Islamic nations are mounting a campaign for an international treaty to protect religious symbols and beliefs from mockery -- essentially, a ban on blasphemy.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Algeria and Pakistan have taken the lead in lobbying to bring the matter to a vote in the U.N. General Assembly.
Such a ban would face great resistance in Western nations that enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental right.
The countries that form the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference are currently lobbying a Geneva-based U.N. committee to accept its plan, a first step for it to eventually be put before the General Assembly.
If that occurs, Muslim countries and their allies in the developing world would stand a decent chance of mustering the simple majority needed in the General Assembly to adopt such a treaty.
Dear Cary,
I've recently realized that I am atheist. Now being that atheists are 1 percent of the population, this could produce a lone sense in anyone. However, I feel especially alone. My husband's family -- I have no family of my own to speak of -- is intensely Roman Catholic and close-knit. I love them very much and have for many years, but their Catholicism is their identity. The holiday and social gatherings all revolve around a conservative Catholic faith and a conservative political base. I have always been the token liberal, politely placing counterpoints to their own. Or simply staying silent with the more reactionary members of the family. It is a somewhat lonely existence as a result of the only other liberal being a poorly read and largely ignorant knee-jerk friend of my husband's.
I just had a baby and do need the support of my husband's family but the constant silence and playing along is causing me depression. I have no real issue with religious people, I'm certainly not one of the in-your-face New Atheist types. But to be unable to share this with even my husband forces me to live an endless lie of church services and religious gatherings. I do not believe in the miracles they constantly trumpet or find comfort in the theological books they offer! I do not feel any kind of supernatural presence in my life or feel that birth control is inherently evil. Yet if I shared these beliefs I would be shunned faster and with more passion than a leprous Nazi with a rotting cheese on her head. I hear the passionate gossip they speak of other wayward family members all the time!
I look down at my son and realize I even must lie to him. I must parrot the tired myths to him or else risk the natural talkative nature of children to spill my words to everyone. While there is no real evil in living out religion, any more than there is deciding to dance in a circle in your yard with a flowerpot every day, it is not some truth. Nor is it a surefire cure for what ails you. To me it represents wasted time and effort. I do not know what to do because I love these goodhearted people. They are the only family I have. My constant silence and lies depress me greatly because I love them so much.
Thank you for your consideration of my issue.
Surrounded by Saints
Dear Surrounded,
Is faith a matter of choice? Is it an act of will? Are we therefore to be held accountable for the presence or absence of faith in our lives?
I don't see how that can be.
Is it not possible to be a person of goodwill who honestly has no faith? If people who profess to have faith cannot accept that, then it seems to me they lack some essential element of understanding.
How could people of faith accept as a miracle an event in which faith came unbidden to someone, and yet condemn the opposite but equally plausible event in which faith did not come unbidden, or departed unbidden never to return? Why should one occurrence be treated with reverence and the other with scorn, if they are both equally mysterious in this putatively mysterious, god-infused universe?
I would think that people of both good faith and goodwill would accept your atheism as simply another miracle.
But I am obviously not living in the real world.
If the people around you lack deep understanding and intellectual capacity, what is to be done? I do not know. Can they be educated? Not by you.
If they cannot accept your difference then that is their own personal hell; that is their tragic incapacity of perception.
If you would like something to read, let me suggest the estimable Terry Eagleton's small book, "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate."
Let's hope that there is a God, and that she shows her hand in such a way that these people are struck with sudden holy forgiveness, and that they see, in this moment of wholly improbable struckness, how you, too, and your atheism, are part of their perfect godly world.
And let us hope that this merciful God tells them, in a few simple words, to leave you the fuck alone and not try to convert you.
Wouldn't that be a nice kind of God to have?
What? You want more advice?
The Washington Times has been having a rough few weeks. There was a big shake-up at the conservative paper recently, with new top executives coming in and the executive editor getting kicked out, with the staff not informed of his departure for days afterwards. Tuesday was yet another bad day for the Times and its beleaguered staffers.
For one thing, there was a problem with a blast from the past, Editor Emeritus Wesley Pruden, and his latest column. Pruden has always been known for having views on race that might generously be described as disturbing, but he went all out in an attack on President Obama:
Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.
(Hat-tip to Gawker.)
Then there's RIchard Miniter, the paper's editorial page editor, who's been MIA for some time now. Now, it seems, we know why: He's reportedly filing a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging among other things that he was forced to attend one of the mass weddings put on by the Unification Church, whose leader founded the paper.
