Credit where it’s due: way to go Chris Stedman. He has a post at CNN’s religion blog – CNN! lots of eyeballs! – saying Kyrsten Sinema shouldn’t treat the word “atheist” as a contaminant.

Seriously, way to go!

Preamble: Synema’s a None, and some have called her a nonbeliever or atheist. But…

Sinema doesn’t actually appear to be a nonbeliever. In response to news stories identifying her as an atheist, her campaign released this statement shortly after her victory: “(Rep. Sinema) believes the terms non-theist, atheist or non-believer are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character.”

As a nontheist, atheist and nonbeliever (take your pick), I find this statement deeply problematic.

It is perfectly fine, of course, if Sinema isn’t a nontheist, and it is understandable that she would want to clarify misinformation about her personal beliefs. But to say that these terms are “not befitting of her life’s work or personal character” is offensive because it implies there is something unbefitting about the lives and characters of atheists or nonbelievers.

Why yes it is and yes it does, but I wouldn’t have expected Stedman to say so. I like having my expectations overturned. (Well, sometimes. Some expectations. Others not so much.)

Prominent individuals like Powell rightfully decry anti-Muslim fear-mongering in politics, but few speak out against those who wield accusations of atheism as a political weapon.

Whether people don’t see it or simply aren’t bothered isn’t clear, but it remains a problem.

I respect Sinema’s right to self-identify as she chooses, and I don’t wish to speculate about her religious beliefs. But while I celebrate that she is comfortable enough to openly identify as bisexual, I find her response to being labeled an atheist troubling.

Why not instead say that she’s not an atheist, but so what if she was?

The 113th Congress is rich with diversity. As an interfaith activist, I am glad to see the religious composition of Congress more closely reflect the diversity of America. As a queer person, I’m glad that LGBT Americans are seeing greater representation in Washington.

But as a proud atheist and humanist, I’m disheartened that the only member of Congress who openly identifies as nonreligious has forcefully distanced herself from atheism in a way that puts down those of us who do not believe in God.

We are Americans of good character, too.

Yeah!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Washington Post tells us there are some eccentric petitions on the White House’s petition site. That’s not really very surprising.

There’s a petition to designate the Catholic church a hate group. Yes well that’s not going to happen, but the idea itself isn’t crazy. The Catholic church does foster certain kinds of hatred. It’s silly to deny that.

The “We the People” petition was filed on Christmas Day and was prompted by Pope Benedict XVI’s Dec. 21 year-end address to Vatican administrators in which he denounced gay marriage as a threat to Western civilization.

The petition blasts Benedict for “hateful language and discriminatory remarks” and for implying “that gay families are sub-human.”

Well? Is that inaccurate?

Atheists and secularists could file a similar petition. What about Protestants? Muslims? Jains? Would that fly, or has the pope’s interfaith work immunized him?

I don’t know. I merely watch from the sidelines.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I went to the Monarch Grove this afternoon. That’s the little grove in (brace yourself for another “grove”) Pacific Grove, very near Point Pinos and the lighthouse, where migrating Monarch butterflies gather for a rest on the trip. It’s very cool.

They’ve moved to the other side of the path. They used to clump in some trees on the south side of the path, but now they clump in a Monterey Pine on the north side.

After looking at them there through the binoculars for awhile I took the docent’s advice and went down the little hill where she said they were fluttering around, and so they were, as well as perching singly on pine trees and a bottle brush tree.

They’re butterflies. Butterflies. Fragile as kleenex, and they fly thousands of miles.

Wonderful life.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It turns out the gangrape of Jyoti Singh Pandey was as much her fault as it was the rapists’. A self-declared “spiritual guru” called Asaram Bapu says so.

Addressing his followers recently, Asaram said that when the girl encountered six drunk men “she should have taken God’s name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said I consider you as my brother and should have said to the other two ‘Brother I am helpless, you are my brother, my religious brother.’

She should have taken God’s name and held their hands and feet…then the misconduct wouldn’t have happened.”

Because with genuine rape, the body has a mechanism to shut that whole thing down. Because if you call on “God” and call your rapists “brothers” then the rapists will stop. Period. That’s a fact, and there are no exceptions. Also, it’s a fact that all women know, with certainty, so any woman who is raped clearly wanted to be raped (or she would have done the things she knows with certainty will prevent the rape). So there’s no such thing as rape.

