And then, speaking of where you’d prefer to live, there’s life with Ismail Belghar of somewhere in New South Wales.

Belghar, who has been married to his wife for 11 years, became aware she had been to the beach in late 2009 because her shoulders were slightly sunburned.

He rang his sister-in-law and said: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach.”

Just before Christmas, 2009, Ms Kokden came face to face with Belghar while out shopping with her brother at the Broadway Shopping Centre.

Belghar slapped her across the face then carried her to the railing around the car park where he held her out over it.

She was freed when her brother tackled Belghar.

Family … Read the rest

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

Nice. Last month the Muslim Canadian Congress gave Irshad Manji a freedom of speech award – the first “Mansoor Hallaj Freedom of Speech Award.”

I like the picture.

I also like the way Tarek Fatah explained it in the Toronto Sun.

Earlier this week, the Kuwaiti parliament voted to institute the death penalty against any Muslim who is judged by Islamic clerics to have insulted God.

As medieval as this may sound to the ears of the Western non-Muslim, the threat is real and the target is the millions of Muslims, like me, who are fed up with the clerics who have sucked the joy out of our lives for centuries.

The tradition of silencing dissident Muslims by beheading

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

Irshad Manji has been getting some unwelcome attention in Indonesia.

During a discussion and an event to launch her latest book, Allah, Liberty and Love, at Salihara in South Jakarta last Friday, she said she sensed “a much more conservative vibe” in the capital.

As if on cue, Manji had barely finished her opening talk when a police officer announced that the event had to be postponed partly due to protests from local residents and hardline groups.

Minutes later, shouts of disapproval from those claiming to be local residents were heard. The discussion was cut short formally and Manji had to be escorted out of the venue.

Manji faced more protests from various groups during her next few days

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

In the news from Phoenix (oh god Phoenix – whose bishop is Joseph Olmsted, who tried to force a hospital to promise never again to prevent a woman from dying by aborting her doomed-anyway fetus) -

Instead of playing in a championship baseball game, Paige Sultzbach and her team won’t even make it to the dugout.

A Phoenix school that was scheduled to play the 15-year-old Mesa girl and her male teammates forfeited the game rather than face a female player.

Well that’s insulting.

Our Lady of Sorrows bowed out of Thursday night’s game against Mesa Preparatory Academy in the Arizona Charter Athletic Association championship. The game had been scheduled at Phoenix College.

Paige, who plays second base at Mesa

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

“If you have freedom of speech, please use your freedom to help someone else have theirs.”

Isn’t it time you spoke out?

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy that privilege too.” Voltaire.

Via Tarek Fatah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv7VdQNC8Yc

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

The Washington Post suggests that maybe the “tense relationship” between the Catholic church and the Girl Scouts is approaching a “resolution” – without really clarifying why the bishops think it’s any of their business or why anyone else does either.

Potentially at stake is whether troops can continue meeting in Catholic churches, and whether many Catholic girls, who make up a quarter of the nation’s 3 million Girl Scouts, will continue in scouting as the organization marks its 100th year.

How can the second item be at stake? The bishops can’t actually force people to do things, after all. They’re not cops. They don’t have badges or guns or clubs, and they’re not licensed by the state to enforce the … Read the rest

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

Not just for Catholics any more. You don’t have to be Catholic to love special rules for child-raping theists. Nothin’ says lovin’ like a district attorney who lets clerics deal with child-rape in their “communities” with no pesky police involved.

In short, it’s not just Ireland and it’s not just Catholic priests. It’s also the Brooklyn district attorney and ultra-Orthodox rabbis.

An influential rabbi came last summer to the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, with a message: his ultra-Orthodox advocacy group was instructing adherent Jews that they could report allegations of child sexual abuse to district attorneys or the police only if a rabbi first determined that the suspicions were credible.       

The pronouncement was a blunt challenge to Mr.

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

Another thing, on the matter of Edwina Rogers.

I was re-reading that contested part of Greta’s interview with Roy Speckhardt in a post of Chris Hallquist’s -

I don’t take your characterization as accurate that she was being evasive. I listened to her interview, and actually, the first thing I thought of was, “Gosh, you know, I’ve done a lot of media interviews, and if you do media interviews, you learn how to get your talking points across and not worry, necessarily, all the time about the questions being asked. If you want to get your own message across, this is a technique that you’ve got to learn, to get out there and put across your viewpoint.”

And I had … Read the rest

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

I took my friend Cooper to the beach yesterday afternoon.

Not that beach, but that Cooper. He’s a little over a year old.

This isn’t about him though, it’s about sea stars. It was very low tide, so I went squidging and mincing through the intertidal zone with him so that he could swim after the tennis ball, which he loves doing with a passion that never fades. I eventually noticed a sea star, and then a couple more, and then another.

One was a rather faded dry purple; maybe it was dead. The next two were a vibrant deep purple – probably Pisaster ochraeus.

The last one was red, and many-armed, and it had spinelets along each arm, … Read the rest

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

It’s turning into a “you’ve got to be kidding” day. One “you’ve got to be kidding” after another.

What now? The notoriously vicious US Conference of Catholic Bishops is pitching a huge fit at the Girl Scouts.

Long a lightning rod for conservative criticism, the Girl Scouts of the USA are now facing their highest-level challenge yet: An official inquiry by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

An official inquiry? What does that even mean? What standing do the US bishops have to inquire officially into the Girl Scouts? What business are the Girl Scouts of theirs?

At issue are concerns about program materials that some Catholics find offensive, as well as assertions that the Scouts associate with other

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

And then via Stephen Curry on Twitter I learn that Priss Choss has a veto on legislation that might affect his private interests. Say what? No really; he does. I don’t know how I managed to miss this last October.

Ministers have been forced to seek permission from Prince Charles to pass at least a dozen government bills, according to a Guardian investigation into a secretive constitutional loophole that gives him the right to veto legislation that might affect his private interests.

Since 2005, ministers from six departments have sought the Prince of Wales’ consent to draft bills on everything from road safety to gambling and the London Olympics, in an arrangement described by constitutional lawyers as a royal “nuclear

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