“It’s hard to hold your head high and do the right thing and fix up these properties and put the money into them to make them a nice and attractive place to live when this city is so rough,” said [an Indianapolis landlord]. “It’s just going to get shot up and your hard work is going to be destroyed. It’s disheartening.”

Respect for all forms and practices of religion is so engrained in us that passionate defenses of secularism may feel bigoted. But for strikingly secular countries and provinces (France, Quebec), the rejection of burqas in the public realm, for instance, expresses a reasonable desire that the lived reality of their laicité, the laicité of the courts, schoolrooms, and streets, be maintained. How secular is your culture if city thoroughfares feature large outdoor prayer?

Some religious practices are disgusting (FGM) but difficult to stop because imams preach their necessity from the pulpit; some are objectionable to modern people (gender segregation, face/body veiling) because of their graphic derogation of women. The reason you see so many European countries banning burqas and arresting people who cut off children’s clitorises is because they feel passionately that some forms of behavior denominated religious range anywhere from unacceptably uncivil to outright criminal.

Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture. A girl’s body does not belong to her father, her family or her community. Her integrity is not a token for tradition, not an ornament for family honor and not a site for control. It belongs to her alone. 

Beating women and stoning women, as well, is no special scandal to high-profile Muslim intellectual/rapist Tariq Ramadan. He is far from alone.

So yeah, Quebecers are passionately secular, and this blog doesn’t have a problem with their being so. Details here.

Er, no.

Dress like a construction worker, carry chainsaws and a ladder, and you can walk off with jewels of inestimable value from the Louvre. Wow.

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Update:  [T]he thieves could have got out with a Chardin still life, a Rogier van der Weyden, an ancient Mesopotamian statuette… [T]hieves who executed a robbery that ignored all the Louvre’s cultural treasures for these brainless items are ruthlessly interested in the precious materials from which they are made…  I think the French culture minister must have had to suppress a snigger while claiming these items have “immeasurable heritage value”.

 [O]fficers from the Myrtle Beach Police Department observed an individual in a vehicle brandishing a firearm while traveling near the … demonstration.

Another one.

“And that’s just the ones they caught,” Mr UD points out.

Art distills.

Why should she have anything to do with the so-called laws of so-called Switzerland? This, mes petites, is what people mean when they refer to the failure of (cough) ‘integration.’ She’s like the ultraorthodox in Israel, who see that “country” as the enemy against which God commands them to resist.

Deep Salafist pockets will pay her fines – she will continue to rack them up – until the state decides that the system of fines isn’t working. Next step: A social worker tries to reason with a fanatic. Then jail?

Chicago.

‘[A gun control advocate in Mississippi] said Tuesday that he often reminds his colleagues in other parts of the country that “what they go through don’t even compare to what we have to go through in the South. Because in the South, guns is like having a bottle of water [sic]. Everybody got it. And then it’s a right-to-carry state. It’s a castle doctrine state. It’s constant gun shows every other week in Mississippi somewhere. So guns are just bloody in Mississippi…. Get us all together. You bring in alcohol. Then you bring in all the crazy drugs they got these days, and you got a state where everybody got at least 10 guns. What you asked for? You asked for violence.”’

… and one of its political leaders uses remarkably strong language against the thing.

“[I do not accept that women should be forced to] walk the streets as if they were animals or merchandise.”

“If there are no changes within the Haredi community that succeed in bringing them into the 21st century and making them understand that without core curriculum studies, a modern society cannot function, in 30-40 years, Israel will be a theocratic state.“

 “Lucky Hank,” starring Bob Odenkirk, based on the 1997 novel “The Straight Man,” by Richard Russo, [offers a familiar] vein of disdain, one in which characters say things like: “My book of sonnets on Jonathan Swift has become the benchmark in early feminist 18th century response poetry.”

[Arab women] are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say … [T]oday, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe... People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.

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An essential companion piece.

CONTENT WARNING: Everything.