Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Karachi: mob tries to lynch man accused of blasphemy

    Taimuria Police Station booked a man accused of desecrating a copy of the Koran, and a mob attacked the station.

  • School forbids 5th-grader to give marriage equality speech

    Kameron Slade won a class competition and was supposed to give his speech school-wide, but his principal wouldn’t allow it.

  • Not a plan but a background

    Greg has an interesting followup comment on his claim about how intentional it all is.

    I am not suggesting that people sat down in a board meeting and made a plan and DJ Grothe is carrying it out.

    I am suggesting that a male dominated society within a society (JREF/TAM within Western Culture) is blind to certain things, and has certain self-serving expectations, and smooth sailing is defined when those expectation are not interfered with by, well, by “Feminist Bitches.”  Are there no conversations happening amongst (there’s that word again) JREF financiers, board members, DJ, others? Are there no emails distributed among any of the various mainly male defenders of DJ Grothe in social networking circles that say anything about anything?  Is there no background discussion going on at all?  Of course there are.  How organized is all that? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that an important part of the culture of the skeptical movement is being threatened and JREF is one of the pillars of that culture.  JREF, TAM and DJ Grothe do not need to defend the status quo, and they shouldn’t. Yet they are.  After a while, that ceases, all due respect to my colleague Crommie, to be attributable to incompetence.

    Agreed. I don’t think it was a plan, but yes I do think it emerged from a particular culture (and is getting cheered on by that culture now).

    I said this at Greg’s:

    I think a lot of it is just dislike and contempt, simmering in those background discussions you mentioned. I think DJ blurted some of that out…maybe thinking that it was an “everybody thinks” kind of thing, because of the background discussions – and lots of people do think, so he wasn’t all wrong. I suppose he expected us all just to go “ouch” and creep away to the corner and stop bugging everyone until maybe late July or so. I don’t think he expected the conversation to go the way it has. But the idea that we’re (we pesky women, we feminist bitches, to use Rebecca’s term) threatening the Normal skeptical movement – yes, I think that.

    I’ll say more here.

    It’s like other male enclaves, or places that men think are male enclaves.

    They think we’re going to make it all boring, and weak, and puritanical (or Talibanesque, however bizarre that might seem for feminists), and unfunny, and sexless, and schoolteacherish. They think it’s bean sprouts and Birkenstocks and puzzled frowns and homemade toothpaste.

    They think they have a monopoly on all the good things – jokes, irony, sex, energy, noise, sex, color, hippitude, argument, sex.

    The trouble with that is, The Great Penis Debate. Not funny.

  • O Canada

    I heard a bit of news on the radio late Friday evening that froze me to the spot with surprise –

    A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has declared Canada’s laws against physician-assisted suicide unconstitutional because they discriminate against the physically disabled.

    I thought immediately of Eric. I very nearly got back online to email him (but went to sleep instead).

    In a 395-page ruling released Friday, Justice Lynn Smith addressed the situation faced by Gloria Taylor, a B.C. woman who was one of five plaintiffs in the case seeking the legal right to doctor-assisted suicide.

    Taylor has ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, and she sought the ruling to allow her doctor to help her end her life before she becomes incapacitated.

    Because that’s the terrible fear with diseases like ALS and MS (which Eric’s wife Elisabeth had): the fear of being so incapacitated that you can’t kill yourself when you desperately want to because you’re so incapacitated.

    In her ruling, Smith noted suicide itself is not illegal, and therefore the law against assisted suicide contravenes Section 15 of the charter, which guarantees equality, because it denies physically disabled people like Taylor the same rights as able-bodied people who can take their own lives, she ruled.

    “The impact of that distinction is felt particularly acutely by persons such as Ms. Taylor, who are grievously and irremediably ill, physically disabled or soon to become so, mentally competent and who wish to have some control over their circumstances at the end of their lives,” Smith writes.

    “The distinction is discriminatory … because it perpetuates disadvantage.”

    I was staggered by that; it’s such good sense, and I thought I would never hear it.

    I want to read the full decision. Legal rulings can be wonderful reading, and I’m told this one is.

  • Some FTB peeps talking about TAM

    Here’s what I was doing for the last couple of hours.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_OsT7frPg

  • Canada’s laws against assisted suicide ruled unconstitutional

    Justice Lynn Smith Smith ruled the law against assisted suicide denies physically disabled people the same rights as able-bodied people who can take their own lives.

