A woman who went on the lam with her four-year-old son to prevent him from being genitally mutilated at the behest of his father was arrested and imprisoned last Thursday and is now in federal court.

Heather Hironimus, 31, was arrested Thursday in the long-running dispute over the removal of her 4-year-old child’s foreskin. She went missing with the boy nearly three months ago and ignored a judge’s warnings that if she didn’t appear in court and give consent for the circumcision to proceed, she faced jail.

The case originated in state courts but will be heard in a federal courtroom Monday in West Palm Beach. An attorney for Hironimus filed a federal civil rights complaint as legal options

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Maryam has a dreadful story of a young woman in Pakistan imprisoned awaiting trial on a charge of “blasphemy.”

Over a year ago, a friend of mine, a British Pakistani actor got in touch with me after his annual visit home to Lahore.  He was very troubled by a blasphemy case that he had come across which appeared to have blighted the lives of two young people who had neither contacts nor money without which it is impossible to get out of a sticky situation in countries like Pakistan. He knew I was a long term member of Southall Black Sisters and wondered if I could help. But our funding covers services to women facing domestic violence in this country

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Mr Biblical Gender Roles did a later post asking the vexed question, Is a husband selfish for having sex with his wife when she is not the mood?

That seems like an odd way of putting it. If she’s not in the mood he’s not really having sex with her, is he, he’s using her for sex for himself. But he of course doesn’t see it that way.

I feel that today we make far too many excuses for the sin of sexual denial in marriage, and as men of God we must address this issue without pulling punches.

That’s an unfortunate metaphor for the subject…or perhaps it’s not a metaphor.

Now we need to establish the key Biblical teachings

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Ursula Halligan, political editor of TV3 in Ireland, has a wrenching piece in the Irish Times today, coming out and supporting same-sex marriage. She starts with a tragic example of the way religion can cause people wholly unnecessary self-loathing and misery.

I was a good Catholic girl, growing up in 1970s Ireland where homosexuality was an evil perversion. It was never openly talked about but I knew it was the worst thing on the face of the earth.

So when I fell in love with a girl in my class in school, I was terrified. Rummaging around in the attic a few weeks ago, an old diary brought me right back to December 20th, 1977.

“These past few months must

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Here’s a funny thing: the Mirror reporting on more horrible behavior from Katie Hopkins, to wit calling an autistic nine-year-0ld rude names. But I noticed something particular about it…

The headline:

Katie Hopkins stoops to new low as she bullies autistic nine-year-old girl over weight and calls her a ‘t***’

The story:

You might not have thought it possible, but Katie Hopkins appears to have sunk to a new low as she has called a nine-year-old girl ‘a t***’.

The outrageous columnist was tweeting throughout Channel 4’s new show, Born Naughty?, where nine-year-old Honey was diagnosed with mild autism.

“Honey can’t complete the autism assessment as she is too busy being a complete t***. But the s*** mum assessment is

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More from that article about ex-Muslims.

[Imtiaz] Shams, who seems remarkably self-possessed for his young age, agrees that there are particular gender issues that afflict disillusioned Muslims. To this end he has tried to link up with feminist societies at universities. “But there’s a real problem in this country,” he says. “People don’t want to touch anything to do with leaving Islam. Especially in universities, where the politics are insane.”

He has a point. In recent times the National Union of Students have refused to condemn Isis on the grounds that is would justify Islamophobia. Shams believes that this kind of gesture and the NUS decision last month to lobby alongside Cage, the militant Islamic prisoners pressure group, undermines

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Andrew Anthony has an excellent long piece in the Graun about ex-Muslims.

It starts with the fact that leaving Islam can be dangerous.

The danger is confirmed by Imtiaz Shams, an energetic 26-year-old who runs a group called Faith to Faithless, which aims to help Muslim nonbelievers speak out about their difficult situations. Shams has a visible presence on YouTube and has organised several events at universities. “I am at physical risk because I do videos,” says Shams. “I don’t like putting myself in the firing line, but I had to because no one else is willing to do it.”

As real as the potential for violence might be, it’s not what keeps many doubting British Muslims from

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And now let’s drop in on the people in Biblical Christianity Land to see what they have to say about the vexed question of whether or not a husband owns his wife the way a boy-farmer owns his livestock. (What to do with the analogy when the farmer is a woman is a question we will leave for another day. This is a visit to Biblical Christianity Land, after all. I’m not sure the laws of Biblical Christianity Land permit women to own farms and livestock.)

Let’s consult Mr Biblical Gender Roles for his take on this question. The answer is probably in the title of his post: You don’t pay for the milk when you own the cow!

How … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by AJ Milne on Stop all that reckless breathing!

I got thinking a bit about the carbon footprint of cycling a while ago; I do cycle to work now and then (at 28K, kinda a long haul, and annoyingly, I can’t fit the time in right now, due to other parental duty things, but I probably will be again in a week or two)…

What I was generally hearing (with the billion hedges/estimates you need to build in in our annoyingly complicated economies–and see one high-level estimate here): it’s almost always better to cycle (and I drive a Prius, which is pretty low impact, as cars go). But depends a bit on what you’re eating. Some … Read the rest

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A new private bus company in Cardiff had a fantastic wink-wink nudge-nudge idea for advertising its all-day fare.

What?

Yes, she’s a young woman; yes, she could be naked behind that sign she’s holding, and her bare shoulders seem to suggest that; yes, the sign says RIDE ME ALL DAY FOR £3; but none of that means she’s suggesting you can ride HER for £3. She’s speaking for the bus! Obviously!

The Mirror reports that there was widespread irritation, and that the bus company deleted its tweets and said jeezis it was just a joke.

New Adventure Travel said this morning “there is no-one available here to comment on this today,” before telling the Mirror Online to call back tomorrow.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on The war against infidels.

Essentialism is a fairly universal tendency of seeing things as have defining qualities. Without some kind of essentialism it would be hard to distinguish one sort of thing from another. Science, for example, has its essentialists (indeed, the periodic table is based on essences), and no doubt the fans of football, cricket and hockey, chess, monopoly, and other games, have what they consider to be essential properties of their favourite games. Your claim, therefore, that “essentialism is one of the cognitive biases that both underlies and is encouraged by religious thinking” is really quite misleading. Wittgenstein, as you are no doubt aware, was opposed to this sort of … Read the rest

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More on the way deliberate, planned racial segregation has crushed people’s aspirations as a matter of policy, this time from Jamelle Bouie.

In the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived before he died in police custody on April 12, one-half the residents are unemployed and one-third of the homes are vacant. Sixty percent of residents have less than a high school diploma, and the violent crime rate is among the highest in Baltimore. You can paint a similar picture for the neighborhoods and housing projects on the east side of the city as well. If you are poor and black in Charm City, your life—or at least your opportunity to have a better life—looks bleak.

But then, this is

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This is probably the article that brought Richard Rothstein to the attention of the producers at Morning Edition and then Fresh Air: This Is One Reason Why Places Like Ferguson and Baltimore Have Become Explosive.

(Rothstein has written a number of articles. I’m going to read every one I can find.)

In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance, restricting African Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore’s mayor proclaimed, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White

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Republican legislators in Wisconsin have thought of a new way of tormenting poor people: say they can have food stamps but ban ALL THE FOODS.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republicans in the statehouse took the first step in their agenda to punish people who use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Assembly Bill 177 seeks to ban people who rely on food stamps to survive on a daily basis from buying a huge list of products deemed unworthy for the mouths of poor people and their children.

The legislation specifically bans poor people from buying any kind of shellfish, including lobster, shrimp, and crab.

Too fancy! Too fancy for the likes of poor people who have low wages because rich … Read the rest

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Meet Washington state legislator Ed Orcutt, Republican. He thinks bikers are bad for the environment.

This is from 2013, but it’s funny enough to be resurrected now.

Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.

A bike tax does seem like an incredibly stupid idea. You want to encourage bikes, not tax them.

We spoke with Rep. Orcutt to confirm the email’s authenticity and to get further clarification.

“You

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The US military and the people who should be supervising the US military are doing such a bad job of addressing sexual harassment that the UN has taken notice, Jenna McLaughlin reports at Mother Jones. How impressive is that? I feel so proud.

The US military has a problem with sexual violence. That’s the conclusion of the Universal Periodic Review Panel, a UN panel that aims to address the human rights records of the 193 UN member states. This is the second time that the panel has scrutinized the United States; the first was in 2010, when the list of concerns included detention in Guantanamo Bay, torture, the death penalty, and access to health care. Its latest report came

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The marriage equality referendum in Ireland is in a week and it’s close. Aoife at Consider the Tea Cosy is hosting guest posts for equality. Here is The No side’s warped understanding of democracy is a bad joke:

In the course of this referendum debate there have been many complaints, in particular from the No side, about an undemocratic atmosphere of censorship. When No posters are defaced by unknown persons, they behave as if the Yes campaign had ordered an official strike. When a mural depicting two men embracing was permitted on George Street in Dublin, they behaved as though the government was conspiring against them to give the Yes campaign more publicity.

In short, they are trying to

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)