Author: Ophelia Benson

Maryam has a post saying Bravo Charlie Hebdo, which alerted me to this cringing piece of crap in the Guardian. It’s by Philippe Marlière, who is a professor of French politics at UCL. The body of the article is a quick history of Charlie Hebdo, then suddenly in the last paragraph he flings himself down on the floor in surrender.

Of course people should be entitled to mock Islam and any other religion. However, in the current climate of racial and religious prejudice in Europe, how can these cartoons be helpful? Charlie Hebdo is waging a rearguard battle.

Helpful to what? It depends what you’re trying to “help,” doesn’t it. If you’re hoping to help defend the genuine right to mock Islam and any other religion, as opposed to a purely notional right mentioned in passing only to be negated in the next sentence, then these cartoons can be helpful by exercising the very right that Marlière pretends to affirm only to deny it in the next breath.

I mean get a bead on what you’re saying, dude. Don’t say people should be entitled when you mean they shouldn’t. Don’t say it in one sentence only to take it back in the next. Just admit it – you think people should not be entitled to mock Islam. Any other religion, yes, maybe, but Islam, no. So say that. Say that and then explain why.

Via Kausik Datta, a satirical video about the exciting possibilities when bosses can fire employees for using birth control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLFDF2dxerM

Sean Carroll points out a study of gender bias among scientists.

To test scientists’ reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.

Not at all surprising, alas. I’m sure I have the same bias.

I’m especially interested that it’s Sean Carroll who points it out, because it was Carroll who said, in that chat about why so few women in atheism on The Point last month, that the goal should be equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. I sighed at his production of that particular bromide because of exactly this problem of unconscious bias, which renders formal equality of opportunity worthless.

I wonder if Paula Kirby will see this study, and if so, I wonder if it will prompt her to have second thoughts about her “just try harder” version of feminism. The problem it indicates is precisely why I’ve all along found her version to be surprisingly naïve.

If you want to get your blood hotter, read the comments by “TW”…The first, for instance:

I would argue that experienced researchers use all information available, and sex is additional information in two ways:

1) The woman on average worked harder to get the same qualification, leaving a man with a greater potential for growth.

As mentioned before, women are more conscientiousness. Across my student years, many just got better marks, because they did homework well and studied more regularly. Even though some got better marks than myself for example, I always felt they were closer to their limits.

I recently had a class reunion where I discussed with a female school friend who was the No 1 math student why she never did math at university and “just” became a middle school teacher. I told her: Why did you never do it? You were better than me! She said: No I was not better than you, but I worked so much harder and regularly.  I felt my limits. But you were just totally lazy, disorganized and de-focused and still passed!

2) Women get pregnant. This is a real disadvantage and risk for any project leader. I witnessed myself that a project leader hired a woman with all good intentions, but she got pregnant just after, promised to keep working, but then left. His project was delayed significantly and he said “never again”.

So given the same qualifications, I would rationally go for the man.

Yay. Conscious bias.

Deeyah has produced and directed a documentary film about the “honour” killing of Banaz Mahmod in South London in 2006. Deeyah talks to A Safe World for Women.

If you worry about offending the Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or any other community by criticising honour killings, then you are complicit in perpetuating it. Our silence provides the fertile soil and circumstances for this oppression and violence to continue. It’s not Islamophobic or racist to protest against honour killings. We have a duty to stand up for individual human rights for all people, not just men and not just for groups. Let’s not sacrifice the lives of ethnic minority women for the sake of so called political correctness.

Exactly. Not just men, and not just groups; if people within the groups are subject to oppression and violence, then we have to try to do something about it.

It is not OK to shy away from abuses happening against women in some communities, for fears of being labelled racist or insensitive – the very notion of turning a blind eye or walking on egg shells and avoiding to protect basic human rights of some women because they are of a certain ethnic background is not only fatal, but that is actually racist in itself.

We also need community awareness, responsibility and action. We don’t want the reactionary, rigid and orthodox religious leaders. But ones who care for our own communities, based on love, respect, dignity and equality. We don’t need community or religious leaders who will only protect and fight for the rights of the men and completely ignore the needs and struggles of women.

 See the trailer.

