Via Planned Parenthood Advocates in Missouri:

Today, the Missouri House passed HJR 98, a “personhood” bill that would criminalize abortion in all circumstances (as well as ban common forms of birth control and infertility treatment). Rep. Hubrecht opposed an exception for rape, stating that pregnancy can be a “silver lining” for a rape victim.

Rape is a violent crime. There is no silver lining. Ever.

Guest post by James Garnett.

So this Kentucky Derby thing was run today? Heh. Reminds me of the last time that I watched horses being raced. It was in Lima, Peru, circa 2006. We had just climbed a series of peaks in the Andes and were killing time back in the city before we had to get back to the airport. Unfortunately, the arrival schedule (straight from camp to the city, no hostel or hotel stop) had not permitted us to shower or change clothes after returning from base camp, so we were rather dirty and stinky. Also, unshaved. Basically, we looked like complete bums, and smelled the part. But Bob wanted to go to the race track rather than sit in a bar, so that’s what we did.

When we arrived, we saw a group of well-dressed, clean, groomed indigenous Quechua-speaking people headed into the race track entrance. Feeling a little embarrassed, we joined their group and followed them in, but the Spanish-speaking entrance guards stopped us from going in. I was pretty certain that it was because of our bum-like appearance. Bob spoke with them briefly (he speaks Spanish, I do not), and told me simply “come on”. He walked towards a different entrance that none of the indigenous peoples were using. Just inside the door was a uniformed police officer behind a desk. So at this point, I was pretty certain that we were doomed and going to be spending some time in some kind of vagrant jail.

The police officer smiled, stood up, greeted us, and had us enter our names and passport numbers (“just enter any number, I use 8675309 myself,” said Bob), and then motioned us towards a door leading to the race track. Through that door, an usher directed us down towards a clean, tidy table right by the track itself, and a waiter appeared to take our orders.

I was obviously somewhat agog. So I asked Bob wtf had just happened. “That was the VIP entrance. We’re white, so we’re VIP’s. They wouldn’t let us in through the other entrance because that’s the one for the indigenous peoples, who sit up there,” he said, pointing to the faraway upper stadium seats.

White, dirty, smelling, disheveled? VIP.

Clean, groomed, well dressed, indigenous? Lower-caste, relegated to the nosebleed seats.

A tweet:

Rohan ‏@Chops8592 13 hours ago
It’s barely been a day and already the Queen is wearing a hijab #LondonHasFallen

On Monday, the Seattle City Council voted 5 to 4 not to sell a downtown city street to a developer to build a potential sports stadium. (How many stadia do we already have in downtown Seattle? Two. How many of those two did voters reject? One.) All 5 voting no were women, and all 4 voting yes were men.

And you can write the rest of the story yourself.

Seattlish has some details:

[In] play were any number of issues—labor, land use, traffic, competition, taxes, the value of public/private partnerships—many of which received quite a bit of consideration in the months leading up to and during the meeting.

But little of that nuance is present in much of the blowback following the decision. Instead, there’s this:

And then there’s the attorney who emailed all five of them:

As women, I understand that you spend a lot of your time trying to please others (mostly on your knees) but I can only hope that you each find ways to quickly and painfully end yourselves. Each of you should rot in hell for what you took from me yesterday. I hope you enjoy your thirty pieces of silver and know that I will be make donations to your competitors next election cycle. Please don’t misunderstand me. I TRULY pray for nothing but horrible things for each of you moving forward. You have made this world a worse place by whoring yourselves out to the highest bidder. Please Please Please do the honorable thing and end yourselves. Each of you are disgraceful pieces of trash that deserve nothing but horrible outcomes.

The LA Times reported the story.

A bar complaint was filed against Jason Feldman:

Ben Livingston, a longtime Seattle pot advocate, has filed a bar complaint against the attorney who wrote a threatening, misogynistic letter to the five female council members who voted against a street vacation that would have eased the way for a future NBA arena Monday.

