At a what now?

A few posts back I got taken to task by a commenter for questioning the meaning of pronouncements by a Frenchwoman in full niqab. This commenter, like several others, mistook my questioning of her rationale and my feminist difficulties with the idea of 'protecting' women (from what? And whose responsibility is it that they should require protecting? Methinks it's not the women who need swaddling and muffling) for an attack on Islam. I can sort of see where this misreading is coming from, but it's fuzzy thinking at its worst and paranoia to boot.

So let me repeat: I am not anti-Islam as such; I am anti-sexist and anti-patriarchy. And that goes just as much for Christianity. So just to prove that one is an equal-opportunity organised-religion-basher, and heartened by the bracing opinions on the subject expressed by Billy Connolly, whom I saw last night and will post about, much more cheerfully, in a minute, here's something from this morning's news that I find utterly dismaying.

Following closely the faster-than-expected recovery of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords from the experience of being shot in the head by a lunatic (when was the last time you heard, BTW, of a woman shooting someone in the head, apart from those who shoot partners who have been assaulting, torturing and bashing them for decades?), I saw a headline this morning about her, or rather her husband, and clicked on it to read more.

Seems the astronaut husband has decided to go on his planned mission with the next space shuttle, having been reassured that his wife is progressing well and is in good medical hands. And fair do's, I get that part just fine. If I were an astronaut and I'd been at my injured husband's bedside for weeks and weeks and he was getting better every day and being well looked after then I would probably go back into space as well (and imagine, if you will, the opprobrious epithets that a wife would cop from the conservative press for that). No, here's the bit that had me reaching for the bucket:

"Every day, she gets a little bit better and the neurosurgeons and neurologists tell me that's a great sign, the slope of that curve is very important," Mr Kelly said at a national prayer breakfast in Washington.

A national prayer breakfast? In Washington?

It gets worse. Although the phrase is not capitalised in the article, it occurred to me that it might not be any old national prayer breakfast but some sort of particular one. So I googled it.

If you look at the dates you'll see that that's the one all right, and you'll also note that this cute little event began at the height of McCarthyist paranoia, the year the Rosenbergs were executed and the year before J. Robert Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance.

You'll also note that one of the purported purposes (sorry) of this event is for attendees to 'meet Jesus man to man'. Seems to me that leaves the ladiez free to point and mock.

Frankly I don't know why Islam bothers the Americans so much. They seem hell-bent on erasing the separation of church and state quite as thoroughly as even the most evangelical Islamic fundamentalist.

Let's hear it for Australia and the female atheist in charge.

Taking the veil

This is Crikey's Video of the Day today.



As one of the many feminists around the world bedevilled by the question of Islamic dress codes for women, I was hoping, really hoping, that this woman was going to explain the rationale of wearing the whole enchilada in a way that I could understand and sympathise with. Because I've read a number of pieces by Moslem women on this subject and frankly none of them have made a lot of sense to me.

Most of this woman's arguments about why the French ban is wrong do carry some weight. But all she says by way of actual explanation of the wearing of the garment is that she wears the niqab 'because of my spirituality towards God'. Which means nothing to me. 'Spirituality' yes, no argument from me. Even 'God', yes, I at least get the idea. But it's the word 'because' that defeats me. How is one's spirituality towards God expressed by hiding one's body, hair and face, which one presumes she believes God to have made? Does anyone know?

A little faffing around online reveals among other things that the face veil is a pre-Islamic garment worn in the desert to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes (on a literal if presumably not a metaphorical level). Which is the kind of explanation that does make sense. But you have to wonder how often there's call to keep the flying sand out of one's eyes in France -- again, on a literal if not a metaphorical level; France has quite a lot of metaphorical flying sand when it comes to putting pressure on women about their looks or pestering them sexually in public, and two reasons often given for wearing any level of hijab are to prevent unwanted attentions from men and to be able to stop fretting about how you'll be judged for the new wrinkle in your forehead or the fact that you've put on a few kilos.

Goddess knows both of those things make perfect sense to me.  What I want to know is why it should be held the woman's responsibility to prevent them. And why you can't express your spirituality, whether towards God or not, just as easily by singing a madrigal or growing a tomato or cooking a meal for people you love.

Shock, horror: atheist witches not hypocrites

In what parallel universe does it qualify as "news" that the Prime Minister and the Governor-General didn't go to church?

