Baylor: A criminal enterprise and a noisily self-regarding Christian university.

Rather like Bernard Madoff and Orthodox Judaism.

There’s everything to be said, criminal-enterprise-wise, for a covering of piety.

Despite its appalling political cowardice – its announcement that it will refuse to call mutilation mutilation, but will instead call it cutting – the New York Times seems to have allowed the truth – the true word, mutilation (“[F]emale genital mutilation is the accepted term, and it’s the term WHO uses. Mutilation shows the gravity of the practice. You’re damaging healthy tissue and altering it in ways that may be permanent, for no medical reason.”) – to slip through in at least this one column. This remarkable column.

FGM is a cultural practice with one key aim: To control an emerging woman’s sexuality by physically removing the most sensitive part of her anatomy. In the back-and-forth dialogue on FGM over its religious association and clinical definition, there is one psychological aspect of FGM that continues to be ignored: sexuality as voice. A woman’s ability to feel and express herself is an extension of her voice. When little girls are stripped of their ability to feel, and are later shamed for expressing (or wanting to express) themselves sexually, it’s a form of mental abuse that silences the most primal form of communication: sex. It strips them of their ability to discover themselves before they have even reached the threshold of womanhood.

In these cultures, girls are cut off from themselves psychologically and spiritually far before the barbaric genital mutilation takes place. Girls are violated at the earliest age, trained to be obedient and submissive.

Shireen Qudosi really gets at it.

Don’t forget to add to this picture of womanhood the burqa: Female Oral Mutilation.

The latest antics of sordid, farcical University of South Florida catch the eye of a local judge.

Coach Strong, if you are listening, in the last couple of months there have been two arrests of your players for very violent felonies. This court, and I’m sure I’m not alone, questions whether you have control over your players. It’s fairly clear you do not have control of them…

Of course Strong isn’t listening, and why should he? First, the judge is a girl. Second it’s two arrests in two months which is nothing. Teamwork, as you know if you follow this blog, means that some universities have ten player arrests in two minutes. Third, no one in the “community” gives a shit that some of its members “have to suffer at the hands of” USF players. Everyone understands that you have to make some sacrifices for the game.

‘Tis curious how life instructs!
For instance, when it comes to ducts:
To get the test
That way seems best.
Yet when you get to it, it sucts.

She sat on a nearby Adirondack
very very quietly until this
cardinal came by. Not a great
shot, but it’s a start.

Egyptian Ilhami Agina
Wants ladies to have no vagina.
“And also no clit.
For it’s certain that it
Helps enormously with my stamína.”

[West Virginia governor Jim] Justice … summoned both Marshall [University] President Jerome Gilbert and five members of the school’s Board of Governors to his office on separate occasions to demand that the school get rid of [the school’s football coach, and hire a friend of the governor’s], who is 73 and last was a head coach in 2004.

UD‘s garden on a spectacular spring day.

Headline of the day.

We’re only four months into this year’s Golden Handcuffs competition, but it’s never too soon for an update.

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

Tradition remains important. In time-honored style, one arrestee wears instantly legible clothing.

Just to make sure he could be identified, [Adrian] Magee wore a pair of No. 73 LSU Nike shorts that matched his jersey number.

A lower caste being named Merkel
Dressed neither niqabal nor burqal.
Quick! Someone grab
At least a hijab!
The woman’s gone downright berserkal.

… has a hell of a football coach too.

Twenty players started a huge brawl on campus. All have been arrested for assault. The coach has made a statement.

“Anybody who has been a football player or a student on campus knows things like that happen,” he said. “It’s no problem. We’re going to handle that. The University did a great job putting out a statement on it. So we’re just going to take it and wait until they get done with their process.”

… beside a wall of kisses
at Budapest’s Anker’t nightclub.

She hopped over to Hungary for
the weekend. You can do that
sort of thing when you live in
Ireland.

He seems to be under the impression that these women (and girls – some are put under the burqa at eleven, twelve, years old) are able to make this decision for themselves. Maybe some are.

But UD finds it odd that Nawaz addresses not a word to the many men who make their wives and daughters wear burqas.

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk.

It’s kind of like telling eight year old girls that they really should think twice before getting their clitorises removed and labia sewn up. Or fourteen year old girls that they probably shouldn’t get married. It might be better to address your concerns to their parents and guardians.

Walking along the side of the house
just now (taking out the trash), UD

encountered what she takes to be a
Southern Black Racer making its way
into her azaleas and vinca. Here
is her way-amateurish effort to
photograph it.