American women will pay the price for the Democratic dithering that allowed Saturday's passage of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, a worm virus inserted into the House healthcare reform bill with surgical precision. But the Democratic Party will suffer collateral damage.
Stupak-Pitts isn't just "the biggest restriction on women's right to choose in our generation," as Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado puts it; it's also evidence that on abortion the Democratic Party is now captive, just like the GOP, to Christian conservatism. Of course, Republicans traded away their party's moderate wing for real electoral gains, a base that propelled them to power for decades. The Democrats, already in power, sucker-punched themselves, and all they have to show for it is a big fat shiner in the shape of Bart Stupak's knuckles.
But if Stupak, a former state trooper from Michigan, provided the muscle, his partner, Joe Pitts -- a Pennsylvania Republican with decades in the trenches of the antiabortion battle -- may have brought the brains, and more, a new Christian right coalition custom tailored for the Democratic Party's growing religious conservatism. Stupak is Roman Catholic; Pitts is evangelical. Both are members of the predominantly evangelical organization called the Family; Stupak lives in its C Street house. Together, they're poster boys for the evangelical/conservative Catholic alliance known as "co-belligerency," a culture war strategy designed to take territory within the Democratic Party as well the GOP.
Stupak, the Democratic co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, insists that his amendment does nothing more than ensure that the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions, is carried over into healthcare reform. Even some of Stupak's angriest critics within the party concede that Stupak might actually believe that -- nobody has ever accused him of being a subtle legislator. (Though Stupak himself, long known for his amiability, now boasts that he was hiding his "wolfiness" all along.) But the facts are plain: Stupak-Pitts will use the Hyde Amendment as a lever with which to radically roll back abortion rights, effectively strong-arming private insurers -- most of which will be enmeshed with the federal government now -- into abandoning coverage for abortions.
Much is being made in the media about the role played by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which lobbied hard for the amendment. "We just have to accept this as a Catholic thing," goes the new conventional wisdom. Leaving aside the fact that a strong majority of American Catholics are pro-choice, that story line obscures the increasingly significant role played by evangelical conservatives within the Democratic Party.
Start with Stupak and Pitts themselves. Although Stupak is a Catholic, he's lived since at least 2002 in the C Street house run by the Family, which cultivates political leaders on behalf of a long-term vision of what Joe Pitts, speaking at last year's National Prayer Breakfast (the group's only public event), called "God-led government." After the summer sex scandals of Sen. John Ensign, Gov. Mark Sanford and former Rep. Chip Pickering, C Streeters all, made the Capitol Hill address infamous, Stupak denied any knowledge about the house he lives in. "I don't know what you're talking about," Stupak told Michigan reporters when asked about his residence in the house, where he's been enjoying below-market rent for the last seven years, courtesy of C Street's tax-exempt status as a church. But when the Los Angeles Times asked Stupak about his role there in 2002, he pleaded secrecy instead of ignorance: "We sort of don't talk to the press about the house."
That's putting it mildly. In its internal documents, the Family refers to itself as an "invisible organization" and the "prayer cells" into which it organizes politicians as "invisible ‘believing groups.'" That doesn't make it a conspiracy. Rather, the Family represents the soft-sell side of conservative evangelicalism, a social movement that goes beyond -- or maybe beneath -- pulpit pounding and political purity in pursuit of ideological influence on both sides of the aisle. Longtime Family leader Doug Coe, dubbed the "stealth persuader" on Time magazine's list of the 25 most influential evangelicals, declares in a sermon delivered to evangelical leaders that "the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have."
Joe Pitts can testify to that. It's a safe bet that until Stupak-Pitts, few Americans beyond Pennsylvania Amish country had even heard of the avuncular Republican, a former gym teacher who rarely attaches his name to legislation. And yet he's been a driving force in the antiabortion fight for more than three decades. It was Pitts, a "core" member of the Family, who helped bring antiabortion politics into the organization back in the early 1980s. The Family's focus has always tended toward foreign affairs and economics; Pitts merged the two with the red-hot politics of the abortion wars, quietly exporting free-market fundamentalism and draconian social policy overseas. Pitts and Stupak have joined forces on that front before, teaming up to try to turn President Bush's underfunded but laudable President's Emergency Relief for AIDS initiative into an antiabortion crusade. What they couldn't achieve abroad, they've now brought back home, and then some.
