An archbishop has been reading The Little Golden Book of DNA, and he has derived much wisdom therefrom.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA. “There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA…Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.”

Uh huh. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA – which would explain why there is no such thing as polygamy anywhere on earth: it’s because it just ain’t in our biology, that’s why. We can’t fly, we can’t dig tunnels with our snouts, we can’t hide in cracks in the woodwork, we can’t lick our crotches, we can’t scurry up walls, we can’t decipher olfactory messages left on bushes and trees and bits of grass, we can’t digest bamboo – and we can’t do polygamy. Traditional one-man/one-woman marriage is the only way human adults have been managing sex and reproduction and child-rearing and economy for six million years, so now it’s gotten into our DNA and we’re stuck with it. Ask us to have one man married to two or ten or thirty women, and we all just look at you blankly, puzzled, unable even to figure out what you’re talking about. We can’t process it. It’s not in our moral DNA.

It’s also not in the dictionary that is hard-wired into us. I actually didn’t know that – I learned something new today. I never realized we have our very own dictionary hard-wired in. (But in which language? How does the wirer know which language to use? What if something happens and the kid has to move and then is stuck with a DNA dictionary in the wrong language? Is there a 1-800 number to call, or what?) I never realized that, but now I know, and in that dictionary it defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, and anything else is not marriage, and that’s that. All these funny people who have been calling other things marriage all this time are just wrong, because they don’t know how to consult the dictionary that is hard-wired into us.

Actually…I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t know how either. I guess that’s not suprising, since I didn’t know I had such a dictionary until just now, but the archbish seems to think everyone does know how to consult it, because that’s his point – it’s in our DNA and it’s hard-wired and we can’t change it without messing everything up in a big way, so we must know about it, the same way we know we can’t fly or dig tunnels with our snouts. But I seem to have been behind the door the day that lesson was covered. I don’t know how to consult my wired-in dictionary, and I don’t know how to check what the archbish says.

But I should just take his word for it, you’ll be thinking. Well maybe, but how can we be sure he’s not an impostor? Maybe he’s really a geneticist dressed up as an archbishop. Ah – you didn’t think of that, did you. It pays to be careful.

Jeremy has done a new game for TPM: The Monty Hall Puzzle. He would be grateful if people would give it a test run, and especially grateful if they (you) would tell him if there are any bugs.

I saw a headline at BBC News today – on the Manchester page, so doubtless it reads differently to Mancunians. It read

Tributes to flat stabbing victim

Sorry, no offense to the departed, but you must admit…

Typical of the moral blindness of the Catholic church on the condom issue – the archbishop of Sydney talks a lot of emollient drivel about sexual morality as the putative reason for saying condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse – without ever mentioning the blindingly obvious (to anyone but a moral idiot) that condoms are needed because AIDS transmission involves two people, one of whom can be as sexually faithful as any pope or archbishop could desire and still be infected by the other party. Usually this cashes out to women infected by men. The archbishop talks and talks and talks and talks and never mentions this. It is wicked to fail to mention it.

To blame Catholics and Pope Benedict for the spread of HIV/AIDS requires proof that while people are ignoring the first, essential Christian requirement to be chaste before and within marriage, they are slavishly obedient to a second requirement not to use condoms…Catholic teaching is opposed to adultery, fornication and homosexual intercourse, even with condoms, not because it denies condoms offer health protection, but because traditional Christian moral teaching believes all extra-marital intercourse contradicts the proper meaning of love and sexuality.

But even if one agrees with every word of that the problem remains that a woman (or, much less likely, a man) could heed and obey that to the last jot and tittle and still, without a condom, be infected. Why does the archbishop ignore this fact? Because he has nothing to say? Because there is nothing to say other than that condoms are indeed needed as (at least) insurance? If so, that’s a wicked reason to keep silent.

Christ called Christians to a different way of living, to a purity of heart where even looking on a woman with aggressive and disordered desire (lust) is wrong.

Oh – well maybe the answer is even simpler, as indicated by that remark. Maybe the archbishop really is so stupid and so callous that he really doesn’t even realize that women exist – maybe he really does think that it’s only men who are agents, only men who are called to a different way of living, only men who can and should be faithful, and therefore only men who can be infected. Maybe he just doesn’t get it that women are also part of the equation, that when men ‘look on’ them with lust and then act on the looking, the act has consequences for the woman as well as the man.