…

In his complaint, Livingston writes that Feldman, an attorney in Lynnwood, “is sending abusive email to female elected officials because he is angry over a land use decision. He makes sexual suggestions and repeatedly encourages these woman to commit suicide,” and asks the bar association to discipline Feldman for unethical conduct.

As Seattlish noted earlier, the female council members, who made up the five-vote bloc needed to prevent the street giveaway to wannabe stadium developer Chris Hansen, have been subjected to a barrage of misogynistic insults and threats by sports fans, almost all of them male, angry that women would take their stadium away from them.

But of course it’s not “their” stadium.

The insults, which can be summarized as “You cunt,” “Die,” “Get back in the kitchen,” and “women are subhuman,” may be familiar territory for women who spend a lot of time having opinions on the Internet. But they’re unprecedented in recent memory for the Seattle City Council, and give the council’s five-woman majority an unwanted taste of what happens when female public figures fail to “know their place” — by, say, voting against an arena supported by a large, mobbish clique of male sports fans.

Or by doing anything else. Mobbing women on the internet is just one of those things guys do when they want a laugh.

Heidi Groover at The Stranger talked to Feldman.

I reached Feldman by phone this morning. He refused to confirm that he sent the email and refused to comment except to remind me that the First Amendment exists. “I want you to make sure that you understand the level of scrutiny that is afforded political speech under the First Amendment,” he said, refusing to comment further.

That’s easy enough to Google. What’s not—or wasn’t until it was reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal today—is that this isn’t the first time Feldman has allegedly mistreated women. In September, the state bar recommended that Feldman be suspended from practicing law for two and a half years after a client alleged Feldman sexually assaulted her. The Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office did not pursue criminal charges against Feldman in that case, and he is now appealing the bar’s suspension recommendation.

Well I’m sure he did his appeal a lot of good with that email.

Livingston, who filed the complaint, said he was offended by the misogyny and references to suicide in Feldman’s email. “That level of misogyny and hatred has no place in our public discourse,” Livingston said. “I was surprised he was a state-licensed attorney. He has a legal obligation to uphold certain ethical standards and he should know better.”

Livingston added that it’s important to “stand up” for council members who may not have the time to respond to hateful emails. In that same spirit, the National Women’s Political Caucus is circulating a petition of solidarity with the council members. You can sign that here.

I did.

Mr Let Them Marry, Vaughn Olman, has scrubbed his website since Vyckie blew the whistle on him. Now it has Answers to Your Questions instead.

IMPORTANT ANSWERS

In the past our views have been greatly misrepresented, here we attempt to clarify any misunderstanding and put to rest accusations which have been made against us.

Do you support child marriage? No. Marriage is for men and women not boys and girls.

Well that’s a relief.

Oh wait.

At what age do children become men or women? It varies. Every child matures physically at different rates. Mental, emotional and spiritual maturity vary even more.

Oh. So then you do support child marriage, you just claim you don’t, while reserving the right to decide what a child is.

Isn’t it funny that that’s exactly what Hamza Tzortzis (just for one) says? I bet Mr Letthemmarry would be shocked to be told that. Here’s Hamza saying it:

In England it’s sixteen. In Spain it’s twelve. In Greece it’s thirteen. In some places in America it’s twenty-one. This is the fallacy of secular law. It’s very arbitrary. This is our law: it’s nothing to do with age. Now listen to the principles. Number 1. Is she physically fit? Number 2. Is she emotionally ready? Number 3. Is she mentally ready? Number 4. Is this socially acceptable? Number 5. All these different kinds of principles that we apply. And it happened, that there was an outlier from the statistics that a nine-year-old was physically fit, was mentally ready . . . was . . . given by her own father and the tribe, so we have principles which makes our law far more typist, rather than putting a number, saying, you can do it when you’re sixteen. There are some sixteen-year-olds in this country that can’t even tie their shoelace. The point is: if that’s all you’ve got, a sexed-up view of sharia law, a Fox News narrative, if you study the situation properly it’s based on principles that you apply to different scenarios, and yes, if you apply them properly, the eight-year-old will not get married, because look you’ve damaged her, because the problem I have, is that there is no harming, so there should be no harm. So the point is this is really about sharia law on the basis of [inaudible] things and BBC News and Fox News and god knows what we have.

