F Rosa Rubicondior: Human Rights
Showing posts with label Human Rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Human Rights. Show all posts

Wednesday 17 January 2024

Bigotry News - UK Christians May Retain The Right To Abuse Victims Of Their Choice


Women celebrating what they thought was a victory for their right to freedom from harassment and bigotry.
© Sister Support.
Ministers accused of watering down rules around abortion clinic buffer zones | Abortion | The Guardian

Last year, MPs in the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to back an amendment to the Public Order Act which would have established 'safe zones' around clinics offering pregnancy termination services to women who need them.

This would have made it unlawful for anyone to harass or approach women entering the clinics in an attempt to prevent their access or to influence their choice by publicly shaming them.

Those routinely harassing women in this way are invariably Christians using various underhand tactics and disinformation and even threatening to photograph the women and post their picture on the social media. Women are routinely subjected to abuse and shouts of 'murderer' by sanctimonious bigots exercising what they claim is a God-given right to impose their views on others and deny others basic human rights.

The traditional passive-aggressive threat of 'praying' for the women and the foetus was used routinely with ostentations 'silent' prayer, clearly intended to shame and embarrass women. Only a Christian could weaponise 'prayer' while ignoring what Jesus allegedly told them about casting the first stone and not judging others.

Tuesday 28 November 2023

Antivax COVIDiot News - Study Shows Vaccines Halted The Rise In Prem Births Caused By COVID-19


Covidiot Trumpanzees.
Risking the lives of unborn babies for political ends.
Study: Spike in premature births caused by COVID, halted by vaccines

About the last thing the politically-motivated, far right antivaxxers covidiots are interested in is protecting human life. With characteristic hypocrisy, many of the same frauds are also active campaigners against legal abortions and a woman's right to choose which, together with COVID-19 denialism and antivaxx conspiracism, have become major talking points in the Trumpanzee far right playlist.

The hypocrisy of these frauds was revealed yesterday in a study which shows there was a huge spike in the number of premature births during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when women infected with the virus spontaneously aborted their baby. The same study also shows that in those areas where the vaccine uptake was high, the premature birth rate quickly fell back to pre-pandemic levels, but in areas where uptake was low, it took another year to return to pre-pandemic levels.

The study was carried out by Professor Jenna Nobles of Wisconsin–Madison University and Professor Florencia Torche, of Stanford University who have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As the Wisconsin–Madison University press release explains:

Sunday 29 October 2023

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy


Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Friday 27 October 2023

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children


Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.
Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

Sunday 22 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Women Hunted Too - Before Man-Made Religion Assigned Them a 'God-Given' Role


Woman the hunter | UDaily

Sarah Lacey, an anthropologist with Delaware University, USA, believes she has found evidence that, in hunter-gatherer societies, in contradiction to the traditional view which has men as the hunters and women as the gatherers, in fact, women played their part as hunters too.

This was before their assumed gender roles became formalised by religions which provided men with the excuses they needed to control women by declaring that 'God' had assigned them roles as man's 'help meet' and so subservient to men. Women were instructed that they should be obedient to a man's demands and fill the role of sex-slave, housekeeper and cook, because God said so:
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 2: 21-24



GENE 3.15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. GENE 3.16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3: 15-16
As I related in my book, A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything, in pre-Christian Gaelic society, under the 'Brehon Law' women had equal rights to men and could adopt leadership roles, own property and divorce abusive or unfaithful husbands - rights that were systematically stripped from them under the influence of Patricus (St Patrick, first bishop of Armagh), when he called an all-male meeting of Gaelic tribal petty kings and declared those rights to be contrary to God's Law in the Bible, and women should henceforth be subservient and obedient to men and never be in a position of leadership over them.
St. Patrick is reputedly responsible for abolishing the Brehon law or rather with integrating it with Christian Law by going through it line by line with a convention of tribal chiefs called for the purpose and striking out anything which did not accord with the Bible. Brehon law, from the Irish ‘breithim’ meaning ‘a judge’ was the system of law in use in Gaelic Ireland since ancient times – a Celtic Common Law, necessary to settle disputes between residents of different petty kingdoms or different tribal traditions. One effect of this was to reduce the status of women; depriving them of many of the rights they held under Brehon law, such as the right to divorce their husband, to own property and to occupy positions of leadership. St. Patrick’s brand of Christianity was to be strictly hierarchical, patriarchal and misogynistic, in line with the Bible and the teachings of St. Paul, although there were deviations from strict cannon law. Divorce, for example, though no longer available on demand, could still be granted for a wide variety of reasons (4).

