Author: Ophelia Benson

I think Richard Dawkins called the UK’s ”Chief Rabbi” (whatever that is) a very nice man somewhere on RDF before their BBC debate. I thought at the time that that was dubious, and it seems all the more so now that the CR, Jonathan Sacks, has said RD’s description of the Old Testament god in The God Delusion is “profoundly anti-Semitic.”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Sacks really is a nice guy, and just says and does and thinks some nasty things. That can be the case, obviously. But enough quantity or quality of nastiness and you no longer have a nice person.

The thing I dislike about Sacks is his boast about being glad his dying father didn’t have the option of assisted suicide, because the long time it took him to die gave Sacks the opportunity to show his father compassion. He didn’t say anything about what his father might have preferred – it apparently never crossed his mind that what his father wanted should trump what he wanted in that situation. That level of self-absorbtion makes real niceness difficult.

The dispute began with Prof Dawkins’ claim that a controversial passage from his 2006 book was intended to be “humorous”.

“The beginning of chapter two, which says the God of the Old Testament is the most unpleasant character in all fiction, that’s a joke,” he said in the early stages of the debate.

Later Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said that Dawkins had misunderstood sections of the Hebrew Bible, which are also part of the Christian Old Testament, because he was a “Christian atheist” rather than a “Jewish atheist”.

It meant that Dawkins read the Old Testament in an “adversarial way,” he said, something that was “Christian” because the faith’s New Testament was believed to have “gone one better”.

“That’s why I did not read the opening to chapter two in your book as a joke, I read it as a profoundly anti-semitic passage.”

The text was read out loud by Lord Sacks at the debate.

It described “the God of the Old Testament” as a “vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser” as well as “misogynist”, “homophobic”, “racist”, “pestilential” and “infanticidal”.

“How you can call that anti-semitic, I don’t even begin to understand. It’s anti-God,” said Prof Dawkins.

I suppose I can begin to understand it, because there are such things as tropes and stereotypes, and they can be dangerous…But then the Old Testament can be dangerous too.

Human Rights Watch says Tunisia’s draft constitution needs improvement. Now there’s a surprise.

The shortcomings in human rights protections largely concern the status of international human rights conventions ratified by Tunisia, freedom of expression, freedom of thought and belief, equality between men and women, and non-discrimination, Human Rights found in an analysis of the proposals.

Quite a few things, in other words. Quite important things.

Article 3 threatens freedom of expression by stipulating that, “The state guarantees freedom of belief and religious practice and criminalizes all attacks on the sacred.” This provision, which defines neither what is “sacred” nor what constitutes an “attack” on it, opens the door to laws that criminalize speech, Human Rights Watch said.

Anything for a quiet life, eh? But what if someone comes along who has a different idea of what “the sacred” is? Don’t ask.

Other provisions that cause concern are:

• Article 3, which says that, “The state guarantees freedom of belief and religious practice,” but omits wording that would affirm freedoms of thought and of conscience, including the right to replace one’s religion with another or to embrace atheism. Human rights would be best protected by an explicit guarantee in the constitution of a right to change one’s religion or to have no religion, Human Rights Watch said.
• Article 28 on women’s rights invokes the notion of complementarity of the roles of women and men inside the family, omitting the principle of equality between the sexes.
• Article 22, stating that, “All citizens are equal in rights and freedoms before the law, without discrimination of any kind,” is contradicted by another article that states that only a Muslim can become president of the republic.

Familiar, and repellent.

Egypt’s Prime Minister wants the US government to do all it can to “stop people insulting Islam.”

Time out while I sigh a huge sigh.

No. Shut up. Fuck off.

First of all, there’s no such thing as “insulting” a religion to begin with. “Insult” is a human term. You can’t “insult” socialism or libertarianism or skydiving or birdwatching or apricots or cats.

What you mean is “disparage” or similer. We’re allowed to do that. Everyone should be allowed to do that.

If you tried to persuade the US government to do all it can to stop people disparaging Islam, you would still be doing a silly and bad thing. There’s a lot about Islam that cries out for disparaging, and the US government is very limited in its ability to tell us what to say. It’s a pity yours is not equally limited.

Here’s an idea for you: do all you can to stop mobs getting into stupid rages about perceived “insults” to a guy who’s been dead for 14 centuries.

Kristina Hansen demonstrates her aversion to bullying again by turning me into an Amish crone in a bonnet. Hahahahahahahahaha she is one witty blogger.

Bernard Hurley did a very informative comment about the law under which Azhar Ahmed was found guilty of  “posting an offensive Facebook message.” It’s too informative to hide in comments so here it is.

Bernard Hurley

Ahmed was prosecuted under clause 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. The purpose of the act is to define the rôle of OFCOM and to regulate such things a local radio and indeed any services running over publicly funded or partially publicly funded electronic networks. Section 127 is buried in the middle of it and reads:

127 Improper use of public electronic communications network (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or (b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false, (b) causes such a message to be sent; or (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both. (4) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to anything done in the course of providing a programme service (within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1990 (c. 42)).

As far as I can tell, the intent of the legislation was to stop nuisance calls, but, as can be seen, it is very vague. The judgement is only in a magistrate’s court; personally I think it should be appealed. I think, Ophelia, you have put your finger on two legal problems. Which are:

(A) What precisely is a message in the context of services like Facebook?

and:

(B) What makes a message grossly offensive?

The second of these is dealt by the Law Lords decision in DPP vs Collins http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldjudgmt/jd060719/collin.pdf In this case Collins had sent repeated telephone messages to his MP in which he called immigrants and asylum seekers “Wogs”, “Pakis”, “Black bastards”, and “Niggers”. One question at issue were whether, in the given context, this was grossly offensive or merely offensive. The context includes the fact that the actual recipient of the message was likely a secretary or an intern and that Collins did not know or care whether this person would be offended.

