If you haven’t already, sign the petition to Karzai to save Afghan women’s shelters.

UN analyst Una Moore explains why.

Conservative politicians and media personalities have long railed against Afghanistan’s few women’s shelters and demanded that the facilities be closed. Two years ago, the government appointed a hard-line mullah to lead a commission to investigate shelters and recommend reforms…

Now, the shelter commission’s verdict is in. The government will seize all women’s shelters countrywide and place them under the control of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the police. Women and girls seeking protection will have to plead their cases before an admissions panel of government employees and undergo medically dubious “examinations” to prove they are not guilty of

When is it ok to decline to hire a particular person for a scientific job and hire someone else instead? James Hannam says not when the particular person in question is a creationist. For why? For because that is a religious belief, and it is the particular person’s right to have a religious belief and that right is trampled on when someone else is given the job as director of the student observatory at the University of Kentucky. Martin Gaskell was the best guy for the job as any fule kno and so it was no fair to give that job to someone else.

[T]he mere fact he was sympathetic towards creationists and kept an open mind about evolution appears

Jen at Blag Hag is attempting to clarify a few points about sexism and also hoping the drama will die now. I haven’t read all the relevant documents, but the gist of it is that there was a panel at a regional atheist meeting at which a woman objected to a bit of debatably sexist vocabulary and then all hell broke loose.

There’s a video of the relevant part of the panel, and I broke down and watched it this morning.

Here’s the thing. I can see that it’s not a slam-dunk that the word “female” is necessarily sexist…but by god that panel was sexist. It was sexist from the beginning (the beginning of that video, at least). It … Read the rest