Can you imagine how the joyful, nay, orgasmic cries of 'Hypocrite' would have rung round the walls of The Australian's offices if Julia Gillard, who once, when asked by some journalist, readily agreed that yes she was indeed an atheist, had fronted up at church? They must have been really disappointed that she wasn't there.

What next, a trial? As Kate Grenville once said, the test is, if they drown. And if they don't drown, then that proves that they are indeed witches, and you get to burn them at the stake instead.

All women's fault(line): whoever would have thought?

It's not very scholarly of me, but I'm going to assume that the Doonesbury page, in its 'Say What?' feature, is accurate both in its quotation and in the attribution of the quotation:

Many women who do not dress modestly... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.

-- Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi

One has heard of the earth moving but one never realised this was what they meant. I guess that little earthquake here in Adders the other night was caused by the number of people rudely bonking other people's wives and husbands reaching critical mass and causing some kind of butterfly-effect electro-magnetic earth-vibration thingy. It was Friday night, after all.

Next time you see someone say 'Human rights trumps cultural sensitivity', this is the kind of thing they're talking about. Mind you, I wish I could say that one never sees this kind of staggeringly wilful, or wilfully staggering, ignorance wheeled out to support ideological oppression and the maintenance of social power structures in the West, but unfortunately it happens all the time.

Um, no

Reading my emailed online Age this morning I was a bit shocked to see at the top of the Top Stories the headline 'Praying for twins Trishna, Krishna'. The article itself was a perfectly workpersonlike report on the progress of the surgical team in Melbourne working on the separation of the conjoined Bangladeshi twins. No mention was made of prayer, nor was any subject attached to that verb 'praying'.

But be damned if the Adelaide Advertiser, as I found out later in the day, wasn't doing almost the same thing: on the front page, with a large photograph, there appears the headline: 'Nation prays for Trishna and Krishna'.

Now look. I wish those children nothing but well. They're out of surgery and into intensive care, now, after a 27-hour operation. According to the most recent news updates I can find, they are still okay and that is fabulous. Every time I heard an update about the surgery on the news last night and again today, I wished the surgeons and the littlies well, and marvelled, recalling some of the unforgettable 19th century things -- including a number of skeletons of conjoined twins -- that I saw in specimen jars in Vienna's Museum of Pathological Anatomy, at what is now surgically possible.

But I wasn't "praying" for either the surgeons or the children and I'm damn sure most of the rest of the country wasn't either. This kind of thing provokes the same shudder of irritation that passes through me whenever the Prime Minister uses the word "evil" in a public speech. The discourse of Christianity belongs in the churches and the homes of Christians. When you use it in public life you are effectively saying that its concepts are real for everyone, and you are forcing non-Christians into active resistance, which may not be the effect you were trying to achieve.

Australia is, or is supposed to be, a secular country. As one of its citizens, I believe in mindfulness, in suffering, and in the alleviation of suffering. But I don't believe in prayer and I don't believe in evil, and being spoken for by politicians and newspapers as if I did believe in them makes me want to spit in somebody's eye.

How not to stop other people having sex

There are some bloggy conversations being had at the moment containing jaw-droppingly stupid arguments in defence of the Pope and his transparently dishonest 'Condoms don't work' argument re the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, obviously a rationalisation of the Vatican's true line that every sperm is sacred, all contraception is bad, and a woman's place is in the labour ward.

These people are arguing, also with transparent dishonesty (or jaw-dropping stupidity, take your pick) that 'abstinence' works better than condoms (well, der; who'd have thought?), and 'therefore' condom distribution ought to stop. On the subject of how such abstinence is to be enforced and by whom, they appear to have no views. On the question of whether (as they imply but do not openly state) condoms and abstinence are mutually exclusive, they are also strangely silent.

Now I am not anti-religious, not anti-Christian and not anti-Catholic -- three discrete and quite different things -- but I really, really hate wilful dishonesty and disingenuousness, especially when knowingly intended to deceive people over whom you already have power. It's bad enough when the Labor Party does it (*sob*), but this practice of it in the name of God is terrifying. These people vote. Presumably they are the same people whose incapacity to reason through even the simplest syllogism makes them think (or claim to think) that people who are pro-choice actually want to have abortions. They also think that arguing for liberal and pragmatic solutions must mean one is living an undisciplined sex life oneself and is 'therefore' fair game for personal insult and abuse, usually of the most egregiously sexist and misogynist kind.