The Law Lords found for the DPP (i.e. the messages were grossly offensive) however the criteria they used look like a legal minefield to me:

“Usages and sensitivities may change over time … there can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. “The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to whom it relates.”

As to (A) it seems that a message has to have a recipient or group of recipients. I’m not sure what the distinction is as regards Internet communications. Is there a distinction between a blog post and a comment on the blog? Is there a distinction between posting something on your status and posting the same thing on someone else’s timeline? I’m not sure what Ahmed did and why it was considered to be a message.

However there is another interesting part of DPP vs Collins. It is made clear that the aim of this particular offence is to prevent a service provided and funded by the public, for the benefit of the public, for the transmission of communications from being used in a way that contravenes certain basic standards. In the UK most of the land line and internet backbone is publicly funded and in practice it is difficult to avoid using them. However it is clear that the law does not apply to a companies private network, it it does not use these services. It would presumably not apply to a message sent over a completely privately owned mobile phone network either.

Well there’s one thing about the ElevatorGATE stalker’s obsessive stalking and Storifying, which is that it makes it easy to point to some crazy.

I can’t remember why I decided to look at his Storify just now, but I did, to find that he’d storified a conversation I was still having with Amy and Glendon and Melody. Whew! Don’t I feel special! Being watched every second…yeah, that rocks.

But he also Storified this one, in which two people who have lived in totalitarian countries earnestly testified that yes indeed “they” really are totalitarians.

• 

  @Metamagician @philosophyexp @notungschwert They hate being likened to totalitarianism, but their behaviour speaks for itself.
• 

  @PaulaSKirby @Metamagician @PhilosophyExp @NotungSchwert This isn’t really hyperbole. I lived in a communist country for almost 8 yrs.

Absolutely; not hyperbole at all.

Jacques Rousseau has a good post on The Bumblebee Affair and assigning blame and when bullying is what’s called for. (Spoiler: never.)

The takeaway:

No matter how you assign blame for past actions, or what your character judgements are in relation to all the players in this soap opera, we should all remember to include ourselves in those character judgements also, and try to be objective when thinking of our roles in causing or facilitating harm to others. In this instance, Ms Bumblebee has no defence – in the knowledge that Jen McCreight has been jeered off the stage, and had a long-standing depression triggered, she doesn’t take the option of silence (never mind sympathy). Instead, she broadens the net of victims to members of Jen’s family (and of course carries on with ridiculing Jen while doing so). That’s all “on her”, as the Americans like to say, no matter what sins you think Jen might have committed in the past.

Might be a handy insight for a workshop on bullying.

A bit of housekeeping. I asked Chris Stedman about that whole business of my doing something not 100% unlike what Booly Wumblebee did the other day in the matter of Jen and her father. He replied honestly that he thought my self-repudiation should have been more public than comments. Fair enough!

It was June last year. The title was Helicopter parents. It was not my finest hour. I hadn’t even remembered it when I wrote the post about Kristina Hansen’s version. That’s one time when the obsessed haters who monitor my every word actually did get something right, and taught me something.

There are a lot of comments on the Helicopter parents post, but never mind that; they wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t written the post, and the blame is all mine.

Sorry, this all looks a bit self-obsessed and vain – you know, making a display of one’s scruples and so on. Ew. I hate that kind of thing. That’s not it – it’s because of what Chris very fairly and honestly said when I asked him.

I apologized to Toni Stedman at the time, and it didn’t occur to me that I should make that public. Now it’s public.

Now…if the pope starts getting family members to stick up for him when I go after him, I’ll be super-critical of them and I won’t apologize. But he’s the pope. I think that’s fair. Strict, but fair.

Parents in Virginia can prevent their children from getting any education at all if they want to, provided their reasons are religious. What a great arrangement.

Nearly 7,000 Virginia children whose families have opted to keep them out of public school for religious reasons are not required to get an education, the only children in the country who do not have to prove they are being home-schooled or otherwise educated, according to a study.

Virginia is the only state that allows families to avoid government intrusion once they are given permission to opt out of public school, according to a report from the University of Virginia’s School of Law. It’s a law that is defended for promoting religious freedom and criticized for leaving open the possibility that some children will not be educated.

 

The possibility? The near-certainty. The regulation of home schooling is appallingly lax in most states, and the result is children whose education consists of watching tv.

Home-school advocates say the law is essential to preserving the rights of families who believe that any state control of their children’s education would violate the tenets of their faith. It takes on particular importance in the state where Thomas Jefferson helped define religious freedom as a bedrock principle for the country.

“They feel that their deity has given them that responsibility,” said Amy Wilson of the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers. For such families, she said, to have to file paperwork and evidence of progress would put them in a crisis of conscience.

So they get to stunt their children’s lives. Fabulous.

Block became interested in the statute years ago, when a teenager asked for help because her parents had requested a religious exemption from compulsory attendance when she was a little girl, and she later wanted to go to school. It wasn’t until Block and a research assistant began looking into the 1976 law that he realized it was unique.

Once parents in Virginia are granted a religious exemption, they’re no longer legally obligated to educate their children.

The statute does not allow exemptions for political or philosophical beliefs “or a merely personal moral code,” but the beliefs do not have to be part of a mainstream religion.

“We were surprised at how regularly the exemption is granted,” Block said. “School systems almost never deny it.” And, according to a survey of superintendents in the commonwealth, school leaders rarely have further contact with the families after granting an exemption.

Sorry, kids. It’s the free exercise clause. Have a nice life; bye!