Mystifyingly, the UK government is going to make it illegal for the Church of England to perform same-sex marriages.

The Church of England and Church in Wales will be banned in law from offering same-sex marriages, the government has announced.

Other religious organisations will be able to “opt in” to holding ceremonies, Culture Secretary Maria Miller said.

But she added that the Church of England and Church in Wales had “explicitly” stated strong opposition and would not be included.

Labour said the exemption for the established Church was “disappointing”.

I can’t even make sense of that. The government is making it illegal, yet it’s an exemption. What? And the government is making it illegal because the churchs had stated strong opposition?

It gets worse.

Miller said the Church of England and Church in Wales had “explicitly stated” their opposition to offering same-sex ceremonies, so the government would “explicitly state that it will be illegal for the Churches of England and Wales to marry same-sex couples”.

She also said: “I am absolutely clear that no religious organisation will ever be forced to conduct marriages for same-sex couples, and I would not bring in a bill which would allow that.

“European law already puts religious freedoms beyond doubt, and we will go even further by bringing in an additional ‘quadruple legal lock’. But it is also a key aspect of religious freedom that those bodies who want to opt in should be able to do so.”

It’s a matter of religious freedom therefore the government is making it illegal for particular churches to do it.

So “religious freedom” here is taken to mean the government passing a law that the Top Bosses in the national church like, which will make it impossible for rebel churches to disobey the church’s Top Bosses.

That’s a funny understanding of religious freedom, if you ask me.

This is a good one -

Sir Tony Baldry, who speaks for the Church of England in Parliament, said: “For the Church of England, the uniqueness of marriage is that it does embody the distinctiveness of men and women.

“So removing from the definition of marriage this complementarity is to lose any social institution where sexual difference is explicitly acknowledged.”

Oh noes! Now there will be not one social institution where sexual difference is explicitly acknowledged – !! The horror!

But sure there will. Atheism. Gaming. Needlepoint.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Since the pope has been so busy and people have been humming it, here it is for your convenience -

Tim Minchin’s fuck the motherfucking pope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHRDfut2Vx0

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Another guy – a judge this time – thinks women’s bodies have magical little portcullises that slam down during attempted rape.

A Southern California judge is being publicly admonished for saying a rape victim “didn’t put up a fight” during her assault and that if someone doesn’t want sexual intercourse, the body “will not permit that to happen.”

Which is why rape is so extremely rare – it’s hard to bash through the portcullis.

Johnson made the comments in the case of a man who threatened to mutilate the face and genitals of his ex-girlfriend with a heated screwdriver, beat her with a metal baton and made other violent threats before committing rape, forced oral copulation, and other crimes.

Though the woman reported the criminal threats the next day, the woman did not report the rape until 17 days later.

Johnson, a former prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s sex crimes unit, said during the man’s 2008 sentencing that he had seen violent cases on that unit in which women’s vaginas were “shredded” by rape.

“I’m not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something: If someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case,” Johnson said.

I suppose he’s talking about lubrication, and saying the lack of it will leave marks. I’ve watched enough Law and Order: SVU to know that tv cops, at least, treat that as part of the picture. (But I also know they have consultants, so they probably get details like that right, however much they simplify and dramatize.) But it’s not symmetrical – marks may indicate rape, but absence of marks doesn’t indicate no rape. There, I’m a lawyer because tv! Straightened all that out for him.

The commission found that Johnson’s view that a victim must resist to be a real victim of sexual assault was his opinion, not the law. Since 1980, California law doesn’t require rape victims to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting because of threats.

In an apology to the commission, Johnson said his comments were inappropriate. He said his comments were the result of his frustration during an argument with a prosecutor over the defendant’s sentence.

Well ok, but be more careful.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The dear dear pope, so consistently hateful and harmful and bad. Yesterday he launched his new Twitter account and blessed the Ugandan legislator pushing the “kill the gays” bill.

Pope Benedict XVI has given blessings to Uganda Parliament Speaker Rebecca Kadaga during a mass attended by thousands of pilgrims at the Vatican,” Nsimbe Kasim at the Ugandan New Vision news reports.

He hates secularists and loves people who want the state to kill gays. What a mensch.

Then today – how productive he is! – he used his “peace day” message to bash same-sex marriage.

The pontiff said on Friday: “There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union.

“Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilise marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society”, the Pope told worshipers.

That’s not peace.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There is one bit of good news, or not really exactly good, but a delay of bad…

The Parliament of Uganda is about to go on Christmas holiday, returning in February, and the Kill The Gays bill is slated to be taken up then. The Parliament has a daily business list, called the “order paper” which shows what legislation is to be considered and in what order. The Kill The Gays bill was number one on that list, but superseded by an important and contentious oil and gas bill. Remarkably, the Kill The Gays bill, known also as the Anti-Homosexuality bill, has dropped in importance to number seven.

That’s a few weeks more to oppose the bill.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Paul Elam and “Agent Mauve” at A Voice for Men have done what they said they were going to do, and found the identity of one of the University of Toronto students who protested a talk by Warren Farrell. They’ve plastered her picture on the site, and named her, and posted a long angry rant about her. (In reading it, I see in the right-hand margin something claiming that I have my “knickers in a twist.” Oh goody, a new front opens in the great WarOnMe.)

They conclude in their usual threatening manner.

In the coming days, [redacted - OB] will have her profile as a bigot placed at Register-her.com. But she will not be alone.

We will continue to work until we have identified every violence promoting, property destroying, bigotry spouting ideologue associated with that protest and placed them all on the pages of AVfM, as well as Register-her.com

We have a long way to go.

