September 25th, 2023
‘The war of religion that officially began in Israel on Yom Kippur this year will be ugly. In Tel Aviv and perhaps other Israeli cities the tolerance for outposts of intolerant Judaism has run out.’

There is no way now to bridge the divide between those who saw the events of Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv and other cities across Israel as an attempt by religious fanatics to defy the High Court ruling and force gender-separation on a liberal city, and those who saw there radical secularists preventing Jews from holding a sacred event.

Yes, absurdly enough for such a small country, people are talking about the separation of populations.

UD is heart and soul with the Tel Avivians, but she wonders how many will want to keep fighting the fight. Large numbers of rational, self-respecting people are leaving Israel, and who can blame them.

September 14th, 2023
De-Brainers on the March!

Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Decide to Sue New York

Over Having to Teach English, Science

September 10th, 2023
The Resurrection Part

Bacon: I wasn’t sure about the Jesus Christ parts of the sermon… I was struggling with whether I believe this….

So if I could find a church, and this may already exist, where the Sunday school is very low on the beliefs of Jesus and very high on the community part, that’s what I’m looking for.

[I’d like a church] focused less on Jesus rising from the dead and more about being compassionate, caring people…

Martin: Do you think though, to even loosely wear the identity of a cultural Christian, don’t you need the resurrection part?’

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America is secularizing at an astonishing rate, and this NPR interview with a young man raised in the Black charismatic church tells you part of the reason why — and it’s a very simple reason: Increasingly, the very content of the Christian faith strikes a lot of people as untrue.

August 30th, 2023
“Will this election fraud be so mighty as to lay low the mountains of the earth?”

With even Laura Ingraham calling bullshit on the fundamental truth of his being, John Eastman has gone total Beyond the Fringe, huddling on mountaintops with his mad leader, awaiting The Fraud’s earth-shattering revelation.

August 27th, 2023
This blog features mainly the Cathophate aspect of the weird right…

… but there’s SOOOO much more, as this terrific essay from last year notes.

August 26th, 2023
‘[W]e never hear people shouting slogans like “This is what aristocracy looks like!” or “The people, under the guidance of virtuous aristocrats, will never be defeated!” Popular movements aim for popular power.’

LOL. Jodi Dean describes the aristocratic Catholic governing authority trying to worm its way into our democratic hearts.

Public morals legislation, the public observation of Christian religious practices, and a family policy aimed toward incentivizing marriage and increasing family size (as opposed to, say, promoting reproductive justice and publicly funded childcare) are hardly the stuff of a multiracial, multiethnic working-class party in a secular society that recognizes the existence of women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Duh. If you want to know what life under a Cathophate would look like, revisit Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and take a gander at Lady Marchmain – that megaCatholic upper-cruster. She’ll be president, and her son Bridey VP, in the Cathophate to Come, and together their putrescent moral superiority will reduce us all to sniveling drunks, like poor Sebastian.

August 23rd, 2023
‘In the U.S., Catholic Integralist policies are extreme versions of those of Catholic conservatives: a total ban on pornography, a nation-wide, executive-imposed ban on abortion in all three trimesters, including even the case of rape. They would ban blasphemy, end same-sex marriage, and recriminalize sodomy. They would also likely ban Pride parades, given the opportunity.’

[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.

Sounds yummy! Go, Prof Vermeule!

August 19th, 2023
UD loves the way the TVP news site calls Bonot Alternativa a…

militia. I don’t think this Israeli women’s political movement is going to go after the vile and increasingly powerful ultraorthodox cult in that country with guns; but if you ask UD whether the prospect of armed female avengers against primitive theocrats is pleasant or unpleasant, she’d have to go with pleasant.

See also the millions of Iranian women whose fuck the hijab militancy grows with each grotesque effort on the part of the government to frighten them into wearing the modesty cap.

August 10th, 2023
The nihilism at the heart of book bans…

… says BOO first in rural Washington State:

The Columbia County Rural Library District could be dissolved by voters after a community member filed a petition to close the library amid a censorship fight over LGBTQ+ books aimed at teens.

