Since the pope has been so busy and people have been humming it, here it is for your convenience –

Tim Minchin’s fuck the motherfucking pope.

Another guy – a judge this time – thinks women’s bodies have magical little portcullises that slam down during attempted rape.

A Southern California judge is being publicly admonished for saying a rape victim “didn’t put up a fight” during her assault and that if someone doesn’t want sexual intercourse, the body “will not permit that to happen.”

Which is why rape is so extremely rare – it’s hard to bash through the portcullis. [Read more…]

The dear dear pope, so consistently hateful and harmful and bad. Yesterday he launched his new Twitter account and blessed the Ugandan legislator pushing the “kill the gays” bill.

Pope Benedict XVI has given blessings to Uganda Parliament Speaker Rebecca Kadaga during a mass attended by thousands of pilgrims at the Vatican,” Nsimbe Kasim at the Ugandan New Vision news reports.

He hates secularists and loves people who want the state to kill gays. What a mensch.

Then today – how productive he is! – he used his “peace day” message to bash same-sex marriage.

The pontiff said on Friday: “There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union.

“Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilise marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society”, the Pope told worshipers.

That’s not peace.

 

There is one bit of good news, or not really exactly good, but a delay of bad…

The Parliament of Uganda is about to go on Christmas holiday, returning in February, and the Kill The Gays bill is slated to be taken up then. The Parliament has a daily business list, called the “order paper” which shows what legislation is to be considered and in what order. The Kill The Gays bill was number one on that list, but superseded by an important and contentious oil and gas bill. Remarkably, the Kill The Gays bill, known also as the Anti-Homosexuality bill, has dropped in importance to number seven.

That’s a few weeks more to oppose the bill.

 

Paul Elam and “Agent Mauve” at A Voice for Men have done what they said they were going to do, and found the identity of one of the University of Toronto students who protested a talk by Warren Farrell. They’ve plastered her picture on the site, and named her, and posted a long angry rant about her. (In reading it, I see in the right-hand margin something claiming that I have my “knickers in a twist.” Oh goody, a new front opens in the great WarOnMe.)

They conclude in their usual threatening manner.

In the coming days, [redacted – OB] will have her profile as a bigot placed at Register-her.com. But she will not be alone. [Read more…]

Hahahahahaha Justin Vacula explains why what Michael Shermer said about atheism as a guy thing was totally reasonable and ok and fine. He explains it in a comment on Jacques Rousseau’s post accusing me of misrepresenting Shermer, hyperbole, and failure to read charitably.

Unfortunatly, the principle of charity is not something Ophelia (and her commenters) are considering. As you note, the most charitable interpretation of Shermer’s observation — a statement of what he sees — is that men are quite active. Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’ [Read more…]

Scalia’s a funny guy, as any fule kno. On Monday he was talking at Princeton (which is in Princeton, which is where I grew up, or at least where I spent the years from 0 to 17) and he explained about why same-sex sex is a no-no.

A gay student named Duncan Hosie got up and asked Scalia about his avid support for bans on “sodomy,” i.e. same-sex couples doing it, and Scalia answered with this:

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

That’s a reductio ad absurdum? To say that if we can’t have “moral feelings against homosexuality” then we also can’t have moral feelings against murder? Talk about random. He might as well say if we can’t have moral feelings against jelly babies we can’t have moral feelings against murder.

But maybe it’s witch-hunty of me to criticize what he said. Maybe I should email him and ask him what he meant, first.