Uganda continues on its terrible course.

Uganda plans to ban 38 non-governmental organisations it accuses of promoting homosexuality, the Minister for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo has said.

…

The minister says the organisations are receiving foreign support for Uganda’s homosexuals and accused gay people of “recruiting” young children into homosexuality, Reuters reports.

On Monday, police raided a gay rights conference being held at a hotel just outside the capital, Kampala.

Gay activists from around the region were detained for a few hours.

Not recruiting. Not promoting. Demanding equal rights for. There’s a difference.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in the world understood this?

Feminists don’t “recruit” anyone to be a woman. Feminists don’t “promote” being a woman. We just demand equal rights for women. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to other kinds of people where “kind” is not any kind of crime or harm. Criminals and people who do harm also get to have human rights, but the arguments and campaigns are somewhat different. But when it comes to what people just are, then the basic claim is the same: this particular status or identity or label is not a reason to deny people of that status or identity or label their rights.

It would be nice if everyone got that.

This one is on an oldish thread, and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it, because it’s so…choice. It’s from someone indignant about my thoughts on the Vatican’s attitude to “radical feminist” nuns, so presumably from a devout Catholic, who presumably thinks that he is therefore A Good Person. [Compassion is at the heart of every great religion. – Karen Armstrong]

Here’s devout good Phil’s pious comment:

What a bitter and twisted immoral egotistical imbecile you are. No one wants your obedience, they would prefer your absence, permanently. No doubt you’ve found yourself a comfortable little billet where you can open your big mouth as wide as you like as often as you like with impunity. Bully for you. Lesbian narcissist. Go back to kissing your reflection.

Doncha just love the virtue of good Catholics like that?

A couple of good posts on how to not urinate on women.

Dana on How not to handle harassment.

Chris Clarke on Misogyny, the skeptics movement, and grand theft auto.

Once in awhile Twitter’s recommendations come in very handy – I didn’t know Sherry Rehman was on Twitter. I didn’t even know she was Pakistan’s ambassador to the US – last I knew she was one of two surviving politicians in Pakistan who favored reforming the blasphemy law, and thus in very serious danger. I’m profoundly glad that she’s now an ambassador and thus less likely to be murdered by one of her own employees the way Salman Tazeer was.

So in reading her Twitter feed I find Foreign Policy’s list of important women on Twitter. I wish it weren’t an afterthought to a list of just important people on Twitter that was nearly 90% men, and I wish it didn’t have a hot pink tweetybird on it, but it’s good to have a list. I’ll be Following some.

In a comment at Pharyngula responding to people saying things like

I find it sad that, for want of a better analogy, the terrorists seem to be winning… let’s not kid ourselves, this is a fight for our movement, and we have to be prepared to get your hands dirty if we don’t want this kind of dick head behavior to be associated with it.  Yet all I see is declarations of “oh, I’m not going, because poo-poo heads”… it should be more like “They what!?  Let’s take it to ‘em, troops”

Maureen said:

How dare you come here with so poor a grasp of what has been happening, such a complete blank in your brains?  How dare you suggest that we are failing to change the culture because we are too passive?  Some of us do have enough grasp of what is happening to know that sometimes in this fight the opposite of “passive” is “dead”  –  dead in a ditch like Emmett Till in an earlier struggle because he wasn’t quite passive enough, dead under the King’s horse at Epsom like Emily Davidson, dead like Brandy Martell just last month in Oakland CA but then you probably never heard of her.

Besides, guys, we are not on a martyrdom kick.  We are trying to persuade a bunch of entitled buffoons that the culture is changing, it is going to keep changing and, no, they can’t halt the change.  They can only drag it out a little, make it a little more messy.  To achieve that we have to be focussed and rational.  The delayers and disparagers can afford to be emotional and self-indulgent  –  as they have been of late.

What exactly is it that you want us to do?  All sell our houses and fly to Vegas so that we can wrap James Randi and his beard in Scotch tape?  Yes, that would be assault and you can be sure that by the time we finished the first roll every cop within 20 miles would be on hand to protect him.

People are getting away with behaviour on the ill-mannered to criminal scale because they are getting cover from both the arrogant and the dim.  They are getting encouragement.  They are being cheered on as they heap verbal abuse on those who have already been abused.  They are putting on stunts like the Great Penis Debate in the midst of all this and still claiming that it’s all a big joke.

There are two sets of people here  –  the ones who suggest that with some effort we could improve this, that or the other and the other set who say, “Naw, my grandpappy used to get away with groping all the women in his workplace and I want my share, too.”  Not difficult to see which set you lot jumped into bed with!

