I’m amicably disagreeing with Ron Lindsay at his CFI blog, where he is amicably disagreeing with Vic Stenger and PZ Myers about something both of them said at the Sunday morning panel in Orlando two weeks ago. (I was on the same panel.)
Both Stenger and Myers made various recommendations about objectives on which secularists should concentrate, but they both agreed on one point: they both asserted we should aim to eliminate or eradicate religious belief… [Read more…]
Yet more from the misogyny files.
On Saturday morning, after getting the news that President Obama would be giving the commencement address at Barnard College this May, graduating senior Marly Faherty did what her generation does: she went online, to a Columbia University blog called Bwog. But as she watched the comments pouring in, her excitement turned to shock, and then despair. “It was the first time I’d seen something get that nasty that quickly,” she told The Daily Beast. “It was like watching a train wreck. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
…commenters started attacking Barnard, Columbia’s all-women’s sister school across the street, and accusing its students of academic inferiority and much, much worse. Using terms like “feminazis” and calling Barnard “Barnyard,” commenters said the school was just a back door to Columbia, and its students deserved neither Obama as a speaker nor affiliation with the university as a whole.
…
By the end of the day, comments like this one, posted under the name “Blue and White Vagina,” started to appear: “While you guys were perfecting your deepthroating techniques and experimenting with scissoring and anal play, we were learning Calculus (usually by sophomore year of High School). Trust me, if you actually deserved to go to Columbia and put in the work it required, you would understand our resentment. Moral of the story is that feeble, ugly Barnyard women need to shut their jizz holes and just be happy that Columbia let Barnyard pretend it was affiliated for this long.” [Read more…]
Um………no.
Bill Maher explains that it’s fine for him to call Sarah Palin a cunt.
No it isn’t.
In a brief interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, Bill Maher explains why calling Sarah Palin a “cunt” or a “twat,” as he has, is in no way equivalent to calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” or a “prostitute,” as Rush Limbaugh did.
I don’t care whether it’s equivalent or not; I care that it’s sexist and bad. Jacob Sullum notes:
Maher seems sincerely oblivious to the fact that “different tastes and different opinions” tend to color people’s views about when sexist epithets are acceptable and when they are so “disgusting” that they are beyond the pale.
And here’s another thing that tends to color people’s views about when sexist epithets are acceptable: being the object of them. It’s easy for Maher to think it’s fine to call Palin a cunt, because Palin’s a woman and he’s a man. It’s a great deal too easy. It’s not attractive for white people to shrug 0ff racist epithets, and it’s not attractive for men to shrug off sexist epithets.
Nick Gillespie – also in Reason – offers more putative liberals talking sexist shit.
At The Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers provides a somewhat more in-depth catalog of vagina dentata imagineering by liberal asshats.
Olbermann, for instance, suggested that that the best way to take Hillary Clinton out of the 2008 presidential race “was to find ‘somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.‘” And that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents. Enchante!
Matt Taibbi, whom Noah tags for calling Andrew Breitbart “a douche” in his obit, is similarly scampish toward the ladies, writes Powers:
Left-wing darling Matt Taibbi wrote on his blog in 2009, “When I read [Malkin’s] stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth.” In a Rolling Stone article about Secretary of State Clinton, he referred to her “flabby arms.” When feminist writer Erica Jong criticized him for it, he responded by referring to Jong as an “800-year old sex novelist.” (Jong is almost 70, which apparently makes her an irrelevant human being.)
Boy, those jokes are fall-down funny, aren’t they?
And then there’s Chris Matthews, the leg-tingled MSNBC host and stalwart JFK defender, who particularly seems to thrive on attacking Hillary Clinton in gender-specific terms:
Over the years he has referred to the former first lady, senator and presidential candidate and current secretary of state as a“she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” and “Madame Defarge.” Matthews has also called Clinton “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” and once claimed she won her Senate seat only because her “husband messed around.”
Sexist shit, all of it. Not ok, any of it. It’s not any more ok because it’s liberals doing it. On the contrary: it’s a deal-breaker. (We know that. We remember all the deals that got broken last summer.)
Update: forgot to h/t skepticlawyer for the link.
Another treasure from @UCCB – a patronizing ode to wimmin, from a boss of an organization that excludes women from all power and thinks its “God” is a man. You know what it says without reading it. Women are special, women are lovely, women raise the children, bless their little hearts and their soft heads.
During this month, our minds turn toward the great gift of what Blessed John Paul II in his letter Mulieris Dignitatem calls the feminine genius and its positive impact on the life of the Church and society.
Uh huh. Let’s have a look at good ol’ muley dig, shall we?
even the rightful opposition of women to what is expressed in the biblical words “He shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16) must not under any condition lead to the “masculinization” of women. In the name of liberation from male “domination”, women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine “originality”. There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not “reach fulfilment”, but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness.
Plus we’ll have to share our toys, and they’ll tell us we’re wrong about stuff. We don’t want them. They have to stay inside with the children. Next question?
We are blessed in our archdiocese that everywhere we look, we see the stamp of women who have responded faithfully to God’s call. First and foremost, in our mothers who nurture the faith of our children. The history of our archdiocese is marked by the many communities of religious women who have established a rich network of Catholic education and welcomed lay women to partner with them in continuing to serve our schools…
As a Church we can take great pride in the fact that hospitals established by religious women remain the largest private provider of healthcare in the country. They continue to be staffed by religious and lay women who faithfully bring the healing love of Jesus to their professional work.
