Another antique celibate summarizes the problem

What do you think? Is the Catholic hierarchy cheering or cringing at the words of this Brazilian archbishop* and his excuses for the child abuse scandals in the church?

Archbishop Grings, a 73-year-old priest with conservative views, said the gradual acceptance of homosexuality by the public was a precursor to a possible broad acceptance of paedophilia.

“When sexuality is banalised it is clear that that can have an effect on all cases. Homosexuality is one case. Before, no one spoke of the homosexual. He was discriminated against,” he said.

“When we start to say that they [homosexuals] have rights, rights to publicly demonstrate, in a short time paedophilia will also have rights.”

Oh, yes, let us return to the good old days, when homosexuals could be discriminated against. That’s all we need to fix up the church scandals!

His central premise is that “society today is paedophile”, and that’s why Catholics are having such problems — it’s not their fault. Unfortunately for his thesis, the only place where there seems to be a broad acceptance of pedophilia is the Catholic church.

*For some reason, that phrase conjures up images of a wrinkly uncircumcised penis on a waxed crotch. It seems appropriate here.

Mohammed is defiled…but it’s a very old story

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All the kerfuffle about people drawing Mohammed in recent years has been seriously misplaced: there is a very entertaining archive of Mohammed images, everything from serious medieval renditions to obscene contemporary scrawls. Cat’s out of the bag, Muslims—pictures of Mohammed are everywhere, and they’ve been around for centuries.

In related news, the UW Madison Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics did their own consciousness raising excercise, chalking stick figure Mohammed’s all over campus. Some of the reactions were amusing: I think it’s clever that some of the opposition came along with chalk, drew boxing gloves on the figures, and added “Ali” after the name. And of course there were also the expected responses, where people defaced and scuffed out the images.

As it turns out, no, you cannot draw depictions of Muhammad in Madison. At least, not without having them immediately changed to pictures of Muhammad Ali, and not without having them censored the next day. Let’s imagine an alternate universe. Let’s say the drawings were never tampered with, but instead were met with nothing more than shrugged shoulders and public admonishment for our childish behavior. In this scenario the egg would be on our faces. Instead, suffice it to say that our point has been proven. The right to criticize religion and perform blasphemous acts needs to be defended more than ever.

Exactly right.

I’m glad I’m not at risk of ever getting a job offer from a Catholic university

Not that I’d ever apply; I wouldn’t ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.

Marquette University has just done that. They’ve been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and sciences, and had made an offer to a Dr Jodi O’Brien, a professor of sociology at Seattle University. They have now abruptly yanked the offer off the table and announced that the search has failed.

The reason? Partly, it’s because she’s a lesbian. Marquette does have other gay faculty, though, so that’s not the whole story — the other part of the story is that she actively studies the sociology of homosexuality, and has written papers that favor gay marriage.

“I guess if she was a lesbian abut her research was on microorganisms, she might have been acceptable,” Franzoi said. But he said scholars study issues that are important to them and O’Brien’s sexual orientation makes her scholarship related to gays and lesbians important to her.

“This issue has always been a problem with Marquette officials. This is just the latest and probably most publicly embarrassing of its kind.”

Apparently, you can be a lesbian at Marquette as long as you aren’t too lesbian. People outside the university seem to have applied pressure — donors, possibly, who don’t want to hire administrators who are insufficiently conservative.

And that’s why I’m happy to stay clear of private universities with peculiar affiliations. They have a rather limited definition of academic freedom.

Et tu, Canada? It must be dangerous to teach while lesbian.

If the Shroud of Turin is what it is claimed to be, then…

Uh-oh. Gregory Paul has analyzed the proportions of the image on the Shroud of Turin, and come to some troubling conclusions.

This note is intended to describe why, from an artistic and anatomical perspective, the shroud image is an embarrassingly obvious fraud committed by a Gothic artist following the standard conventions of his time. The artistic errors are so severe that it is impossible for the shroud to record the image of an actual human body–unless it was a very seriously pathological person with a brain the size of a Homo erectus.

So Jesus was a hypocephalic cretin? You know, this makes Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man even more prophetic.

Spoiler alert! [In the book, a time-traveler discovers the actual Jesus born of Mary and Joseph is a hapless mentally retarded man…and he ends up taking his place on the cross.]

For the boys with boo-boos

We have a thread on female genital mutilation, and a few boys are insisting on turning it into a discussion of the damage done to their pee-pees by circumcision. For the record, I agree with you: circumcision is mutilation, too, and it shouldn’t be done, and doctors shouldn’t be collaborating in such a primitive and barbarous practice on children — like piercings and tattoos, it should only be practiced on consenting adults. Except that it’s even crazier than a tattoo.

However, FGM is a much more serious problem that causes great pain, destroys most of the capacity for sexual response, and is a tool used to control and oppress women. There is no comparison between FGM and circumcision, and it is annoying to see boys intruding on a thread about a serious political and social issue to insist that everyone look at their little boo-boo.

Yes, I am belittling your loss, because compared to what mutilated women have lost, it’s goddamned trivial.

But since some of you are so insistent on demanding that your tallywhackers must be privileged with sympathy, this thread is for you. Go ahead, tell us in all the detail you want how sad you are that your sensitivity has been reduced and that you were tortured for a bit when you were a baby, all true, and I’ll even concede right here that it is a genuine problem that ought to be stopped.

Ladies, I suggest that you just ignore this thread. This one is for all the hormonal little guys who need a place to hold hands and cry together.

Whatever happened to “first, do no harm”?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has come up with a compromise on female genital mutilation.

International human rights organization Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for “federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ‘ritual nick’,” such as pricking or minor incisions of girls’ clitorises. The Policy Statement “Ritual Genital Cutting of Female Minors”, issued by the AAP on April 26, 2010, is a significant set-back to the Academy’s own prior statements on the issue of FGM and is antithetical to decades of noteworthy advancement across Africa and around the world in combating this human rights violation against women and girls. It is ironic that the AAP issued its statement the very same day that Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) announced the introduction of new bipartisan legislation, The Girls Protection Act (H.R. 5137), to close the loophole in the federal law prohibiting FGM by making it illegal to transport a minor girl living in the U.S. out of the country for the purpose of FGM.

Nice bit of accommodationism there. “We’ll just mutilate baby girls a little bit, to make the misogynist patriarchal assholes happy.” Well, we have no obligation to make misogynist patriarchal assholes happy at all, especially not when it involves waving scalpels about in the genitals of children.

Check out Equality Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the organization. It’s got the most depressing mission ever, but one of the most important, too. Also go to their urgent alert page, where they have names, addresses and phone numbers of AAP board members who should be flooded with messages (they also provide a sample letter) telling them what an awful, horrible, evil decision they have made.

By the way, the director of AAP and both board members you should write to…all male. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

By the way, also read the official AAP policy statement. It’s got another bizarre bit of pandering:

In addition, “mutilation” is an inflammatory term that tends to foreclose communication and that fails to respect the experience of the many women who have had their genitals altered and who do not perceive themselves as “mutilated.” It is paradoxical to recommend “culturally sensitive counseling” while using culturally insensitive language. “Female genital cutting” is a neutral, descriptive term.

It also has several diagrams of the results of the procedure, appropriately labeled “Female genital mutilation.”

They do say that they offer “nicking” as a compromise to avoid greater harm, so that the parents are satisfied and do not go looking for more severe forms of mutilation to perpetrate on their children. It is not enough. Their whole policy is designed to avoid confronting misogynistic bigots with the horrendous consequences of their traditions.