Sarah Lacy, with her colleague, anthropologist Cara Ocobock, from the University of Notre Dame, have published their research in two papers in the journal American Anthropologist and an article in Scientific American. A news release from Delaware University explains their work:

Monday 22 May 2023

Religion News - Californian Christians Demand the Right to Spread Hate and Disinformation

Religion News

Californian Christians Demand the Right to Spread Hate and Misinformation
Pro-Trump Christian extremists join the failed Coup on Jan 6, 2021

Christian Supporters of Donald Trump pray outside the U.S. Capitol January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee/Getty Images
Religious broadcasters seek to reverse California law aimed at quelling online hate speech

In a tacit acknowledgement that religions promulgate hate and division, and spread disinformation, The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), an association of Christian media outlets, is joining a coalition opposing a Californian law that would require social media operators such as Facebook and Twitter to publish their policies for removing hate speech from their platforms.

In effect, NRB's president and chief executive officer, Troy Miller, is campaigning for the right of Christians to retain the special privileges of spreading hate and misinformation with impunity when he declared in a statement:

In an environment where much religious viewpoint expression is considered ‘controversial’ speech, NRB is acting to stop the weaponization of new laws against Christian communicators.

Saturday 11 March 2023

Icons of Feminism - Mary Woolstencraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine

Icons of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797
Source: Wikipedia

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787
Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787
Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism

Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.

Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.

One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.

If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"

"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"

"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"

“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?

… Etc, etc, etc.

Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.

And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.

Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

Sunday 5 February 2023

Religious Abuse - How Religion Deprives Children of Their Human Rights in Northern Ireland

Religious Abuse

How Religion Deprives Children of Their Human Rights
in Northern Ireland

Political map of Northern Ireland
Political divide in Northern Ireland
Reports: Rights of children in NI undermined by religion - National Secular Society

Reports recently submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by the Northern Ireland based child rights advocacy group, The Children's Law Center (CLC) demonstrate how religion continues to poisoning community relations, maintain divisions and hostility and deprive people of basic human rights, in Northern Ireland.

Despite years of progress following the end of the 'troubles' with the 'Good Friday' Belfast Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing executive to administer devolved political power, the major source of intercommunal tension continues to be religion. The single most important barrier to the removal of religion as a source of hostility is the de facto segregation of primary and secondary education because of the insistence by the main Christian churches that they are not only influential in, but have control of education.

Despite a poll in 2012 which showed that 71% of the people of Northern Ireland believe an integrated education system should be the "primary model for the education system" and a 2016 UNCRC recommendation that Northern Ireland "actively promote a fully integrated education system" to facilitate "social integration, 93% of children in the province still attend faith schools while the few fully integrated schools can't meet the demand. In effect, parents have no choice but to send their children to be indoctrinated into one or other of two mutually hostile camps.


In 2016, the UNCRC also recommended ending the legally mandated collective worship in Northern Ireland schools where, unlike in England and Wales, even children over the age of 16 have no right to withdraw themselves from collective worship. Last year the High Court in Northern Ireland agreed that this situation is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although parents can withdraw their children from collective worship, the process is often difficult, and children rarely receive an alternative period of equal educational value. Children are also required to reveal details of their beliefs, in violation of their right to privacy, and often face stigmatisation and prejudice.

