Had to laugh when I read this, although the story of Aminah’s mother (my friend Peter rescued eight year old Aminah from an ISIS prisoner camp a few weeks ago – details here), who was killed in an attack on ISIS, is deeply sad. Home non-schooled by a fervent speaker in tongues (think Carrie; details here), Ariel Bradley escaped a nightmare mother only to become – after a twisted ideological journey – an even worse religious fanatic.

Can it be that if Aminah is repatriated she’ll have to live with Ariel’s mother? Will Aminah never live in a sane world?

Read it all. It’s short.

The Cathophate to come! So much to love.

Defrocked and living in St Louis, McCarrick now faces a criminal charge.

Fond memories of the man here.

White evangelicals represent by far the most vaccine-resistant group in the nation; they constitute America’s current greatest health crisis.

At 412 Murrieta, an evangelical church in Riverside County, southeast of Los Angeles, Pastor Tim Thompson has frequently preached against the vaccines and brought in guest speakers who do the same.

“This is not a vaccination…it’s unclean,” he said during a spring sermon, making a reference to biblical principles of purity and health.

No one knows how to solve this, and meanwhile the evangelicals are taking us all down with them.

UD proposes the following. Summon Pastor Tim to a spectacularly appointed boardroom in midtown Manhattan, where Richard Dawkins (atheist vaccination rate: 90% – highest in the country), following Ned Beatty in this famous scene, will convince Tim that he, Dawkins, is in fact God, and has chosen Tim Thompson from among all men to preach the gospel of uncleanliness. If this works, Dawkins can move on to all the other anti-vax pastors.

Ah, fuggedaboutit. Let’s follow another story.

Renowned for his successful defense of a career genital mutilator in Michigan, Dershowitz should have no trouble successfully defending an Israeli burial society that barred a family from their father’s/husband’s funeral because some of the people who wanted to bury him were women.

Talia, Omer, and Stav’s father passed away four months ago. When they arrived at the cemetery to say their final goodbyes to their father, they were barred from participating equally in the funeral. The local hevra kadisha – burial society – wouldn’t let the family eulogize their father. When a representative of the hevra kadisha tore their brother’s shirt as a sign of mourning, the daughters were told to do it later, at home. And when it came time for the funeral procession, Talia, Omer,  Stav, and their mother were warned to remain behind and not follow their father’s body to the graveside. They ignored the warning and were met with yelling: “Women move aside!”, “Don’t mix women and men!”, and “Women shouldn’t be here!”

The sisters felt that their chance to say goodbye to their father was ruined. They turned to us, and last week we filed a lawsuit against the town in which the funeral was held demanding 268,496 NIS (approx. $76,000) in damages for preventing Talia, Omer, Stav, and their mother from participating in their father’s funeral. 

... It is illegal to force gender segregation or exclude women from … funeral procession[s] … [B]urial societies must not impose segregation unless the family requests it.

The proposed Israeli government plan to break the state’s monopoly on kosher [food] certification will not only harm religious standards but also lead to an increase in sexual immorality, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared last week.

Private certifiers of kashrut, Yosef claimed, could use female inspectors, leading to “licentiousness and a lack of modesty,” according to the ultra-Orthodox Hebrew-language website Kikar Hashabbat.

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[Jorgen Lovberg’s] first produced work, brought to the stage when he was sixty-one, was Those Who Squirm, which drew mixed notices from the critics, although the frankness of the subject matter (cheese fondling) caused conservative audiences to blush.

“Years ago I wrote a book about cosmology, and near the end I tried to summarize the view of the expanding universe and the laws of nature. And I made the remark – I guess I was foolish enough to make the remark – that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless. And that remark has been quoted more than anything else I’ve ever said. It’s even in Bartlett’s Quotations. I think it’s been the truth in the past that it was widely hoped that by studying nature we will find the sign of a grand plan, in which human beings play a particularly distinguished starring role. And that has not happened. I think that more and more the picture of nature, the outside world, has been one of an impersonal world governed by mathematical laws that are not particularly concerned with human beings, in which human beings appear as a chance phenomenon, not the goal toward which the universe is directed…

I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings, is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them…

Science cannot give us what religion gives those who believe in it. Science can’t give us the consolation of knowing that when we die we are going to continue in some sense to exist. It leaves us with a much bleaker view of our own future…

I think in many respects religion is a dream – a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare. But it’s a dream from which I think it’s about time we awoke…”

Saudi Arabia Ends Male Guardian Requirement for Women Attending Hajj

[Israeli] Finance Minister and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman revoked on Wednesday the eligibility of fathers studying full time in yeshiva for childcare subsidies, enraging ultra-Orthodox political leaders. 

In order to be eligible for such subsidies, fathers will need to work or study in a non-religious educational institute for at least 24 hours a week, something which would preclude full-time yeshiva study. 

“In Hasidic thought, lack of sufficient sexual mores is viewed as a literal barrier to the coming of the Messiah,” said Rabbi Ysoscher Katz, a former member of the Satmar Hasidic community, a particularly stringent ultra-Orthodox sect headquartered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Today, Katz chairs the Talmud department of a progressive Orthodox rabbinical school in the Bronx. “One yeshiva boy having a physical reaction to a woman’s picture is viewed as a grievous communal setback.”

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Nietzsche Module, Yeshiva of Flatbush:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And Shmuley’s stiffy killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?”

Thus Sha-Wang! Zarathustra

A nun who took a vow of poverty before taking over as principal at a Catholic elementary school has admitted to siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from the school to pay for “gambling expenses,” the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

Many commentators have noted that the Haredim could find an ally in the Islamist party in the coalition, which is equally conservative when it comes to issues such as gay rights.

