A festive Sunday morning in Indonesia in 2006, with coconut cakes and Javanese music and lots of women in hijabs and lipstick. They were there to chop up the genitals of 248 little girls.

It is April 2006 and the occasion is a mass ceremony to perform sunat perempuan or “female circumcision” that has been held annually since 1958 by the Bandung-based Yayasan Assalaam, an Islamic foundation that runs a mosque and  several schools. The foundation holds the event in the lunar month of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, and pays parents 80,000 rupiah (£6) and a bag of food for each daughter they bring to be cut.

The foundation pays the parents to slice up their daughters’ genitals.

At

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This thing on Facebook…

… Read the rest

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I don’t keep up with everything. I should but I don’t. A friend mentioned Eric Dondero to me and I had to resort to Google, because I hadn’t kept up. He’s pretty funny.

 Republicans around the country are responding to President Obama’s reelection in a variety of ways — among them: anger, depression, finger-pointing. But nobody had the same reaction as Eric Dondero, a former Ron Paul aide who blogs at LibertarianRepublican.net. In a post yesterday, Dondero, reasoning that the only recourse to Obama’s victory is “outright revolt,” laid out the terms of the “personal boycott” against Democrats which he plans to maintain for the rest of his life and which he hopes his followers will as well. What

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And it continues. Remember the crazed reactions to Rebecca’s article in Slate? In particular the one where Russell Blackford took the trouble to tweet a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in order to call Rebecca a liar? This one?

He’s at it again, or still. He’s still doing what he can to harm Rebecca.

 Why? I don’t know. I do not know.

He might say it’s because of Stef McGraw, but that doesn’t make sense. Stef McGraw doesn’t consider Rebecca the world’s most evil monster bully. Remember?

 Photo by Brian S. Engler.

 There are a lot of crazy people out there who want to destroy Rebecca. And there’s Russell Blackford, who also wants to destroy Rebecca. I … Read the rest

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Moving from Dublin and Galway to Athens for a moment – actors in and the producer and director of “Corpus Christi” have been charged with blasphemy.

A production of “Corpus Christi” in Athens was canceled this month after weeks of almost daily protests outside the theatre by priests and right-wing groups, including deputies from the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party.

Charges of “insulting religion” and “malicious blasphemy” have been filed after Bishop Seraphim of Piraeus lodged a lawsuit against those involved in the play, the officials said.

Our worst nightmare, eh? Fascists joining priests, priests joining fascists. Teaming up to stamp out everything that’s not fascist and priestly.

Dozens of demonstrators, including some from Golden Dawn, blocked the entrance of the

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There’s a group that’s going to examine the A, B and C v Ireland judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. It was set up as of January 13th this year…so it doesn’t seem to be breaking its neck in the rush to get the job done.

The Expert Group is to report back to Government within six months with options on how to implement the judgment of the European Courts.

The European Court held there is no right for women to an abortion in Ireland, emphasising that there is no straightforward right to an abortion under the Convention, and that member states have a broad margin of appreciation to prohibit abortion.  However, given the violation of applicant C’s

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There are a lot of tweets about the terrible way the RTE is reporting on the Savita case and the protests against it. I’d already noticed its ridiculous headline.

Rallies held in Dublin, Galway in memory of Savita Halappanavar

Uh, no – those were protest rallies, not memorial services. They weren’t about just remembering Savita, they were about trying to make sure that what happened to her doesn’t happen to other women.

Subhead:

Several thousand people are marching through the centre of Dublin to attend a rally in memory of Savita Halappanavar, the woman who died following a miscarriage at University Hospital Galway.

That is one misleading subhead.

RTE talked to an official.

Earlier Minister of State at the

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There was a big rally in Dublin in the name of Savita Halappanavar to say Never Again. It just ended, I think. There are lots of pictures of the crowd on Twitter. I got permission to post one, by Gavan Reilly at TheJournal.ie.

Here’s another great photo, by Cathy Heffernan.

 … Read the rest

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EJ Graff is also angry.

Savita Halappanavar died because an entire country decided to sentimentalize every clump of dividing cells that might or might not be able to develop into a full human being. In fact, in this case, the clump of cells’ only actual effect was to destroy the life of its host, a real human being. As her husband told another newspaper:

How can you let a young woman go to save a baby who will die anyway? Savita could have had more babies. … It has been a terrible few weeks, very hard to understand how this could happen in the 21^st century, very hard to explain to her family. If it had happened

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Emer O’Toole is from beautiful Galway. She was born in the hospital where Savita Halappanavar died because that hospital refused to treat her until too late. She is ashamed.

This is a Catholic country. If these were indeed the words used by the doctors, then the hospital did not feel the need to sugarcoat its rationale with references to Halappanavar’s psychological health, or the wellbeing of her foetus. Its ideology was not veiled – as Youth Defence, Precious Life and Ireland’s other powerful anti-abortion lobbyists have learned to do – in the language of care and concern for women. The rationale was not cloaked in academic arguments about the moment when human life begins.

It’s hard to veil refusal … Read the rest

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