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Like all of our imaginary friends gods, Terence deserves a little respect as his way – the way of the honey-badger – can be the only true way to heaven. Cool Hard Logic examines the toxicity of religion and the spurious arguments that are used to defend adult’s imaginary friends.
When you believe in magic you can just stow your moral and ethical compass in your back pocket and whistle while you do God’s work.
“Estimates suggest that anywhere between 60 and 80 percent of migrant women and girls are raped on their journey as they travel across the southern United States border. But many of the organizations that provide medical care to these migrants are refusing to provide emergency contraception or make pregnancy-related referrals to girls who have been raped. What’s more, the religious organizations that operate these groups are opposing a move by the Obama administration to address epidemic rape of young unaccompanied migrants by requiring contraceptive care.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m whistling up a storm. It takes a great deal of raw tune-age to mask the sound of melting moral/ethical compasses.
“[…]the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) that would require federally funded organizations that house unaccompanied migrant children to provide victims of sexual abuse with “unimpeded access to emergency medical treatment, crisis intervention services, emergency contraception, and sexually transmitted infections prophylaxis, in accordance with professionally accepted standards of care, where appropriate under medical or mental health professional standards.”
The rule includes a clause that would allow faith-based organizations to offer external pregnancy-related referrals for unaccompanied children. Grantees that house unaccompanied children could deny services “on religious or moral grounds,” needing only to coordinate with federal staff members who would provide the services. But a letter submitted last week even objected to a referral requirement that would “impose a duty on the conscientious objector to refer for the very item or procedure to which it has a religious or moral objection.” What’s more, the letter co-signers want the ORR to free up organizations “from any requirement to provide, facilitate the provision of, provide information about, or refer or arrange for items or procedures to which they have a religious or moral objection.”
My belief in foolishness trumps your rights as a human being to receive medical care. Or more bluntly – You, Girl-Child, get to keep the rapist’s baby – because Jesus.
There is not a thicker blight on the moral order of the universe than wooly-headed religious beliefs like this. I’m short on the indignation today, I just wrote a post about how awesome Jim Prentice and Tory rule has been for Alberta, so all I have left is to say that this level of callous fuckwittery is just plain ole’ evil.
Oh, and of course, evil has support in the GOP.
“At the time, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) unleashed a round of attacks against the Obama administration over its “anti-Catholic bias.” Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) stated that the USCCB was a victim of discrimination “solely because it fundamentally respects the innate value and preciousness of an unborn child and refuses to be complicit in procuring his or her violent death by abortion.” Smith has otherwise supported anti-abortion legislation that makes exceptions in cases of rape and incest for minors. Still, ORR continues to contract with the USCCB and other faith-based organizations to provide services for unaccompanied alien children.”
Somethings just don’t change. :/
The chance of being raped is quite high for women migrating to the US. This reality that women face when they attempt to cross the border. This is also the reality that the aforementioned Faith Based Groups stridently ignore…
[h/t: to recent commenter Muffy for bringing this article to my attention.]
I’m always impressed with La Belle Province and her ability to serve up controversy. Recently a judge in Quebec decided that a hijab was considered not to be suitable attire for her courtroom and dismissed a case when the litigant refused to comply with her request. The judge’s words courtesy of the CBC:
“Hats and sunglasses for example, are not allowed. And I don’t see why scarves on the head would be either,” Marengo says in the recording.
“The same rules need to be applied to everyone. I will therefore not hear you if you are wearing a scarf on your head, just as I would not allow a person to appear before me wearing a hat or sunglasses on his or her head, or any other garment not suitable for a court proceeding.”
The stage is set and the result:
“When El-Alloul first appeared before Marengo, the judge asked her why she had a scarf on her head. El-Alloul replied that it was because she is a Muslim. The judge then said she would take a 30-minute recess.
When Marengo returned, she told El-Alloul she had a choice: remove her headscarf immediately or apply for a postponement in order to consult a lawyer. El-Alloul replied that she couldn’t afford a lawyer and that she didn’t want to postpone the case. Marengo then adjourned the case indefinitely.”
Boom. Tinder meet match. Religious freedom versus the institutional values of a secular court.
There are a multitude of ways to look at what transpired in the courtroom but here are two that I think represent both sides of the argument.
A. In a secular court of law, the secular values and rules of a society must be followed. If a judge rules that what you’re wearing to be inappropriate for the proceedings it behooves you to follow the same standards that everyone else must follow.
B. Canada is a multicultural society and we respect and treasure the cultural practices that every Canadian brings to the table and, if secular protocol can be reinterpreted to allow for the diversity of cultural expression within secular institutions we should do so.
Before we go into further discussion we should note the reaction from El-Alloul, it was one of shock and dismay:
“[…] But what happened in court made me feel afraid. I felt that I’m not Canadian anymore.”
“El-Alloul said she’s speaking out because she doesn’t want what happened to her to happen to any other Muslim woman. When she insisted I should remove my hijab, really I felt like she was talking with me as … not a human being. I don’t want this thing to happen to any other lady. This is not the work of a judge. She doesn’t deserve to be a judge.”
El-Alloul is rightly quite upset at the outcome of her hearing (or lack thereof). There should be a more amenable solution available to the parties involved – a transfer to a different judge that has a more liberal interpretation of ‘suitably dressed’ might have saved a lot of ink and electrons as this story blossomed across Canadian news networks.