I took Cooper to the beach this afternoon, his first time since he had his paw stitched. It had been a foggy morning but was pretty sunny in the afternoon, though not as hot as it had been the last few days. The park where the beach is (Golden Gardens) was sunny, and I chucked the ball (with the chuckit) on the grass before we got to the beach and Cooper chased it, and then we got to the little trail through the Scotch Broom (aka gorse) to the beach…and we were in a different universe – some of the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, which got thicker while we were there. It was weird and beautiful. There was just the water, and blur. Blur south, blur north, blur west, and blur behind us, east, where the park still was, in the sun.

When we got back home (which is on a hilltop that overlooks Puget Sound) the fog was still there, just a strip over the middle part of the Sound. It was like a Thing – a long serpent stretched south to north over part of the water.

It was innaresting.

Maryam reports that there’s growing evidence that very young girls are being “married” to much older men in Sharia courts in the UK. Girls as young as five.

A recent undercover investigation by the Sunday Times found imams in Britain willing to “marry” young girls, provided this was carried out in secret. The imams had been approached by an undercover reporter posing as a father who said he wanted his 12 year old daughter married, to prevent her from being tempted in to a “western lifestyle”.

Imam Mohammed Kassamali, of the Husaini Islamic Centre in Peterborough, sanctioned the marriage, but stressed the need for total secrecy. He stated: “I would love the girl to go to her husband’s houses (sic) as soon as possible, the younger the better. Under sharia (Islamic law) there is no problem. It is said she should see her first sign of puberty at the house of her husband. The problem is that we cannot explain such things (the marriage) if the girl went tomorrow (to the authorities).”

Clearly “married” means “imprisoned” and “prevented from ever having adult autonomy and freedom.” It means being cut off from adulthood before it starts.

Maryam’s One Law for All is helping to stop this; you can help One Law for All.

One important way to tackle this matter is to galvanise support for the Arbitration and Mediation (Equality) Bill introduced to the House of Lords last year by crossbench peer, Baroness Caroline Cox. The Bill is due for a second reading in October.

The Government has so far declined to support Cox’s Bill. They do not believe there is a parallel legal system in operation. They also insist that everyone has full right of access to the British courts. This is simply not the case. There are many with little or no English language skills, trapped by community pressure, who believe Sharia courts operate as real courts and who regard their decisions as legally binding. The idea that they can easily instruct a high street solicitor to help them access their full rights under UK law is far from reality.

The Government must be pressured into taking immediate action, including by supporting Cox’s Bill, and shutting down Sharia and religious courts. If child welfare takes precedence then the Government is duty-bound to take action.

Sign our new petition in support of Baroness Cox’s Bill; tell the Government that enough is enough! Please sign it now.

Help Us

Baroness Cox has said in the past that her Bill was inspired by One Law for All. To donate to our important work, please either send a cheque made payable to One Law for All to BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK or pay via Paypal. We need regular support and also for supporters to commit to giving at least £5-10 a month via direct debit. You can find out more about how to join the 100 Club here.

If you have donation funds, that’s a very good destination for them.

I often find Sam Harris irritating, but he can be very good at hitting the right nail on the head. He is in his new piece on the freedom to offend.

I’ll just give a few examples of nail-hitting.

Whether over a film, a cartoon, a novel, a beauty pageant, or an inauspiciously named teddy bear, the coming eruption of pious rage is now as predictable as the dawn. This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas.

…

The contagion of moral cowardice followed its usual course, wherein liberal journalists and pundits began to reconsider our most basic freedoms in light of the sadomasochistic fury known as “religious sensitivity” among Muslims. Contributors to The New York Times and NPR spoke of the need to find a balance between free speech and freedom of religion—as though the latter could possibly be infringed by a YouTube video. As predictable as Muslim bullying has become, the moral confusion of secular liberals appears to be part of the same clockwork.

…

Unlike the founders of most religions, about whom very little is known, Mormonism is the product of the plagiarisms and confabulations of an obvious con man, Joseph Smith, whose adventures among the credulous were consummated (in every sense) in the full, unsentimental glare of history. Given how much we know about Smith, it is harder to be a Mormon than it is to be a Christian. A firmer embrace of the preposterous is required—and the fact that Romney can manage it says something about him, just as it would if he were a Scientologist proposing to park his E-meter in the Oval Office.

…

The moment one adds seer stones, sacred underpants, the planet Kolob, and a secret handshake required to win admittance into the highest heaven, Mormonism stands revealed for what it is: the religious equivalent of rhythmic gymnastics.

The point, however, is that I can say all these things about Mormonism, and disparage Joseph Smith to my heart’s content, without fearing that I will be murdered for it. Secular liberals ignore this distinction at every opportunity and to everyone’s peril.