As part of their religious education syllabus, faith schools are permitted to include their religion's orthodox teaching on relationships and sex education, leaving LGBTQ+ students feeling that they are the victims of homophobic bullying and demonisation, again in violation of their basic human rights.

There is no requirement for Northern Ireland's schools to teach evolution in science class and, unlike in England, where state-funded schools are forbidden from teaching scientifically discredited superstitions like creationism and intelligent design as science, no such bar exists in Northern Ireland where creationism in its various forms can be presented to children as a valid alternative to the scientific view, and the Christian Bible can be taught as real science and history.

Indeed, the state is complicit in misleading children and depriving them of a sound, evidence-based education, or an objective view of religions, because schools are required to teach RE "based on the holy scriptures", with the syllabus designed by the "four main Christian churches", without non-religious, or non-Christian input. Religions besides Christianity are described as "other religions", illustrating Christianity's privileged position. There is no provision to objectively evaluate the claims of the various religions or make an meaningful comparison between them and the non-religious view of the world.

Despite the diminishing role and influence of religion in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, religion continues to hold sway in Northern Ireland, and in doing so, continues to foment and encourage intercommunal tension and strife while pretending to be peacemakers. Clearly, the interests of the priests and the churches is paramount and the interests of the people comes way down the list of priorities.

Tuesday 6 December 2022

Human Rights News - Women Fighting Back Against the Chritian Fundies Who Took a Basic Human Right Away

Pro Roe protestors outside the Supreme Court Building
SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade, despite strong popular support for retaining it.
Pro-choice crowdfunding has surged in the U.S. — but donating that way has risks

America women, who had the basic human right to bodily autonomy taken away from them by Christian extremists who now dominate SCOTUS, are fighting back through crowdfunding.

They need to do this to raise money for travel out of a Repugnican-run state that doesn't respect their basic human rights, to a Democrat-run state where pregnancy termination services are still legal and a woman’s right to choose is recognised and valued over a Christian fundamentalist's assumed right to control others.
However, there are risks, not the least of which are retaliatory measures by extremists seeking to constrain even the right to travel in order to restrict a woman's right to choose, and pressure on social media platforms to deny women the ability to crowdfund their freedom-seeking trips. In an ominous foreshadowing of what a fundamentalist theocracy would be like, not content with forcing their religion on the people in the states they run, extremists also seek to impose it on people who have rejected them at the ballot box.

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Jeremy Snyder, Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada, examines the sharp increase in crowd-sourced funding by women seeking abortion services outside their home states. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original may be read here:

Monday 5 December 2022

Trumpanzee Cult News - Trump or Desantis? The Nutjobs May Decide It.

Evangelical Christians are crucial voters in Republican primaries. Would they support DeSantis or Trump?
The American Christian far right now has two dogs in the fight for the position of Repugnican candidate in 2024 - the odious, epitome of a sore loser, former president, Donald Trump and the evangelical white supremacist, governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who emerged the stronger of the two in the mid-term disaster for Trumpanzee Repugnicans, where candidates who publicly bought into Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election, fared badly.

But is there much to choose between them? To someone like me from outside the USA, there doesn't appear to be a fag-paper's difference between Trump and DeSantis. They both appeal to the hate-filled, neo-fascist, human rights denying, white Christian evangelicals and misogynistic pro-life hypocrites who blame God and the Bible, and thank Trump and his stooges in SCOTUS, for their legalised denial of a woman's right to bodily autonomy.

What will come next? A ban on contraception? Legalised persecution of anyone who isn't heterosexual? Prohibitions on voting for anyone who isn't a white evangelical Christian? The abolition of democracy itself?

Seems a bit exaggerated? All of these have been advocated by the Christian far right at various time very recently and many of them see it as the entire reason for the 'culture war'!