Yet he’s the archbishop of Sydney; he has a platform; he can go right on telling Catholics – women and men alike – that condoms are bad and harmful. That’s unfortunate.

It’s a funny thing how the ‘athests should shut up’ crowd is constantly passing back and forth this old crumbling shredding battered item labeled ‘atheists use intemperate language’ and then when you look at them turn out to be so unpleasant themselves. They’re a vituperative bunch to be giving advice to other people about not being so foghorn-like.

Look at Mark Vernon for instance. He’s always boasting of his own superlative and superior uncertainty, his better than anything else agnosticism, and yet when it comes to characterizing people he disagrees with, why, he throws uncertainty to the winds and just gets right down to name-calling.

Julian Baggini was asking militant atheists to turn down the volume in the Guardian yesterday. What I think Julian hasn’t quite realised is that this movement, from which he wants to distance himself, is evangelical in nature – which is to say loud in nature, and crude and ultimately dehumanising.

Well same to you, bub.

Moreover, and ironically, he won’t understand it unless he uses religious categories to analyse it. It will tarnish anyone who wants to use the word ‘atheist’ of themselves, much as fundamentalist Christianity or Islam does for Christians and Muslims.

That’s Mr Agnostic, Mr Uncertain. Nice, isn’t it? ‘Militant’ (you know, bomb-throwing, bus-exploding, mass murdering) atheists are evangelical in nature, loud in nature, crude, dehumanizing, a source of tarnish, like fundamentalist Christianity or Islam. That’s civil, that’s temperate, that’s fair, that’s reasonable.

He then jokes about Julian calling him ‘fluffy.’ Quite right; I wouldn’t call him fluffy either; I would call him just plain nasty. But unlike him I offer genuine quotes to illustrate why.

G mentioned, and quoted a bit of, On Liberty yesterday. I’d been thinking of quoting it myself, and G sent me to the right bit to quote, so here is some more. From the last paragraph of Chapter 2.

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

That’s just it, you see. Theists and fans of faith were always going to say that atheists were too noisy and ‘militant’ and dogmatic and whatever other stick came to hand. Of course they were. They weren’t going to like explicit atheism, and once the explicit atheism hit the best-seller lists, well – the result was what you might call overdetermined. Of course they would say atheists were too noisy! For the very reason that Mill suggests. Shouting that atheists are too noisy is a lot easier than arguing. So to conclude that therefore atheists really are too noisy and should be more quiet now so that…so that I’m not sure what, is to conclude too much.

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions.

Bingo.

In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.

Thank you and good evening.

I was going to post a comment to say that things didn’t actually get all that much better but I was relieved to see that someone already had.

This isn’t necessarily a substantive change. The Afghani Constitution is written in a way that simultaneously enshrines conflicting values, leaving wiggle room to really do anything you want regarding women- or remain paralyzed in confusion. And a Western audience is particularly susceptible to not “getting” this because of the power of some of the lipservice to rights, and the common ignorance of how Islamic law actually works…“Equal” does not mean (has not meant) “identical” in an Islamic context regarding gender, especially in the realm of family and personal law. “Equal” can mean “complementary,” (*wink*) meaning, patriarchal gender roles being upheld with the full force of the State. So, basically, women are screwed.

Precisely. Equal can and very often does mean ‘complementary,’ and women are indeed screwed. The Vatican, the FLDS, conservative Baptists – all use this trick. There’s a chapter of Does God Hate Women? that’s largely about that. Pretending to give with one hand and violently snatching away with the other. Bastards.

You know how I keep saying (among other things) ‘But why are all these people calling atheists too loud too talkative too militant too out there too much too often too loud too excessive when they don’t call believers that and yet there are a lot more religious books and articles and invocations and devocations than there are of the atheist variety?’ You do know, right? So today I was at the University bookstore and I decided to do a rough quantitative study. The books on religion of course stretched to the horizon, so I made things easy for myself, I counted the space given to ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Metaphysical and Astrology’ (the two are neighbours). Three sections of shelf, four shelves each, for twelve in all. Atheist books take up less than half of one shelf. That’s a ratio of 24 to 1.