Jyoti Singh Pandey’s father made her name public yesterday.

Badri now cherishes the memories of his daughter. He remembers her dream of being a doctor.

He said: “I told her I can’t afford to pay for her to do such subjects but she was determined. She wanted to be a doctor and earn lots of money and go overseas a lot.”

When Badri first moved to Delhi in 1983 he earned just 150 Rupees a month – the equivalent of £1.70 today.

But he sold some land to pay for his daughter’s studies and saved as much as possible from his 5,700 Rupees (£65) a month he now earns.

Badri said: “It’s hard living in Delhi on my wages, very hard. But Jyoti always said she would change all of that. She wanted to change our lives once she got a job.”

Jyoti had only just finished her four-year course in physiotherapy at college outside Delhi. She was doing an internship when she was attacked.

That’s the end of that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sixteen years ago, in India, there was an extended gang-rape…by 42 men, to be exact, over a period of 40 days.

In the Suryanelli case, a 16-year-old was abducted by a bus conductor who raped her, then passed her onto others, some of who were powerful and well-connected in Kerala at the time.

She was then discarded with no money and in no condition to return home – she couldn’t sit or stand because of her injuries.

And then?

35 people accused of raping her were convicted. But the Kerala High Court, three years later, reversed that decision, holding only one person guilty. The grounds for this verdict were criticised by many people.

Her family and the state prosecutor both appealed to the Supreme Court in 2005 against the High Court’s verdict. Nothing happened after that.

The family survives on her parents’ pensions. The victim was given a job as a peon in a government department but in February, she was arrested and suspended for financial misappropriation.

Now the Supreme Court has decided to hear her case.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oy. I saw some of this on Twitter yesterday, but was too disgusted and short on time to say anything about it beyond Twitter. But Stephanie said anything, and said it damn well.

Summary: Greta bought a pair of dress shoes for professional occasions. Can you guess what came next?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Update: I changed the title. It was meant as angry irony, but – well I can see why it didn’t work.

And in Uttar Pradesh – a teenage girl resists “eve teasing” and the guy who was “eve teasing” her, i.e. demanding sex from her, throws kerosene on her and sets her on fire.

She died.

The girl, who suffered nearly 90 per cent burns, was rushed to the District Hospital and later she was referred to Aligarh Medical College for better treatment.

Mourning the death, the girl’s father said that the police had not taken action against the culprit who had used his influence to harass his daughter.

“I had complained to the police. If they had acted then, my daughter would not have had to suffer so much pain. I am a weak man, and the culprit is powerful. Also, I am a poor man, and my tea stall is all I have to sustain my children with,” said the victim’s father.

“Teasing” is not the right word.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The barmaid asks Mo a crucial question.

And wham, he falls into her trap.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A very wise guy said on Twitter a few hours ago -

The desire to carve up the world into people-like-us (righteous) and people-like-them (unrighteous) is utterly pervasive. Nobody escapes it.

Yes. (Or almost yes. I wonder if it holds for psychopaths? They simply don’t care about righteous/unrighteous, so they wouldn’t carve up the world that way, would they? For them it’s just Self and everything else.) Yes, but – that desire isn’t always salient. It’s far from always salient. It depends.

It’s a bit like that shift I mentioned the other day, about walking the Pebble Beach golf course – from a distance I think of everyone as caricature Plutocrats, because after all – it’s Pebble Beach. It costs $500 to play a round on that course. But then someone stops to greet Cooper and talks about his Chocolate at home, and poof goes the caricature Plutocrat. Life is like that. We have little shifts like that all the time. If that guy had stopped to tell me what he thought of Obama, the “people-like-us (righteous) and people-like-them (unrighteous)” carvation would have come into play. If he’d stopped to ask me if I’d found Jesus, it would have come into play more sharply. If he’d stopped to tell me I’m a fucking feminist cunt, it would have come into play more sharply still.

The very wise guy who made the Twitter observation is a dedicated FTB hater, and the very wise tweet came immediately after one citing Richard Carrier, so that was pretty clearly another “you FTBullies are just as horrible as everyone else” snipe. Well it’s not quite that simple.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The NY Times has an editorial on abuse in religious groups.

 the truth is, there are not two kinds of religions — the enlightened and the medieval. Every religion has evildoers stalking its corridors. They just survive, and thrive, with different strategies.