They make just the best assistants. Amen.
Interlude. (By the way it’s snowing here right now. Quite hard. This is very odd for March 17 in this particular spot on the globe. A few miles east, in the mountains, it wouldn’t be odd, but down here it’s very odd.) One of the entertainers at QED last Saturday, as I mentioned, was Alun Cochrane, and I thought he was dam’ funny. This is what he’s like.
Deep breaths taken. Onward. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, formerly archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan, tells us what keen supporters of women’s rights he and his friends in the church are. He also explains how unfair it all is, and how hard done by they all are, and how mean everyone else is, and what whoppers everyone tells about the church.
I could go on and on: if you want to see creative, daring, lifegiving healthcare for women and their children, look at what the Church is doing.
And now understand why Catholics rightly bristle when politicians and commentators characterize the Church as backwards and insensitive when it comes to women’s health. Yes, the PR experts advise them that this tactic is a proven ploy to take the attention off the current urgent issue of religious freedom. The marketers advise them that, if they can reduce the issue to one of contraception, stereotyping the Church as opposed to women’s rights, they have a chance of clouding the towering issue of the First Freedom.
Other way around, dude. Your tactic of yelling about your “religious freedom” is a ploy to take attention off the way you interfere with secular government and what ought to be secular laws in order to impose your warped views on the entire population.
And the issue is one of contraception, along with other things. Without contraception women’s rights are never secure, but it is your church’s settled view that contraception should not exist, period.
But more than that: don’t you dare pretend to be a defender of human rights when you bar women from all positions of power and authority in your organization, and when you treat attempts to give women such positions as a terrible crime, deserving the worst punishment in your arsenal. Don’t you dare.
Oh hey gee what do you know, the US Conference of Catholic bishops is on Twitter. One can keep up with their theocratic doings so easily…
Here’s yesterday’s press release. It’s about their plans to pray for success at imposing their filthy theocratic laws on the entire US population.
The Administrative Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), at its March 13-14 meeting in Washington, called for a nationwide prayer campaign for protection of religious freedom and conscience rights from several threats, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandate that forces employers, including religious ones, to provide contraception/sterilization in their health plans.
What about my religious freedom? What about my conscience rights? And by “my” I mean those of people like me, who don’t agree with your arbitrary retrograde vicious ideas about contraception. I mean our religious freedom and conscience rights. I mean our right not to be governed by a group of Catholic bishops.
“We call upon the Catholic faithful, and all people of faith, throughout our country to join us in prayer and penance for our leaders and for the restoration of our First Freedom—religious liberty—which is not only protected in the laws and customs of our great Nation, but rooted in the teachings of our great Tradition,” the bishops said in “United for Religious Freedom” a March 14 statement. “Prayer is the ultimate source of our strength—for without God, we can do nothing; but with God, all things are possible.”
Their “freedom” to block the freedom of other people, is what they mean. Their “freedom” to prevent other people from getting contraception; their “freedom” to make it more difficult for other people to get contraception.
There is also of course their treasured “freedom” to try to compel all Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide life-saving abortions. There is their treasured “freedom” to conceal child rape from law enforcement, and to demand the right to deal with child rape according to canon law instead of the secular law of the relevant country.
I’d better take some deep breaths before I read any more of their press releases.
Remember Tom Martin, the MRA who was suing LSE for sexism? The one who likes to call women “whores!” when they disagree with him? His case has been dismissed; he has to pay LSE’s costs.
Representing himself at his application for a trial at the Central London County Court on Tuesday, Mr Martin complained of a lack of men-only sessions in the university’s gym and the preponderance of posters in the corridors advertising services for women without the presence of similar materials geared towards men.
Mr Martin, who describes himself as a feminist, said “hard” chairs in the library were uncomfortable for men and that a “male blaming culture” was evident in course materials, which “ignored men’s issues” and focused on wrongs done by them. [Read more…]
And speaking of going to things – for people in the Seattle area – Richard Dawkins, Elisabeth Cornwell, and Sean Faircloth will be doing a talk in Bellevue on April 1. Details at RDF.
Rock Beyond Belief has an official statement from Fort Bragg saying they are allowed to be critical of organized religion. Chris Rodda explains how that happened.
So, why are we thanking Major Dowty? Well, because it was his blog post about his “concern” over the lyrics of a Rock Beyond Belief performer being picked up by FOX News that caused Fort Bragg officials to scrutinize the Rock Beyond Belief lineup and attempt to require additional promises from the performers and speakers that they would not be critical of religion.
But Justin stood his ground, as he always does, and got it in writing that the speakers and performers at Rock Beyond Belief can be critical of religion (just like the speakers at similar religious events are, by the very nature of the promotion of their beliefs, critical of non-religion or what they deem to be “false” religions).
The Christian Fighter Pilot (as Air Force Major Jonathan C. Dowty is not-always-fondly known) made a boo-boo. This is good.
If any of you are able to get to Rock Beyond Belief, do. They need a big turn-out. Go hang out with a bunch of foxhole atheists and other good people.