Back to the Christian version:

What age is too young for a young man or woman to get married? We recommend that a young man or woman wait until the legal age to get married. Even if it was legal we do not believe that children (i.e. not grown men and women) should marry. We choose not to specify a particular age because it varies from person to person.

Yeah. Like Lolita. Remember Lolita? Humbert Humbert told us all about how mature she turned out to be.

I’ve always hated “See something, say something.” It’s obvious why that’s such ridiculous (and dangerous) advice. “What do you mean ‘something’?!” Anything could be “something,” and given the fact that lots of people are assholes, if that’s the standard, there will be way too much saying something.

And so it came about yesterday on a flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse.

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard.

His seatmate thought something was a little off about him. She decided to check him out by asking an impertinent question about whether he lived in Syracuse. He said no and kept on scribbling.

He similarly deflected further questions. He appeared laser-focused — perhaps too laser-focused — on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.

Rebuffed, the woman began reading her book. Or pretending to read, anyway. Shortly after boarding had finished, she flagged down a flight attendant and handed that crew-member a note of her own.

Then there was a long wait. Then an attendant asked the woman if she felt ok and the woman said yes.

She must not have sounded convincing, though; American Airlines flight 3950 remained grounded.

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

Then he too was escorted off the plane and taken to have a chat with someone, whose role was never clear to him.

What do know about your seatmate? The agent asked the foreign-sounding man.

Well, she acted a bit funny, he replied, but she didn’t seem visibly ill. Maybe, he thought, they wanted his help in piecing together what was wrong with her.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

Jeez. I’m lucky I’ve never been escorted off a plane – I sometimes scribble stuff in illegible handwriting when on a plane.

The curly-haired man’s scribbles were math.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

They might even have discovered that last year he was awarded the prestigious Carlo Alberto Medal, given to the best Italian economist under 40. That’s right: He’s Italian, not Middle Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights these days.

He was on his way to give a talk at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The flight left more than two hours late.

Menzio for his part says he was “treated respectfully throughout,” though he remains baffled and frustrated by a “broken system that does not collect information efficiently.” He is troubled by the ignorance of his fellow passenger, as well as “A security protocol that is too rigid–in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks–and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless. ”

Rising xenophobia stoked by the presidential campaign, he suggested, may soon make things worse for people who happen to look a little other-ish.

In the United States, where most of the population looks a little other-ish,and that’s how we like it thanks very much.

So this is what “White Feminism” is – a guaranteed win in the Oppression Olympics. It’s a piece from last summer by Paris Lees, politely titled Ban Sex Work? Fuck Off, White Feminism.

The title seemed stupid to me, as well as abusive, since Paris Lees is white. But she explains that.

I feel duty bound to break my self-imposed silence – I’m on holiday, fuckers – to speak out on a subject that, like so many important issues in the media, has been discussed almost exclusively by a privileged few who are neither affected by nor particularly informed about their current excuse to grandstand.

That’s a remarkably disgusting thing to say. What are the implications? That people should never seek to reform or end an exploitative institution if they’re not directly “affected” by it? That people should be even more ruthlessly selfish and coldly indifferent than we already are? And how does Paris Lees know that opposition to prostitution is nothing more than an excuse to grandstand?

The loudest voices I have seen in the latest sex work debate bring zero first-hand experience to the table. Yeah, I see you, White Feminists.

I am both white and a feminist. But I am not what you would call a White Feminist, capital letters, for I am also trans.

Oh. Oh is that how it works. She’s white, but she’s not White, because she’s trans. So being trans is her ticket to the right to be verbally abusive to feminist women she dislikes, because being trans makes her not White even though she is white.

What an ugly mind.