  • Nevers, France: parents sentenced for FGM

    The mother got 18 months in prison, the father two years, for the genital mutilation of their four daughters. [story in French]

  • It’s Sunday

    It’s Sunday, Boko Haram bombs in Nigeria day, so there have been bombs going off in Nigeria today (because it’s Sunday). Boko Haram keeps its appointments.

    Multiple blasts have hit at least three churches in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna.

    A local Red Cross worker told the Associated Press that at least 12 people had been killed and 80 injured in the attacks.

    A decent haul. They could do better, but 12 + 80 is respectable.

    Meanwhile, Urooj Zia reports via Twitter that there’s a mob attacking a police station right now in Karachi, trying to kill a man accused of “blasphemy” who is being held there. Taimuria police station.

    A couple of days ago another mob in Quetta, trying to kill another man accused of “blasphemy,” killed at least three people.

    At least three people were killed and several others injured as protesters went on a rampage over an alleged desecration of the Holy Quran in Kuchlak area of Balochistan on Saturday. A large number of protesters set a police station and five vehicles on fire as news of desecration of the Holy Quran spread in the area. Police have arrested a suspect who was reported to be “mentally retarded”, administration official Qambar Dashti said.

    Allah is wise, merciful.

  • UK: Helen Duncan was convicted as a witch in 1944

    She was tried by jury at the Old Bailey and found guilty of contravening section 4 of the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

  • The princess and the MCB

    A religion allows men to have multiple wives. What could possibly go wrong?

    When Dr Zabina Shahian married Pervez Choudhry she thought he would be the man with whom she would settle down for the rest of her life and start a family.

    But she did not know the former Conservative party leader on Slough Borough Council was still married.

    Choudhry, 54, who claimed he did not realise the marriage in Pakistan was legally valid in the UK, was given a community order after admitting bigamy.

    A “devastated” Dr Shahian now wants to help other women who are victims of polygamous marriages – a practice a leading family lawyer says is “rife” within the British Muslim community.

    Jeez, what a princess. What’s her problem? Just because he gets two and she gets half? He’s a man. Men need more. More what? More everything. More sex, more rights, more freedom, more power, more ability to tell women to cover up and shut up. The prophet said so.

    Dr Shahian, who did not want her picture published, realises she was lucky, as a career woman, to have been able to afford the detective fees and also to have support from her family to go through with the prosecution.

    However she said some members of her local South Asian Muslim community were less understanding.

    “When I go down to my parents I get all the neighbours looking at me. As a Muslim woman I’m supposed to keep a low profile. I feel like I’ve committed a crime here although I’m the victim. You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut and you’re supposed to just carry on. It is impregnated into our culture.”

    Princess. Feminazi. Westernized spoiled demanding princessy biatch.

    But combating a cultural pressure on some Muslim women is difficult, says Dr Siddiqui. Polygamy “is so widely spread they don’t blame men having a second wife or a third or fourth wife,” he said. “They accept this is their lot.”

    Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain and who is an imam, said in the Koran it stated men were allowed to take more than one wife, but only under strict rules that included obtaining consent from the first wife and treating all wives equally and fairly.

    He did not think there were many polygamous marriages in the UK but “condemned” the actions of men who flout the polygamy rules. He also described as “sad” the “cultural pressures” that prevent women standing up for justice. “Whatever cultural norms there may be, what Islam does not allow is the mistreatment of women, full stop.”

    Why does the BBC think it has to consult the MCB? Why does it act as a conduit for their bullshit?

     

  • Polygamy in Islam: the women victims of multiple marriage

    “You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut and you’re supposed to just carry on. It is impregnated into our culture.”

  • It’s Sunday so Boko Haram set off bombs in Nigeria

    A local Red Cross worker told the Associated Press that at least 12 people had been killed and 80 injured in the attacks.

  • Y U dispute shoddy science?

    The Heritage Foundation is baffled by criticism of its flawed “same-sex parenting” study.

  • Udo Schuklenk on the tortured logic of anti-cartoon laws

    The trouble with religious freedom is that it is all too frequently misunderstood as the unrestricted freedom of the religious to run roughshod over everyone else.

  • This thing is different from the other

    What is “dogmatic feminism”? It turns out it’s not dogmatic at all, it’s stating things in strong terms. Well it’s too bad that Becky called it dogmatism then, because that’s a different thing, and much more blameworthy than stating things in strong terms.

