The head of the National Council of Canadian Muslims recognizes the absurdity of governments paying for religious schools, many of which inculcate values destructive to the functioning of a modern democratic state (head/body veiling for girls and women, withdrawal from the civic realm, derogation of women); and though he ain’t happy about Bill 9’s extension of secular laws in Quebec, he’s able to understand that there’s Provincial consensus on higher levels of secularization.

All say no. Legislation is pending.

You may recall Christopher Buckley’s God is My Broker: A  Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth. Brother Owens is the man!

Teehee. If you force teachers to display the Ten Commandments, they will have to comply; but some of them will cover the display wall with additional posters from all sorts of supernatural sources, see, not just Christianly-approved ones.

And again I say teehee.

… (it’s unregulated, so deaths and mutilations happen) has outraged circumcision enthusiasts. But for UD’s money, no defender of the practice (look at what they’re up to in New York!) will ever come up to the standard of this 2012 piece by Jeffrey Epstein’s best buddy Alan Dershowitz, which compares anyone with the slightest objection to slicing the dicks of non-consenting infants to Adolf Hitler.

LOL as if Iran will listen to her. She probably hasn’t even had her clitoris sawed off.

Christopher Hitchens famously compared some forms of religious life to “celestial North Koreas,” where one is compelled to praise one’s secular or divine god unceasingly. As Rick Plasterer, an evangelical, puts it:

God is always the final authority in our lives (Acts 5:29, certainly for Christians, and really should be for everyone). We are commanded to pray without ceasing (i.e., frequently, I Thess. 5:16-18) and certainly before meals (I Tim. 4:4-5).

Now, if you’re France, or Quebec, and you regard yourself as a secular country, or province, you do not want to live an unceasingly religious civic life; you positively wish to assert as a fundamental value, as a definitional identity, freedom from clerical existence. Religious life belongs in religious institutions – churches, mosques, synagogues, parochial schools – and of course in the domestic sphere. The shared public realm visibly, in an everyday way, ought to proclaim that God (whichever God yours happens to be – final-authority Gods abound, and you can ask Lebanon what it looks like when everyone designates a different one) is a private matter, and belongs mostly out of sight.

If it is true that for many religious one is commanded to pray unceasingly, or frequently, and if, on top of this, one takes a, well, evangelizing approach to faith (“really should be for everyone”), a country’s going to have a hell of a time establishing a public life based on shared (the vast majority of French and Quebecois, when asked, confirm that they are strongly secular/anticlerical) secular values, as in the equality of the sexes, sexual freedom, free thought, individualism, and a broad contempt for the array of surviving primitive and destructive religious practices that bedevil advanced and less advanced nations. How to establish and safeguard a truly secular realm?

Legally and constitutionally. Quebec already has some forms of restraint on people who want to gather in the streets and pray, and on people who want to wear burqas; but it wants more of this, and proposes tougher legislation. Since by definition most religious people do not understand why anyone wouldn’t like their ways (they bear after all salvational truth to us), there’s a kind of impasse here. But, like France, Quebec will proceed to assert and defend its foundational values.

Vermeule Valley, in Tennessee! Home lots currently available.

We can only hope the French courts keep her there for the duration, and don’t decide after six months that I mean golly she’s a girl and all with kids and all … let’s let her out.

A longtime, hardened, ISIS propagandist, she explained to the court that “ISIS ideology had prevented her from fully grasping the severity of the crimes being committed around her.” Which is like… I don’t get that. Hitler’s ideology – killing Jews en masse, for instance – prevented me from fully grasping the crematoria smoking away at Auschwitz… ?

ISIS was never coy about its ideology and its intended actions, and puleeze don’t pull the I’m just a silly female bit puleeze? We hear that a lot from the Al-Hol honeys who wanna come home. At the very least, we know that these are dangerous people who may regret what they did but have established a susceptibility to the very worst ideas and actions human beings can generate. Their extremism and moral degeneracy means they will never be safe to have around. It will never be safe to have them walking the streets of French cities.

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Update on one of her collaborators. Another case of a girlie sentence.

But this one was overturned in 2023!

I mean of course her husband got a life sentence for tying up their five year old slave girl in hellish heat and letting her burn and starve to death in it. But I mean his wife is a girl! and we can’t be expected to believe that a girl is just as philosophically committed an enslaver and torturer as a boy…

Clearly the German courts are just as disgusted as UD by this bullshit. They are reviewing her initial sentence with an eye toward lengthening it.

Like the fairy godmother passing her wand over Cinderella, Asha Hassan visited each Somali house and poof made all the children autistics.

[M]easles can cause complications like blindness, brain swelling and even death. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective.

The Texas Mennonites merrily kill their kids and spread measles to the rest of the country. Plus they’re “now staring down the barrel of a different vaccine-preventable outbreak: whooping cough,” which will torment their children and kill some of them.

One-day wonder Da Costa posts her way out of a Mamdani job. She lasted 24 hours.

… how massive majorities in UD‘s Maryland want the assisted suicide law that Illinois just voted in (it’s the thirteenth state to do so), but powerful religious lobbies have been able to block the legislation.

It’s hard to read the actual religious justification for letting dying people undergo protracted suffering without your eyes bugging out. National Review, which takes itself to be a respectable national publication, should be ashamed for publishing this mad screed, which tartly instructs us that God wants us to suffer because he loves us, and if you have trouble making sense of that, tough titties.

How can the strong will of a populace (62% of Maryland’s Catholics want assisted suicide) be overruled by obscurantist sadism?

Can’t be a judge in Germany if you won’t take off your hijab. Reasons here.

This harsh attack on Quebec’s evolving secularism laws chastises that province for failure to love diversity, but nowhere makes an effort to figure out why, in certain parts of the world (see France), large majorities vote decisively in favor of a secular public realm. Nowhere does the writer note that burqas are banned in countless countries, many of them middle eastern. Nowhere does she wonder why people find the sight of three year old girls in hijabs and thick black robes disturbing. She appears to find comments like this one, from a Canadian day care owner about her staff, convincing:

“I have had [college] students [who work in the day care center] that have been wearing burqas and hijabs. And it did not affect the way they interacted with the children. Actually, it was a very good thing because the children were curious and they were asking a lot of questions and they wanted to know why were they different, why were they wearing that. And, you know, so again, it gives them the opportunity to understand and to learn something that they may not have been exposed to otherwise.”

Indeed, very young female children spending all day with women whose very mouths are covered up (along with everything else except their eyes) are going to find that curious for sure and are going to want to know why they can’t see their teacher. What a wonderful early lesson in diversity for them to know that certain cultures insist women be totally hidden from the world. No doubt they are learning inspiring truths about their gender and how it is valued.

Anyone who thinks there’s the slightest difficulty interacting with someone who won’t let you see their face, or the mere contours of their body, or even their hands, is a party pooper.

Which is to say – if you’re to go all-out against any form of public secularity, you’re going to have to take seriously the grounds of majority opposition to some forms of public religiosity.