White Feminism is a special club but membership doesn’t rest solely on race. White Feminism is about privilege. Ladies who lunch and feel hard done by because a man held the door open for them on their way in to the Four Seasons. White Feminism is many things but it is not inclusive, or, in fancy feminist lingo, “intersectional”. The voices of the “wrong sort” of women – black women, trans women, sex workers and so on – get drowned out, just as “bad” women have been silenced and shamed by privileged women, men and society in general since time immemorial. White Feminists have the biggest media platforms and are able to do this. They can launch patronising campaigns to save “fallen women” who cannot possibly be expected to make choices for themselves or, if they do, to understand the implications of those choices like the clever, educated ladies of White Feminism do. White Feminism always knows best. It is paternal and judgmental and, in many cases, indistinguishable from the partriarchal dictatorship it ostensibly seeks to dismantle. I am just saying.

That is an ugly, ugly mind – and a misogynist mind. Talk about excuses to grandstand – this is clearly her excuse to pour venom on feminist women as “ladies who lunch” – the old “princess” taunt dressed up to look vaguely progressive.

An ugly, ugly mind.

Via Raquel Evita Saraswati, a new horror in Pakistan –

Pakistani police on Thursday arrested 15 members of a tribal council accused of ordering the burning alive of a young girl for helping a couple to elope in a so-called “honor killing”, police said.

Those are the men who had a 16-year-old girl set on fire.

They just look like ordinary men. No doubt they are. Ordinary people can be horrible; it doesn’t take extraordinary talents or qualities.

The 16-year-old girl was set on fire last week in the town of Donga Gali, about 50 km (30 miles) northeast of the capital, Islamabad, on the orders of the council, said district police chief Saeed Wazir.

Police said the honor killing was ordered as punishment for what the council deemed irreparable damage to the village’s reputation. The couple appeared to have escaped.

Well the village’s reputation is certainly burnished now. Donga Gali can join Lidice and Oradour and Srebrenica and My Lai and Dos Erres and Chibok.

The girl’s mother told police her daughter had helped a couple from the nearby village of Makol elope, in defiance of cultural norms.

“The jirga then took her to an abandoned place outside the village and made her unconscious by injecting her with some drugs,” said Wazir.

“Then they seated the girl in a van in which the couple had escaped. They tied her hands to the seats and then poured petrol on her and the vehicle.”

The vehicle was set ablaze.

For the sake of the village’s “reputation.”

Amanda Marcotte reports that Mr Forced Marriage Retreat Guy has been trying to backpedal now that he’s getting all this unwelcome attention from The Internet.

Now Ohlman and his Quiverfull crew are feeling the heat. “Note: Contrary to vicious internet rumors we do not support or in any way condone child sexual activity of any sort, child marriage, or any other illegal activity,” his website reads at the top. “Nor do we support or condone forced marriages. We believe that parents should NOT seek a spouse for a child where that child has not actively sought for the parents to do so.”

There is reason to be skeptical of these disclaimers, however. The claim that the child is supposed “actively” seek marriage first, for instance, doesn’t comport with the rest of Ohlman’s website.

For instance, in his FAQ, Ohlman says that “when they are of an age where marriage is appropriate for them,” a child’s father “should agree with another father as to their betrothal”. Only after the fathers agree to the marriage, the father “should again go to his own child to assure himself of their integrity of purpose before announcing their new betrothed spouse to them.”

Daddy and Daddy get together and agree on the marriage and then tell it to the two children. Since the children have been raised to treat Daddy as a mini-God, that amounts to forced marriage. Saying No to Daddy is not an easy thing, given that raising.

The language is deliberately flowery, but the meaning is clear enough: Fathers decide unilaterally for children when they marry and to who. Ideally, while the children are still minors and have very little power to resist, to boot.

Just so, and especially given that they have been trained not to resist. They’ve never been to real school to learn from their peers that resistance is an option.

Also, Kansas has no age of consent for marriage provided the parents give permission. Daddy would give permission, so hey, why not marry off a girl of 12 if she has tits?

