Punished for love

Hate is alright.
Assault is almost alright.
Rape is not so alright in some cases, but alright in many cases.
Killing is alright in many cases too. For example, the state can kill in the name of capital punishment, you can kill people as much as you want during the war, you can kill a passerby if you feel you would get attacked by him.
But
Love is not alright.
You can be jailed for love in a country called Bangladesh.

Here is the news.

A 22-year-old Muslim woman in Bangladesh has been arrested and charged with kidnapping after she eloped with and married a Hindu teenage girl in what could be the first reported same-sex marriage in the conservative country that bans homosexuality.

Police arrested Sanjida Akter and her 16-year-old girlfriend in Dhaka on July 23 after the minor’s father registered a complaint, saying his daughter had been abducted.

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Abduction charge? Then the girl who abducted the other girl should be arrested, why the girl who was abducted was arrested? Old men forcefully marry girl children everyday in the rural areas. I have never heard any man gets arrested for their crimes to marry minors. Now, a couple who love each other and start living together arrested. I doubt whether the younger girl is really 16. It can be a made up age to make the arrest easier. We live in a violent world, where love and love making are often considered crimes.

“We detained them in a house they rented and were stunned to discover this is a lesbian case,” Lieutenant Sazzad Raihan, an officer.

“Both told us that they love each other. They fled their homes in Pirojpur district to start a family in Dhaka. (The younger girl) told us that they were married under Hindu traditions at their home the previous night.”

Homosexuality and same-sex marriages are illegal in the majority Muslim south Asian nation and people who are open about their sexuality often face discrimination and violence. This may be the first known case of a same-sex marriage in Bangladesh, although the wedding was not performed by a cleric, priest or magistrate.

Homosexuality is illegal in Muslim countries. But homosexuality is legal in Muslim heaven. Beautiful young boys are kept in heaven to serve men wine and sex. Muslim countries are terribly hypocrite to ban alcohol and homosexual Love. Alcohol is not really banned in Bangladesh. People drink alcohol as much as they want. Male homosexuals are roaming around the cities, they don’t get often punished for being homosexuals. But girls get punished for being homosexuals only because they are girls, I don’t think they are punished because one of the married girls is a minor. The court would not recognize their marriage anyway. They only exchanged the garlands of flowers to be married.

Why so much anger against girls? Is it because they have denied to marry men and denied to be humiliated, abused and raped by men and denied to be treated like child bearing machines and slaves by men? The loving girls did not kill or harm anyone. Their only crime is they kick the ass of male dominated patriarchal system. Right, officers?

“A jinn (evil spirit) has possessed her since she was a student in class four [9 years old] and we tried many ways to free her from it. This is what’s provoking her into this behaviour,” Abdus Sobhan, Sanjida’s father said.

“No one will ever lodge any complaint against me. Not even [this girl] as I did not abduct her. She went with me willingly,” she told the newspaper before going to jail.

Finally! Women love women, so women must be possessed by evil spirits. Now beat her up until jinns leave her body. What a wonderful solution for the same-sex-love!
Patriarchy, religion, misogyny, ignorance, barbarism all walk hand in hand to destroy women whoever dare to enjoy the rights they deserve.

Remembering Gore Vidal, a great humanist

“…homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime . . . despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word ‘natural,’ not normal.”Gore Vidal, Esquire 1969

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.”Gore Vidal on monotheism

Gore Vidal, a great humanist died yesterday.

I am remembering those days in 1995, when Gore Vidal, some other writers and I gave lectures at Oxford university. Our lectures were published in book form. Chris Miller, a fellow of All Souls College edited the book titled ‘The dissident word’.

THE Times Higher Education wrote about Gore Vidal in 1995 before the Oxford lecture series started.

Six leading writers will speak on the subject of the Dissident Word in the fourth series of Amnesty Lectures which starts next week at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

Whatever Gore Vidal has to say in the course of his Amnesty lecture, there can be little doubt that it will be said wittily and well. His calculated wit has been criticised as an ingenious means of skating over thin ice – one reviewer said he had “perfected the art of going nowhere, while being deliciously funny en route”. But few deny the man who defined a narcissist as “anyone better looking than you” and who said he was all for bringing back the birch “but only between consenting adults” his standing as a master of the epigrammatic one-liner.

For half a century he has fulfilled the dual roles of iconoclast and scion of America’s ruling classes. Like his exact contemporary and political opposite William F. Buckley – also born in 1925 and the other half of a famous televised spat in which Buckley called him a queer and Vidal labelled Buckley a Nazi – he is a critic from within, a satirist with a deadly serious purpose, chipping away at the complacency of the milieu and the nation that produced him.

Politically well-connected -his grandfather Thomas Gore was a senator from Oklahoma while vice-president Gore and ex-president Carter are relatives – he has run for office himself, losing a New York congressional race in 1960 despite outpolling presidential candidate John Kennedy, and polling half a million votes in the California Democratic Primary of 1982.

But his immense self-confidence rests on achievement as well as birth, with a formidable canon of novels, essays, journalism and scripts built up in the half-century since his first novel Williwaw was published in his teens. Most of his twenties were spent in the shadow of censorship. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, outraged conventional opinion with its portrayal of a college sportsman driven by obsessive love for another male athlete.

He found refuge in pseudonymous crime novels and scriptwriting for MGM. “Censorship was very real in the 1950s and I had a bad time after the blackout. You don’t write a movie like Ben Hur if you’re having a good time.”

He is a ferocious critic of religion as a constraining force and was denounced as an anti-Christ by television evangelist and ex-presidential candidate Pat Robertson. Along with a disdain for religion goes a fear of the over-mighty state. He contends that the postwar United States has been a “National Security State” and calls for a reorganisation along the lines of the Swiss cantons to take power away from the centre. “The rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the power to imprison – or otherwise intimidate – anyone who violates any of the state’s often new-minted crimes,” he says.

He is perhaps an ironic choice for a lecture series held on university premises. A scourge of current fashions in English departments, he has said: “It is quite evident that, in the English departments of the United States, not only do they not understand imagination, but to the extent that it comes their way they hate it. And they have eliminated literature altogether from the English departments and replaced it with literary theory.”

‘I regret to report that Gore Vidal has died. He was one of my favorite authors, and a notable atheist and humanist.’ PZ Myers, biologist and blogger.

“The progressive and humanist values Gore Vidal repeatedly espoused moved the culture in a positive direction. He spent his life pointing out the places in society that needed the most attention without worrying who might be embarrassed or upset by his opinions.”David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association.

”He’s been called an iconoclast, a provocateur, and a misanthrope, and of course Gore occasionally said things that gave humanists pause. But he was forever dedicated to the cause of enlightenment and exposed injustice and hypocrisy at every turn.”Jennifer Bardi, editor of Humanist magazine.