Imagine having an assistant state attorney general harassing you, even including following you around and showing up where you live.

That’s what happened to the University of Michigan’s first openly gay student body president.

Late this week, a federal court jury in Detroit awarded $4.5 million to Chris Armstrong, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan and the campus’ first openly gay student body president, who was harassed and stalked by the former Michigan assistant attorney general Andrew Shirvell in early 2010.

Shirvell was found guilty of defamation, stalking, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and invasion of privacy on Thursday. After Armstrong was elected student body president, Shirvell took to his personal blog called “The Chris Armstrong Watch” to

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

Well isn’t that sweet – the Russian Orthodox Church declares it has “forgiven” Pussy Riot. It forgave them all along. It wanted to see them severely punished, certainly, but hey, that doesn’t mean it didn’t “forgive” them.

Two top clerics in the Russian Orthodox Church said Saturday that it has forgiven the members of feminist punk band Pussy Riot who were convicted of hooliganism and sent to prison for briefly taking over a cathedral in a raucous prayer for deliverance from Vladimir Putin.

Tikhon Shevkunov, who heads Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery and is widely believed to be the Russian president’s spiritual counselor, said on state television Saturday that his church forgave the singers right after their “punk prayer” in the

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Paul Fidalgo has a gut-wrenching open letter to Alexander Aan at Friendly Atheist. The petition failed, you know. I should have done more, maybe – I blogged about it twice, the second time with considerable urgency, and tweeted and re-tweeted often. I guess I figured blogging a third time would be counter-productive, like begging Mummy for ice cream once too often and being put on an ice cream fast for a month. But I was probably wrong.

Anyway – it failed, and failed pathetically.

In order to guarantee such a response — and it was a loose guarantee at that — we had to collect at least 25,000 signatures. Alexander, I promise you, I and my colleagues truly believed this

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Ron Lindsay has an interesting post on Jonathan Haidt and his insistence on the importance of “sanctity” as a foundation of morality, which is something I’ve been disputing for more than five years.

In arguing for the importance of sanctity, Haidt relies heavily on the reactions of individuals in other, non-Western cultures to conduct they consider degrading and violative of various taboos, such as a woman eating a meal with men. Haidt maintains, with some justification, that these reactions show that conventional morality in many cultures includes prohibitions based on sanctified custom and a sense or revulsion as opposed to any reasoning about the harm caused.

Yes, but he does it by pointing to the people who end … Read the rest

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

Russia tells the world it has learned nothing from its authoritarian history and goes right on being authoritarian by sentencing Pussy Riot to two years in prison. For what? For staging a political protest in a church.

“The girls’ actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church’s rules,” Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.

Maybe all three of those claims are true, but they still shouldn’t be subject to punishment by the state. The state shouldn’t be telling people what is “sacrilegious” or whether or not they’re allowed to do things that are “sacrilegious.” The state shouldn’t be … Read the rest

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