So why are we considered too noisy? Really. When even in a university bookstore the spiritual/’metaphysical’ crowd are 24 times more noisy than we are, and that’s before we even start counting the religious books.

These mysteries are byond human understanding. They are ineffable. I can’t eff ’em, not nohow.

Here’s the thing…It’s illiberal on the face of it to tell people to be quiet, or even to turn down the volume, in a liberal rights-based culture that places a high value on free open frank uninhibited discussion – and one that does so not arbitrarily or as a mere matter of preference but for good reasons, which can be freely openly frankly uninhibitedly discussed. The idea and the value of free open discussion is central to liberal culture, and we all depend on it very heavily indeed, perhaps more heavily than we can realize while we continue to have it. In such a culture there is a presumption against urging people to turn down the volume. That is doubly or triply the case when the subject matter is taken by many to be 1) innocent (not criminal or harmful) and 2) enlightening. So the people who want to say ‘pipe down’ have a heavy burden of justification. The presumption isn’t on their side.

A very strong background assumption in liberal culture is that open free discussion is healthy – is generally a good thing. There are exceptions – certain kinds of discussion of race for instance may be hedged with caution (Ahmadinejad’s speech at Durban II springs to mind) – but even there, caution and hedging are not always seen as the best way to go. Obama said in his great speech on race that we could shut up about the whole subject, but we ought not to. He is the product of a liberal culture; the product of it, an educator about it, a defender of it, an ambassador for it. I think it is one of the better ideas of liberal culture, this idea that we should be able to discuss most things openly, freely, without fear or shyness.

If I’m right about that, then telling people they are discussing something too openly and freely and noisily is inherently likely to antagonize liberals (as opposed to authoritarians). If you’ve followed any of the discussions between Matthew Nisbet and Everyone Else over the past few years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re primed to think that yanking taboo subjects out of that cupboard under the stairs is a good thing, so people who tell us to put it back into the cupboard have a steep hill to climb.

I think I can do a little to clarify what Julian has in mind (because I did a little background re-reading). I think it’s more interesting than these two recent articles might suggest (just as Russell said in comments).

I re-read the end of Atheism a VSI, because I did a comment on it in January 2007 and some of the issues are the same. My attention was snagged by a passage about Don Cupitt, who ‘finds himself under fire from Christians and atheists, who both think he is actually an atheist after all and should just admit it, but I think his attempt to save something distinctive from the wreckage of religious belief is admirable…’ Ah, thought I, so perhaps via Don Cupitt I can better pin down what Julian means by ‘what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away.’ So I plucked my copy of What Philosophers Think from the shelf and found the interview with Don Cupitt and read it. He’s a non-realist about God, so one inevitably wonders well why bother then (and Julian did press him on that point) – but he did say some interesting things. The interview is in the archive, in case you have access.

‘I sometimes quote there the contrast between Sartre’s atheism and the reli gious attitude of a British philosopher like Ernest Gellner, who was certainly no theist and no religious believer. But he did tell me, “I have a religious attitude to life”. He wondered at life, he felt there was something there that deserved our respect and acknowledgement, just in the flow of life itself. He didn’t like either the Marxist or the atheist existentialist view of the individual human being as a purely sovereign positer of values and organiser of the world. One needs to have a sort of to-and-fro, a dialectic between the self and life. I have suggested that in today’s thinking the word “life” has taken on much of the religious significance that the word God used to have.’

When you strip away from religion all the excess baggage Cupitt believes needs removing, this seems to be at the core of what remains. Cupitt describes this attitude as ‘love of life, a kind of moral responsiveness to existence, no more than that, trying to get away from a rather aggressively masculine, Sartrean imperialism of the will.’

I wouldn’t call that religious, and I don’t think religion has a monopoly on it – but I can at least see what Cupitt is getting at. ‘A kind of moral responsiveness’ – that does describe something (in my view) even if I don’t agree that the something is religious.