They had plenty of help, starting at the Family's C Street House. It's home not just to Stupak but also to antiabortion Democrats Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania and Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and two of the Senate's fiercest abortion foes, Oklahoma's Tom Coburn -- an obstetrician who once mused on applying the death penalty to abortion providers -- and South Carolina's Jim DeMint, famous for pledging to make healthcare reform Obama's Waterloo. Other Family associates lining up behind Stupak-Pitts include evangelicals Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., John Tanner, D-Tenn., and Lincoln Davis, a Democrat from Tennessee who once proclaimed that no Republican could "outgun, out-pray, or out-family me."
These Family ties don't mean that Stupak-Pitts is a plot hatched at C Street. The Family offers politicians a "worldview," not a vote machine. In the documents stored at the archive of the Fellowship Foundation -- one of the Family's multiple nonprofit entities -- at evangelical Wheaton College, congressional briefings typically lead off with reminders that the Family's prayer groups don't take direct action but rather facilitate the behind-the-scenes relationships that lead to action. "One person grows desirous of pursuing an action," Sen. Sam Brownback, a Family man and former C Street resident, explained the process to me, "and others pull in behind."
Which raises the question: Who's pulling whom? Did backbencher Bart Stupak really come up with the bluff that led pro-choice Democrats to abandon not one but two compromises, one of which Stupak himself seemed to be signing off on earlier this summer? Or was it Pitts, an abortion-wars warrior since the 1970s, and a longtime leader of the House Values Action Team -- an off-the-record caucus of religious right organizations and members of Congress -- who drew up the blueprint?
Neither Stupak nor Pitts is talking. Of course, if they just keep quiet, the press will pin it on the bishops -- who, to be fair, are more than happy to take credit. That version of events neglects the role of relationships forged within the evangelical context of the Family -- a group founded in the spirit of virulent anti-Catholicism, and which maintains to this day that being Catholic brings you no closer to Christ than being Jewish or a Muslim -- and the growing evangelical movement within the Democratic Party. A source close to the Faith Table, a gathering of ostensibly progressive Christians helmed by evangelical leader Jim Wallis, notes that the group has been agitating for Stupak-Pitts for months, with Wallis declaring Stupak-Pitts the most important vote of the year.
He may have been right about that. Right now, even the diluted healthcare reform bill that's limping toward more mauling in the Senate looks like the result of a historic vote. But as a weather vane, Stupak-Pitts tells us which way the wind is blowing. Last time the Democrats possessed this much power in Washington, the Dixiecrats tried to hold the party hostage. Now, it's the faith-based Democrats. Dixiecrats were racists, plain and simple; the faith-based Democrats are a more complicated bunch, a mix of genuinely moral conservatives, many of them to the left on economic issues, political cowards, and default Blue Dogs. They're anti-choice and anti-gay but, by God, they're about love, not hate, a gentler fundamentalism, a faith based in the conflation of Christianity and the Constitution, not the substitution of one for the other. So that's progress, right?
"Sure," says the Faith Table dissident who reports that the council of "progressive Christians" was not willing to even consider any deal that didn't leap past the Hyde Amendment into a new country -- or maybe it's old -- of abortion restrictions. "If you're playing horseshoes with James Dobson."
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
Manna from heaven for the climate skeptic brigade: A British judge has ruled that a man can sue his employer for unlawfully termination based on his "green views" on the grounds that environmental beliefs deserve the same legal protection as religious or philosophical beliefs.
The case is complicated, but not for those who believe human-caused global warming is a hoax, and that environmentalists who urge action restricting greenhouse gas emissions are just trying to impose their anti-capitalist Marxist agenda on society. They are cheering: See, we told you global warming was a religion!
The backstory: Tim Nicholson, head of "sustainability" for the property firm Grainger PLC, says he was attempting to come up with a "carbon management" program for the company, but couldn't get Grainger to give him the necessary information to determine the firm's carbon footprint. He claims he was eventually fired because of his belief that action needed to be taken to stop global warming. Grainger contends that "that Mr Nicholson's redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company during a period of extraordinary market turbulence."
In 2003, the UK enacted a law that prohibits discrimination against employees for "religious or philosophical beliefs." In his ruling, Justice Michael Burton declared that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".
Oddly, Grainger's lawyer had been arguing, reports the Daily Telegraph, "that adherence to climate change theory was 'a scientific view rather than a philosophical one,' because 'philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof.'" Which would seem to be saying that it would be OK to discriminate against an employee for views based on science, but not on religion or philosophy. Which is just plain weird.
Nicholson's own reaction to the verdict seems nuanced and reasonably clear-headed.
I'm delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision ... It's a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that's the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world's religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it's the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.