    A comment on Bad analogies are bad pointed out another strange claim of Becky’s, and I belatedly got curious enough to take a look.

    Becky’s claim:

    In Stephanie’s post addressing our episode, you in three words reveal your tacit agreement with one of the most egregious characterizations of atheist men I’ve seen condensed into one paragraph (the 5th, if you’re following the links), bolstering an us-versus-them mentality.

    The “one of the most egregious characterizations of atheist men” she’s seen in one para is in comment 91 on Stephanie’s post, by Jacqueline S Homan of godless feminist. Para 5 says:

    Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how many “rational” men who are “reasonable” resort to evo psych — the last refuge of scoundrels, a load of bullshit cooked up by professional bullshit chefs — in order to justify oppressing women and keeping the atheist community a privileged white ol’ boys’ club, where the only women that are welcome are women who don’t challenge men’s use of their unearned male privilege as a cudgel to beat women down and silence us.

    But I “in three words” reveal no tacit agreement with that at all – my three words have nothing to do with that paragraph. I quoted a different paragraph – the second, not the fifth, and added my three words. That’s comment 97.

    When the whole Elevatorgate thing erupted, what really bothered me the most was not the initial incident (although that was uncool), but the vicious misogyny and the threats of sexualized violence aimed at Rebecca Watson in response to her very reasonable request that guys not corner women in elevators. This same kind of vitriol was also hurled at Greta Christina.

    And at me.

    See? Nothing to do with para 5. Becky says my quoting a different paragraph and saying that the same kind of vitriol was hurled at me reveals my tacit agreement with a different paragraph. What an idiotic claim. There’s nothing else I can say about it, and I’m bored with this anyway. But really – it’s idiotic. Quoting one passage is not tacit agreement with a different passage. Pretending it is is just a silly gotcha move. That’s how flimsy her “case” is, yet they squandered two hours of talk and a blog post on it, all for the sake of gaining a bunch of ERVites hurling more vitriol at me.

     

     

  • Jen dances all night

    I forgot to say!

    Jen is doing her annual SSA blogathon  – not the wimpy 6 hours I did but the big kahuna: twenty.four.hours.

    You know why the SSA is a great thing and needs your support.

    Donate to the Secular Student Alliance here.

  • Naming the problem

    I keep meaning (and wanting) to get back to more usual subjects – violence against women, persecution of “blasphemers,” bishops telling everyone what to do – but more shrapnel keeps coming in, so I keep reporting on it.

    I could do the other thing. I could ignore it. I could skirt around it, leaving names out.

    But I don’t think that’s the way to deal with bullying. There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately, with regard to the bullying of gays, atheists, women – lots of Others – and there’s a pretty strong consensus that advice to “ignore it” just lets it go on. It’s not Buddhist or Tolstoyan or pacifist, it’s lazy and callous and status quo-protecting.

    So fuck that. I’m being subjected to systematic bullying, as are other women who are talking about this, and no I’m not going to smile politely and ignore it.

    So I’m sorry about the interruption and the monotony, but there it is. There’s a grotesque awkward situation here and it’s not my job to try to smoothe away the awkwardness by pretending it isn’t happening.

  • Squicked again

    Oh good – this just in – another “bitchez need to stfu about all this sexual harassment shit” announcement, from a Dr Marty Klein.

    He cleaned up the facts about the harassment to improve his case though. That’s naughty, Dr Marty Klein.

    I recently attended the national conference of a large progressive organization. It was well-organized, stimulating, and fun. The people were mostly energetic, interesting, and friendly; it was a good mix of ages, sexual orientations, and divided almost 50/50 male-female.

    I was eventually asked, as a sex therapist, what I thought about Sexual Harassment. Apparently a couple at last year’s conference had gotten friendly with a particular woman in her mid-30s. Eventually “Mary & John” handed the woman their card—suggesting quite clearly that they were “open” to “adult activities.”

    The woman didn’t want to share this kind of fun, which is perfectly fine. But she was somehow “offended,” which is not.

    See where he got the facts wrong? The couple did not “get friendly” with Elyse during the conference, at least not according to her account.

