Author: Ophelia Benson

It’s not just Ireland, it’s not just Saudi Arabia, it’s not just Pakistan. It’s New York City, too. The New York Times sets the scene.

The abuse began when the girl was 12 years old, prosecutors in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn said on Monday. She was sent to a prominent man in her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community for counseling, and prosecutors said the man sexually molested her over the next three years.

But lawyers defending the man, Nechemya Weberman, 54, of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, told a far different story during the opening arguments of his trial. The girl, a defense lawyer told the jury, had hatched the sordid tale of abuse as an act of revenge against Mr. Weberman and against a religious community she found stifling and rulebound.

Community community community. “Her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community” – meaning, the one she was born into and could not escape. It’s more a prison than a “community.”

Both the prosecution and the defense informed the jury that the Satmar Hasidic community, to which Mr. Weberman and the girl belonged, was so rigid that questions from a young girl about something as simple as the proper length of a skirt could lead to mandatory counseling, and even expulsion from school. The accuser in this case, both sides said, was just that kind of girl: a free spirit whose questioning and challenges to authority landed her in trouble.

“She was going off the path,” said Kevin O’Donnell, an assistant district attorney. “She was being a little bit different.” In response, Mr. O’Donnell said, she was branded a “heretic” by her Satmar girls’ school, the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg, and her parents were required to send her to therapy.

There it is again – the community to which they both “belonged” – that sounds cozy, but it’s more like being drafted. And how can her parents be “required” to send her to “therapy”? Required by whom? On whose authority? And what do you mean “therapy”? Weberman is not a therapist.

The Times a couple of days ago:

Dressed in the traditional long black coat and white shirt of the Satmar Hasidim, Mr. Weberman testified that he had first begun counseling his accuser in 2008, not in 2007, as she had claimed. He testified that he billed $150 an hour to see her, and also charged her family $1,500 for a trip upstate that he took alone with her. He denied that anything untoward had happened.

The parents were ”required” to send her to him, and he charged them $150 an hour, but he’s not a therapist. Not a bad racket, from his point of view, even without the sex.

Beyond the details of the accuser’s case, the testimony also shed light into the way the Satmar Hasidic community enforces its strict religious rules. Ms. Gluck testified that masked men from the religious modesty committee, based in Monroe, N.Y., had come into her bedroom at night when she was 15 or 16 years old to take away a cellphone that she was not permitted to have. The same committee, Mr. Weberman testified, regularly referred young boys and girls to him for counseling.

Mr. Weberman testified that as an unlicensed counselor, he was not obligated to report allegations of child abuse to secular authorities, nor was he legally bound to respect the privacy of the young people he was counseling. As a result, he shared information given to him by the teenagers with their parents and schools, he said.

The New York Jewish Week goes deeper.

…many people with ties to the chasidic community believe there is something even more important about the Weberman case — namely, what it exposes about the larger communal role played by chasidic “modesty committees” in communities like Williamsburg, Borough Park and Kiryas Joel. These groups — to which, sources say, Weberman was connected — originated years ago to guard the “purity” of the community by enforcing strict dress and behavior codes that characterize the insular chasidic lifestyle. But, insiders say, the tactics of these self-appointed, freelance modesty patrols have evolved from public shaming to extortion and threats.

The narrative to emerge from the trial testimony so far is that a chasidic girl, perceived as “acting out” by the standards of her chasidic school and family — defying the community’s dress code, communicating with boys, asking questions about the existence of God — was sent to Weberman for therapy. She was 12 at the time, and the move apparently came at her school’s insistence and under threat of expulsion.

So that’s what “required” means. It’s not quite as savage as the Magdalen laundries, but it’s not a million miles away, either.

According to Yerachmiel Lopin, who blogs at FrumFollies and has been reporting on the case for two years, “UTA was in effect, extorting money for Weberman. I strongly suspect they kept some of it. Given widespread rumors about his sexual misconduct, Satmar was in effect pimping its girls to Weberman, adding insult to injury by making the victim pay to be victimized.”

And pimping its girls to Weberman as punishment for growing up and developing their own ideas. That’s the “community.”

H/t No Light.

Martin comments on Chris Clarke’s post:

These last two threads have put me in mind of Tim Minchin’s lovely “Pope Song,” which includes the lyrics…

If you cover for another motherfucker who’s a kiddie fucker Fuck you you’re no better then the mother fucking rapist

…and then I wonder how many of these dudes showing up here to complain that it’s so unfair to draw moral equivalency between everyday, blogging, comment-trolling, rape-threat-making-on-Reddit misogynists and mass-murdering-IRL misogynists are huge fans of that song.

