Barry Duke at The Freethinker tells us:

Iain Lee has lost his job as a presenter for BBC Three Counties radio after calling an anti-gay Christian group representative ‘a bigot’ during a debate on homophobia.

Lee made the comments to Libby Powell, a lawyer for the Christian Legal Centre, who was appearing on breakfast show to defend homophobic Pentecostal preacher Barry Trayhorn who had read out verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality during a service at a prison.

The presenter described the passages, and Libby’s belief in them, as “homophobic” and “bigoted” during a heated debate.

He asked her “Do you support bigotry?” and, when Libby defended her stance, said:

You’ve chosen not to question it, because you’re a bigot.

So the BBC doesn’t want him presenting things for them any more.

I suppose I can understand why the BBC doesn’t want its presenters calling people names, even names like “bigot”…but even so, I find it a tad sickening.

The on-air row arose from Reverend Barry Trayhorn’s reading of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 6, Verses 9-11 at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire in May 2014.  He was working as a gardener at the prison.

Trayhorn subsequently said he felt “compelled” to resign from his job and brought a case of constructive dismissal.

Ok, so let’s have 1 Corinthians 6:

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men¹⁰ nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

It’s that weirdly impoverished morality again, the same one that’s so striking in the “ten commandments” – nothing about cruelty or torture or rape or abuse or exploitation or violence – it’s all either “vices” or property crimes. It sweats the small stuff while ignoring the large. It is indeed a morality for bigots.

But it doesn’t do to say so.

Update: The SOAS SU Twitter account says it’s not true, and they’ll investigate tomorrow to find out where the story came from.

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 40 minutes ago
There was no vote to no-platform @monaeltahawy, we are not sure where this story came from.

Ophelia Benson ‏@OpheliaBenson 23 minutes ago
@soassu @monaeltahawy Nor a vote that she not be allowed to give a talk, but a panel instead?

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 18 minutes ago
@OpheliaBenson @monaeltahawy no, no vote.

Will investigate further tomorrow where this story came from to see what has happened.

So, good.

Original post:

In the You have got to be kidding department –

Mona Eltahawy tweets that the SOAS Student Union has voted not to let her speak.

Mona Eltahawy ‏@monaeltahawy 5 hours ago
And I just found out that SOAS student union voted to not let me speak at invitation of some students. Union insisted on panel & not me alone

Mona Eltahawy! Who had her arms broken by the Egyptian police during a Tahrir Square demo. What do they think she is, an agent of imperialism?

Apparently, some students don’t like my views. This is brilliant! I was getting worried why I wasn’t being prevented from speaking at UK uni’s.

We’re literally about to take off but I had to share this SOAS nonsense &say while I’m glad my views upset some,what a shame they’re scared.

The student who invited me – a feminist – is understandably angry & upset. More when I land.

I’m pretty pissed off myself.

Originally a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject again.

It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that any recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or boys/men) and they do not feel the sort of dysphoria that would lead them to identify as trans.

In other words, there are in reality multiple senses in which someone can be a woman, of which the most common – sense 1 – is being a person born with a female body and not being trans; one much less common – sense 2 – is being a person born with a male body but being trans and identifying as a woman. Workable trans advocacy is based on advocating that senses 1 and 2 be treated as equivalent for most purposes, and that people who are women in senses 1 or 2 have equal human worth. Unworkable trans advocacy, e.g. the sort of thing that got Ophelia hounded off FtB for thinking, seems to rely on denying sense 1 entirely and insisting that all women are women because they identify as women. To me this seems like advocating for gay rights by claiming that everybody is straight.

This feeds over in several odd directions, one in particular being the claim that if a person is female in the identity sense, then their body is female, tout court, as being the body of a female person. This of course relies on ignoring that there’s a sense of male/female for bodies (bluntly, having tab A or slot B) which doesn’t have to map onto the sense of male/female for persons. This seems like a deliberately or unconsciously Orwellian move to disable the language – and it ignores the way languages work anyway. The word “head” has different senses as applied to a human body, a geographical feature (Beachy Head), a sexual act, a pint of beer, an organisation, or a steam engine, but this doesn’t cause any actual difficulties; yet the word “female” apparently cannot be permitted any such polysemy.

Amy Poehler has a thing I didn’t know about, called Smart Girls. As part of that, she has this highly appealing video in which two women – who say they are each other’s fiancées – explain about female bodies, starting with menstruation. I wish I could be besties with both of them. Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, they’re called.

