Tag: God hates women

Uh oh. A state-funded religious education program in Australia has been telling girls they’re sluts.

Parents and teachers have called for an urgent overhaul of religious education in schools after year 6 children were given material claiming girls who wear revealing clothes are inviting sexual assault, and homosexuality, masturbation and sex before marriage are sinful.

Students at Torquay College were presented with “Biblezines” as a graduation present at the end of their Christian education program, run by Access Ministries – the government accredited provider of religious instruction in Victorian schools.

The magazines, Refuel 2 and Revolve 2 – which intersperse the text of the New Testament with dating advice, beauty tips and music reviews – warn girls not to go bra-less because “your nipples are much more noticeable and a distraction and temptation for men”, and not to wear tube tops and low-rise jeans because men are “sexually stimulated by what they see”.

“The Bible says not to cause anyone else to sin. Are you putting sexual thoughts about your body into guys’ heads? If you are showing a lot of skin you probably are,” it states.

Yes, that’s what you want the state telling teenagers in schools, for sure.

The material, produced by the News Corp-owned Nelson Bibles, America’s largest Christian publishing house, also “exposes the lie of safe sex”, claiming that condoms condone promiscuity, and urges those who think they are gay never to act on it.

In response to an agony aunt-style question about, “How far can you go before you are no longer pure?”, the document reads: “Let’s put it this way: How much dog poop stirred into your cookie batter does it take to ruin the whole batter.”

Nice! Sex is dog shit! And by the way, you there with the nipples, you’re a slut.

Joe Kelly, principal of Cranbourne South Primary School – who last week spoke about how he was so concerned about religious indoctrination he has not allowed Access Ministries into his classrooms since 2012 – said the latest revelations reaffirmed his decision.

“This kind of material is disgraceful and this is why I strongly call upon the Education Department to instigate an immediate review of the practices of special religious instruction [SRI] providers with a view to having SRI taken out of our great public schools,” he said.

Quite right. I hope the Education Department listens.

A Turkish lawyer and women’s rights activist, Canan Arin, was arrested for mentioning the fact that girls get married off very young in Turkey.

I was the co-founder of the Istanbul Bar Association, Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and worked as a trainer there.  The Antalya Bar Association was opening a Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and the lawyers needed training. I gave a talk on violence against women in the form of early and forced marriages in the context of training.

I used two examples to illustrate my point. One was the Prophet who married a girl of seven. The second was the head of the Turkish Republic who was engaged to his wife, the first lady, when she was 14 and married her when she was 15. These are facts.  As I spoke, a group of young men got up and started shouting at me. They said I was insulting and going off the subject. I denied this and said they were free to leave the conference room, which they did.

The next day another group of young men, (I am not sure whether they were lawyers), held a press conference and reported me to the court on charges that I was insulting the Prophet and President of the Republic of Turkey. This group of around 10 men who filed a complaint against me were not present at my talk.

So the cops arrested her.

The interviewer, Bingul Durbas, asks searching questions.

BD: The new education reform known as “4+4+4” seems very problematic. Under the new education law, it is not compulsory to continue education after the first four years. The Child Bride project of the Flying Broom, a women’s organisation in Turkey, has recently found that, almost all of the students who are absent from school due to early marriage and engagement are female. According to the TurkStat the prevalence of lifetime physical or sexual violence against females decreases with the increase in their education. This indicates that the new education reform is likely to increase the vulnerability of girls to early marriages and violence.

CA: Exactly. And, no one reports these crimes despite the fact that child marriages constitute sexual abuse of children and sexual intercourse with those who have not achieved adulthood is a crime, according to the articles 103 and 104 of the Turkish Penal Code. However the law is not implemented.

It’s a multi-pronged approach – minimal schooling, marriage at 15 or 12 or 9, no right to leave, “honor” killing if you do leave, a terrible life if you stay.

BD: In another recent case, Nevin Yildirim, who killed her rapist to save her honour, was not allowed to have an abortion and she had to give birth to her rapist’s child. There is also a link between the abortion issue and ‘honour killings’. My research shows that in cases where the victims got pregnant out of wedlock, the defendants (the girls’ families) take the victims from one hospital to another, in a desperate bid for an abortion to avoid any social stigma. They try to avoid murdering the victims in every way they can. If they fail to resolve the situation then they kill the victims to cleanse their’ honour’.