    Then, at the very end, when everyone was preparing to leave, and I was packing up the Hug Me table, answering questions, and generally socializing with other speakers and attendees, thinking about how fat my check is going to be from Big Pharma when one man and his wife, whom I’ve become vaguely acquainted with on Facebook in the last week, approached my table. He said, “Here’s a little something to remember us by” and handed me an upside-down card. I turned it halfway over, glanced at it peripherally, then thanked them.

    A minute or so later, I had a “wait… what?” moment, then flipped the card over and looked at it not peripherally to discover I had not been handed a business card, but a card with a naked photo of the two of them, with their information on how to contact them should I want to fuck.

    See? That’s different, isn’t it. They didn’t get friendly with her and then “eventually” hand her their card. They came up to her at the very end of the conference, handed her the card face down, and split.

    Is it fine for her to be “somehow ‘offended’” at that? What a fucking stupid question. How fucking stupid and unpleasant of this Dr Marty Klein to change Elyse’s account of the incident and then announce that it’s not fine for her to be “offended” in scare quotes – it’s not fine for her to be offended by two total strangers – apart from vague acquaintance on Facebook – sneaking her a card of them naked inviting her to contact them if she wanted to fuck, and then running off.

    The name of his blog is Sexual Intelligence. That’s sexual intelligence?

    The woman didn’t want to share this kind of fun, which is perfectly fine. But she was somehow “offended,” which is not. In fact, the woman felt that this invitation constituted Sexual Harassment, and she complained. Even worse, this previously loyal movement member then blogged and blogged and blogged about it, urging her female readers to stay away from the organization. Now the word is out to younger progressive women—don’t go to this group’s conferences.

    Unless you want strangers slipping you an invitation to fuck and then running away. If you do, by all means go to this group’s conferences! But no, that’s not good enough for Dr Marty Klein – it has to be forbidden for people to blog about such jolly incidents, because to blog about it is disloyal. (And as for blogging and blogging and blogging – there are no words to describe such treason.)

    So what did that young woman experience? Not Sexual Harassment, but Unwanted Sexual Attention. And when the woman made it clear it was unwanted, the attention went away. That should have been the end of the story. But if the recipient of a friendly, non-pressuring, non-institutional sexual invitation isn’t grown up enough, she (or he) will feel assaulted. And with today’s heightened consciousness—and internet access—she will have the option of describing herself as victimized to a large number of people.

    No, the attention went away before she registered what it was. One could see that as considerate tact, or one could see it as creepy. I think it’s creepy. But in any case – some people (at least, some women) really don’t want to be the recipient even of a friendly, non-pressuring, non-institutional sexual invitation from complete strangers in a work situation. Not as a card with naked people having sex on it, not as a 4 a.m. invitation for coffee in a hotel room. Some crazy women just really want to be able to go places without being asked for sex. Dr Marty Klein apparently thinks that’s nuts. What a creep.

  • I did not compare TAM to Nazi Germany

    I sent Travis Roy a message on Facebook. (He’s not a friend, but you can send messages to people who aren’t friends. That’s convenient sometimes.) He’s the guy who announced on that “Great Penis Debate” that I compared TAM to Nazi Germany, which is not true. I asked him where he got that piece of misinformation.

    The only place I’ve seen it via Google is on a stupid wiki set up by ERV people (and places they’ve dropped it lately, such as Ask an Atheist). I’m curious about how much success they’re having in spreading malicious falsehoods.

    Maybe for my TAM talk I’ll just say “I did not compare TAM to Nazi Germany” as many times as I can in the time allotted.

  • Tomorrow, raise a glass to the Exes

    And when I say “tomorrow” of course I mean “a week from tomorrow.” Because I was rushing, and got it wrong.

    The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain are having a 5th anniversary celebration and fundraiser tomorrow Saturday June 23 in London. If you’re in or near London, go along and give them bales of money tied loosely with twine.

    Book your tickets today and join 5th anniversary celebrations

    Join us to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain on Saturday 23 June 2012 from 13.00-16.00hours in London. Book your tickets today. Speakers and acts include: Renowned Philosopher AC Grayling Writer and Documentary-maker Gita Sahgal Comedian Kate Smurthwaite Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss and Best-selling Author of A Universe From Nothing DV8 Physical Theatre Director Lloyd Newson with a clip from Can we Talk about This? CEMB Founder and Campaigner Maryam Namazie Magician Neil Edwards Singer and Songwriter Shelley Segal