Via @EverydaySexism via @Cheesyhel – a cheery little birthday card for a girl turning 13 –

 Update – the good news is that it’s apparently old stock. The bad news is that Cheesyhel just saw it in a local newsagents in her town.

Update 2 –

The image is a card, with “You’re 13 today!” at the top and a cartoon picture of a girl beaming with surprise and pleasure at a box with a ring in it. In smaller writing that winds down the page it says

If you had a rich  boyfriend

he’d give you diamonds and rubies

Well maybe next year you will  –

when you’ve bigger boobies!

And speaking of “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” – speaking of calling sustained frothing hatemongering “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” – that’s all over a thread of PZ’s on the Montreal Massacre.

PZ made the point that the Montreal Massacre was a very overt example of misogyny. He made the related point that misogyny has consequences. Misogynists came along at a dead run to protest the outrage of saying that misogyny has consequences. There was a lot of bullshit about “dissent” and “disagreement” and “people who do not share your opinion” as cozy ways of describing sustained frothing misogyny. From Al Stefanelli for instance…

Al Stefanelli

Are you fucking kidding me? Really, this is the best you can come up with, comparing a horrendous act of violence with people who do not share your opinion on various social justice issues?

Wow, Godwin would be impressed…

No, see, that’s not it. Not sharing one’s opinion on various social justice issues is not it. That’s not the right thing to call it. That’s very much the wrong thing to call it. It’s inaccurate, and self-flattering.

The train wreck inspired Chris Clarke to a metaobservation on misogyny.

1) PZ posts a remembrance of the 14 women killed and 10 injured by the misogynistic murderer responsible for the École Polytechnique massacre that took place 23 years ago today, and points out that the hatred that motivated the murderer is still all too common.

2) 12 comments in, the thread becomes about whether the particular rhetorical trope PZ used to point out the continued existence of misogyny was fair to misogynists, and is no longer about remembering the massacre victims.

Naturally. It’s a violation of the Universal Declaration of Misogynist Rights! PZ unfair to misogynists!

Yeah, you’re right: hate speech against individual women based on their gender isn’t the same as being a mass murderer. But it feeds those who commit the murders. And when you post online, or shoot the misogynistic shit in a bar, or complain “all in fun” among friends, they are listening to you, and deciding that you’ve got their backs.

And when you essentially march into a memorial service to complain about that fact, you’re saying the victims aren’t as important as your right to deny the consequences of your actions.

Chris Clarke unfair to misogynists!

The Family Research Council thinks Uganda’s commitment to hatred of gays is just the best thing ever.

Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga has taken up the challenge of national repentance by promising passage of the “Kill the Gays” legislation as a “Christmas gift”to the people of Uganda.

Naturally, Christian conservative leaders in the U.S. are thrilled with what FRC has called an “inspirational moment for the [Ugandan] nation.” As Alvin McEwen pointed out, FRC President Tony Perkins tweeted a big, warm hug to President Museveni for “leading his nation in repentance” and thus helping to create a “nation prospered by God.” But Perkins’ tweet was an hors d’oeuvre for the main course, a November 26 email alert sent out to FRC subscribers entitled, “During Revival, Media Still Atone Deaf.” As the title suggests, one target of the longer commendation of Museveni is the mainstream media in the U.S. which, having drawn attention to violations of LGBT peoples’ human rights in Uganda, is accused of being “so threatened by religion that it refuses to leave another country alone to pursue its own views on sexuality and faith.”

Ah yes “views.” Views. That’s all it is – just views. Just opinions. Just dissent, disagreement, seeing things differently. Who could possibly object? Why do those horrible liberal people in the liberal media object to Uganda having “its own views on sexuality and faith”? Because they’re horrible-liberal.

Other Christian Right leaders and pastors have seen fertile ground for their own religious agendas and enterprises in African nations — notable among them the organization known as “the Fellowship” or “the Family,” which operates the famed “C Street house” in Washington, D.C., a residence for right-wing senators and congressmen — and they’ve often lauded the human rights violators who carry out those designs.

For its part, the Family Research Council, which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its “demonizing lies about the LGBT community,” continues to heap praise on President Museveni’s theocratic aspirations. In its email alert, FRC quotes liberally from Museveni’s speech and notes that Uganda “has stood — often alone — for traditional values, abstinence, and families despite tremendous pressure from the West.”

They’re doing intertheocratic work.

Oh so that’s what interfaith is for – fighting secularization! There I was half-convinced it was for dialogue and bridge-building and working together to do things. Ok no I wasn’t, I wasn’t even quarter-convinced, but I was at least aware that that was the advertising slogan. But it appears that not everyone got the memo.