Dominating the judiciary isn't enough for these privileged extremist who will only settle for a Taliban-style self-selecting theocracy which dominates both the Executive and the Legislature, which will be mere rubber stamps for the dictates of the self-appointed evangelical cult leaders. At least one popular televangelist with a huge following has already claimed to a cheering audience that God told him the government should be accountable to him, not the people.

How these extremists, who still form a significant block of American voters, despite the growing rejection of organised religions in the USA, will divide between the two candidates, then unite behind the winner, is still an open question, as is the question of how far their repugnant extremism will push people into the Democrat camp.

One frightening aspect of Christian fundamentalism the USA, is that many of them, the so-called dispensationalists, saw the relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by Trump as the first move in setting the precondition for an apocalyptic war, and believe Donald Trump will complete that process. In that war they believe they alone will be saved and 'raptured' to a place of safety until it is safe to return to Earth where they will have everything for themselves and all those who disagreed with them will be dead - the greatest thing they can imagine!

If these self-possessed, entitled nutters gain the political powers they crave, they will have control of the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet, with enough warheads to destroy all life several time over, all under the command of a narcissistic psychopath with an acute personality disorder, the self-control of a toddler and his own private nuclear bunker.

The stakes in 2024 really are that high!
In the following article reprinted from The Conversation, Professor David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney, gives his assessment of the prospects, and to what extent the unpopular (even amongst Repugnicans) state bans on abortion will affect the outcome of November 2024.

The article, which can be read here, has been reformatted fos stylistic consistency.

Saturday 12 November 2022

The Christian Bigots Are Revolting

Bishops openly repudiate the teaching of the Church of England - Christian Concern
Bishop Stephen Croft and Andrea Williams COE of Christian Concern
Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft (left) and Andrea Williams, CEO of Christian Concern (right)

Like the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, or Church of England (CofE) in Britain is struggling to come to terms with the fact that society has moved on and no longer accepts the primitive Bronze Age moral code in the Bible. In order to stem the haemorrhage of members which has now left Anglicanism a minority cult in the UK with empty pews and derelict churches and not enough vicars to fill all the vacancies, reformers such as the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Crofts, are trying to distance the church from that primitive barbarism, division, exclusion and hate that the Bible encourages. They are trying to make the CofE become more inclusive, embracing the humanist ethics that now form the basis of UK society, with same-sex marriages, sexual freedom, contraception and a woman's right to chose.

The problem for the CofE, like the Catholic church ,is that to catch up with modern society it has to abandon the fundamentals of the Early Medieval religion, yet, as its membership dwindles, the fanatical fundamentalists become proportionately more powerful within it. To those fundamentalists who are used to using the Bible to justify their smug bigotry and persecution of those who don't agree with them, to abandon the fundamentals is to abandon the faith altogether.

To these bigots the 'faith' is how they define it and they are not easily going to give up the basis for their entitled demand for the right to dictate to the rest of us.

This can be seen in a response by arch bigot, Andrea Williams, of Christian Concern, which represents the fundamentalist wing of Anglicanism, to proposed reforms in the CofE's attitude to same-sex marriage, with is dripping with condescension and the dogmatic assumption that their interpretation of their Bible is the definitive word of a god who empowered them to dictate to the rest of us.

Tuesday 1 November 2022

Religion Provides Excuses for People Who Need Excuses - Iranian Women's Protest

Iranian parliament
Photo: AP
Iran: protesters call for move to a non-religious state. What changes would that bring?

The closest things we have to the fundamentalist Christian dream of a fundamentalist theocracy, can be found in the Islamic world in states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where Sharia Law is little different to the Levitican Laws a Christian theocracy would impose on the rest of us. In fact, they have the same cultural roots in the tribal cultures of the Middle East, where religious superstition and the support of the priesthood was used to control and subjugate the population and, for the ruling men, the women.

