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.
London’s mayor put out some rainbow flags and BOY IS HE IN TROUBLE.
“The [flags] will be ‘rolled back’ whether you like it or not, Mr. [Khan],” [wrote Joshua Charles]. “The options are: 1. Repentance now; or 2. Eternal punishment later.”
The latest on this smokin hot monk is that the University of Innsbruck has had a change of mind, and has decided that it does not want to host his habilitation thesis.
Apparently the school lacks faculty expertise in carbonizing flesh.
Perhaps Waldstein should pursue his interests here, for instance, rather than at Innsbruck.
In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:
The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…
[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…
[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…
No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…
If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.
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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.
Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.
… or else.
The Indiana Bible College has caught hell for plagiarizing (it seems a clear case — listen to two performances) Auburn University professor Rosephanye Powell’s The Word was God.
Instead of doing the Christian thing and taking it down, IBC has sued Powell for defamation. And the beat goes on.
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UD thanks Andrew.
Just steps from Harvard Yard, a group has been trying to … [make] space for [conservative voices] for years… It … has brought in speakers like … Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor who has supported the idea of a worldwide Catholic theocracy.
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F-u-u-u-ck. Has that ever been done before? I mean a worldwide Catholic theocracy? Did I miss the years before 1054 when Catholics bestrode the globe?
Okay they were doing well in Europe then, but THE GLOBE? Has pretty much anyone besides Adrian Vermeule thought about, much less lectured, on this unprecedented SOOOOOOOPERWILD thing?
You thought the idea that gender is socially constructed was radical. What about A FOR REAL WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY? Maybe in his most buried dreams Savonarola’s unconscious generated images of A WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY of which he would be the SOOOOPERBUSY executive in chief, but I can’t think of anyone, outside of Vermeule (including anyone within the territory of the Vatican), capable in our time of producing and then sharing with everyone the idea that from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar everyone gets to be forcibly Catholicized.
Which may help one understand why viewpoint diversity institutes, like the one honored to have this fanatic share his superpower fantasy, remain somewhat in disrepute.
… with anti-hijabis ignoring the law making veiling mandatory, and pro-hijabis screaming in the streets against the anti-hijabis, while also insisting that women, as per nonexistent divine command, should be far more veiled, the parts of the government that matter seem to have had enough.
Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday that the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has instructed the legislature not to enforce a contentious law mandating stricter hijab regulations.
“Although I had no intention of publicly declaring this in such explicit terms, the SNSC has formally written to the Parliament, directing us not to promulgate the hijab and chastity law for now,” Ghalibaf told lawmakers.
On the other side, the religious fanatics running Iran into the ground have decided that stealing citizens’ personal information, and setting up a Stasi-like system of everyone spying on and denouncing everyone else, is a great way of enforcing an unenforceable law.
“Does the Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice even have legal access to people’s personal data?” asked Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman and law professor, in a popular post on X.
But forget legal niceties! When God decrees hijabs and chadors for all, you gotta go there.
[T]here were over 1,900 reported cases of students challenging the values of the [French] Republic in 2023 alone — from refusing to attend biology lessons due to perceived “immorality,” to threats against teachers who discuss secularism, gender equality, or the Holocaust. A growing number of teachers report self-censoring in the classroom for fear of retribution.
And the problem is not confined to France. In Germany, several states have reported an uptick in Islamist-linked intimidation in schools. In 2022, a Berlin teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for showing a satirical cartoon during a civic education lesson. In Sweden, a teacher in Malmö was assaulted after discussing LGBTQ rights in class. Even the UK is not immune: Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire found itself at the centre of a firestorm in 2021 when a teacher faced threats and had to go into hiding after showing images of the Prophet during a lesson.
These incidents are not isolated. They represent a systemic issue: the infiltration of radical Islamist ideologies into the educational environments of liberal democracies. Schools — once viewed as neutral spaces for the development of civic identity — are increasingly contested zones where the state’s authority is being tested and, at times, eroded.