I wondered in what sense religion could still be a source of values if we accept that all values are human-made…’We don’t just think up our values and impose them on experience. Rather our thinking is always prompted by things out there, persons who think for us. It’s no accident that celebrity endorsement and celebrity opinion is nowadays needed for English people to take any idea at all seriously. We do things by various kinds of proxies, symbols and ideas. Very few people are purely sovereign and autonomous creative thinkers in a post-Cartesian individualist way. Most of us work through myths, through other people, through values derived from religion.’

Okay – now that I get. I have said here, some time in the past, that I can see the value of the idea of God as an externalization of the idea of goodness or of being good. Thinking of God not with fear as a punisher but with love and emulation as someone who simply wants humans to be good – kind, generous, forgiving, helpful – that I can understand. All the more so of course if it’s a non-realist God.

The trouble of course is that so many believers think of God’s idea of goodness as something horribly different from kindness – but that’s another story.

‘So I want to say,’ he continues, ‘religion supplies us with poetry and myths to live by and human beings need stories to live by. Because our existence is temporal we’ve always got to construct some kind of story of our lives and that story, to my mind, needs to have a religious quality. So I don’t think any religious beliefs are literally true, but I think they’re all existentially or morally useful, or a great many of them are.’

Religion without doctrine, religion without creed, religion without belief in another, spiritual world, distinct from the world we live in – that is what Cupitt is striving for. Is religion without all these things still religion? The question bothered me more before meeting Cupitt than after. Whether you call it religion or not, Cupitt is trying to show us the precious baby sitting in the now rather dirty bath water of traditional religion. What we call it is neither here nor there; what matters is whether or not we should be saving it.

Well there you go. (That’s the final paragraph of the interview.) That’s exactly it. It’s a nice baby, but alas it’s not the only baby, and we’re not sure that the only way to get at the baby is through the dirty bath water, and so on. Julian himself doesn’t seem all that convinced. I’m not at all convinced but I can at least see what Cupitt is getting at. That’s something.

It’s a pig’s life for women in the US military.

According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed. The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.

Well yes but don’t forget, women are privileged, the bitches.

I was the only female in my platoon of 50 to 60 men. I was also the youngest, 17. Because I was the only female, men would forget in front of me and say these terrible derogatory things about women all the time. I had to hear these things every day. I’d have to say ‘Hey!’ Then they’d look at me, all surprised, and say, ‘Oh we don’t mean you.’

Hm. I wonder if they ever referred to women as cunts. Ya think?

There are only three things the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military – a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You’re a bitch if you won’t sleep with them. A ho if you’ve even got one boyfriend. A dyke if they don’t like you. So you can’t win.

Oh well, those are just words, they don’t matter.

Talk Islam obligingly posted the whole of Chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser’s email message on apostasy. He starts off by laying down some ground rules.

While I understand that will happen and that there is some benefit in them, in the main, it would be better if people were to withhold from debating such things, since they tend not to have the requisite familiarity with issues and competence to deal with them. Debating about religious matter is impermissible, in general, and people rarely observe the etiquette of disagreements.

But this is an issue that necessarily is of pressing interest to all Muslims. They have a natural desire to know if they are to be killed or not if they should ever decide to leave Islam. Therefore it is only natural that they should want to know about it, and if they learn something they don’t altogether like, to argue about it. It seems more than a little unfair to say that that is impermissible. It would be like telling Americans that it is impermissible for us to debate about capital punishment, when we could be subject to it. In the US it is not impermissible to debate about capital punishment.

The preponderant position in all of the 4 sunni madhahib (and apparently others of the remaining eight according to one contemporary `alim) is that the verdict is capital punishment. Of concern for us is that this can only occur in the domain and under supervision of Muslim governmental authority and can not be performed by non-state, private actors.

Of concern for us? Meaning that capital punishment for leaving Islam is not of concern if it is in the domain and under supervision of Muslim governmental authority? Why’s that then? Because Abdul-Basser and the people he’s talking to are all outside that domain and supervision and thus don’t have to worry about it? Well, if so, that’s rather callous. In fact it’s worse than callous: it’s complicit and callous. What it means is that Abdul-Basser is adhering to a religion that kills people who leave it when it has state power, while staying out of reach of such power himself. If he in fact is happy to be safe while still defending the religion that executes other, distant people simply for changing their religion – he’s a nasty man.

Maybe that’s not what he meant. But that is what it looks like.

