Author: Ophelia Benson

Lots of girls calling for help.

Hundreds of children fearing for their lives have called a new national helpline set up to assist victims of forced marriages since its launch four months ago…Many are seeking ways to escape parents and family members who are trying to force them into unwanted marriages. Others have said they fear becoming victims of so-called “honour killings”, because of social and sexual behaviour that their community disapproves of.

A small but nevertheless significant point – if a ‘community’ disapproves of various forms of innocuous social and sexual behaviour enough to motivate killing the people who engage in it, then that ‘community’ is not ‘their community,’ and it’s misleading to call it that. It sounds cozy and loving and protective and, you know, communal, in a good way. But it isn’t any of that, is it – not if it’s so controlling and so puritanical that it prompts some people to murder female relatives. So newspapers should stop calling it that. They should say something blunter and more neutral – their neighbours disapprove of, their co-religionists disapprove of, their parents’ friends disapprove of; something like that.

Run by the refuge charity Karma Nirvana and initially funded by the Government’s Forced Marriage Unit, the network is staffed by survivors of forced marriages who help find refuges for women who predominantly hail from Britain’s south Asian and Middle Eastern communities. According to Jasvinder Sanghera, who was disowned by her family for refusing a forced marriage and went on to set up Karma Nirvana, the youngest caller to the new helpline was 13. “We have to move away from thinking that forced marriages and honour-based violence only affect a few people,” she said. “These numbers will be just the tip of the iceberg.”…When asked to name who was responsible for violence against them, just 13 per cent of victims mentioned husbands, while 71 per cent blamed immediate family. “For me this is one of the most shocking, but insightful statistics,” said Ms Sanghera. “It shows how violence is being perpetrated by the entire community, not just abusive husbands. That’s why it is so hard to tackle and so difficult for people to escape.”

It’s the entire community, and not ‘their’ community; more like their jailer. If it were really ‘their’ community they wouldn’t need to escape.

Hey it’s late September – yet again I’ve forgotten to say Happy Birthday B&W until weeks after the date. Well happy birthday B&W – it’s six years old. More than that, since I’m late. Staggering, isn’t it? Still here after all this time.

Go CFI, go IHEU.

Mr President, integrating the human rights of women throughout the United Nations system must start here in the Human Rights Council. No State should be permitted to hide behind tradition, culture or religion in order to justify any abuse of women’s human rights. This Council is the World’s primary institution charged with the promotion and protection of human rights, and has a sacred duty to fulfil. It must be possible here to freely exercise the right to freedom of expression in order to defend the human rights of all, including women, and to expose abuse, whatever the attempted justification.

Including women indeed; women most of all, since we’re the ones whose rights get snatched away and trampled in the dust by the religious bullies.

But of course Roy Brown wasn’t allowed to get away with it completely unopposed.

Later, a Pakistani delegate stopped Brown on the way to lunch to complain that he had “told only half of the truth” because honour killings were outlawed in Pakistan and that the police had arrested several people in connection with the two barbaric killings we had mentioned. Furthermore, the marriage of young girls was not on the increase in Saudi Arabia as we had claimed.

Too bad the Pakistani delegate is more worried about Roy Brown than about murders of women and child marriage in Pakistan.

Steven Weinberg on living without God.

Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali argued against the very idea of laws of nature, on the grounds that any such law would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smolder because of the heat of the flame, but because God wants it to darken and smolder.

Not a very curiosity-inspiring way to think about things. Whatever happens happens because God wants it to. Ho hum. What’s for dinner?

I do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications—it’s still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.

Quite. This is what all the futile squabbles about what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible miss: it doesn’t matter what is or isn’t in the Koran or the Bible, all that matters is whether the rule in question is good or (as is all too often the case) jaw-droppingly horrible. If it’s the latter, then don’t obey it; that’s all.

Well I’ve been thinking (and murmuring, much of the time) that this all seemed rather hasty and unconsidered and likely to end in tears. It’s all very well, but writing someone a check for $700 billion to do as he likes with is really a little bit extravagant, when you think about it. I understand that he says the situation is urgent, but all the same, this business of shouting ‘hurry up, right now, there’s no time to lose, don’t stand there talking about it and thinking about the consequences and asking foolish questions and wondering if it will work, we’re in a crisis here, give me the 700 billion dollars right now!’ looks unpleasantly like…a rather bumptious way of bouncing legislators into throwing away a very very very large sum of money. Paul Krugman thinks much the same.

Some are saying that we should simply trust Mr. Paulson, because he’s a smart guy who knows what he’s doing. But that’s only half true: he is a smart guy, but what, exactly, in the experience of the past year and a half — a period during which Mr. Paulson repeatedly declared the financial crisis “contained,” and then offered a series of unsuccessful fixes — justifies the belief that he knows what he’s doing?

Hmmmmmm. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. No, on second thought, it isn’t.

[T]he financial system will still be crippled by inadequate capital…unless the federal government hugely overpays for the assets it buys, giving financial firms — and their stockholders and executives — a giant windfall at taxpayer expense.

And one of the tweaks that some legislators want to make is to provide help for people who can’t pay their mortgages – by for instance arranging ‘work-outs’ so that they get lower mortgage rates – say 5%. But the trouble with that is – what about all the people who can pay their mortgages (though not easily)? They would like to pay 5% too, presumably; why is it only people who took on too much debt who get to have cheap mortgages? What about people who don’t have mortgages at all, but rent their living space? What do they get? Bupkis. This seems perverse to me. I believe in subsidized housing, but I don’t believe in subsidized mortgages, and I don’t quite see why anyone does. Why stop there? Why not give tax money to people who can’t make their car payments? In a little over your head with that new SUV? Well here, we’ll just slash the interest rate, courtesy of the taxpayer. Feel better?

We can’t have national health insurance, because we just can’t, that’s all, but we can have national mortgage insurance, along with tax benefits for mortgages. Why?

if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place…But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

Why indeed?