Imperiled by the possibility that Israel may soon get a democratic government, the ultraorthodox are – should be – looking for friends. They will find no closer soulmates than the Islamists.

With France enacting, or attempting to enact, much tougher anti-veiling legislation, UD has been grappling with the question of how far a secular state (or province – Quebec has also been passing increasingly restrictive legislation) can legitimately go in the anti-clerical direction … in the direction of banning, in public spaces, symbols of religion. Human Rights Watch, from which I’ve drawn my headline, takes a firm anti-anti-religious position: absolutely whatever an individual asserts as religious clothes or jewels or weapons always goes; it’s none of the state’s business what people claim as religious self-expression. As Katha Pollitt once wrote: “[R]eligion is what people make of it.”

Yet how can this be true, really? On the most fundamental level, no state with any sense of self-preservation is going to cede legitimate religious self-designation to groups that in fact constitute state-reviling cults, like radical Salafists. For extremist Muslim women resident in France, the burqa virtually all of them wear communicates above all that “one does not belong to other groups, but only to Islam.” Their clothing conveys “complete loyalty to God, Islam, and fellow-Muslims and their utter rejection of everything else.”

(“These outfits are also available for children as young as two,” explains a writer visiting the Hijabi Store in Germany.)

I’m not seeing much in here touching even lightly on being a citizen of France, with even a rudimentary sense of affiliation with or responsibility toward France. (Does HRW absolve religious people of any responsibility to consider the meaning of state symbols?) It seems to ol’ UD that it is definitely up to the state to be aware of markers of perilously corrosive anti-state convictions among people who live in your country. (‘The national authorities say that the networks that once recruited jihadists have been weakened or have disappeared. The most visible signs of fundamentalism in [the once jihadi-rich city of] Trappes have also diminished, like the wearing of full-face coverings in public, which is illegal in France,’ a New York Times writer notes matter-of-factly.)

HRW does not seem to have glanced at human history; if it did, it would discover that plenty of religions – groups of people who called themselves religions – have been plenty dangerous to civilization, and civilization has every right to detect them and protect itself from them. Hell, religions have every right to protect against them. Think of the long history of the Vatican, or of Mormons, guarding against extremist offshoots.

UD also understands that free states should go as far as possible in the direction of neutrality in regard to belligerently non-assimilationist, and even extremist, groups within them. It is a sign of the strength of democracies that they can tolerate weird, utterly uncooperative sects like ultra-orthodox Jews and their fellow insurrectionists, the worshippers of Hitler. Spiritual extremity makes for strange bedfellows, and confident democracies can keep an eye on their zanies even as they trash the Capitol. But keeping an eye is the point I’m making – if a democratic state would like to do something other than roll from one street beheading and congressional beshitting to another, it would be wise to identify people who are likelier to behead and beshit than other people.

People who are pissed with Paris because it’s not a caliphate do indeed tend to dress in a certain rather rigorously invisible way on its streets. Not all of them; some burqa wearers don’t think this way at all. But some do, and the state and its citizens have a right to be unnerved by them. When you parade opposition to every foundational value of a secular state, you shouldn’t be surprised when people look at you funny. Doesn’t matter if you’re not a Salafist. I’ll quote Pollitt again: Religion is what people make of it. Goes both ways, see.

One of those foundational values, yes indeed, is neutrality in regard to religion; but what I’m trying to argue here is that not every cult should be accorded the status of a legitimate religion. So that is my first problem with HRW‘s argument.

[W]e uphold the right to express opinions which some deem contrary to the principles of human dignity, tolerance and respect, and which may deeply offend, because of the fundamental importance of freedom of religion and expression in democratic societies.

Of course no one’s talking about opinions here; we are talking about the symbolic action/expression of dressing in a certain very public, evocative way. And here again UD’s willing to be way offended by the enactment on the streets of her cities of female submission (remember: what people make of it. Yes? UD makes of entirely covered women an undignified statement of submission. On what basis does she make this judgment? Well, she listens to what women in burqas – and women who no longer wear them – say to interviewers; and she reads what Islamic texts and clerics tell women about submission.). She ain’t happy to be offended, but okay. Her daughter’s elementary school classroom, though? No. Her daughter is young, impressionable, just learning. She will take her daughter out of any school that normalizes the idea that an entirely blacked-out woman – with cloth over her mouth – is a role model.

This is the root of the legislation we are seeing. We shouldn’t be surprised. Most of us don’t like lies, or exposing our children to lies. Everyone outside of certain adherents knows that “The burqa is a vehicle of personal liberation” or “self-expression” is a terrible lie. Our children are going to have enough politically correct twistedness to negotiate as they grow up. Enough already.

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UD thanks David, a reader, for linking her to the NYT story about Trappes.

[T]he ramp on which 45 people died on Friday morning was built without permission, [a local politician] said.

“Anyone who looked at that slope could see it was something that was just thrown together,” he said. “The incline was too great, the metal floor was something you could easily slip on.”

“I tried to stop this,” he added. “I wrote letters. I got nothing.”

Part of the problem is the lack of a clear management system on the mountain. Four Haredi groups run different parts of the compound, but none has jurisdiction over the entire site. The group that oversees the area where the disaster occurred, Toldot Aharon, rejects the authority of the state, and the concept of Zionism, altogether.

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See my theory of the disaster in the post below. The state of Israel to Toldot Aharon: Go ahead and kill yourselves.