… his spiritual advisor.

Any number of cliches pertain to the problem facing hijab defenders in France, who are outraged that French Olympics athletes can’t cover their heads during play.

Secularist France has nothing against people wearing the thing in all other Olympics venues, but wants those officially representing the country during games to project religious neutrality.

Supported by many human rights organizations, hijabis are making a lot of noise about overturning the ban before the event begins next month.

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Ecoute. Here’s the problem, if you ask ol’ UD.

The far right so massacred Macron’s government in the recent EU election that Macron has called snap elections. My guess is that support for hijabs, abayas, burqas, etc., among this lot is approximately zero percent. Left, center, or right, in any case, French governments have long banned various forms of veiling, and it sure looks as though growing majorities of the French people object to strongly visible religious garb. At the moment, ye olde will of the people is against you, in other words, and while you’re free to fight the good fight, it’s arguable that this isn’t the moment.

It can’t help matters that, hijab-wise, most of the attention of the world is riveted to Iran, whose vile theocracy has succeeded in linking the head covering to murderous surveillance of women. Certes, it’s unfair, certes, it’s illogical, but efforts to portray the hijab as a symbol of healthy diversity, gender equality, and individual expressive rights (which all the letters from human rights organizations gas on about) are currently up against super-repressive mullahs who have made the hijab the central actor in their globally notorious death-to-women thing.

Hijabis in France, seems to me, would do well to acknowledge what they’re up against there, and act more strategically.

Here’s where you might start. Concede that hijabs don’t seem to most people to have jackshit to do with gender equality. (Recall this unfortunate campaign.) On the contrary. Drop that quixotic quest, and confine your language to religious freedom more broadly and indeed more vaguely.

IVF is “as immoral as anything we can imagine.”

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A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this year found that 86 percent of respondents thought IVF should be legal …

Our country is at a crossroads. What we saw today has never happened before, and I think for the majority of Americans, it raises questions about whether our legal system can be trusted. Pray for our nation, for God‘s guiding hand that this republic will be one nation under God.

FRANKLIN GRAHAM

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Please pray that God restores our right to pay off porn stars to hush them up and to create fake records to cover up the payoff.

GEORGE CONWAY

lololololololol

Spawn of Franco Fanboy goes down.

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Bozell’s father submitted a letter to the court in which he … questioned prosecutors’ motives for seeking a terrorism enhancement.

“I have remained silent for the past 3 1/2 years because I didn’t want to tip the apple cart of justice,” he wrote. “But given what I saw in the trial, and more importantly learning about this terrorism enhancement, I no longer can. I believe there is more at play here.”

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Indeed there is, indeed there is. It is the hand of God. Praise Him.

… Harrison Butker has initiated a petition of his own. It calls for striking the song “I Can’t Say No” from the score of Oklahoma.

Mr. Butker casually mentions that “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail,” a not-so-thinly veiled reference to a recent bill passed in the House to combat antisemitism.

The Jesuit Review concludes:

 Mr. Butker quoted the lyrics of his “teammate’s girlfriend” (Taylor Swift), “familiarity breeds contempt.” But he demonstrated what contempt for the outside world breeds.

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UPDATE: THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE KICKER

UD thinks the contempt point really gets at it. Here’s another writer:

 A sort of loneliness radiates from Butker’s speech; there is the sense, in his words as in Aaron Rodgers’s increasingly dire podcast riff sessions, that all of this displeasure has been bubbling away in there for quite some time without an outlet. Mostly, though, there is just disdain, not just for all the sinful things of the world but seemingly everyone and everything else in it. 

…  There is no room for anyone else in this worldview, no space for anyone to live or breathe. It’s striking how Butker is unable or uninterested to connect his own faith with those of the coreligionists listening to him; this whole belief system vibrates at the frequency of cable news, and so there’s nothing for him to share but a list of demands. If Butker’s speech works as a commencement address, it is only as an opportunity for new graduates to learn how they will be treated by the sour and vengeful mediocrities who are also the most powerful people in the world they are joining: as a series of shadows whose only purpose is to be harangued, so that they might learn to be less displeasing. The advice Butker offered at Benedictine College is not really trying to be a part of any kind of conversation. It’s just a kicker moving further and further out, to see what he can get away with.

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Masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of, any more than running away from a mob you yourself have excited; but if Butker and Hawley are going to present themselves as national avatars of generative masculinity, these are not their best looks.

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More deeply: If you want to find the world contemptible, babe, the world will always oblige. Piece o’ cake. Look around. But it’s kind of a mistake – one that is obvious to all of us when you make it – to confuse your misanthropy with unworldly piety.

[Gov. Maura] Healey was invited to give the keynote address on the opening day of [a recent Vatican] conference, a perhaps surprising choice by the Holy See given that she is secular, openly gay and staunchly pro-choice despite identifying as Catholic.

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UD thanks Joanna.

Including Dave Zirin.

Yes, the NFL wants female fans, and yes, they want fans of color, and yes, going soft on Butker risks that. But above all else, NFL executives exist to appease the whims of billionaires in the owners’ boxes most of whom—judging by their bankrolling of Donald Trump—agree with Butker. The destruction of Black bodies for white consumption and profit is an ugly business. Normally the NFL wants to keep the underlying ideology of its owners under wraps. The biggest problem with Butker is that he vomited it up for everyone to see.

************

SOS grudgingly concedes that Butker’s speech displayed, Zirin notes, impressive concision.

Butker managed, in just a few minutes, to be homophobic, anti-abortion … and racist… He cried out against, “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media, all stem[ming] from the pervasiveness of disorder.”

Given the size of Butker’s … vomit, you’d expect a great deal of difficulty coughing up a few tidy paragraphs, but he did the deed. He got it done. And now all of America is talking about it.

From an address at Benedictine College (acceptance rate 100%):

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on this stage today, able to be the man that I am, because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.

“I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all. Homemaker.”

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lololololol

UD does wonder about the nature of evangelical Christianity these days.

But as one pro-Trump evangelical leader eloquently puts it:

“Irregardless of how overt he is with his faith, he always made faith something he was a stalwart for.”

Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.

Obviously UD wants to know more, more, more about Catholic University’s Pat Fagan; but on searching for him and his, er, institute, initiative, whatever, she finds nothing.

I mean — not nothing, but … well, take a looksee. Here’s the first CU hit you get on his name. Then a link to a faculty-in-the-media list, which takes you to an article about sex, and then a link to Fagan’s initiative (not institute); but CU’s only mention of the initiative (MARRI) includes no link…

Given Fagan’s natalist hysteria about the incipient death of Christian populations via low birth rate, I’m wondering why CU seems a bit coy about acknowledging his existence, let alone his institute/initiative. Fagan holds the key to healthy numbers of incoming CU students, etc.

Plus UD is panting to find out more about superorgasmic Christian sex.

Who can be surprised – even if you’ve only read this l’il ol blog – that an all-male concentration of moral primitives issues in so much enemy abuse that our country is about to sanction the group? These fanatics think it’s fine to spit on Christians, and women wearing skirts a quarter inch shorter than godly, and women who forget to sit in the back of the bus etc etc. They riot when slightly perturbed, set cars aflame when slightly more perturbed, and ignore court rulings against them that come from a nation whose existence they deny. They reject science and refuse to vaccinate their children. It’s hilarious that Israel thinks establishing a lord of the flies fighting faction will result in anything other than war crimes.

And oh yes. Right. Religious people are so much more ethical than non-religious.