God and sex: two potent ideas that never get along well together

Imagine yourself in this situation. A young girl is accused of a heinous crime — use your imagination here, too, and think of the most horrible thing a person can do — and she is trapped in front of you, helpless. You have a rock in your hands. People around you are urging you to kill her; they say that you are justified in taking her life. What would you do?

Let’s say you don’t have a rock, but are just part of the large crowd of spectators, witnessing a small group of men killing this girl. What would you do then?

Be honest now.

I wouldn’t be able to do kill anyone, and I would try to stop the killers. She could be an unrepentant mass murderer, and I couldn’t be an executioner — I wouldn’t want to sink to her level, and I think killing is an easy ‘solution’ that solves nothing. At the same time, it reduces the humanity of the killers, and diminishes the quality of our culture. I may not be the target myself, but such acts harm me.

That makes this story of a 13 year old girl stoned to death for adultery in Somalia incomprehensible to me. I know that people do evil all the time, but this was a mob of a thousand people watching 50 thugs murder someone in a particularly brutal fashion. Couldn’t just a few have raised a voice in protest, couldn’t some small fraction of that thousand intervened? Are the killers so divorced from empathy and morality that they would gladly snuff out the life of someone who can do them no harm?

What’s especially appalling is that the murderers weren’t driven by a fundamental human need — they didn’t kill her because they were defending themselves, or because they were starving, or because she had some real power that could harm them. She was killed because she offended their sense of sexual propriety. Because they perceived her as sexually potent, she challenged their own insecure, mouselike manhood. This is outrageously vile.

And even at that, she was an innocent. She was a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men, and for this she was dragged out, begging for her life, buried up to her neck, and then stoned to death by weak, blustering men who let their machismo overwhelm their humanity.

And of course, this was driven by Islamist delusions. Religion is excellent at elevating intangible, untestable lies to a higher plane of moral significance than something as real and as simple as the life of a child.

I should also add, before everyone condemns this as simply the act of a primitive society, that the same impulse is at work right here in America. Those people who voted yes on Proposition 8 in California were simply performing a slightly more civilized version of casting a stone at those who offend their moral and religious sense of propriety.

What word is missing in this story?

I’m sure everyone has already heard about the plot to murder Obama and many others:

Two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, federal authorities said Monday.

In all, the two men whom officials described as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people – 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn.

It’s a horrible and sordid story of idiots with guns, but in scanning the various news sources, there is a curious but obvious word missing — a word that normally our media and government fling about with unscrupulous abandon.

That word is “terrorism”.

Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that white homegrown right-wing fascist killers are somehow exempt from being called what they are — terrorists?

Witch doctors kill

Ignorance leads to evil: albinos are being butchered for their body parts in Burundi. Witch doctors are spreading the claim that their body parts are valuable in attracting gold, so stupid and greedy people are killing them and selling off bits and pieces.

Officials have gathered all the albinos in the country into a walled safehouse to protect them, which seems like a short term solution. I say since their number came up in the genetic lottery as cursed in Burundi, offer them asylum and bring them to Minnesota, where their paleness won’t be at all exceptional.

Say…wasn’t an African witch doctor one of Sarah Palin’s heroes? Let’s be sure not to bring them to Alaska, then.

Terror attack on US soil

Only, of course, it won’t be called an act of terrorism because the victims were Muslim, and the perpetrators were conservative white Americans. They sprayed gas into a mosque filled with kids.

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers. This, apparently, is what the scare tactic political campaigning of John McCain’s supporters has led to — Americans perpetrating a terrorist attack against innocent children on American soil.

Common decency would suggest that babies should not be targeted. These are people who lack decency, I’m afraid.

“Our tribal custom”

Whenever you hear someone defend an action with the excuse that “it is our custom,” “it is traditional,” “we’ve always done it that way,” “it is written so in our sacred texts,” or variants thereof, slap ’em down and spit in their eye. Those are not excuses for anything but the perpetuation of bad old dogma rather than taking the useful step of actually thinking about causes and consequences — it’s the common fallacious shortcut that allows ancient evils to thrive. Case in point in Pakistan:

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A horrible story

You’ve probably already heard this one, since it is all over the news: a preacher, Anthony Hopkins, murdered his wife after she caught him sexually abusing their children and stuffed her in a freezer — with the daughter’s assistance. This happened four years ago and the children’s mother has been kept in the freezer in this house ever since. The pastor of Hopkins church reports that “the children were so respectful, just so easygoing”, and that they “loved their dad. They were very close to him.” Right. Rape, murder, and incest are just ordinary events in the Abrahamic family tree.