Now listen up, children.  I was 70 last week and I have been on to this since I was 12.  In my lifetime and in just one country I have seen changes to the teaching of maths and science, the professions opened to women, the banking system woken up so that it no longer demands a male countersignature, individual taxation for couples, women’s refuges and rape crisis centres, clarification of what rape is and stalking on the books as a criminal offence plus other changes to the law.  And so on and so forth.  And marched and wrote and spoke and supported comrades in the fight.

In the course of that I have met an amazing number of totally impressive people, people I have been so proud to know.  Not a few of them on this very blog where I come for the very clarity of thought, effective communication, depth of commitment and experience which has always proved to be far more effective than any amount of mealy-mouthed wanking.

We are not there yet and sometimes that get a bit frustrating.  Some of us, though, know exactly what we are aiming for and it is still eyes on the prize.

You don’t like that?  Tough!

I got email threats about TAM today, so I’m not going.

One less thing to worry about.

The popular Pakistani singer Ghazala Javed was shot to death in Peshawar yesterday along with her father.

Police official Imtiaz Khan said the ex-husband was suspected of involvement in the murders.

The singer had fled to Peshawar in 2009 to escape the then Taliban-dominated northwestern district of Swat as the army launched a sweeping offensive.

Ghazala Javed sung in her native Pashto language and released more than two dozen albums that were popular among Pashto speakers in the northwest.

She married businessman Jahangir Khan in 2010, but demanded a divorce after finding out he had another wife and because he tried to ban her from singing, the family said.

Not the Taliban, just a murderous possessive ex-husband.

Same thing.

The pope’s consigliere says it’s the devil who’s making things hot for them.

In a rare interview with the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, accused the media of “intentionally ignoring” the good things the Church does while dwelling on scandals.

Yeah the good things! Like telling people condoms cause Aids! Like trying to stop people using any kind of birth control ever! Like trying to make hospitals promise never to save a woman’s life if it requires an abortion – never ever ever. Like excommunicating anyone who tries to ordain a woman. Like saying no no no no no no women can never be priests because they are women. Good things!

Bertone branded as false the image of the Vatican as a place of intrigue and power struggles, saying: “The truth is that there is an attempt to sow division that comes from the Devil”.

Nothing to do with any faults in the institution itself or its way of thinking about the world – such as claiming that problems are the work of the devil.

 

A few hours after we did the hangout video yesterday, Russell Blackford did a tweet.

I see that DJ Grothe is still Witch of the Week. #bullies

Followed by another.

Freethought Blogs – the haven of bullies, bully-enablers, and witch hunters. I’m sick to death of this. #bullies

Some hours after that, Jeremy Stangroom did one.

…the bullies at FreeThought Blogs run the risk of precipitating a tragedy. Bullying ruins – and sometimes ends – lives. #bullies

So now you know. We (we of Freethought blogs, we who did that video, we whom DJ Grothe accused of turning women away from TAM by discussing harassment issues, we who have been rejecting that accusation, we who have been getting shouted at by raging men on ugly videos) – we are bullies and witch hunters. We run the risk of driving people to suicide.

We are. We do. Really? How? Who is it who is being bullied by us? DJ? Apparently, according to Blackford. But DJ is the president of a big skeptics’ organization, and he has lots of allies. Is he really the powerless one here? And what exactly is it that we’re doing that constitutes bullying? We’ve been disputing what he said about us, certainly – but is that really bullying? I think it isn’t. In fact I think it was DJ who was bullying us. I certainly think it is some of DJ’s partisans who have been bullying us ever since – Emery Emery and Travis Roy, for instance. The people who call us cunts and fucking bitches on Abbie Smith’s blog, for instance.

Blackford knows all about that. He’s never said a word about it that I know of (and believe me, I’ve looked) apart from once saying the Abbie Smith gang should stop it because it’s not helpful to Stef McGraw. I’ve never seen him call it bullying. Not once. It’s been going on for a year, singling out Rebecca Watson, me, and PZ Myers for their most devoted attention.

Stangroom knows all about it too. He has friendly exchanges with some of the Abbie Smith gang. I’ve never seen him say a word about it, either. I’ve seen him say nasty things about “Freethought Blogs” many many many times, but never once anything about Abbie Smith’s blog, where the vilification goes on day in and day out.

So how does this work? What’s the thought process that sees us as bullies and witch hunters (and Talibanesque) while it ignores or even encourages the vicious bile at Abbie Smith’s blog and The Great Penis Debate?

I don’t know. It’s a poser. I don’t get it.

I’ll tell you what though. It makes me feel a little sick to see a couple of men calling a few women witch hunters and bullies when the women have been and are being regularly targeted by genuine misogynist bullies. It’s like a couple of white people calling a few black people who are being targeted by racist bullies “KKK” and “racist.” It’s fucked up. It’s backward. It’s appropriating words that are meaningful to a particular liberation struggle and using them to beat up on the very people doing the struggling.

Greg tried to get some light shed on this matter, but he was told to fuck off.

#bullies indeed. What a joke.