Misogyny and a desire to control the females of the tribe probably originated in pre-human ancestors where biologically, there was an advantage in the males ensuring the children they supported were their own and not those of other males. Males would have been insecure in their ability to ensure fidelity, reinforced by their own tendency to 'spread their seed' as widely as possible, which required the women in the tribe to be unfaithful to their partners. The biological dynamics resulted in males being physically stronger than females and able to impose their control by force, if necessary.

Androcentric religions, such as the Abrahamic religions, evolved partly to codify this gender relationship and give it divine authority, to provide males with the excuses they needed to control and coerce females.
The insecure little men who control the Islamic Republic of Iran are continuing to use religion as their excuse for denying the women of Iran the right to choose what clothes to wear in public!

Imagine if this was reversed and women were telling men what to wear! The regime wouldn't last 5 minutes, and nor would any religion that supported it.

And yet, because their holy book, like the Bible before it, was written in a time when inadequate, insecure little men held the political and economic power, women were regarded as goods to be bought and sold, little different to slaves, the same holy book can be used as an excuse to treat women the same way today.

Just like the Catholic and most fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches, Islam is obsessed with sex. It assumes that if women are not rigidly controlled, they will go and seek out other men to have sex with, and if a women reveals more than just her eyes to any man other than her husband, it will provoke sinful sexual urges in the man which will condemn his 'soul' to an eternity of pain because the religion's god hates nothing more than a man lusting after a women to whom he isn't married.

But of course, that will be the woman's fault for tempting the man. The man can't be expected to see a woman's face, hair or legs and not want to have sex with her, and since it's her doing the tempting, anything that follows will be her fault too, consensual or not.

A couple of recent articles in The Conversation explain the importance of the women's demonstration against the compulsory wearing of the hijab in public and how fundamentalist Islam is merely the excuse for repression. They are reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Sunday 11 September 2022

Religious Bigotry News - Now Judaism is Exempt From Laws Protecting LGBTQ Rights, Thanks to SCOTUS

Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Blocked order forbidding Orthodox Jewish University from discriminating against LGBTQ students

By Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Steve Petteway Source - http://www.oyez.org/justices/sonia_sotomayor (direct link), Public Domain, Link
High court blocks recognition of LGBTQ campus at Yeshiva U

I wrote recently about how the American Methodists, and the Australian Anglican churches are both splitting over whether they should be continuing to victimise, demonise and generally discriminate against LGBTQ people or not. Now we have an Orthodox Jewish university in New York winning the right to discriminate on 'religious grounds'.

Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish University in New York had appealed against a New York Judge’s ruling that their refusal to recognise an LGBTQ campus club violated New York City ‘s Human Rights Law, which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ordered the university to recognise it as an official student club.

The University appealed to SCOTUS on the grounds that, as a religious organization, it was exempt from the non-discrimination law, by virtue of the First Amendment right to freely exercise religion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with them and issued a temporary blocking order against the NY judge's ruling. The surprise is, that Sotomayor, who hears emergency applications from the state of New York on behalf of SCOTUS, is considered to be a liberal in SCOTUS with its 6:3 majority of conservative justices, courtesy of Donald Trump who rewarded his supporters on the far right by stuffing SCOTUS with partisan religious conservative.

Now, it seems, even the liberal justices are coming into line with the highly partisan SCOTUS. There is little doubt that this ruling will be confirmed by SCOTUS with a majority of at least 7:2 and will have the effect of giving any religious organisation the right to victimise anyone with whom they disagree and the right to pick and choose which laws to comply with. The problem is, the legal definition of a 'religion' in the USA is so nebulous that such a ruling would give carte blanche to any organization or group, formal or informal, to declare itself to be a religion and ignore any law it disagrees with on the same grounds that Sotomayor ruled constitutional.

The US Dictionary of Law entry on 'Religion' reads:

Saturday 3 September 2022

God the Great Abortionist

Most human embryos naturally die after conception – restrictive abortion laws fail to take this embryo loss into account

Religious fundamentalists in the USA recently scored what might turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory in the struggle over a woman's right to choose whether to allow her body to be used to grow a new person or not. In a historic ruling, the right-leaning Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), recently stuffed with Republican placemen and women ruled that since there was no traditional right to an abortion, the states were free to regulate and restrict abortions.

