Ann Marie Hourihane has an interesting piece in the Irish Times on how awkward it is for her to be in the US right now, because of all the shocked questions about how that hospital could have let Savita Halappanavar die rather than perform an abortion to complete the miscarriage that was already happening.
Perhaps America is tired of Ireland’s excuses. The sad bewilderment among liberals here, when they heard the news of Savita Halappanavar’s death in a Galway hospital in October, is worse than any aggression. [Read more…]
India is still in a committed relationship with censorship. The Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray died on Saturday, and Bombay was shut down by way of farewell.
On Sunday, the police in Palghar, in Thane district, on the outskirts of Mumbai, arrested Shaheen Dhadha after she posted a status update on Facebook that questioned the shutdown, also known as a bandh. A local daily, the Mumbai Mirror, reported that Ms. Dhadha, 21, had written, “People like Thackeray are born and die daily and one should not observe a bandh for that.” The police also arrested her friend who “liked” the post, whom NDTV identified by her first name, Renu. [Read more…]
Iran is worried about its shocking ungodly laxitude about the always-vexing problem of women going anywhere without permission. It’s thinking about tightening up.
The draft law, set to go before the 290-seat Majlis, stipulates that single women up to the age of 40 must receive official permission from their father or male guardian in order to obtain travel documents. [Read more…]
The new issue of Free Inquiry is out. It has a special section on the Women in Secularism conference. I did an article for that section, based on my part at the conference but not restricted to it. It is online.
The basic idea is that the stereotypical idea of women is not very well suited for overt rebellion against god.
The main stereotype in play, let’s face it, is that women are too stupid to do nontheism. Unbelieving in God is thinky work, and women don’t do thinky, because “that’s a guy thing.” [Read more…]
We’ve got new people joining Freethought blogs – it’s going to be great.
Lalala I can’t wait to say who they are but I have to, we don’t say until their blogs are up and running, lalala I can’t wait.
You’ll be thrilled. I guarantee it.
(Well. When I say “you” I mean people who read B&W because they like it – not because they agree with every word of it, but because they like it as opposed to hating it. I don’t mean people who read it solely because they hate it and more especially me, and are monitoring it for things to spit bile at – thus increasing my hit count and causing millions of dollars to flow directly into my wallet every day. Those people aren’t “you.” You people reading this because you hate me with an obsessive hatred – you won’t be thrilled. The guarantee doesn’t apply to you. No refunds.)
Stay tuned.
A festive Sunday morning in Indonesia in 2006, with coconut cakes and Javanese music and lots of women in hijabs and lipstick. They were there to chop up the genitals of 248 little girls.
It is April 2006 and the occasion is a mass ceremony to perform sunat perempuan or “female circumcision” that has been held annually since 1958 by the Bandung-based Yayasan Assalaam, an Islamic foundation that runs a mosque and several schools. The foundation holds the event in the lunar month of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, and pays parents 80,000 rupiah (£6) and a bag of food for each daughter they bring to be cut.
The foundation pays the parents to slice up their daughters’ genitals.
At the mass ceremony, I ask the foundation’s social welfare secretary, Lukman Hakim, why they do it. His answer not only predates the dawn of religion, it predates human evolution: “It is necessary to control women’s sexual urges,” says Hakim, a stern, bespectacled man in a fez. “They must be chaste to preserve their beauty.”
Otherwise, they get all crusted over with ugly because of the oozing disgusingness of women’s sexual urges.
…far from scaling down, the problem of FGM in Indonesia has escalated sharply. The mass ceremonies in Bandung have grown bigger and more popular every year. This year, the gathering took place in February. Hundreds of girls were cut. The Assalaam foundation’s website described it as “a celebration”. Anti-FGM campaigners have proved ineffective against a rising tide of conservatism. [Read more…]
This thing on Facebook…
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A reader pointed out an article at “Catholic Health World” –
Interjection: what the hell is “Catholic health”? I know, that’s not what they mean, it’s just the name of a publication of the CHUSA, the Catholic Health Association of the US. But that’s stupid too. We’re deadened to all this because of habituation. We’re used to it so we don’t notice how ridiculous it is, let alone how dangerous it is. Catholic health? Catholic health care? What the hell, man? There is no such thing. Health is health, it isn’t Catholic or Jewish or Baptist. Health care is health care, it isn’t Lutheran or Muslim or Hindu.
An article at “Catholic Health World,” I was saying. Pregnancy complications can bring on complex ethical questions. [Read more…]
I don’t keep up with everything. I should but I don’t. A friend mentioned Eric Dondero to me and I had to resort to Google, because I hadn’t kept up. He’s pretty funny.
Republicans around the country are responding to President Obama’s reelection in a variety of ways — among them: anger, depression, finger-pointing. But nobody had the same reaction as Eric Dondero, a former Ron Paul aide who blogs at LibertarianRepublican.net. In a post yesterday, Dondero, reasoning that the only recourse to Obama’s victory is “outright revolt,” laid out the terms of the “personal boycott” against Democrats which he plans to maintain for the rest of his life and which he hopes his followers will as well. What does the boycott entail? Cutting all ties with Democratic family members, friends, and lovers; refusing to work for a Democratic boss; spitting on the ground when a Democrat talks to you; and possibly shitting on your Democratic neighbor’s lawn, among other things.
That last one would be really hard to do! Think about it. You’d have to set the alarm for, like, 2 in the morning, because if you tried it at 11 or midnight, you just know some nocturnal nabe down the street would be walking a dog and the dog would totally run over to you while you were squatting there, and knock you over and jump around and bark while the human shouted “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE?!!” It would be soooo embarrassing. You’d have to move out. So you get up at 2 and go over to the neighbor’s lawn – and force yourself to shit? Yeah good luck with that.