Which part of 'Other people are going to have sex whether you like it or not, so as a society we need to find ways of at least mitigating at least some of the consequences' don't these people understand? Yes, of course abstinence works. It's preaching abstinence that doesn't work.

Anyone with any kind of classical liberal education knows that the connection between religious nutcasery and sexual repression, leading to truly terrifying beliefs and behaviours of the evangelical or crusading kind, is very close and very old. Abstinence has its own dangers. But every time I see someone speaking or acting out of that nexus I get kind of terrified about the amount power and influence they still have over the way the world is governed.

Eek

The current novel-for-work is a rather good historical-psychological semi-thriller by Alex Scarrow called October Skies, in which a couple of contemporary documentary-makers find themselves on the trail of a deluded breakaway Mormon sect (yes, they've broken away from the Mormon mainstream; I'll leave you to contemplate what sorts of people we're talking about here) led by the standard charismatic yet drug-addicted sociopath who does a lot of chattin' to Gahd. This group is heading west along the Oregon Trail in 1856, just a little too close to the onset of winter.

Scarrow telegraphs a few too many of his ideological punches, which is annoying when what you're reading is fiction and when in any event you could not agree with him more, but he certainly leaves us in no doubt of what he thinks about organised religion in general and, in particular, the tight grip that "faith" seems to have on much of contemporary America.

[UPDATE: I should have mentioned here that the whole plot turns out to revolve around those tablets containing the Direct Word of God that Joseph Smith claims to have found on a hillside. Because that fact is directly relevant to the following paragraph.]

So it was a tad spooky to go outside to look in the mailbox and find in it a single and clearly hand-delivered item: a CD in a clear plastic sleeve of the ten-a-penny supermarket kind and a rather nicely designed label with pastel Persian patterns, entitled 'The Noble Quran: The Creator's Message to Mankind'.

Now, I've already read the noble Quran so I am not in need of it on CD, especially not one labelled 'Free Gift' (as though there were any other kind of gift). But they want to be careful. Round here we've got two big Russian Orthodox churches and one Greek ditto, plus a high-octane Baptist stronghold, all within a few streets of each other, and they're all extremely active and well-attended. I can't really see the local Muslims, the local Eastern Orthodox and the local Baptists going at it hammer and tongs with gardening tools* in the middle of these quiet little old suburban streets, but you never know. If they do, and if you're looking for me, I'll be the one selling binoculars and red cordial.

AFTERTHOUGHT, 3.43 PM: You know, I can foresee several different kinds of not particularly distant future in which having written 'I've already read the noble Quran' on my own personal blog will be enough to get me into some very serious trouble. I really can. But I don't think I'll remove it quite yet. Goddess preserve me in the meantime.

*Or, indeed, hammers and tongs. Der.

Celibate men say no

Strong words on hospitals and abortion from the Catholic church today in the Age, threatening to close Catholic hospitals if proposed law reform goes ahead.

Actually, I agree that no doctor should have to perform an abortion against his/her will, and surely it couldn't be too difficult to allow for that in the legislation. Even the referrals business could be negotiated.

But this bullying, bluffing absolutism isn't really about that. It is about power and the exercise of power.

I mean, look at that man's face. Just look at it.

And given the Catholic church's record to date on the care and nurturing of unwanted, rejected and/or parentless children and the damage, sorry, "evil" done by its institutions in that respect over the centuries, you'd think they'd have done some sort of cost-benefit analysis by now.

I've been arguing the toss about abortion for decades and not once, not ever, have I heard any member of the so-called pro-life brigade come up with an argument -- not just a decent argument, but any argument at all -- about the "evil" of allowing embryos to develop into foetuses that become unwanted children born into a world that doesn't or can't make proper provision for their care. And about the "evil" of shunting priests who are known sexual abusers of these and other children from one parish to the next and then covering it up, we hear, likewise and strangely, nothing.

There's no point in asking a pro-lifer to justify the unspoken basis of his/her position, which is that a woman is basically a sort of centrally-heated wheelbarrow, because if you say that they'll just look at you like Well, der, yes; what's the problem?

So one must use their own alleged priorities in argument, and ask about the welfare of the child that has been allowed first to become viable and then to be born. And I have never yet heard anyone even take that argument on. They just go straight back on-message, projecting all refusal of logical engagement onto the hapless Almighty, and replying with the faithful's equivalent of 'Computer says no'.