Denying services to same-sex couples may soon become legal in Kansas.
House Bill 2453 explicitly protects religious individuals, groups and businesses that refuse services to same-sex couples, particularly those looking to tie the knot.
It passed the state’s Republican-dominated House on Wednesdaywith a vote of 72-49, and has gone to the Senate for a vote. [Read more…]
Unbelievable.
The headline at the Raw Story: Idaho bill would allow doctors or cops to refuse service to LGBT people on religious grounds
WHAT?
We’re going from people with hotels refusing rooms to same-sex couples to DOCTORS AND COPS refusing service? On religious grounds?
How would that go? “Sorry you’re having a heart attack, I hate you on religious grounds so I’m not going to do anything about it. Have a nice day.” [Read more…]
In the UK there are people trying to defend gender segregation as a religious freedom, while opponents point out what that would look like if it were racial segregation as opposed to gender segregation. In the US, in the state of Oregon, there’s an effort to get an initiative passed to give business owners a “right of conscience” to refuse gay people service. It’s all the same bullshit, people: when they want to shove you to one side, it’s because they hold you in contempt.
As worded, the referendum will present itself as a modest caveat to the gay marriage law, extending a few basic safeguards for religious freedom. In reality, this ugly, mean-spirited initiative will herald nothing less than a new era of anti-gay segregation in Oregon—and, potentially, all across America. [Read more…]
Are you worrying about Lent? Thinking about giving up video games or tequila or marathon running? Considering making a sacrifice of your gardening, or those excursions to WalMart, or spinach and ortolan foam? Last year NPR reported that an archbishop once gave a useful and helpful ruling. It reminds me of those rulings that find it’s halal for men to “marry” women for 15 minutes.
Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter, but seafood is allowed. Three years ago, when Jim Piculas was trying to settle a debate among his friends about whether gator qualified as seafood, he wrote a letter to the archbishop of New Orleans to ask. [Read more…]
This is something I didn’t know about: the women in the refrigerator trope. Anita Sarkeesian offers an illustration in three panels from the 1992 arcade game Dead Connection.
Wikipedia provides some background.
The term “Women in Refrigerators” was coined by writer Gail Simone as a name for the website in early 1999 during online discussions about comic books with friends. It refers to an incident in Green Lantern #54 (1994), written by Ron Marz, in which Kyle Rayner, the title hero, comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, had been killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed in a refrigerator.[2][3] [Read more…]
Rupert Sutton tells us that last week the Student Union at University College London passed a motion calling on the union to support a campaign called Real Student Rights, or rather that that’s ostensibly what it did but in reality it attacked his organization, Student Rights.
It insinuated that our work showed support for far-right politics and claimed that we deliberately fuel Islamophobia and encourage fascist groups like the English Defence League. [Read more…]
Good job, New York Times. Never let a woman try for a big job without asking the universe if she can have it all.
Originally a comment on Guest witticism by Anthony K: The purity of Engliſh ſpellyng. (I know; can I do that? Can I make a comment on a guest post another guest post? What if there’s a guest post comment on that post? How many levels can we take this? I don’t know. I’m venturing out into the unknown here. I can’t predict.)
End of preamble.
I think whenever we talk about gender in language we have to remember that the term “grammatical gender” often has almost nothing to do with the gender-as-social-construction we usually mean.
Take French. “le crayon” — masculine, “la plume” – feminine There is no logical reason for this whatsoever. (What could the possible difference between pencils and pens be?) Trying to connect this to “traditionally male” or “traditionally female” roles/nouns and such makes no sense. There is simply no correlation with, well, anything, which is why for second-language learners French or Spanish or Italian requires straight-up memorization for which nouns are masculine or feminine. [Read more…]
I’m being very bad, very truant and frivolous and unserious, and I’ll probably be banished from all the things as a result, but I just found Dawkins’s latest Tweetinspiration too funny to resist.
Philosophers’ historic failure to anticipate Darwin is a severe indictment of philosophy. Happy Darwin Day!
Yup. Also of music, poetry, agriculture, painting, weaving, pottery, history, drama – oh the list is long. Long long longitty long. Think of all the people who failed to anticipate Darwin. It’s a severe indictment of being a person.
So I’ve been preaching sombre sermons on the problem on Twitter. Twitter is terrifically good for writing about complicated things in ten or fifteen words, so I go there whenever I have sombre sermons to preach.
After their meeting with the Student Union the Southbank University AHS peeps went for coffee and what did they see?
what had already been placed behind protective glass??? #EpicWin #SecularSelfie
Posted totally with permission