CA: Very true. The Prime Minister is involving himself in women’s private lives more and more – from how many children she should have to whether she can have an abortion or a caesarean. So that is why it is especially difficult for young women in Turkey.  A woman has no value unless she is married and it is the family that must be protected – not the women, whatever the cost.

Every door is closed and locked.

A member of the General Synod of the Church of England explains about the vote not to allow women bishops.

The legislation we voted on needed to achieve two outcomes: the ordination of women to the episcopate; and sufficient provision for those who, for theological reasons, find this innovation unacceptable.

For theological reasons – that’s important, you see. They can’t be political reasons or moral reasons or we just don’t like them reasons. Why? Because it looks bad. But theological reasons – ah now that’s a whole different kettle of bullshit. That gets a pass, and a wide berth, and a deep bow, and a determined looking in the other direction.

You can do a lot with theological reasons. You can drone about how the bishop is supposed to be a Jesus-substitute, and pretend that that means the bishop has to be A Man, while the bishop doesn’t have to be Jewish, or a carpenter, or an Aramaic-speaker, or a whole list of things that Jesus had or was. All the variables can vary except just this one thing, and that one can’t be touched not nohow. The bishop can be different from Jesus in more ways than anyone can count, as long as the bishop too is A Man.

In other words, the Church of England wanted women bishops but within the framework of an inclusive church, where people could disagree about the ordination of women yet remain loyal Anglicans and united around the good news of Jesus Christ.

An “inclusive” church that includes people who think women are inferior, but not people who think churches shouldn’t make rules that apply to everyone while excluding half of everyone from the rule-making jobs.

Voting no was a vote for equality in the church; equality that stems not from what we do, but from what God has done for us; God created each one of us and Christ paid the same price for each one of us, so we are free to serve one another without reference to role or status. Leadership in the Church is surely modelled on the Son of Man.

Word salad. The church makes rules for all its members, but excludes half its members from the top decision-making jobs. That’s not some special fancy goddy kind of equality.

To be called to be a bishop is a calling to serve God’s family. The Church is not a workplace, with a hierarchy to climb, but a family in which each member has different responsibilities but is equally valuable. To be called to be a bishop is not to be called to be a CEO but to be a father to the church family. The bible teaches us that fathers are called to lay down their lives in self-sacrificial service by taking responsibility for the spiritual welfare of their family. Of course, the Church needs mothers, too, but I believe they have a different, equally self-sacrificial and equally valuable role to play.

No. It’s not “equally valuable.” If women are officially excluded from the top of the hierarchy, that is not any kind of equal. It is profoundly dishonest to pretend it is.

Okay maybe I’m being a big mean atheist poopy head, but honestly, I do wish people would stop thanking Allah for saving Malala’s life. Say what? If Allah saved her life, why the fuck didn’t Allah prevent her (and her schoolmates) from being shot in the first place? Why didn’t Allah cause the shooters to have four flat tires on a very isolated mountain road? Why didn’t Allah give them all a bad intestinal upset that day?

Same old same old. Theodicy. If God this, then why that. Well think about it, people. Use your heads. Don’t just mindlessly thank Allah for stepping in hours after a girl of 14 was shot in the head by a man who thinks he’s acting on Allah’s behalf.

If Allah saved Malala’s life, why didn’t Allah simply set the Taliban straight years ago? Why didn’t Allah sit them all down and say look here, you shits, I don’t want you bullying women and whipping them for not wearing a burqa and keeping them from getting an education. What a stupid vicious idea; stop it this minute. ?

If Allah gets credit for the apparent failure to kill Malala, Allah gets blame for the attempt to kill Malala. It’s both or neither. You don’t get to choose only the nice bits.

Małgorzata has sent me another gem – a lecture on tv by an Egyptian cleric explaining why men have to beat up women.

Abd Al-Rahman Mansour: Islam instructs a man to beat his wife as a last resort before divorce, so that she will mend her ways, treat him with kindness and respect, and know that her husband has a higher status than her.

That’s usefully blunt. We know where we are. We’re among stupid unreflective people who have not managed to figure out that stronger does not equal better or higher, and that the mere fact that person X is able to beat up person Y does not mean that person X is better than person Y. It’s the morality of street thugs. What do you do if you’re a street thug? You look for people you can take, as opposed to people who can take you. That’s not morality, it’s just engineering.