Take Zen Buddhism, the paragon of open, nonhierarchical spirituality. Anyone may practice Zen meditation; you do not have to convert, be baptized or renounce your old religion. Yet leaders of major Zen centers in Los Angeles and New York have recently been accused, on strong evidence, of exploiting followers for sex. This weekend, Zen teachers ordained by Joshu Sasaki, the semiretired abbot of the Rinzai-ji Zen Center in Los Angeles, are holding a retreat to discuss sexual harassment accusations against Mr. Sasaki. The Zen Studies Society, in New York, is under new leadership after its longtime abbot, Eido Shimano, was forced out after he was accused of inappropriate sexual liaisons with students and other women.

Paul Karsten, a board member of the Rinzai-ji Zen Center, said the intense relationship between Zen teacher and student can be trouble. For example, in private meetings, some teachers touch students. The touching is never supposed to be sexual, but there can be misunderstandings, or outright abuse.

It’s like therapy in that way – an intense but hierarchical one-on-one relationship. It’s no big surprise that the priest/teacher/shaman/therapist can parlay that into sex. Priests and teachers get to be seen as special, wise, “spiritual,” enlightened – they don’t get rich but they do get admiration. No doubt to some it would seem just plain wasteful not to leverage it for sex.

That is everyone else, not just religious people. The Satmar Hasidim may have wanted to protect a beloved member, the Modern Orthodox administrators probably worried about their community’s reputation — and the Penn State loyalists enabled Jerry Sandusky. Somehow, the victims never seem as important as the rabbi, the Zen master, the coach. In the words of a once-revered rabbi, Norman Lamm, may as well let the perpetrators “go quietly.”

Oh yes I forgot to say coaches.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Carmel beach again this afternoon, but a completely different kind of day – it’s cloudy, and it was very windy there. It was fantastic! Dramatic, and turbulent, and beautiful – also, oddly enough, more conducive to lingering. On a sunny day it actually gets glarey after awhile. No glare today, so I was able to walk all the way north on the beach, where it’s directly below the Pebble Beach golf course. You have the beach, and then these bluffs rising sharply out of it, and on top of the bluffs is the course.

I can see a surfer from here. [looks through binoculars] Gosh, the surfer is using a paddle. I didn’t know they did that. It looks like lousy surf – practically flat.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I’m catching up on the Steubenville (Ohio) rape-and-Twitter-and-football case. It’s not unfamiliar. Years ago I read a shocking but not surprising book about a New Jersey rape case that also involved high school jocks seen as heroes and the girl they raped seen as oh who cares. Our Guys, by Bernard Lefkowitz.

Lefkowitz’s sweeping narrative, informed by more than 200 interviews and six years of research, recreates a murky adolescent world that parents didn’t–or wouldn’t–see: a high school dominated by a band of predatory athletes; a teenage culture where girls were frequently abused and humiliated at sybaritic and destructive parties, and a town that continued to embrace its celebrity athletes–despite the havoc they created–as “our guys.” But that was not only true of Glen Ridge; Lefkowitz found that the unqualified adulation the athletes received in their town was echoed in communities throughout the nation. Glen Ridge was not an aberration. The clash of cultures and values that divided Glen Ridge, Lefkowitz writes, still divides the country.

Steubenville sounds as if it fits the pattern quite neatly. The Steubenville High School football coach didn’t bench the players involved. The Times tried to ask him about that.

Approached in November to be interviewed about the case, Saccoccia said he did not “do the Internet,” so he had not seen the comments and photographs posted online from that night. When asked again about the players involved and why he chose not to discipline them, he became agitated.

“You made me mad now,” he said, throwing in several expletives as he walked from the high school to his car.

Nearly nose to nose with a reporter, he growled: “You’re going to get yours. And if you don’t get yours, somebody close to you will.”

Because football.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

India has other horrible rapes. (As does the US. I’m not claiming any national superiority here.)

On most days, Indian newspapers report shocking new atrocities – a 10-month-old raped by a neighbour in Delhi; an 18-month-old raped and abandoned on the
streets in Calcutta; a 14-year-old raped and murdered in a police station in
Uttar Pradesh; a husband facilitating his own wife’s gang rape in Howrah…

One of the most painful and lingering cases is that of the Mumbai nurse Aruna Shanbaug.