But who's got time for nuance? Belief in global warming is now officially a religion is the shorter takeaway for the climate skeptics. I expect to hear Senator James Inhofe declaiming on this topic before the week is done.
An interesting sideline to this case. Justice Michael Burton, reports the Daily Telegraph, is the same judge "who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan."
The Telegraph grossly misrepresents Burton's 2007 ruling. A parent had been trying to stop "An Inconvenient Truth" from being distributed by the Department of Education to secondary schools. Burton declined to do so, calling the film "broadly accurate." He did, however, enumerate nine errors that he said he had found in the documentary and that teachers should be aware of.
Whether or not Burton's citations were truly "errors" has been contested. But I was intrigued to see that one of the supposed errors, in Burton's view, was that "the receding snows of Kilimanjaro are due to global warming." Burton declared that "the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change."
Well guess what? Just this week, a new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented that "the melting on Kilimanjaro is accelerating and that in a few years there may be no ice left."
The lead author of the study, Lonnie Thompson, said that the scientists looked at ice cores from the glacier covering the top of Kilimanjaro that "represent almost 12,000 years of history, since the glaciers first formed on Kilimanjaro," and that "the top, most recent layer shows evidence of melting and refreezing, in the form of elongated air bubbles -- a pattern that is not seen at any other time in the glaciers' history.
"So in the 11,700-year history, we don't find that type of melting having been preserved, and it would be preserved and you should be able to see it in the bubble structure," he said in an interview.
Sounds like bad juju to me. The spirits are angry. Maybe it's time to start praying. Or at least cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions.
As far as I'm concerned, there is only one surprising element of this weekend's story about a female Saudi journalist who was sentenced to 60 lashes. It isn't that the country's Wahhabi clerics decided to pursue legal action against not only Mazen Abdul-Awad, a Saudi man who aired his dirty sexual laundry on a program for Lebanese TV (he, by the way, has already been sentenced to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes for his indiscretion), but also LBC, the station that aired the show. And in one of the world's most misogynist nations, it isn't hard to believe that a court tried and convicted 22-year-old Rozanna al-Yami in connection with the scandal, "on grounds that the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. she worked for did not have proper authorization to operate in the Islamic kingdom." (Never mind that, as the Associated Press reports, "The charges included involvement in preparing the program and advertising it on the Internet. Ms. Yami said she had worked as a coordinator for the program but had not worked on the episode in question.") Despite the many layers of injustice involved in al-Yami's conviction and sentence, it wasn't even a shock to learn that she wouldn't fight her punishment. "I was not aware (that LBC was unlicensed), but in the end this is the verdict and I accept it," Reuters quotes al-Yami as saying. "I don't want to appeal."
No, the only aspect of al-Yami's case that raises my eyebrows is this: Early Monday morning, the Canadian Press broke the news that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has stepped in to defend the journalist. Donna Abu-Nasr reports that "the king waived the sentence and ordered al-Yami's case and that of another journalist -- a pregnant woman also accused of involvement in the program -- be referred to an Information Ministry committee." It certainly bodes well for women in the country that the controversial Saudi leader (who Reuters notes "has begun to reform education and the judiciary in recent years, partly to discourage Islamic militancy") was willing to defy the nation's ultra-conservative clerics in an obvious case of guilt by association. But then, the king's women's rights record has always been shoddy, at best. And since the international press picked up on al-Yami's story in a big way, the move may primarily be a play to improve Saudi Arabia's public image.
It's also heartening to see King Abdullah -- for whatever reason -- stand up for greater freedom of the press. "This is the first case in which a journalist was tried at a court of summary jurisdiction for an offense relating to the nature of his or her profession," Sulaiman al-Jumaie, the lawyer who defended Abdul-Awad, told Reuters. Had the king upheld al-Yami's sentence, the decision might have set a precedent for further persecution of journalists.
Although this case ended well, al-Yami's conviction does raise some questions worth pursuing. For one thing, it's notable that she and another woman appear to be the only journalists charged in connection with the incident. Of course, the official reasons for al-Yami's trial range from her employment at an unlicensed network to the apparently bogus suggestion that she aided in "preparing the program and advertising it on the Internet." But what the ordeal really smacks of is yet another attempt at deterring women from entering the workforce. With that in mind, al-Yami's victory feels particularly sweet.
An Illicit Affair with YHWH, Death & Doubt
Scientology Accused of Forced Abortions, Crimes in Oz
The Opposite of Political Correctness
Secular Sunday School: In Defense of Slavery