This seemingly simple case of what “suitably dressed” means and how it is enforced speaks to how intersectional an issue multiculturalism is. Institutional power in Canada remains largely white and male and thus reflects the normative values of what is considered ‘normal’ culture here in Canada. From this orthodoxy we get the notions such as:
1. Why should our Canadian institutions cater to every whim of the minorities?
2. If it is good enough for everyone else, what is the problem here?
3. Why aren’t secular Canadian values being learned by new Canadians?
Under the assumption that we are a multicultural society, clearly, point 1 is out to lunch. The very point of having a tolerant open society is that we appreciate and try to accommodate the everyone and their preferences within the state structure of Canada.
Point 2 is problematic because the words “everyone else” usually uses the dominant culture as a touchstone thus, by play of words, avoids the obvious racism associated with similar statements.
Point 3 has the most merit as new Canadians do adopt Canadian values and standards, but the process of acculturation takes a great deal of time, often generations before the values of the dominant culture are ingrained. It is unrealistic however to expect that somehow Canadians of all types have a switch that can be flipped instantaneously that would guarantee cultural assimilation.
The Hijab should be allowed in Canadian courtrooms as it does not interfere with workings of the court or the dispensing of justice.
However, as an open and tolerant secular society we should also have the ability to rightly name and not adopt cultural practices that would be corrosive to our society. For instance, honour killings and female genital mutilation, have no place in Canadian or any other civilized society and I can assert this claim with a good deal of confidence because we need only to discuss the negative impacts these practices have on those societies who still practice these modalities (cultural relativism be damned).
When christian’s ask you to go read teh bible, it should go something like this:
Oh, those wacky religious Muslim terrorists are at it again going all murder happy on people who dare to make fun of their religion.
This event is completely ludicrous and, in 2015, should not be happening, some reasons off the top of my head:
1. Mohammad, Jebus, Krishna, Sif – pick your imaginary friend – they all don’t fucking exist.
2. If they did exist wouldn’t there be some godly smiting going on, like all the time? Being immortal and all powerful and all that shite, you would think that they could take care of business without the help of mere mortals.
3. How can you, a mere mortal, even think that you can contemplate what your Godhead wants, never mind what she’s offended by?
4. How does killing Western journalists advance your cause by even one micrometer? Not all journalists are card carrying lackeys of empire yet, but with doing shit-for-brains (shit for brains is my new term for “stupid” because I’ve been informed by certain elements that “stupid” is ablest slur) wankery like mass murder how is the non-wanking western media supposed to put forward the case for Islam not being full of yahoos ready to kill people for shit-for-brains reasons?
If you think this is going to be all about bashing the religious and the Muslims, you’d be wrong. Let’s get a little context on the situation from Ziauddin Sardar:
“I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forged an alliance with radical factions, as created them”, I was told, in London, by my friend, and leading progressive Muslim intellectual, Ziauddin Sardar.
And Mr. Sardar continued:
“We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”
Of course our hands are dirty on this one most of the terrible shit going on in the world can be directly or indirectly attributed to putting our state interests (see colonialism, empire, and name your flavour of exceptionalism et al.) ahead of the needs of other people who happen to be living in their own countries.
Andre Vltchek continues:
“From the hopes of those post-WWII years, to the total gloom of the present days – what a long and terrible journey is has been!
The Muslim world is now injured, humiliated and confused, almost always on the defensive.
It is misunderstood by the outsiders, and often even by its own people who are frequently forced to rely on Western and Christian views of the world.
What used to make the culture of Islam so attractive – tolerance, learning, concern for the wellbeing of the people – has been amputated from the Muslim realm, destroyed from abroad. What was left was only religion.
Now most of the Muslim countries are ruled by despots, by the military or corrupt cliques. All of them closely linked with the West and its global regime and interests.
As they did in several great nations and Empires of South and Central America, as well as Africa, Western invaders and colonizers managed to totally annihilate great Muslim cultures.
What forcefully replaced them were greed, corruption and brutality.
It appears that everything that is based on different, non-Christian foundations is being reduced to dust by the Empire. Only the biggest and toughest cultures are still surviving.
Anytime a Muslim country tries to go back to its essence, to march its own, socialist or socially-oriented way – be it Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, or much more recently Iraq, Libya or Syria – it gets savagely tortured and destroyed.
The will of its people is unceremoniously broken, and democratically expressed choices overthrown.”
[Source]
Picture is unrelated. I need some awesome in this post, because otherwise it is too damn depressing.
You’ll see the word “stability” crop up when you begin to examine the officially accepted version of history we all know and love. Stability used in the geopolitical exceptional context is anti-democratic and anti-nationalist – pretty much the exact opposite of the flowery boilerplate about human rights and democracy promotion that is exuded from ‘top government’ officials.
It is usually about here I get painted as a part of the I hate america/canada crowd – but that shit can frack-off before it starts. I am not about hating my country, I’m about this country looking at our history without the friendly blinders on and owning up and taking responsibility for the horrible shit we have done/continue to do in the name of the ‘national interest’.
So ya, wanna fix the terrorism problem? Lets start at home ,with us, like this:
“If we seriously want to end the plague of terrorism, we know how to do it. First, end our own role as perpetrators. That alone will have a substantial effect. Second, attend to the grievances that are typically in the background, and if they are legitimate, do something about them. Third, if an act of terror occurs, deal with it as a criminal act: identify and apprehend the suspects and carry out an honest judicial process. That actually works. In contrast, the techniques that are employed enhance the threat of terror. The evidence is fairly strong, and falls together which much else. ”
Thank you Mr.Chomsky for that gem of a quote. Thank you dear readers for taking the time to listen to me rant.
Arbourist out.
Ms. Betty Bowers hits the highlights of christian religious folly from 2014.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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