This has led to about a third of American women losing the right to have an unwanted pregnancy terminated, in some states regardless of how the pregnancy occurred or the effects continuing with it might have on the health of the woman. So, in these states, for example an underage girl who was raped or the victim of incest will be obliged to carry the baby to term, and some states are even attempting to make it illegal to get help in another state where abortion is still decriminalised.

But what is this objection to abortion and the right of women to control their own bodies based on?

As we might expect with beliefs that lead to limitations on human rights, it is based on Christian fundamentalism and two things in particular:

Friday 2 September 2022

Bigotry News - Religions Fighting For the Right to Discriminate and Victimise

Free school lunches being prepared
Magaly Valentin (left), and Rosalba Gomez (right) Arlington Food Services prepare fresh salads and vegetable cups for the National School Lunch Program in the kitchen at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, Wednesday, October 19, 2011.

USDA Photo by Bob Nichols.
USDA exempts religious schools from nondiscrimination rules to keep kids fed

Religions in the USA are continuing their campaign to be allowed to continue to victimise and bully minorities and women, using religion as their excuse.

The latest move is to persuade the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to drop its insistence that to participate in the free school lunch program, schools must not discriminate on the basis of sexuality or gender identity.

The National Schools Lunch Program is a federal initiative that provides meals for tens of millions of children in public and non-profit private schools. Schools had complained that participation in the program would oblige them to comply with the non-discrimination provisions of "Title IX" - a 1972 measure aimed at ensuring equal opportunities at educational establishment across the USA.

Last July, Grant Park Christian Academy of Tampa Florida, launched a lawsuit, supported by the unashamedly Christian nationalist hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom, claiming exemption from the non-discrimination provisions of Title IX on the grounds that the school taught a “biblical worldview about marriage, sexuality, and the human person.” In other words, it intended to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and teach the students to do the same, based on ancient texts written in the Bronze Age.

And recently, the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, withdrew from the lunch program, claiming that:

Accepting any federal subsidy would subject archdiocesan schools to federal mandates that could impede a school’s ability to faithfully carry out the teachings of the Catholic Church

In other words, the catholic schools would no longer be allowed to discriminate against the LGBTQ community, continue to condemn same-sex marriages and victimise and demonise homosexuals, and teach their students to do likewise. Obviously the Catholic Church would rather have children go hungry than to grant everyone full human rights.

Monday 29 August 2022

Religious Bigotry News - After the Methodists, the Anglicans Are Now Splitting Over Whether to Hate Gays or Not.

The Anglican split: why has sexuality become so important to conservative Christians?

I wrote recently about how the American Methodist church is breaking up over the question about whether members of the LGBTQ community are entitled to full human rights or whether they should continue to be figures of hate, condemnation and persecution.

Now the Anglican Church in Australia is falling apart over the self-same issue. The cause, as always, is tension between what modern evolved social ethics is demanding these churches conform to, or whether they should continue to adhere to the outmoded behaviour codes as first laid down by Bronze Age male tribal leaders, some of whom were so insecure in their sexuality that they forbade homosexual sex between men (though not between women), in the belief that these are the objective and unchangeable commands of an invisible sky man on whose whims our social ethics should be based.

Curiously, the diehards these days have little difficulty accepting the triumphs of the progressives in society who in the past have adjusted to changing social attitudes towards slavery, female emancipation, European Christian white supremacism and the colonial imperialism it gave rise to, to disability right, to full adult suffrage, etc, which they now accept as right and proper in a civilised society where once they vigorously opposed them as going against the sacred word of their favourite god.