I would finally note that there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand. The formal consideration of excuses for the accused and the absence of Muslim governmental authority in our case here in the North/West is for dealing with the issue practically. And Allah knows best.

Ah; well that’s consoling. As long as Allah knows best, and everybody knows what Allah wants (but do they? how? how do we know? how do they know? how does anyone know? if everybody knows why does anybody have to ask Abdul-Basser? if anyone doesn’t know then how does everyone know that someone knows and who that is and how to know who it is?) then being killed for changing your religion is no problem. That’s a relief.

Hmm…I hope Julian isn’t permanently joining the tedious chorus of people shouting at ‘new’ atheists to shut up. It’s not a very glorious vocation.

Intelligent atheism rejects what is false in religion, but should retain an interest in what is true about it. I don’t think many of my fellow atheists would disagree.

I would – depending on what is meant by ‘what is true about it.’ I don’t think anything is true about it, if we mean factually true. If we mean something much looser by ‘true’ such as ‘having some good things to say about compassion or peace’ then I don’t think religion has anything to offer that is inherent to religion as opposed to simply widely-shared moral intuitions, so again, I don’t really think there is anything true about it (about it alone, to the exclusion of other ways of thinking). If I want wisdom about morality or justice I don’t turn to clerics. There are other sources, who are less encumbered by beliefs that need to be protected.

Why is it, then, that we are increasingly seen as shrill, bishop-bashing fanatics who are tone deaf to the spiritual?

Because people like Matthew Nisbet and Madeleine Bunting and now, alas, you, keep writing pieces that call us shrill, bishop-bashing fanatics who are tone deaf to the spiritual, that’s why. Or at least that sure as hell is part of why. It’s a drum that a number of people have been banging on with frenzied energy – Chris Hedges comes to mind – for two or three years now; obviously it’s had an effect! So it’s a little disingenuous to ask such a question while engaged in yet more of the same thing. Why is it that we are seen as shrill fanatics, Julian asks, while engaged in the 40 thousandth piece calling us shrill fanatics.

The answer, I fear, is to be found in St Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In short, we had it coming.

Really – for what crime? For not being quiet enough? For not being evasive enough?

Last week, in these pages, Madeleine Bunting spoke for many when she complained about the “foghorn volume” and “evangelical fervour” of the New Atheists, with their “contempt for religion”…Atheists who criticised the details of Bunting’s argument missed the point. What it revealed is the negative perception people have of the godless hordes, and the New Atheism must share responsibility for creating its own caricature.

He says, doing his bit to re-enforce it that little bit more.

You can’t publish and lionise books and TV series with titles like The God Delusion, God is Not Great and The Root of All Evil? and then complain when people think you are anti-religious zealots.

You also can’t (or shouldn’t, anyway) set about scolding books with titles like The God Delusion and God is Not Great when you are on record as not having read them, and you also shouldn’t scold people for titles (The Root of all Evil?) that other people chose for them and that they are on record as detesting. That’s unfair, frankly. We mentioned this to Julian last time…

Perhaps a period of New Atheist exuberance was necessary. At least it got people thinking, although I fear it has confirmed every negative stereotype about it. We now need to turn down the volume and engage in a real conversation about what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away.

But there again – not having read the books, how can Julian know that the volume is up? How can he know that the ‘new’ atheist books don’t engage in a real conversation about what of value is left of religion?

PZ is also skeptical, and so is Jason Rosenhouse.

No no, I’m not starting it up again, I just want to offer a little illustration of what I’ve been saying, which is that the (putative) fact that ‘cunt’ does not refer to women and is not an insulting epithet for women in the UK does not mean that that description holds everywhere. I consulted Google blog search, and one of the first items was a rather truculent San Francisco blog…

This Just In: Jeanene Garofalo is a CUNT

Ugly, bitter, has-been Jeanene Garofalo spews more racist hatred on Olbermann.

Bitch still thinks she’s funny. But I guess we can remove the “still” – seeing that she was never funny.

What motivates a person like Garofalo to scream “racist” at anyone who dares object to her God Obama?

I trust I don’t have to convince anyone that that post conveys more than a whiff of misogyny?

I certainly hope I don’t.

