Respect for all forms and practices of religion is so engrained in us that passionate defenses of secularism may feel bigoted. But for strikingly secular countries and provinces (France, Quebec), the rejection of burqas in the public realm, for instance, expresses a reasonable desire that the lived reality of their laicité, the laicité of the courts, schoolrooms, and streets, be maintained. How secular is your culture if city thoroughfares feature large outdoor prayer?
Some religious practices are disgusting (FGM) but difficult to stop because imams preach their necessity from the pulpit; some are objectionable to modern people (gender segregation, face/body veiling) because of their graphic derogation of women. The reason you see so many European countries banning burqas and arresting people who cut off children’s clitorises is because they feel passionately that some forms of behavior denominated religious range anywhere from unacceptably uncivil to outright criminal.
Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture. A girl’s body does not belong to her father, her family or her community. Her integrity is not a token for tradition, not an ornament for family honor and not a site for control. It belongs to her alone.
Beating women and stoning women, as well, is no special scandal to high-profile Muslim intellectual/rapist Tariq Ramadan. He is far from alone.
So yeah, Quebecers are passionately secular, and this blog doesn’t have a problem with their being so. Details here.
“If there are no changes within the Haredi community that succeed in bringing them into the 21st century and making them understand that without core curriculum studies, a modern society cannot function, in 30-40 years, Israel will be a theocratic state.“
Killing babies and lethally imperiling the rest of the population: The ultraorthodox way.
Responsible ultraorthodox are vaccinating. These people are however unable to stop the insane among their lot from letting children fall ill.
Millions, however, don’t seem to mind the language directed against them which is quoted here.
One did decide she’d had enough, and she threw the thing away.
And wrote about why.
Critics decried the [2018] law as discriminatory, but Denmark viewed it for what it truly is: a defence of secular values, civic participation, and national identity.
Now the ban has been expanded to schools and universities.
Civic life depends on visibility, communication, and engagement. Classrooms are not private spaces—they are the arenas where citizens learn to interact, debate, and participate. Full-face coverings obstruct all of that.
It is confusing to people when the freest, best countries in the world ban face-coverings. One of the reasons these countries are the best is that they ban face-coverings.
Secularism is non-negotiable. Public institutions, particularly schools, must be neutral spaces. Clothing that isolates or excludes individuals from shared norms compromises that neutrality... Visibility is not oppression—it is the foundation of civic life.
These themes are playing out right now in the political and legal wrangling in Canada over proudly secular Quebec’s insistence on some controls over things like burqas and hijabs. This blog is firmly (as you well know if you read me) in the secular camp, and will follow the Canadian story closely.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Especially if you’re a journalist, and especially if you’re referencing a very well-known legal principle, LOOK IT UP. Sheesh.
As to the particular subject matter of this typically INSANE story out of Texas, the state is invited to welcome a brand new city, established by the crazies who live there so they can be free to set their own demento rules. One thinks of the hare krishna cults establishing domains in places like Oregon back in the ‘nineties, until the lunatic excesses of their leaders drew the attention of the police.
The group currently in question is bible-thumping, gun-humping Torch of Freedom – pious shooters blasting their love of the lord 24/7.
Neighbors are seriously pissed (“We hear constant shooting. And when I say shooting, I’m not talking about a pistol or a shotgun. It’s a professional military-type shooting range and they were shooting high-powered rifles, essentially non-stop every day,” said Jim Schaefer, Gillespie County resident. “We cannot sit on our porch and enjoy the evening when they shoot. Sometimes they’ll shoot throughout the weekend.”), and, even though it’s absolutely berserko Texas, it looks as though local authorities also find Spewing for the Savior a bridge too far.
That can’t be true, and it’s one sign among a few others (the article is generally fair) that Macleans – Canada’s leading magazine – reflects non-Quebec social attitudes. Plenty of non-deists are spiritual; we’re talking about religion here.
A large majority of Quebecers indeed opposes hijabs and other religious garb in the public sphere (schools, courts), and restrictions on this garb are currently in place there. As one supreme court decision put it:
[C]itizens should not be able to perceive any religious influence in state services, and … when a government representative is exercising their function, they are no longer a private citizen. Their first duty is to state neutrality, not their private beliefs.