But they seem to be stuck on the question of equal rights for homosexuals, including the right to marriage, consensual sexual activity and ordination as priests in the church of their choice, though why anyone would want to be a member of, let alone a minister in, any church in which such bigotry was tolerated, and even admired, is quite beyond me.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Mark Jennings, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Divinity, Australia and an employee of the Anglican diocese of Perth, Australia, analyses this split and the origins of homophobia in the Anglican Church. The original article can be read here.

Sunday 21 August 2022

Christian Hate News - Now The Methodists are Splitting Over How Best to Hate LGBTQ People

Bishop Ken Carter, former president of the UMC's Council of Bishops.
For United Methodists, the center is not holding

A losing or defeated group invariably turns inward and fragments as it looks for scapegoats.

This was never more true than of the American United Methodists, America's second largest Protestant denomination, who, like other Christian denominations, are struggling against falling membership and with trying to keep up with rapidly changing cultural attitudes such as acceptance of LGBTQ people as being as entitled to full human rights as anyone else, including the right to same-sex marriage and/or ordination as pastors in the church of their choice.

It's the same old story of a religion which believes it's morals are handed down from divine authority and codified in a sacred book. These morals eventually become outdated and no longer suitable, as social ethics evolve along with society, to the extent that they come to be regarded as immoral. The mistake is in assuming that morality is fixed and unchangeable and based either on some objective standard or the arbitrary whim of a deity. In reality, of course, they evolve as part of cultural evolution.

Like the Catholic and other Christian Churches, the Methodists are now tearing themselves apart because, to change and accommodate the growing cultural acceptance of LGBTQ rights is to abandon what die-hard conservatives regard as core beliefs. The traditionalists regard the progressives as no longer 'real Methodists' while the progressives regard the conservatives as truculent die-hards, holding the church back and preaching an immoral gospel that gives excuses to would-be bullies and sanctimonious hypocrites, who would deny basic human rights to people of their choosing if allowed to, whilst preaching freedom and the essential equality of Man.

Friday 5 August 2022

I hate to Say it, But I told You So!

Kansas votes to protect abortion rights in state constitution | US news | The Guardian

Back in mid-July when the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe vs Wade was announced, I said it looked like a Pyrrhic victory for the forces of American Christo-fascism and a wake-up call for the forces of democracy, human rights, and female bodily autonomy, as about two thirds of American adults supported the right of women to choose and were in favour of decriminalised abortions.

Now the stunning victory for the pro-choice cause in Kansas, that most conservative of states which has voted Republican in every election since the mid-1960s, vindicates everything I said in that article - SCOTUS now represents only a small, vociferous minority of Americans to whom Donald Trump effectively handed control of the US judiciary by stuffing the Supreme Court with fundamentalist Christo-fascists.

According to this article in The Daily Yonder, the result is even more impressive when analysed in detail. Although the rural parts of Kansas voted 'Yes' (to allow the prohibition of abortions in the state) by 58% to 42%, the swing away from the pro-Trump vote in the same areas was about 17%. Across the state, the result was 58% to 42% against the proposal in a state which voted 56% to 42% for Trump and against Biden. The pro-abortion position was even more popular than Biden, showing that what was thought to be a core Republican issue is in fact a major vote loser for them.

On Abortion Referendum, Kansas Rural Voters Shifted Further from 2020 Presidential Results

Kansas voters in small cities and rural areas swung further from the Republican Party vote just two years ago than their more urban counterparts in Tuesday’s defeat of an anti-abortion state constitutional amendment.

Statewide, the amendment, which would have removed abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution, failed by about 16 percentage points, 42% to 58%.

Voters in large and medium-sized metropolitan areas defeated the amendment 2 to 1. Voters in small metropolitan areas split evenly over the amendment. And rural (nonmetropolitan) voters favored the anti-abortion amendment 58% to 42%.

But the bottom-line vote is only part of the picture. Another story arises from how much the anti-abortion amendment underperformed compared to Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. And by that measure, Kansas’ small-city and rural voters shifted further away from the Republican Party than voters in bigger cities.