The cancellation of this event is a victory, but sadly, it’s a small one. The sad truth is there are  not enough safeguards in place to keep abusive religious fundamentalists like Ohlman and his followers from treating children like this. Yes, forced marriage is illegal, but we’re talking about minor adolescents here. The fact that they formally “consent” means very little, when they know that saying no is not an option.

These are kids who are usually homeschooled and kept separate from the rest of the world. They don’t have a lot of options if they reject their parents’ teachings: Few places to go, no real way to make a living. This event should be a wake-up call about how serious this situation is, and there needs to be more direct interference to keep these folks from pushing underage teenagers into arranged marriages.

Exactly. They’ve been raised to have no other options, so how are they going to say no to a marriage Daddy offers?

The people who were trapped north of Fort McMurray are getting out in convoys, the Times reports.

Convoys of cars and trucks made their way gingerly through the wildfire-ravaged community of Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Friday, headed south to safety past the charred ruins of neighborhoods and businesses, after being stranded for days north of town on the area’s main highway.

Bracketed by Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruisers and preceded by a military helicopter watching for flare-ups near their route, the first convoy got rolling shortly after dawn and others followed at intervals.

They’re hoping to get 15,000 vehicles out in the next few days.

When Fort McMurray was swiftly overtaken by a wildfire on Tuesday and the city was ordered evacuated, most of its 90,000 residents escaped south on Highway 63, and the road rapidly became choked with traffic and was blocked at times by the fire. About 25,000 people headed north instead, to take refuge in the large work camps used to house transient workers at oil sands projects. Some camps that had been mothballed after the recent slump in oil prices were reopened as shelters.

The camps, too, were cut off when the flames closed the highway, and they soon ran low on food and supplies. Officials tried to resupply the camps using a military transport plane, but on Thursday evening, Ms. Notley said that effort was no longer sustainable.

It’s reminiscent of the horror of Katrina, when thousands of people were stranded in New Orleans for days, dying because there was no water.

Overnight on Thursday, tankers with gasoline and diesel fuel were escorted north to Fort McMurray to top off the tanks of the isolated evacuees, many of whom had run out of fuel.

That would be one hell of a scary drive – gasoline and diesel fuel in the midst of out of control fires.

The police released the convoys to travel on their own once they were a safe distance south of Fort McMurray. Ms. Notley urged the evacuees to continue on to Edmonton, the provincial capital and nearest large city, or to Calgary farther south.

“What we’re trying to do is encourage them to go to the two major centers, because that’s where we have the greatest number of services, both in terms of health, income support, mental health support, as well as the capacity to absorb the students into the school system,” she said.

New shelters were expected to open in both cities on Friday.

A city of 90,000 people, many of whom have lost everything they owned.

Eric Holthaus at Slate points out that the Fort McMurray fire is just the time to talk about climate change. It’s not as if it’s peripheral, after all.

Friday marks the fourth day of an intense firestorm in Canada’s boreal forest that has engulfed large parts of Fort McMurray, Alberta—a frontier town that serves as the base for the province’s oil sands region. Already, the fires rank as Canada’s costliest natural disaster on record, and the town’s entire population of more than 80,000 people has been evacuated. The area burned, about 250,000 acres, is now 17 times the size of the island of Manhattan. And conditions could still get worse. “The beast is still up. It’s surrounding the city,” said fire chief Darby Allen in a video update Thursday night.

That no one has yet died in the fire is a miracle, if you believe in such things. Photos of the fire from space on Wednesday resembled an explosion.

On Wednesday afternoon, the fire began to create its own weather conditions, with lightning from pyrocumulus clouds likely further fueling the fire’s growth. On Wednesday evening, one of the main evacuation centers itself had to be evacuated, as the fire spread out of control. On Thursday, the fire grew in size more than eightfold, after more than quadrupling in size the previous day.

And, not surprisingly, it isn’t just a random uncaused miraculous event.

