The archbishop of Canterbury claims Christians in Africa are being massacred because of growing acceptance of gay unions in the West.
From Barry Duke at the Freethinker:
Justin Welby said he had stood by a mass grave in Nigeria of 330 Christians who had been massacred by neighbours who had justified the atrocity by saying:
If we leave a Christian community here we will all be made to become homosexual and so we will kill all the Christians. [Read more…]
This again. The Savita Halappanavar scenario, in the US, in a Catholic hospital. It happens a lot but it seldom gets reported on. This one got reported on because the woman is a nurse. Most women this happens to aren’t nurses or doctors.
Jennifer had been experiencing heavy vaginal bleeding for over a week when she went to her physician’s office. He told her she was miscarrying and discussed her need for a dilation and curettage (D&C) to stop the bleeding and protect her health. A D&C is a procedure to empty the uterus; the same technique is used for both miscarriage management and abortion. [Read more…]
The New York Times has a long piece about the tech industry and women.
Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged.
She was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation. “Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,” Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone flashed on the screen behind him.
After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.”
The crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed. Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it.
Ms. Shevinsky, 35, wasn’t the only one who was disgusted by the presentation. Twitter lit up with outrage. She joined in, writing a blog-post manifesto: “I thought that we didn’t need more women in tech. I was wrong.” [Read more…]
Religions teaming up to demand special status for religion, again.
Churches and faith groups are calling for the role of religion to be recognised in any written constitution for Scotland.
They plan to hold an interfaith conference on the subject in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, in July.
The call follows an interfaith meeting convened by the Church of Scotland. [Read more…]
Lea Verou is (via the New York Times) an incoming Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T. She wrote a much-read essay on Women in Technology initiatives, which she thinks mostly do more harm than good. Near the beginning she says this:
I want to be invited for my skills as a developer and a speaker, not because I happened to be born with a vagina.
On female role models
I’m tired of being told I will be a good “role model” for other female web developers at a conference. If somebody is a good role model, they’re a good role model for everyone, regardless of gender. I never cared if my role models had dark eyes like I do, why should I care if they are the same gender? It’s equally meaningless. The whole notion that women need female role models springs from the notion that gender is this incredibly important characteristic that defines who you are. I call shenanigans on that. [Read more…]
Why should Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recuse himself from abortion rights cases and related cases like McCullen v. Coakley? Because he’s married to an anti-abortion rights campaigner. See her page at the anti-abortion Nurturing Network:
Maureen Scalia
Crisis Pregnancy Counselor
Pro-Life Advocate“I have been moved by the courage of so many who in their loneliness struggle to protect the life they nurture within. Serving on the Board of the Nurturing Network is the culmination of my experience in working to protect and defend life.” [Read more…]
Rayhaneh Jabbari is sentenced to hang for killing her rapist in self defense in Iran. There is a petition to get this stopped.
Reyhaneh Jabbari is at risk of imminent execution for having killed a member of the Iranian intelligence services, Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a physician, who was attempting to rape her. Her execution verdict has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
Rayhaneh Jabbari is a 26 six year old woman who has been in prison for the last 7 years and is awaiting imminent execution[ by hanging]. [Read more…]
Behold, the entanglement of church and state in Ireland. The very police forces brandish bibles at their graduation ceremony. The Irish Times has the photographic record:
Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons
That’s a truly frightening picture. These are police officers, agents of state power. They’re not supposed to work for any church.
Originally a comment by Gordon Willis on How different?
The major point is that the desire to learn about the world as it is in itself is not and cannot be the same as the desire to understand god’s creation. There is a fundamental difference which the words “learn more about the world around us” conceals. The one leads to knowledge regardless of any desire for human or personal “significance”, the other has as its goal an interpretation of the world related only to personal meaning (whatever “meaning” means). There is a search for knowledge and a search for meaning, and although these seem to go together there is a point at which the ways divide. Stedman seems to be trying to pretend that such a division can be slurred over, but it effectively destroys common ground except in the most trivial sense: we all “want to know” something or other about the world we live in. [Read more…]
Is there a First Amendment right to bother strangers in the street? I sure as hell hope not.
By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will have decided one of the most contentious topics facing abortion clinics and their patients today: at what point does a protester’s First Amendment rights interfere with a clinic patient’s right to seek medical care without nonconsensual proselytizing? That is the issue in McCullen v. Coakley, and a 35-foot buffer zone surrounding women’s reproductive healthcare facilities in Massachusetts. Mark Rienzi, on behalf of the anti-abortion activists who are challenging the state’s law, argued that being made to stand outside of a buffer zone inhibits his clients’ opportunities to speak with patients, and therefore is a violation of their First Amendment right to free speech. [Read more…]