In a few months, the supreme court will revisit Quebec’s secularity bill, and the notwithstanding clause that enables it; and it should be interesting. Issues going to the degree of Quebec’s autonomy are in play here; but more than that, opposition to face covering, for instance, is 76% in Quebec and not far behind (65%) in Canada overall; and though I can’t find federal numbers on the hijab, it looks as though at least half the country would probably follow Quebec.
It thinks letting parents wrap their ten year old daughters in veils and black sacks is a beautiful instance of religious freedom, and that keeping that behavior out of schools is ‘discriminatory and authoritarian.’ But of course covering up your child like that is utterly discriminatory and authoritarian, which is why country after country is banning child veiling in schools.
We all understand that you have to throw black coverings over girls at the youngest age possible so they begin right away to accustom themselves to being inferior and hidden relative to their brothers and fathers and male schoolmates. We get it. But we don’t have to like it, and we have laws. In Europe, we think women are equal to men.
The Israel Defense Forces have launched a large-scale operation at Ben-Gurion International Airport. The goal is to identify and detain ultra-Orthodox men who are evading mandatory military service…
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No more seat assignments next to ultra-assholes who refuse to sit next to you because you’re a stinky gross woman. Hurray!
There’s a very special ick factor in play when Jesus directly aids and abets sexual abuse, when his holy writ is quoted in direct support of the rape of teenagers. “This is God’s will for you,” instructs Hayle Swinson’s spiritual teacher as he scrounges in her panties.
“I asked myself why was this God’s will for me to be violated?”
Hayle’s either a bit slow on the uptake, or deep in the weeds of theodicy here, as she lets Pastor Brad have his – the Lord’s? – way with her.
One … email [to her] featured a dream in which he and Swinson were laying [the writer means lying] on a beach; as he began making love to her, he began praying and their spirits were united spiritually.
Pastor Brad, who held a high position at some Baptist something, was a notorious sexual nutcase, but the school ignored it all, including a petition fifty students filed about him with the administration.
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UD thanks Andrew.
So the city of Montreal is now officially taking down the Welcome to Montreal — women cover themselves here sign, due to loud and broad objection from its secular citizens.
But local hijab enthusiasts are complaining that women who dress in order to be invisible are in danger of being made invisible if the city takes down a sign depicting them as draped up and down in order to be … invisible…? Head neck hair torso arms legs all invisible but God forbid you make hijabis/body drapers invisible? Don’t make no sense.
Become what you are, sillies. If you’re dedicated to hiding the female body, go right ahead. But don’t complain that we’re erasing you.
‘Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.”‘
In an opinion piece about whether what Israel’s doing in Gaza constitutes genocide, the writer duly notes Israel’s penchant for calling its enemies Nazis. What he doesn’t mention, but what intrigues UD, is the now routine tendency of Israelis to call other Israelis Nazis.
It’s gotten so bad that multiple efforts have been made to pass laws that would make it a crime to call someone a Nazi.
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Most of the Nazi name-calling comes from Israel’s adorable primitifs, the ultra-orthodox.
Holocaust imagery has been an especially evocative tactic used by ultra-Orthodox Jews, particularly when they’ve felt their traditional way of life is under attack from Israeli society. Two years ago, ultra-Orthodox protesters wore striped prison uniforms and yellow Stars of David mimicking Jewish concentration camp prisoners.
Yoelish Kraus, who belongs to a fringe religious group that rejects the secular Jewish state, collects protest posters that the Ultra-Orthodox community has used. One, from the early 1980s, features a swastika, in protest of an Israeli archaeological dig of Jewish graves. Another compares a police chief to Hitler for his gruff handling of ultra-Orthodox street protesters.
(It’s much less routine for politicians to accuse other politicians of being Nazis, but it happens enough to worry people.)
With their prodigious fucking, Israel’s ultraorthodox are well on their way to demographic dominance, while the country’s educated are leaving in droves.
The sort of people who think it’s peachy to scream NAZI at the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are gradually taking over.