Harvard has an ‘Islamic chaplain’. Lucky Harvard.

Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates. In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”

Oooooookay, isn’t that interesting. One shouldn’t dismiss out of hand the idea that apostates from Islam should be executed, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse. So Harvard has a chaplain who not only quasi-approves (or perhaps fully approves, who knows) death for apostasy, it has one who is disdainful (in a Theoretical kind of way) of human rights. Harvard has a chaplain who not only thinks that perhaps it is ‘wisdom’ to kill people for leaving a religion, but also thinks killing people for leaving a religion is better than human rights. He doesn’t think, then, that people have or should have a human right to leave a religion without being killed for doing so. Harvard has a chaplain of this description. Isn’t that fascinating.

It’s good, under the circumstances, to see that students have no fear about speaking up.

“I believe he doesn’t belong as the official chaplain,” said one Islamic student, who asked that he not be named to avoid conflicts with Muslim religious authorities…“[His remarks] are the first step towards inciting intolerance and inciting people towards violence,” said a Muslim Harvard student, who requested that he not be named for fear of harming his relationship with the Islamic community…A Muslim student at MIT, who also asked to remain anonymous to preserve his relationship with the Islamic community, said the chaplain’s remarks wrongly suggested that only Westerners and Westernized Muslims who did not fully understand Islam would find the killing of apostates objectionable.

Spot on, Muslim student at MIT; that’s exactly what the chaplain’s remarks suggest, insultingly enough. But how sad it is that these students want to preserve their relationship with a ‘community’ that they think might disagree with them about this. How sad that their ‘community’ might agree with Abdul-Basser, and might shun the students for not agreeing with him. How depressing it all is.

One or two more items, by way of mopping up. (And just in case there is any doubt on the matter, as apparently there was for at least one commenter: no I don’t think the importance of the subject is in proportion to the time I’ve spent on it; no the fact that I’ve done several posts on it doesn’t mean that I think words are more important than, say, marrying a child of 8 to a man 52 years her senior. I’m just interested; and there is a lot of disagreement and a lot of testimony. I’m interested in language – this is not a big surprise, surely; one of the first things I did with B&W was to start the Fashionable Dictionary. I write about what interests me, in the full faith and confidence that if any reader or readers find a particular post boring, they will know they don’t have to read it. There’s no exam, there’s no exit question, nobody has to read any of this.)

Jeremy told me an anecdote last week. He (you may or may not know) is from London, now lives in Toronto.

“I was at soccer, and some guy on the opposing team was acting the tough guy, and I said something like – “You couldn’t hurt pussy, mate”, which to a UK person kind of makes sense (it just means you couldn’t hurt a small furry animal – though I think I picked it up from my father, so it isn’t something that many people say).

Anyway, there were gasps all around, and someone on my own team said:

“What did you just say!?”

Of course, I’d just said something that (a) was just very bizarre – suggesting a penchant for sexual violence or something; and (b) probably a violation of numerous taboos. Luckily, people guessed that in the UK it didn’t mean what it means here, so I escaped with my life. But it was a close thing!”

So apparently in Toronto it’s risky to assume it means kitty-cat.

But then you move farther east…He told me this yesterday:

“Strange thing. I mentioned this stuff to a Canadian woman tonight (born here), she said that hearing ‘pussy’, even as an insult, she would only really think of cats. She’s aware of the female genital meaning, of course, but denied it would be what came to mind.

When I expressed surprise, she claimed that there’s a difference between the way in which people in the Maritime provinces – where she was brought up – understand this stuff and people in the rest of Canada. It’s less Americanized (so she said).”

Another friend of mine, who has emigrated the other way – from California to Surrey – made this point, after discussing the oddity of ‘how gay’:

“I’m away or I’d look up some quotes about how words ‘chime’, they carry overtones of meaning because they mean more than one thing. In essence, if you know multiple meanings of ‘gay’, then you cannot mention one without invoking the overtones of the other.”

That’s a crucial point, I think. After this discussion I might not go so far as to say you can’t (if only because I’m so sick of Adam yelling at me), but I would at least say that you should realize the possibility is always there.