Sodomised by a cleaner in the hospital where she worked, the 25-year-old was strangled with metal chains and left to die by her attacker, Sohanlal Bharta Walmiki, on 27 November 1973.

She was saved and survives, but barely so. For the past 39 years she has been lying in a hospital bed in a vegetative state, brain dead, unable to recognise anyone, unable to speak, unable to perform even the most basic of tasks.

…

Violence against women is deeply entrenched in the feudal, patriarchal Indian society, where for the rapist, every woman is fair game.

Ah ah ah – you’re not allowed to use the word “patriarchal.” There is no such thing. There are only women who fail to take proper precautions.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Cooper and I walked (part of) the Pebble Beach course today. We walked a bigger part of it on Tuesday. It wasn’t as gorgeous today because it’s a little hazy, so the hills just southeast of Carmel were a bit blurry and flat as opposed to sharp and full of depth and detail as they were on Tuesday. But it was fun anyway. It’s on bluffs overlooking the ocean and Carmel Bay, so it’s a pretty dazzling place for a stroll, even with all the pesky people messing around with sticks and balls and buzzy little carts.

Actually the people are rather nice though. I always expect them to be parody millionaires, sniffing out my alien nature and ordering me to leave, but instead they get all googly over Cooper.

Cooper’s a fortunate dog, safe at home dropping sand on the carpet. Other dogs are not so lucky. As we were driving the bit of 17 Mile Drive between the lodge and the visitors’ entrance (where the trick is to turn left into an obscure parking lot next to the tennis courts, impossible to find unless you know about it, which places you at the most scenic part of the course) – the car ahead stopped for no apparent reason, then I saw that a car in front of that was stopped and the driver was getting out, then I saw a little red-brown terrier racing up the road as that driver tried to catch it. The driver in front of me jumped out and tried but the terrier raced away, I was too slow to jump out and instead tried to get Cooper to quit barking, the driver behind me jumped out and tried, and the terrier raced away and off the road in the direction of the course. Oh dear. Nothing to be done, so we all resumed driving, and Cooper and I did our walk and on the return leg as we were approaching the clubhouse next to the beach there was a woman far across the lawn calling, “Gracie! Gracie!” and whistling. Uh oh, I thought, I wonder if Gracie is a little red-brown terrier. Oh dear. I kept my eye on the woman so that I could ask her, and tell her what I knew, and as we converged she called, “Have you seen a little Yorkie?” making a Yorkie-size with her hands.

Gracie’s human left the car window open a little – so that Gracie wouldn’t overheat, for crying out loud – and foolish Gracie jumped out. Oh dear. The clubhouse is quite far from the place on the road where I’d seen Gracie, and it was about 45 minutes later. The woman works there. I’ll never know if Gracie got found.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Michael DeDora reports one bit of good news.

In a landmark move welcomed by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), the United Nations General Assembly has adopted for the first time a resolution calling for a global end to female genital mutilation.

The measure, A/67/450 A/C.3/67/L.21, calls female genital mutilation, or FGM, “an irreparable, irreversible abuse that impacts negatively on the human rights of women and girls” and “a harmful practice that constitutes a serious threat to the health of women and girls.”

Oyyyy. Couldn’t they have just said “damages”? What is this “impacts negatively” crap? I assume people made “impact” into a verb to save time/words in the first place, but now we’re always getting “will negatively impact” when we could just have “will damage,” so clearly the laudable stab at efficiency has backfired, and clarity has been negatively impacted at the same time.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was the the UN has called for an end to FGM, and that’s good.

The measure’s approval certainly sends a strong political message to governments, as well as one of hope to millions of women and girls. However, as noted by UN Women Assistant-Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director John Hendra, it is now extremely important that the UN and its member states work to implement and support the ideas outlined in the resolution.

“This is a very important step to bringing about cultural and attitudinal change,” said Hendra. “Just as important though, is working on the ground with governments, communities and other partners to end FGM. … while efforts to criminalize FGM are vital, they need to be backed up with services for victims, engaging key influencers and supporting community-based activities to change social norms, as well as practical actions to bring perpetrators to justice.”

No faffing around with re-naming it “cutting” or “surgery,” I’m pleased to see.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)