Good, right? Great idea?

Most commenters on the Facebook post about it think so, but there’s an exception.

Hey Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. I think you are doing a great job empowering cisgender girls–but that’s about where it stops. All kids with vaginas, breasts, or any of the parts that you refer to as “the female bod,” deserve to be empowered and well educated about their bodies.

Bodies are not as simple as “female” and “male” and neither is gender. And it is harmful to teach children (especially girls) that they are a sum of their genitals. (i.e. that a certain genital configuration=female. that is outdated and hurtful)

This post equates womanhood with vagina– and that is very hurtful to trans girls. It is also hurtful to intersex kids, trans boys, and nonbinary trans kids. Body parts and gender are both spectrums.

I think you do a great amount of work, but I really think you could make a stronger effort to include (rather than isolate and exclude) all kinds of underprivileged genders–girls, trans kids, and intersex kids. These kids deserve to learn about their bodies too.

Same old shit – stop talking about girls, stop telling girls about their bodies.

H/t Jen

George Ongere has a guest post at CFI about Ron Lindsay’s visit to CFI-Kenya. (I was looking forward to seeing George Ongere at the CFI conference last June, but he couldn’t get a visa. Many disappointed people there.)

On November 10 and 11, 2015, CFI President and CEO Ron Lindsay visited CFI–Kenya. Ron’s visit during this time was very important because he was coming to officially launch the Humanist Orphans Center, which is a project of CFI–Kenya, located in the rural of Kisumu County. While launching the center, Ron stressed the importance of education to the growing generation and explained the commitment of the Center for Inquiry to supporting vulnerable children living in disadvantaged areas to make them realize their potential.

Since 2013, through the support from CFI, we have managed to sponsor 11 orphans’ schooling. In this arrangement, we have paid school fees, bought uniforms and books, and helped their guardians to provide some of the children’s basic needs by distributing foodstuffs. We are glad for the continued support from CFI to this particular program that has enabled us to sustain the program.

…

Apart from launching the Humanist Center, Ron also had the opportunity to visit our offices at Varsity Plaza, located inside Maseno University. Thereafter, he met the campus Maseno University group at Kisumu Hotel and gave a powerful presentation about humanism.

Read the whole thing and see the photos of the children and university students.

The Peshmerga took Sinjar back from IS on Friday, but the Sinjar that remains is shattered.

In Sinjar, Islamic State focused more on destruction than governance. In the aftermath of the Sinjar offensive, fresh Islamic State atrocities are coming to light. An officer of the Kurdish regional government forces known as Peshmerga confirmed that a mass grave with tens of bodies was found Saturday near the city, filled mostly with old women and some old men.

Just like the Nazis. The “selection” at Auschwitz and elsewhere was the same way: select out the people who can be fucked or worked or both; kill the old and the very young.

Meanwhile, more than a thousand Yazidi women have been kidnapped, according to the United Nations, and community leaders say many remain Islamic State slaves.

“Our girls are still imprisoned by Daesh,” said Mr. Ali, referring to another name for the terror organization. “They are sold in exchange for a bottle of Pepsi,” he said of dealings among the militants.

Walking vaginas, that’s all they are.

The militants not only killed and terrorized Yazidis, but turned their Sunni Muslim neighbors against them. Some Yazidis said their Sunni neighbors, who they considered friends, looted Yazidi houses and joined Islamic State in killings.

A few Yazidis said neighbors taunted them by text message or phone calls, daring them to return to the city.

Now Yazidis harbor bitter feelings toward Sunni Muslims, whom they accuse of either helping Islamic State or doing nothing to stop the damage.

You can see how that would cause bitter feelings.

An hour’s drive from Sinjar, at the Bajet Kandela refugee camp where at least 10,000 people are packed into tents, the suffering is a daily source of anger directed at Arabs. One of the Yazidi refugees, Barakat Garais, said he won’t forget and he won’t forgive his former Sinjar neighbors.

“Yazidis hate the Arabs for what they’ve done,” said the 35-year-old. “We can’t trust living next to them.”

IS goes on winning even in defeat.

Via Maryam:

Maryam Namazie ‏@MaryamNamazie 24 hours ago
After liberation, a female peshmarga destroys ISIS signboard ordering women to cover themselves with a niqab.

Le Bataclan is a gorgeous building.

Eric Tenin