What I find disturbing about the whole story is this. Anthony Hopkins spent all this time since as an itinerant preacher, traveling about and preaching the ‘Holy Word of Jesus Christ’. His daughter moved out of his house, finally, reported what he’d done to the police, the police went into his house and opened the freezer, and then they went off to the church where he was preaching that day. What did they do then?

Police allowed Hopkins to finish his sermon before arresting him.

Wait, what? Was this an example of Christians showing respect, that they allowed a child-raping murderer continue mouthing words of love and redemption in their church, words that clearly meant nothing to this monstrous psychopath? If only he’d crumbled a cracker, perhaps then they would have been less tolerant.

Conservative confederate killer

People keep writing to me about this wretched scumbag who shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee, killing two people there to watch a children’s play. I don’t know what happened, but despite it happening in a church, I don’t get the impression that it’s a consequence of a conflict between Christians and an atheist. It was a Unitarian church, full of secular humanists and deists and non-specific theists, not exactly a prime target for a psychotic atheist. More likely issues are that the place had a sign out front saying “Gays welcome”, that he was a Confederate South sympathizer, that he was insane, and that he “was motivated by frustration over being unable to obtain a job and hatred for the liberal movement.” At least, that’s the word that has leaked out of a long note he left behind.

So until we know more specifics, it sounds to me like this is the work of a far right-wing nut who targeted a particular church not because it was religious, but because this is the kind of church where you’ll find the highest concentration of bleeding heart liberals. We’ll have to wait until more details are made available, though, to know for sure.

New reports: “He disliked blacks, gays, anyone who was a different color or just different from him”, and his ex-wife was a member of the church he targeted. There’s a whole bunch of crazy motives behind these actions, I suspect.

Hitchens under torture

Christopher Hitchens’ views on war in the Middle East often infuriate me, even while I greatly enjoyed his views on religion. My respect for him goes up, though, because he has done something I wouldn’t: to determine whether it really was torture, he had himself waterboarded by the US military (and if you relish the thought of watching Hitchens actually being tortured, it was recorded on video).

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning–or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and–as you might expect–inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

The answer is clear.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

It is a dreadful act to perform on the subject, and it degrades those who do it. I’m ashamed to admit that I would like to see all of the proponents of torture in this awful war subjected to this treatment; it is by an act of conscience that we have to say it must not be allowed to happen to anyone.

(via Cycle Ninja)

Astonishing pusillanimity

This has to be seen to believed. John Conyers asks John Yoo a simple question: “Is there anything the president could not order be done to a suspect?” He can’t give a straight answer. So Conyers reduces it to a simple hypothetical: “Could the president order a suspect to be buried alive?” He still can’t answer! It’s a yes or no question!

What can be done in the face of such a disgusting evasion of simple decency from the Bush administration? Not much, but laugh.

Gary Farber has invented a game, “Stump the Yoo”. Go ahead, think of some outrage you would propose as a hypothetical to John You, just to see him squirm.

Gary suggests, “Can the president order the arms of a suspect eaten by wolves while still attached?“

How about, “Can the president order a suspect to be impaled for his lunchtime entertainment?“

Or perhaps, “Can the president order a suspect to be repeatedly drowned to the point of suffocation?“

Your turn. Can you think of a question that would get John Yoo to say simply, “No, the president cannot order that”?

A barbaric tragedy

I wondered, incorrectly, if Leila Hussein was a reluctant accomplice in the death of her daughter, Rand Abdel-Qader, the young girl who was murdered by her monstrous father for speaking to a British soldier. Now I feel particularly awful about that; Leila Hussein was devastated by the killing, condemned the act, and left her contemptible husband at grave personal risk.

Leila Hussein has been murdered, gunned down as she tried to escape Iraq.

It was two weeks after Rand’s death on 16 March that a grief-stricken Leila, unable to bear living under the same roof as her husband, found the strength to leave him. She had been beaten and had had her arm broken. It was a courageous move. Few women in Iraq would contemplate such a step. Leila told The Observer in April: ‘No man can accept being left by a woman in Iraq. But I would prefer to be killed than sleep in the same bed as a man who was able to do what he did to his own daughter.’

Her words were to prove prescient. Leila turned to the only place she could, a small organisation in Basra campaigning for the rights of women and against ‘honour’ killings. Almost immediately she began receiving threats – notes calling her a ‘prostitute’ and saying she deserved to die like her daughter.

This is an instance of unimaginable fear, hatred, and tragedy…and it’s just one example of a climate and pattern of oppression of women. It’s a story that’s hard to read through the tears.