…

The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost. And the only forces on earth that can recover it are strong, secular governments that will face down charges of blasphemy with scorn. No apologies necessary.

He’s right you know.

Faith healing doesn’t work; would interfaith healing do better?

No. So why is interfaith such a good thing again? Why is faith a good thing?

It’s not.

Consider Randi and Russel Bellew for instance. (No, I don’t know why Russel spells his own name wrong.)

A Creswell,  Ore., husband and wife have pleaded guilty to negligent homicide charges in the faith healing death of their 16-year-old son.

KVAL-TV reports that the teen, Austin Sprout, died at home last December after his appendix  burst. Lane County sheriff’s Capt. Byron  Trapp says medical professionals believe the boy’s condition was treatable had he been provided medical care.

Ya think?

That’s one hell of a painful death those two damn fools inflicted on their kid.

Another piece on women in tech fields. The takeaway:

It was always the ones that said they didn’t see gender or color who did the most damage. “They’re just words,” they would say, “Why do you let them hurt you?” And with that, my pain was made as invisible as me. “They’re just words.” Indeed, just the verbal incantations of power, like law and code and everything else that made the world. I decided to leave tech for words.

❧

But now I’m all shouty. Now people are angry at me because I have a stage, and they can’t make me invisible and ignore me, because the truth is you can’t ignore words, and I have the words. So now they really hate me. The others, the majority, sit uncomfortably with the conflict. No one is quite sure what to do, they want things to be abstractly better, but they don’t want anyone to be loudly upset, either. One side is considerably louder than all the others.

That “just words” thing is so ridiculous. People who say that – how do they think we got here? We humans? Do they think language is just incidental? A minor ornament that makes no difference to anything?

And I love the second para, because it applies to so many of us, us shouty women, us women who are all shouty. We have a stage, so now they really hate us – but it doesn’t do them any good because they can’t make people stop reading us or listening to us. They try and try and try but it just doesn’t work.

H/t Chris Lawson

There’s a dreadfully wrong-headed article by Eboo Patel in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. You can probably guess the gist if you remember that he’s one of Chris Stedman’s favorite interfaithy types. The gist is that faith is great, it doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s faith, and it’s a kind of identity like race so let’s start making sure there’s lots of diversity of it, because faith.

Part of the rationale for 1990s-era campus multiculturalism was to remedy the racial bias in the broader society: to lift up underrepresented narratives, to remind people that many communities have contributed to the American project, to ensure that our perceptions of race were not driven by the crime reports on the evening news. Gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity all got some airtime, but mostly we talked about race. And one form of identity was almost totally excluded: faith.

Now that the evening news is full of stories of faith-based violence, and our public discourse has a constant undercurrent of religious prejudice (Barack Obama is a Muslim! Mitt Romney isn’t a Christian!) colleges can no longer ignore faith identity. For many of the same reasons that they actively engaged race, so should they now actively and positively engage faith identity.

That’s how he gets the toe in the doorway: treating “faith” as identity rather than a set of beliefs and claims, and then treating identity as something that has to be “engaged.” But that’s a bad idea. Religion does operate like an identity in a lot of ways but it’s bad to treat it like one because it makes it less open. It shouldn’t be hard to leave one’s religion just because it feels like an identity.

What if campuses took religious diversity as seriously as they took race? What if recruiting a religiously diverse student body, creating a welcoming environment for people of different faith and philosophical identities, and offering classes in interfaith studies and co-curricular opportunities in interfaith leadership became the norm? What if university presidents expected their graduates to acquire interfaith literacy, build interfaith relationships, and have opportunities to run interfaith programs during their four years on campus? What impact might a critical mass of interfaith leaders have on America over the course of the next generation?

I have one word to offer as an alternative to Patel’s nightmare vision: secularism.

H/t to Christopher Moyer, via Jessica Moyer.

I know it’s obvious, I know it’s too easy, I know everybody and its dog is all over it, but can I just point and laugh at Romney a little all the same? Because it’s too perfect.

That is how they think. I know some, and that’s how they think. They think everybody who isn’t rich is contemptible, and out to steal their stuff.

At the fundraiser, Romney was asked how he could win in November, and he replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

You have to love the way it ticks all the boxes, and the way it ignores reality. He seems to think that 47 percent of the population is on welfare, which is never cut off. That’s Romney’s America! Almost half of us are beneath contempt and not his job to worry about.

Class war. Booya.