I want to be clear: Talking about climate change during an ongoing disaster like Fort McMurray is absolutely necessary. There is a sensitive way to do it, one that acknowledges what the victims are going through and does not blame them for these difficulties. But adding scientific context helps inform our response and helps us figure out how something so horrific could have happened.

Because climate change isn’t “by the end of the 21st century” any more. It’s here. We’re in it.

Though uncertainty still reigns among those working to put out the fire in Fort McMurray, there are certain facts that we do know: Experts have warned for years that Alberta’s forests are being primed for “catastrophic fires.” We know that. In the boreal forest, once the winter snowpack melts, the exposed dry brush serves as perfect kindling—which is why this time of year marks the start of fire season. We know that. Record warm temperatures, a vanishingly small snowpack, and drought conditions—all of which are symptoms of climate change in boreal Canada—very probably made this fire worse. “This [fire] is consistent with what we expect from human-caused climate change affecting our fire regime,” said Mike Flannigan from the University of Alberta.

The government of Bangladesh has drilled down to a new level of horribleness. The Daily Star headline sums it up:

Govt displeased with anti-religion bloggers, their killers: Minister

The government is more angry at the bloggers than at the people who chopped them to death.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal today said that the government is not pleased with “bloggers who demean religion” and the people who are killing them.

“Bloggers should [refrain] from hurting religious sentiments,” the minister said. It is a criminal offence when bloggers hurt religious sentiments of the public, he added.

If it is a criminal offence, it shouldn’t be.

If it is a criminal offence, it’s a very minor and non-violent one. I would argue that it’s a victimless crime, because the murderers’ sense of grievance is illegitimate. People shouldn’t be working up their grievances into red-hot justifications for blood-drenched murder.

But in any case it shouldn’t be a criminal offence at all. On the contrary: it should be treated as a public benefit. Religion has a death-grip on the minds of too many people, and those who loosen it are doing a service. It’s disgusting of the Home Minister to claim that the bloggers are doing a bad thing.

He was briefing reporters at his office after a meeting with Nisha Desai Biswal, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs.

The murder of LGBT magazine editor Xulhaz Mannan, press freedom in Bangladesh, terrorism and US-Bangladesh partnership came up in the discussion.

The United States is said to have agreed to cooperate in helping setting up a counter terrorism unit and assist in training of law enforcers to combat terrorism in Bangladesh.

And that’s all there is about that. Apparently it was important to scold the bloggers, who did nothing wrong, while passing over the murderers who murdered them in silence.

What a dreadful government Bangladesh has.

H/t Stewart

The nice man at Let Them Marry has a nice page for us where we can see the plans for their forced marriage “retreat” in Wichita – now put on hold because of the Salvation Army’s refusal to let them rent its facilities. It’s a mildly amusing read.

Mostly it’s about the money. Actually it’s almost all about the money. The pricing is complicated enough that there are examples, so that we can understand:

The Smith family want to come to the conference with their five children. Their oldest child, George Smith, is seeking a wife. The Smiths want a bit of comfort so they sign up for our ‘Cottage Family’ package. They heard about our conference a bit late, so they don’t get our special ‘early bird’ discount. The Smiths would pay:

$125 Cottage Family Package registration fee
$150 per person for Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the four little Smiths (six people)
$130 for George

Mr. and Mrs. Smith would get a double bed in a cottage, three younger Smiths would be in twin beds in the same cottage, and George and one of the younger Smiths would be staying in the ‘men’s bunkhouse’.

Their total fee would be:
$125 + $900 + $130 = $1155

Poor Smiths, missing out on the discount – but never mind, they get eight meals for that price.