Well of course not. Lots of faith people don’t want secularism, after all – they want their particular dogma imposed on everyone else. And if there’s anybody who not only wants that but has the power to make it happen, it’s the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The National Catholic Register was there.

WASHINGTON — Participants at a recent interfaith conference in the nation’s  capital discussed how interreligious dialogue can play an important role in  establishing peace and fighting secularization in America.

Dialogue between faiths “can serve our nation and the world in ways that  professional diplomats cannot,” said auxiliary Bishop Barry Knestout of  Washington, who delivered the keynote address at the event.

He explained that a shared “commitment to an authentic and robust dialogue  will foster understanding and peaceful coexistence.”

Held Nov. 10 at St. Paul’s College in Washington, the “Generations  of Faith” conference was the second of its kind sponsored by the U.S.  Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Hey, Bishop Barry, you and the rest of your gang want to fight secularization (and secularism) because you want to be able to force Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions even to save the woman’s life. You want to be able to make it harder and more expensive for women to use contraception. You want to bully and punish and exclude nuns whom you consider (or pretend to consider) “radical feminists.” You want to fuck everything up in the name of a nonexistent but nasty god.

And what you mean by “dialogue” isn’t actually dialogue. Don’t you remember what the bishop of Phoenix told St Joseph’s Hospital? I’ll just refresh your memory.

In effect, you would have me believe that we will merely have to agree to disagree. But this resolution is unacceptable because it disregards my authority and responsibility to interpret the moral law and to teach the Catholic faith as a Successor of the Apostles…Thus far, you have insisted that you are not doing anything wrong, but that your interpretation (of the USCCB’s directives on Catholic health care) simply differs from my own. According to Catholic teaching, though, there cannot be a “tie” so to speak in this debate.

Until this time, you have not acknowledged my authority to settle this question, but have only provided the opinions of ethicists that agree with your opinion and disagree with mine.

If actions speak louder than words, your actions communicate to me that you do not respect my authority to authentically teach and interpret the moral law in this diocese.

It’s not about dialogue. It’s about obedience. Bishops have authority, and when they tell you to obey, the dialogue is over; they get to settle the questions. They’re not the right kind of people, in the right kind of institution, to blather about dialogue. Blathering about it as a way to combat secularization is just insultingly dishonest. Secularism (whose goal is secularization) is a precondition for dialogue. Secularism takes us out of the realm of magic invisible beings who bestow absolute authority on certain human beings, and into the realm of fallible uncertain all-on-the-same-footing people. To fight it is to fight dialogue and free inquiry and free thought.

The secular response to religious diversity is to push all religious beliefs  out of public life, Bishop Knestout warned. But while this approach has become  prominent in the modern era, it is dangerous to all religious beliefs and fails  to respect “the reality of the spiritual dimension of life.”

Interreligious dialogue that builds and maintains relationships among  different faith traditions is therefore even more important in protecting the  role of religion from the secularism that threatens it, he explained.

Authoritarians of all stripes unite against secularism, and then when that fight is won, the bishops can fight religious diversity. Baby steps.

I mentioned meeting Mark Fournier at Eschaton. (There are surprisingly many B&W readers-and-commenters in Ottawa.) Step in the time machine and go back to 2006, and Richard Swinburne…

Remember this of Swinburne’s? The interjection is mine.

Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Good? Good explanations? Good in what sense?

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.

Uh huh. Because everything, if you look at it like that, can be warped into something that is actually good. We should all go out and cause suffering then, right?

Mark a few months earlier was considering Swinburne’s take on causality and why God.

And now we come to another of Swinburne’s arguments: that assuming an intelligent creator is a simpler premise than the naturalistic alternatives. Given that it took all of this infrastructure just to get a few billion moderately intelligent and generally benign humans to appear on one planet, how is it simpler to assume the existence of an infinitely intelligent and good entity? Where did God come from? The answer is usually that God has always existed, but since Swinburne finds it highly suspicious that particles all follow the same rules across most of space and time, how likely is it that an entity as complex as God would never change? It’s no good to say that God is above time, because apparently he intervenes occasionally, which situates Him as an actor in time. It is precisely this temporal existence of the divine that believers crave–a God above time is not interactive. Indeed, an entity above time and space would be so utterly alien as to be completely orthogonal to all human hopes and wishes, ruling the universe by an incomprehensible aesthetic more conducive to blind terror than comfort and hope.