Republican Trump won Kansas by 14 points, 56% to 42% in the 2020 presidential election. (The total percent is less than 100 because it doesn’t include third-party candidates.)

The anti-abortion constitutional amendment was thought to be a bedrock Republican issue. The Kansas party initiated the referendum and scheduled it for the August primary, as opposed to the November general election, thinking a highly motivated base would make up a larger proportion of the turn out and get the amendment passed.

The strategy didn’t work. Turnout was extremely high – double the last midterm election. The anti-abortion vote shifted 30 points away from the support Trump received in 2020. And the amendment failed.

Across the state, the pro-abortion vote outperformed Biden’s vote in 2020. In other words, the issue of abortion rights was far more popular than the Democratic candidate.

And the anti-abortion amendment was far less popular than the Republican presidential candidate.

Small metropolitan and rural areas had the greatest shift away from the 2020 Republican vote. The pro-abortion rights vote was about 19 points more popular than Biden in 2020 in these smaller communities (see graph above). And the anti-abortion vote was about 17 points less popular than Trump (see graph at the top of the story).

From this data, we may be able to draw a couple conclusions. One is that politicians can’t assume small-city and rural voters are in lock-step behind banning abortion. And, two, voters behave differently when they have the chance to vote straight issues without party labels. The proposed constitutional amendment was nonpartisan.

One caveat is that turnout affects elections. The high turnout means there were likely some different types of voters than the ones who typically go to the polls for a relatively low-key midterm primary.

The abortion vote in Kansas will certainly inform party strategy in the general election in November. Democrats are concluding that the Kansas vote means they should be campaigning more on abortion rights. And others think the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade may motivate a different type of turnout in the November election to blunt some of the Republican momentum in congressional elections.

This data tells us that the vote in small cities and rural areas is also up for grabs.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.



Americans now need to follow up this magnificent victory for secular, human rights values, in the mid-terms with a similar vote for Democrats and against the largely pro-life, (read, anti-choice), minority opinion the Repugnican Party now represents.

American women, supported by fair-minded American men, can take back control of their bodies from the extremist Christian minority that SCOTUS handed it to.

Friday 15 July 2022

How The SCOTUS Now Represents an Extremist Minority of Americans

Political and Religious Activation and Polarization in the Wake of the Roe v. Wade Overturn | PRRI

A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) into attitudes to abortion and the overturning of Roe vs Wade shows the extent to which the ruling represents the viewpoint of a small, extremist religious minority of Americans - white evangelical Christians. But there are signs that this extremist minority may have shot themselves in the foot in this case.

The following charts tell their own story.


Thursday 2 June 2022

Americans Increasingly Ignore Their Church and Support Same Sex Marriage

Same-Sex Marriage Support Inches Up to New High of 71%

A sure sign that a religion is losing its grip on the people is when public opinion differs markedly from its teachings. This is a manifestation of an increasing tension as social ethics progresses and leaves behind the fossilised ethics of religion from an earlier age. The local religions then have to change to keep up but in doing so, they alienate the traditionalists who tend to become an ever-diminishing minority, pushing it further out to the fringes, or leave the church in protest at its increasing abandonment of sacred principles.

The problem is a direct consequence of the control of public morals religions presume they have entitlement to and their claim of the divine authority of an omniscient god for so doing. This means they can adopt change only by abandoning their justification for their control and in effect, giving up the pretence that morals come from an omniscient deity who, by definition, is never wrong. The reality, of course, is that morals are a social construct that change and develop according to the developmental needs of society, and have no divine, objective basis save what goes to create a cooperative society that is pleasant to live in.

So the progressive forces in society produces a tension between them and the regressive, traditionalist forces of religion and the needs of religions to keep control of their people and so the livelihoods and power of the priesthood. A useful analogy is that of a rope by which religions try to hold back social progress until either the rope snaps and the people give up on that religion, or the religion is dragged, kicking and screaming into the modern age.

Web Analytics