Then there are what is expected of the forced-marriage families. It’s a long list:

We ask that everyone who attends the conference (parents and marriageable-age children) agree to the basic statements of faith and purpose:

1. Statement of Faith: Basic agreement to a major statement of faith such as London Baptist Confession or Westminster Confession of Faith (Note: those are intended as examples, not to be an exhaustive list. We are not attempting to limit our conference to Calvinists. But we do feel we owe the participants some kind of assurance that they are coming to meet with other Christians. Feel free to contact us with questions.)
2. Intentionality: While we hope to provide information and encouragement to the families that come to this retreat, we ask that a family agreeing to come state that they are actively, deliberately, seeking a marriage for one of more of their children.
3. Confidentiality: We ask that all participants respect the privacy of the other participants and keep all discussions and revelations private. Things might be said in the context of discussing a potential marriage that would not be at all appropriate for general revelation.
4. Definition of Marriage: We ask that all of the participants agree to the following minimum definition of marriage: a lifelong sexual relationship that is always open to the blessing of children.
5. Trust: In order to preserve the integrity and purity of our children’s hearts and affections wholly for their spouses, we expect the interactions of the young people while at this retreat to be purely on the spiritual sibling side (I Timothy 5:1-2). We ask that any ‘courting’-type behavior be withheld until after this conference. For the purposes of this conference we ask that a young man who is interested in a young woman approach her father (mother, brother, etc.) before approaching her. In the case where he is interested in a young woman who is not accompanied, we ask that the young man speak privately to one of the retreat staff members. This is not because we are insisting on any one given way for marriages to happen, but because many families may have serious objections to the young women being approached directly. We will be able to sound out a given young woman and determine what will be appropriate.

So wholesome, so reassuring, so not at all creepy.

Then there is the schedule, which promises a wealth of fun and excitement:

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE
Thursday 4 pm: Check-in
Thursday 6 pm: Dinner
Friday – To Be Announced
Saturday – To Be Announced
Sunday: Breakfast (in an effort to give families the flexibility to attend church on their own, we will be providing a bag breakfast)

That’s it, the whole of the schedule. The money is figured out down to the last dime, but the way the time will be filled…not so much. Good thing the schedule is only tentative.

Vyckie Garrison reports on another Quiverfull plan: get a bunch of grownups together for the purpose of arranging marriages among each other’s children. Don’t bother about what the children want.

A group of ultra-conservative Christian men are planning to meet up in Kansas later this year to arrange marriages for their pubescent daughters … and they don’t believe their daughters’ consent is actually necessary.

Quiverfull patriarch, Vaughn Ohlman, who runs a website promoting early, “fruitful” marriage for Truly True Christian™ children, has announced plans for a “Get Them Married!” retreat where fundamentalist fathers will find, and TAKE, suitably submissive young brides to bear many babies for their adolescent sons.

And this will be good, because all those babies will overwhelm the few babies infidels have, and soon God’s kingdom will be established.

For around $1200 per family, Quiverfull parents will spend three days “networking” with similarly-delusional zealots who believe men are to be in charge, wives are to be submissive baby-makers, and children are to be sheltered, isolated, indoctrinated, and pushed toward early, prolific marriages for Jesus.

Jesus was all about the marriages. That’s all Mark, Matthew, Luke and John ever talk about: marriage marriage marriage. Jesus is so happy that Americans are doing all this marrying and baby-having. Jesus likes to watch.

How early? As soon as they can fuck, of course.

In case you’re inclined to doubt these freaks actually mean to marry off their girls the minute their bodies have developed enough to have children, Ohlman elaborates, so make no mistake about it:

John Calvin defines the “flower of her age” (1 Corinthians 7:36) as “from twelve to twenty years of age”. Likewise, John Gill defines it as “one of twelve years and a half old”. And Martin Luther says, “A young man should marry at the age of twenty at the latest, a young woman at fifteen to eighteen…” We do not endorse marriage at ages as young as twelve. Our position is that, for a woman:

1. The ‘youth’ ready for marriage has breasts. A woman who is to be married is one who has breasts; breasts which signal her readiness for marriage, and breasts who promise enjoyment for her husband. (We believe that ‘breasts’ here stand as a symbol for all forms of full secondary sexual characteristics.)
2. The ‘youth’ ready for marriage is ready to bear children. Unlike modern society Scripture sees the woman as a bearer, nurser, and raiser of children. The ‘young woman’ is the woman whose body is physically ready for these things, physically mature enough to handle them without damage.
3. The ‘youth’ ready for marriage is one who is ready for sexual intercourse sexually and emotionally. Her desire is for her husband, and she is ready to rejoice in him physically.