I always think it’s odd that many people think they know not only that god exists but also what god is like and that god is good in a sense that is meaningful to humans. That’s a lot to know. It’s a lot to know and there’s no real source for any of it. How can they possibly be so sure that god is not “so utterly alien as to be completely orthogonal to all human hopes and wishes”? It always makes me wonder how they know god isn’t raising us for food. That’s why when we got to this point in the conversation on Friday evening, I said “it’s a cookbook” and everyone laughed. They all knew the reference.

Neil deGrasse Tyson did a couple of alarming and disheartening tweets just now –

Neil deGrasse Tyson‏@neiltyson

Done with Jury Duty. I said I could not convict a person solely on eyewitness testimony. They sent me home. I’m now 0 for 4.

After hearing my skepticism of eyewitness testimony, six other jury candidates promptly agreed. And they got sent home too.

Oyyyyyyyyyy.

Eyewitness testimony is so crappy – so very unreliable and yet so trusted.

TV trains everyone to think it’s infallible, as if there were a video camera in our brains and all we have to do is roll the tape. We’re bad at noticing stuff even when it’s right in front of us, and then we’re bad all over again at remembering. Put the two together and you get a big “Huh? I dunno. I wasn’t watching.” But noooooo, cop shows always present it as Hidden Photography Inside The Head. The cops ask for detailed descriptions of the suspect, they get impatient when people don’t know, they take the lineup very seriously – as if all this were totally reliable.

Jesus and Mo and Moses are on the story.

Hank Fox took a bunch of nice photos at Eschaton. There’s Genie Scott, PZ, Larry Moran – and there’s Eric.

Eric and I had the opportunity for several long talks. He’s a compadre.

There is Dorothy Grasett. Dorothy gave me a beautiful wooden box her brother made, as a present. It’s here on the desk beside me.

That’s Saturday evening, before or after PZ’s talk.

And there’s one of me squirming.

Hank calls it relaxing, but it’s squirming. I always squirm. That’s Heina up in the right corner.

Thanks to Hank for letting me re-post a few. Go over there to see them all.

It’s a literary trope, the father who disowns or betrays a daughter. I don’t say that to make light of it, but on the contrary, to point out the way it has haunted the human imagination, which underlines how horrible it is. (This applies to all combinations of parents and children, but fathers and daughters gets noticed less than fathers and sons.)

Agamemnon, you know. He sacrificed Iphigenia – which is to say, he killed her on an “altar” – to get a wind when the attack on Troy was becalmed. Not very fatherly, as one of the Mitfords might have put it. Lucretius used it as the occasion for his famous comment, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum – religion can persuade [people to perform] such evils.

And then there’s Shakespeare, who repeatedly portrayed fathers disowning daughters. In other Elizabethan plays, fathers who do that are defending “honor” (does it sound familiar? Of course it does, because it’s the same) and the daughters either deserve it or are betrayed by fate or bad luck or some such thing, not by their fathers. In Shakespeare’s many plays on the subject, the father is always dead wrong.

Juliet’s father tried to force her into a marriage and when she refused he disowned her. Hero’s father believed lying tricksters who said she’d been letting men in her bedroom window so they could fuck like weasels. Desdemona’s father disowned her because she married a Moor – a man of Another Race. Cordelia’s father not only disowned her, but cursed her – meaning not he swore at her but he called down curses on her, curses that were meant to be efficacious – for declining to flatter him in the way he expected. Imogen’s father was another who accepted a trickster’s claim that she was a Secret Slut. Perdita’s father disowned his wife because he got it in his head (for no reason) that she was humping his best friend, and he tried to have the infant Perdita killed.

Juliet dies disowned, as does Desdemona. Cordelia and Lear, and Perdita and Leontes, however, get the chance for reconciliation at the end. It’s interesting how thoroughly Shakespeare puts the fathers in the wrong.

And speaking of horribly unenlightened views, there is also Ashley Miller’s father, who has decided to stop talking to her, to disown her, to cut her off, to make her an undaughter, because her boyfriend is unwhite.

I can’t get my head around it. Imagine caring more about your racism than you care about your daughter! Imagine giving up a daughter for the sake of racism. What an incredibly bad bargain. What a pathetic, wrong-way-around exchange.

I suppose I am thankful that he waited until the day after Thanksgiving to do it.  Not that he told me, he made my stepmother his proxy as he was too angry to speak to me directly.  I have been disowned for loving someone my father does not approve of.

“Too angry” – as if there were an important principle involved.

I don’t know how one goes about coping with these things.  I have a very supportive family, friends, and boyfriend.  And Dad and I were never super close.  And, perhaps there were things I could have done better, but none of them change the fact that my dad is the kind of person who would disown their only child for dating “out of race”.

Just what I’m trying to get my head around. That kind of person. What kind of person would do that?

It’s heartbreaking.