When ‘Aisha thought ill of the Prophet Muhammad, believing that he did not treat her the same as his other wives, and that when he left her room, he would go to another wife, she followed him and spied on him. ‘Aisha said that when the Prophet found out about this, “He gave me a shove that was painful.”

This was done in order to discipline her, not because the Prophet enjoyed beating or inflicting bodily harm. The Prophet did this in order to discipline this woman.

“Discipline” nothing. He did it to make her knuckle under and let him fuck around the house as much as he liked. She wasn’t as keen on polygamy as he was, so he punched her to force her to do what he wanted.

A good woman, even if beaten by her husband, puts her hand in his and says: “I will not rest until you are pleased with me.” This is how the Prophet Muhammad taught his women to be.

Well of course he did, because it make things so pleasant for him. It’s been making things pleasant for Muslim men ever since.

Remember the 9-weeks pregnant Dominican 16-year-old with acute leukemia whose doctors refused to give her chemo because she was pregnant? Well, great news: you don’t have to worry about her any more, because she’s dead.

Her plight gained attention over the last few weeks as doctors debated whether it was morally correct to start treating her cancer, given as Article 37 of the Dominican Constitution states that “the right to life is inviolable from the moment of conception and until death.” It took doctors and the Dominican government a full 20 days to decide that God and Country might care about the actually living mother’s life, too, not just the fetus inside of her, and allow the treatment. By then, it was too late.

Oh well. Plenty more where she came from.

For awhile there it looked as if Mali were going to have a new and better Family Code to improve the rights of women.

Its provisions included raising the minimum legal age of marriage for girls, improving women’s inheritance and property rights and removing the clause demanding a wife’s obedience to her husband. The law was adopted by the National Assembly in August 2009 but was withdrawn following uproar from conservative Muslim groups.

Provocative headlines in newspapers warned that women would no longer have to obey their husbands and thousands took to the streets in protest. A task group formed by Mali’s top Islamic council called it an “open road to debauchery” and the National Union of Muslim Women’s Associations said the law reflected the wishes of a tiny minority of women. When the Family Code was finally enshrined in law in January this year, it was substantially watered down. Campaigners say that far from protecting women’s rights, the code perpetuates discrimination.

Religion trumped women’s rights, as it so often does. Religion equated equal rights for women with “debauchery” – as if women weren’t people at all but just walking genitalia; as if all equality and rights could possibly mean to women would be fucking any man they could find; as if all women ever want to do is just fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck and therefore they can’t ever have rights.

According to Safiatou Doumbia, a member of the Malian Association for Care and Assistance to Women and Children, the new law has set women back. “The new law brings women’s rights back to more than 50 years ago because some rights women had in the former law have been banned. Before, a woman would automatically keep her children if her husband died. This is not the case with the new law, which allows a family counsel to decide who should keep the children.”

Under the new Family Code, as in the original 1962 law, a woman must obey her husband, men are considered the head of the family and the legal age for marriage is 16 for girls, and 18 for boys.

In short, women (including girls) are on a par with livestock. They are wholly owned by men; a woman without an owner is as nature-defying as a feral Bichon Frise.

Udate: note this is from the Washington Times, a very dubious source.

Good old liberation struggles, like the liberation struggle of Chechnya from the brutal embrace of Russia.

Chechnya’s government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

Hmm. That’s nice. Imagine living in a country where the head of state announces that women who have Incorrect sex deserve to be murdered by their male relatives.

“You hear about these cases almost every day,” said a local human rights defender, who asked that her name not be used out of fear for her safety. “It is hard for me to investigate this topic, yet I worked on it with [human rights activist] Natasha [Estemirova] for a while. But, I can’t anymore. I am too scared now. I’ve almost given up, really.”

Estemirova, who angered Chechen authorities with reports of torture, abductions and extrajudicial killings, was found in the woods in 2009 in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Her killer or killers have not been found.

Has anyone looked?

I don’t understand.

Eleven years ago, Farida Bano was circumcised had her genitals mutilated by an aunt on a bunk bed in her family home at the end of her 10th birthday party.

The mutilation occurred not in Africa, where the practice is most prevalent, but in India where a small Muslim sub-sect known as the Dawoodi Bohra continues to believe that the removal of the clitoris is the will of God.

I don’t understand, because if they think God wants the clitoris removed, how do they explain God’s putting it there in the first place?