Filthy and rotten children

Mohammad Shafia doesn’t seem to have liked his three daughters very much. In fact he seems to have disliked them – indeed one could say he seems to have hated them.

An Afghan immigrant accused of murdering a wife and three teenage daughters in what prosecutors have called an “honour killing” told his alleged accomplices that the newly deceased women were “filthy and rotten children”, adding: “may God’s fury descend upon those girls”.

Not affectionate.

A court in Ontario yesterday heard a series of secret police tape recordings
of 58-year-old Mohammad Shafia attempting to justify the brutal murder of his
daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13. He described them as
“treacherous” and said they deserved to die for having betrayed Islam.

Shafia, a Muslim who lived in a polygamous household, is accused of drowning
the girls and their mother Rona, 50, the first of his two wives, in June
2009.

Because?

The motive for the alleged crime was Zainab’s recent marriage to a Pakistani.
Shafia did not approve of the relationship, and blamed Rona for it. He decided
to also kill Zahar and Geeti because they had picked up Western habits.

It’s all so out of proportion, you know? He didn’t approve of Zainab’s relationship – so because he disliked something she did, she had to die, and so did her sisters, and so did his first wife. To him it’s just a thing he dislikes, to her it’s her whole life, as theirs are to the other three – and he considers himself so important that it’s worth killing four people just because he dislikes something. Apart from anything else I can just never get my head around the vanity and self-centeredness. I can’t get my head around people who never manage to grasp that they are not somehow fundamentally more important and real and significant than other people; that their displeasure counts more than other people’s lives.

 

 

Scream it into a megaphone

Sometimes yipping is effective. Justin Griffith yipped about a school charity project that turned out to have a missionary element, complete with a question asking children to complete the sentence “I love Jesus because _______.” The school is fixing at least some of the problem. Justin says –

This is not the first time that I’ve put out a request for help that was massively successful because of the public and legal pressure it generated. In the last year, I’ve learned that those two things are the only forces that work when the system is broken.

I’m proud of you, internet atheists. Crowd-sourced activism is like an effective Lorax, speaking for those who can’t.

Speak up, Lorax.

It’s a holy city with sensitivities

What is theocracy fundamentally (you should excuse the word) all about? Men on top. Nothing else is as central, as obsessive, as enforced, as nagged about.

Witness Jerusalem.

Posters depicting women have become rare in the streets of Israel’s capital. In some areas, women have been shunted onto separate sidewalks, and buses and health clinics have been gender-segregated. The military has considered reassigning some female combat soldiers because religious men don’t want to serve with them. [Read more…]

They’re not here to play

Frank Schaeffer fills us in on the world of evangelical child discipline for the glory of god, otherwise known as child abuse.

There’s the Texas judge, there are Michael and Debi Pearl, there’s James Dobson, and there’s Bill Gothard.

And it is not just individuals who are abused. Whole “Christian” organizations are involved. According to a report by Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis (and many other media sources over the years),

“At first glance, the Bill Gothard-founded and run Indianapolis Training Center looks like an ordinary conference hotel. But some say there are dark secrets inside. “They’re not here to play,” Mark Cavanaugh, an ITC staffer tells a mother on hidden-camera video. ‘They’re here because they’ve been disobedient, they’ve been disrespectful.'” [Read more…]

Glory in store

Enough of this frivolity; back into the theocratic trenches. Back to the anti-feminist “Biblical” reactionaries. It’s time to wade into The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

There is One Woman’s Wrestling Match with Submission, Part IV. Yes, part 4 – we want to be thorough about our wrestling matches with submission (provided, of course, we end up by submitting).

Christ’s purpose and joy was to glorify his Father, and he did this by submitting to him, thus elevating submission and the role of a servant for all time.   The Holy Spirit, for his part, was to glorify Christ.  If God gives me, as a woman, a task, that is the place and position from which he wants me to glorify him.  His intention is that my position of submission to my husband would bring glory to God.  And not only to him – ‘The woman,’ wrote the apostle Paul in I Corinthians 11:7, ‘is the glory of man.’  What if God has glory in store as I joyfully submit to my husband? [Read more…]

SIMOTI

Someone is mean on the internet. No really?!

Yes but sometimes it is worth noting. When it’s part of an extended misogynist group-rant is one time; when it’s an ostensibly rational person going off the charts for months on end is another; when it’s a matter of singling out a few women is another. [Read more…]

Starting young

See what it’s like to grow up as a Quiverfull child.

I’m the oldest of 12. I was 13 when my baby sister Tess slept in my room. I was responsible for changing and feeding her in the middle of the night (she was 6 months plus…I don’t remember exactly). That was pretty much the beginning. (To be fair, she was one of two babies who was passed off so young, but still.)

My second sister (seven years younger than me) is mother to our second-youngest sister, Abby. I don’t say second mother. I say mother. After a high-risk pregnancy, mom had an emergency C-section, and Abby became Beth’s buddy. She couldn’t nurse, so she was purely bottle-fed. Beth did everything for her. Last I knew, Abby would come to Beth if she had a problem, before she would come to mom.

Beth and I shared a room for many years, and the younger girls’ room was right next door. When Tess had nightmares and hallucinations, most likely it was Beth or me (or both) who got up with her. When the little girls needed help going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, it was us again who helped (or the twins, when they got older).

It wasn’t that our parents’ room was across the house, either. It was across the hall from our rooms. They believed they deserved the right to sleep through the night while someone else took care of their kids. They believed they earned the right to sleep through the night while someone else took care of their kids.

Child labor laws would rule that out for unrelated children, but within the family it’s ok to make children do the night duty.

Another baby!

So I watched the Duggars for half an hour or so last night. I hadn’t seen them before apart from a few minutes once, before I knew they were Quiverfull. The whole thing is, not surprisingly, blood-curdling. Especially Jim Bob. God he’s awful – genial and ignorant and intrusive. They all went to Edinburgh (apparently because Jim-Bob is under the delusion that “King James” translated the bible), their first time ever out of the country, and perhaps even Arkansas – and on their very first afternoon there, Jim Bob got in a friendly chat with a street performer and damn if he didn’t come right out and say “what’s your faith background?” No really, he did – 90 seconds into a chat and he asks a total stranger what his religion is. When the guy said none, Jim Bob said hey look Jupiter is too cold and Venus is too hot but here it’s just right, God keeps it all working. His first day in a foreign country and he’s out there lecturing people!

And all the children have names that begin with J. Like Jim Bob; geddit? How stinking conceited is that? One is called Jinger.

But that’s just by the way. The really creepy part is where they tell the kids – all 19 of them – that Mom is pregnant again. Then there’s a flashback to the last birth – when her blood pressure skyrocketed and the baby had to be taken out 3 1/2 months early. The kid is now 2 and she looks very damn fragile. But they were all beaming about the exciting prospect of doing all that again or perhaps just plain seeing Michelle Duggar die. She told the camera that would be fine.

It’s disgusting.