sudanese songwriter now living in exile in Egypt, said: “Listen To The Banned has empowered me to face censorship and let me trust on my music and feel I am not alone.”

Mahsa Vahdat of Iran said that she was encouraged by being part of the project. “I am honoured to be part of this, we are invisible and hidden voices that can impress the world and can elevate the feeling of life,” she said.

Pass it on.

Update: Links to purchase sites in different countries here.