Or not, but she does what she’s told, so it comes to the same thing. More Ohlman:

Scripture speaks of the father of the son “taking a wife” for his son, and the father of the bride “giving” her to her husband…. It gives example after example of young women being given to young men, without the young woman even being consulted, and often, in some of the most Godly marriages in Scripture, the young man is not consulted….

Some use the idea of “consent” to deny the very relevance of the action of their authorities to bind them in covenant, as if a covenant was of no effect whatsoever and all that matters is what the person themselves decide. Others consider a covenant to be something substantial but that it is not really binding until the person themselves “consents”.

In contrast, our study of Scripture has shown that the Word of God considers a covenant made by an authority to be meaningful and binding upon the those under his or her authority. Biblical consent is not the “consent” of dating or courtship. It is not a “veto” power. It does not presume to cast judgment over their father’s actions. And so, a lack of consent of the individual concerned is a choice of disobedience, a breach of a vow and of a relationship. God has designed the marriage relationship (in particular that of the virgin daughter marrying the virgin son) to be a relationship initiated by the parents, in particular the fathers, of the young couple.

So if she hates the very idea, and doesn’t like the boy she is supposed to “marry,” and says so? That’s disobedience, of “God” as well as Daddy. Disobedience is not allowed. She will “marry” the boy anyway, and no talking back.

Vyckie has a followup story today: the Sally Army has refused access to the group.

A Christian retreat for Quiverfull fathers to marry off their teen daughters has been cancelled after Raw Story readers expressed concerns that the event constitutes human trafficking and contacted the Salvation Army which owns the campground where that retreat was scheduled to be held in Wichita.

Even the Salvation Army can’t stomach these rape-promoters.

The Raw Story article sparked outrage among readers and many were moved to action, demanding that authorities be notified in order to protect the children who were slated to be married off young for the purpose of procreating lots of babies for Jesus.

Readers discovered that Camp Hiawatha, where the retreat was planned to be held, is owned by the Salvation Army. I contacted a good friend who is a officer at the Salvation Army’s training school in Chicago, and she responded right away to let me know the Wichita corps has already denied access to Ohlman’s group for what would have amounted to a child trafficking “retreat.”

Well done, Vyckie.

Update: The Salvation Army of Wichita/Sedgwick County released a statement on the group’s decision, as seen below.

The Salvation Army has denied a request by the Let Them Marry organization to conduct its event at Camp Hiawatha.

Our decision is based upon our long-standing concern for the welfare of children. At The Salvation Army, we work every single day to provide a safe, caring place for children, many of whom have been left vulnerable due to the actions of adults.

We remain steadfastly focused on our mission of advocating for and protecting children.

Good job.

The Governor of Wisconsin is really terrible. The worst. He likes to inflict harm on people who lack money.

Governor Scott Walker on Wednesday, May 4th approved a rule requiring certain Wisconsinites receiving unemployment insurance benefits to pass a drug test.

“This new rule brings us one step closer to moving Wisconsinites from government dependence to true independence,” Governor Walker said in a statement issued to FOX6 News.

Insurance is not dependence. Unemployment insurance is funded by workers and employers, and it’s insurance, so there shouldn’t be pointless bullying hurdles to getting it. Scott Walker is a bad man.

According to Governor Walker’s office, by being good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollar and fighting fraud and abuse, Wisconsin transformed its unemployment insurance trust fund from a $1.3 billion deficit in 2010 to a $743 million positive balance, and employers now pay less unemployment insurance tax as a result of these efforts.

Unemployed people were made poorer, but I suppose they deserve it, because they’re unemployed.

Via Miriam Ben-Shalom