That’s not even very controversial, is it? Aren’t there quite a few words (like tea-bagging!) that have overtones one doesn’t always want to invoke? Don’t we all know that? Don’t we hesitate over certain words? I think we do, and I don’t think this is particularly different.

And then there’s some just plain stupidity. From the comments:

Look, I can call another bloke a twat just as I can call a girl a prick and neither have any more significant meaning when the terms are reversed. I think you’re just being a massive prude with this whole sexist epithet thing.

It’s got nothing to do with prudery – that’s just a category mistake. It’s not about swearing, it’s not about obscenity, it’s not about blasphemy, it’s not about genitalia as such, it’s about epithets; name-calling; pejoratives. That’s a different subject.

And then just to top it all off we get a guy wondering if women are really all that badly treated – and then I lose my temper. Yes – women are all that badly treated. I’m not, of course, but I’m fortunate; women in Uganda and Pakistan and DR Congo and Nicaragua and Saudi Arabia and a lot of other places are not. Do me a favour: don’t play ‘comparative oppression’ with me. I’m not in the mood.

Saudi Arabia has seen the error of its ways. Or perhaps not.

Saudi Arabia says it plans to start regulating the marriage of young girls, amid controversy over a union between a 60-year-old man and a girl of eight. A court in Unaiza upheld the marriage on condition the groom does not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.

Oh good; because the only problem with marrying a child of 8 to a man of 60 is of course that she won’t much want him to fuck her, yet. There is no other problem. No problem with ending her schooling, no problem with her having to live with (and under the rule of) a man more than seven times older than she is, a man old enough to be her great-great-grandfather, a man she didn’t know and didn’t ask to marry, a man with whom she can be assumed to have absolutely nothing in common. No problem with consigning her to what amounts to a long prison sentence when she is too young to have committed a crime by any sane legal definition. No problem with deciding her life before she is anywhere near old enough to think about it herself. No problem with turning her into a wife when she is all of two years older than Sasha Obama and should be playing with a puppy rather than obeying some horrible old bastard who thinks himself entitled to marry a child.

Saudi Arabia implements an austere form of Sunni Islam that bans free association between the sexes and gives fathers the right to wed their children to whomever they deem fit.

That’s a stupid word for it – ‘austere.’ Typical BBC mealy-mouthing. What’s austere got to do with it? Where does austerity come in? It’s not austere, it’s harsh and punitive and degrading and cruel. What is ‘austere’ about making a small child marry an adult seven times her age? What is the luxury or hedonism or voluptuousness that that is the antidote to? The wallowing sybaritic indulgence of going on being a child, and going to school, and not being married to some old goat? Is that it? If so, what about the old goat then? Is he being ‘austere’ by marrying a child too young to cross the street by herself? That doesn’t sound like austerity to me. Greedy, ruthless, piggish, hard as nails, yes; austere, no.

I wrote to the women’s studies list yesterday to ask for thoughts on sexist epithets, especially pussy and cunt. Here is a sampling from replies.

“Recently, I was standing at the bus stop with a young man who was singing along to rap music. Suddenly, he yelled “Bitch!” and I almost ran for cover. But he was just singing along to the music. Can anyone wonder why young women are treated so badly when the music kids listen to describes them as bitches, evil, and mean?”

“I’m not sure who your informants are but I can absolutely disabuse you of their misinformation. “Cunt” is seen as one of the worst possible expletives that can be used. “Twat” is aged and falling out of fashion currently. “Pussy” has a little ambiguity as (now very old) comedies occassionaly play on the dual usages as a colloquial for cat and for genitalia. I’d be surprised to see any evidence that the meaning of these words isn’t known – what evidence do your informants proffer for that view?

In my opinion is it explicitly sexist but for slightly different reasons – its implication is that the worst possible thing is to be penetrated and that penetration is a sign of weakness in that instance. It relies on a belief that penetration is synonymous with strength and masculinity and to be penetrable is a sign of weakness. It also (certainly in the UK) is often used in the trope which asserts that female genitalia are dirty and smelly.” [That one is from someone at Oxford, so she’s not clueless about UK usage.]

“I had a discussion about “pussy” in my psych of women class recently, and the students insisted that when Jon Stewart and others use the word they mean “weak as a kitten.” Of course, that is sexist, especially when men apply it to each other to suggest they are not macho enough. But I think they are wrong in their understanding.”