Better dead than read, baby. You won’t want to miss America’s inaugural community bonfire, where you can join hands in the big circle and cremate Shakespeare while journalists and historians mill about recording the event. No more pencils no more books no more teachers’ dirty looks children will chant in the moonlight while sparks fly upward and hitlers from the hollers whoop whoop de whoop.

August 8th, 2023
Why is this guy reluctant to return to Israel? With the new government, he not only won’t go to jail; he’ll be offered an honorary seat in the …

Knesset.

August 4th, 2023
Even without the current disaster, Israeli tolerance for the ultra orthodox was never going to hold up. But now it has shattered.

Until recently, a large majority of Israelis tolerated the [ultra orthodox]. Sometimes they gritted their teeth, sometimes they griped, but they went on shouldering the security and economic burden of the state on behalf of the haredim. The events of the last few months, and the conduct of the government, in full partnership with the haredim, will likely change all that. Utterly blind to reality, the haredim have now gone even further by proposing a new Basic Law: “Torah Study,” which would give draft dodgers a status similar to those serving in the IDF.

… Faced with yet another step which the majority of Israelis, the burden bearers, perceive as unfair and exploitative, the tumult of recent days may pale in comparison to what is to come. True, the haredim can do whatever they want under the current government, but short of a complete dictatorship here, they will pay the full price when the next government takes power. The budgets that finance their way of life will be slashed, government support for those who don’t prepare their students for a productive life will be terminated, and rights will be denied to those who don’t serve in the army or at least in civilian national service.

August 2nd, 2023
‘Zibly said he was concerned about letting his children grow up in an Israel he said is becoming increasingly undemocratic.’

“I can’t have my daughters living in a place like that,” [Zion] Zibly said of Israel. “They grew up in a country with Jewish democratic values and it is becoming undemocratic and [more] Jewish — not in the direction of my Jewishness, but in a manner in which they dictate to me what being Jewish is.”

Hey, he’s even named for the place. But no one with half a brain (and Zibly, now director of neurosurgery at Yale, has a whole brain) would let a daughter grow up in haredi Israel.

July 30th, 2023
She was fragile, confused, psychologically frail; but she called out the Catholic church for its many vile sex scandals long before almost anyone else. As a result, the NYT points out, she suffered fierce and grotesquely hypocritical condemnation from precisely some of the high-profile clerics who would ultimately have to step down from their posts in shame.

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who resigned in 2002, said at the time that her actions were “a gesture of hate.” A spokesman for Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who was removed from public duties in 2013, called her actions “just another example of anti-Catholicism.”

[O’Connor] became most associated with efforts to combat abuse within the Catholic Church, decades before the scale of the [sexual abuse] problem within American religious organizations — from the Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to the Hasidic dynasties of New York — became common knowledge.

One of the church’s most high-profile and influential priests in the United States, Theodore E. McCarrick, was expelled from the church in 2019 and is facing sexual assault charges in two states, the first and only American cardinal to be criminally charged in connection with sex abuse.

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McCarrick didn’t unload on O’Connor. He’s in the article to remind you just how bad it was, and how right O’Connor was.

July 30th, 2023
‘As Eric Levitz of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer chillingly explains it, “Vermeule argues that right-wing jurists should reinterpret the U.S. Constitution as a charter demanding the subjugation of infidels to ‘rulers’ who share all of Adrian Vermeule’s views on God and good government.”’

UD has somewhat sputteringly tried, over the years of this blog, to summarize the sicko fantasies of Adrian Vermeule. She’s always on the lookout for calmer, clearer, accounts. Levitz’s is good.

July 29th, 2023
‘Mr Tsaghati is the founder of a cultural centre focused on piety and the hijab.’

Indeed Randy Reza is a state official in charge of maintaining Islamic values in Iran. And while he’s humiliating, intimidating, and jailing thousands of women for not wearing their piety cap, he’s getting it on with his boyfriend which is SOOOOO non-Islamic ….

But nothing will happen to Reza. He’s a man, after all.

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