Katha Pollitt refused to believe that the British are ignorant of the word ‘cunt.’ Well I sympathize, I can’t believe it either, and yet people insist – not quite exactly that they’re ignorant of the meaning, but that that’s no longer what the word means. In particular John Meredith in comments on Knowing what words mean.

“‘Slag’ is, nearly always, a sexist term…It means a woman who is disgusting by dint of having more sex than is approved. It is sexist because it can only be applied to women and evinces disgust simply because she is a woman and behaves like one. But ‘cunt’ which can really only be applied to men, just means (in its sweary sense) ‘bastard’ and does not imply any hostility towards women as women, so is not sexist. It is an empty sign, really, that just indicates ‘I feel extreme hostility towards you to the degree that I will use a taboo word for you’. The word itself could be one of dozens used pretty much interchangeably.”

I find that completely incomprehensible, and hard to believe. Just for one thing, why is the word taboo if it’s an empty sign? What is it that makes the word taboo if it is just an empty sign? What are the dozens of other words that could be used interchangeably? I don’t think there’s even one, let alone dozens. As far as I know, cunt is right at the top of the heap of Bad Words to call someone, and it is there because it is the most vicious hate-filled word for the female genitalia, while ‘pussy’ is a little less vicious and ‘twat’ is comparatively mild.

But there’s also a thread on Shiraz Socialist:

The word “cunt” is a highly effective insult precisely because of its shock value – nothing is more guaranteed to upset the secretary of the local WI than such a word. It’s no more endemically “oppressive” than any other word, the point is the context in which it is used. As Rosie said, it’s simply nonsense to claim that most people who use the word these days are referring to female genitalia, any more than when they call someone “posh” they are referring to Port Out Starboard Home. When they use the word “cunt”, they just mean that they really really disapprove of or dislike the individual to whom they’re referring. Like the word, dislike it, use it or don’t – I should care. But don’t invent a hierarchy of oppression amongst swear-words which is simply a false excuse for some left-wing version of parochial moralism.

I don’t buy it. If the word has shock value, then the shock value comes from somewhere. If the shock value comes from somewhere, where does it come from? I submit that it comes from the fact that it is a word that 1) equates women to their genitals and 2) expresses hatred for both. If that’s not where the shock value comes from, then where does it come from?

More later.

Out of curiosity, since Jean told us Jon Stewart did a segment playing off the word ‘pussy,’ I googled his name and ‘pussy’ – and got a lot of hits, most of them not about that segment. They don’t support the ‘pussy just means kittycat’ view.

For instance:

You already know my feelings on Stewart, particularly after that notorious appearance on Crossfire – but you’re being much to kind to call him a wimp, I’ve always felt that he’s a big pussy, period.

Wimp is too nice, you see; Stewart is worse than that; he’s a big pussy.

For another example:

Thank you to the team at Josh Marshall’s liberal TPM blog for putting together this lovely clip of Cramer desperately stomping around various NBC studios, finding any and all operational cameras, and yelling at them about how Jon Stewart is a sack of shit. In one of these episodes, Joe Scarborough gets in on the act! They talk about how Jon Stewart is dishonest, mean, personal, a cherry-picker, an idiot, and a pussy.

I detect a pattern; do you? It looks to me as if tough-guy liberal-hating right-wing types love the word and fling it around like confetti because it means everything they hate about liberals – which is that liberals are weak, cowardly, sentimental, cowardly, manipulative, cowardly, and just all around generally like women. Which fits exactly with that comment about Mo, and doesn’t sound at all like cats or like sweet fluffy cuddly animals.

An interesting bit of moral idiocy:

[T]he Somali pirate commander warned against any forcible intervention. “I’m afraid this matter is likely to create disaster because it is taking too long and we are getting information that the Americans are planning rescue tricks like the French commandos did,” Abdi Garad said.

Tricks. That’s good, isn’t it? People attempting to rescue a guy being forcibly held by heavily armed thieves are accused by the thieves of planning ‘tricks.’ The pirates inform all parties a week in advance that they will be seizing their ships and threatening their lives, do they? All open and aboveboard? All strictly according to Hoyle?

Right.