And then there are the comments…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Hahahahahaha Justin Vacula explains why what Michael Shermer said about atheism as a guy thing was totally reasonable and ok and fine. He explains it in a comment on Jacques Rousseau’s post accusing me of misrepresenting Shermer, hyperbole, and failure to read charitably.

Unfortunatly, the principle of charity is not something Ophelia (and her commenters) are considering. As you note, the most charitable interpretation of Shermer’s observation — a statement of what he sees — is that men are quite active. Atheism is a ‘guy thing,’ I would say, like needlepoint is a ‘girl thing.’ This isn’t to say men are being excluded from the ‘needlepoint community’ or that some inherent gender ‘thing’ makes men not attracted to needlepoint…and it is not to say that women aren’t rational thinkers or whatever spin was put on Shermer’s comment.

Isn’t that great? Needlepoint is a girl thing, atheism is a guy thing. Nothing sexist about that! Nothing to see here folks, go on home, take your needlepoint with you. (more…)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Scalia’s a funny guy, as any fule kno. On Monday he was talking at Princeton (which is in Princeton, which is where I grew up, or at least where I spent the years from 0 to 17) and he explained about why same-sex sex is a no-no.

A gay student named Duncan Hosie got up and asked Scalia about his avid support for bans on “sodomy,” i.e. same-sex couples doing it, and Scalia answered with this:

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

That’s a reductio ad absurdum? To say that if we can’t have “moral feelings against homosexuality” then we also can’t have moral feelings against murder? Talk about random. He might as well say if we can’t have moral feelings against jelly babies we can’t have moral feelings against murder.

But maybe it’s witch-hunty of me to criticize what he said. Maybe I should email him and ask him what he meant, first.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Michael Shermer is displeased with me. It’s about this thing from last August.

And speaking of videos…I didn’t watch all of that one on The Point the other day, and yesterday a Facebook friend, Mavaddat, pointed out a later segment when they talked about Y no women. Michael Shermer explained:

It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it, you know, it’s more of a guy thing.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam.

 I quoted him in the column I wrote for Free Inquiry the same month. He’s replied to the column today.

I’ll just comment on a few things.

I would like to use this opportunity to address a larger issue at hand, starting with another important point that Benson also failed to mention, and that is Cara Santa Maria’s own comment that she made after reading the viewer question and before I answered: “In putting together this panel I had a hellova time finding a woman who would be willing to sit on the panel with me to discuss her atheism. Why is that?”

It’s because she didn’t ask enough women. Shermer emailed her later to ask her about it, and she told him

“In my search for panelists on the show, I did reach out to a couple of high-profile female atheists local to Los Angeles, but none were available to join.

Two. That’s not very many. That’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough to justify even the claim that she had a hellova time finding a woman who would be willing to sit on the panel, let alone any broader claim that women don’t do atheism so much.

Anyway. Shermer goes on -

We must remember that we are all subject to the same cognitive biases as those whom we criticize in religious and paranormal cohorts, and keep in mind that in journalism, as in science and all rational inquiry, there is an ethic of going to the primary source, and especially giving the person in question the benefit of the doubt. In this case, a simple email asking what I meant would have cleared up any misunderstanding. (Skeptical Inquirer columnist Kenneth Krause did just that after reading Benson’s article, and that removed any doubt for him as to my position.)

Is that true? Is it true that in journalism, as in science and all rational inquiry, if X says something, there is an ethic of asking X what X meant?

I don’t believe it. (Get me, I’m a skeptic!) I think people get quoted all the time without further inquiry. That’s because very often that’s the issue – what was said, what people heard, what got out there into the discourse. Shermer said what he said. I wanted to address what he said. So I did that.

Farther down the page -

Perhaps unintentionally, Benson makes a strong case that something other than misogyny may be at work here, when she asks rhetorically if I would make the same argument about race. I would, yes, because I do not believe that the fact that the secular community does not contain the precise percentage of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans as in the general population, means that all of us in the secular community are racists, explicitly or implicitly.

Ah no that’s not what I said. I didn’t ask if he would make the same argument – I asked if he would say the same thing. Then I helpfully spelled it out.

Would Shermer have said that if the question had been about race instead of gender? Would he have said “it’s more of a white thing”? It seems very unlikely.

The difference is obvious, yes? I don’t believe he would say “It’s a white thing.” I think he would hear it before he said it, and stop. My point was that he didn’t hear “it’s a guy thing” in the same way.

There’s a lot of stuff about tribalism and witch hunts and purity, which is frankly mostly bullshit. Not totally bullshit, but mostly.

PZ has a post.

And so does John Loftus – totally non-tribal, of course. It begins with some friendly advice:

When will the witch hunt end? I’ll tell you. When atheists kick people like Ophelia to the curb just as people ended the real witch hunt in the 18th century.

Kick kick kickety kick.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

AJ Milne waxes poetical.

I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they won’t play this new bleep comment

It’s not that it’s buzz or beep beep dangerously insightful

Honestly, it’s more dingingly pointlessly banal ‘n abusive

You can’t say honk on this blog

Or shot or twang or blargh

You can’t even call the proprietress a silly sound effect

Even if you say doing so gives you a huge, stiff boing

So I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they daren’t well scatching mark it approved

I bet you those ch’chinging old losers

Will just shrug and delete the load of horse raspberry

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Renee Hendricks has been commenting here. She’s also been discussing her commenting with her pals on Twitter.

Welcome to the cool kids’ table in junior high school.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Sunil D’Monte alerted me to this blood-curdlingly horrible article on FGM by a sociologist, Lisa Wade, who wants more “balance” in the discussion of the grand old tradition of carving up the genitalia of very young girls.

While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.”  While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”

Good start. Put ”mutilation” in scare quotes because hey, it’s not really mutilation, it’s just “cutting,” which is another thing altogether. Then present a stupid parody version of opposition to FGM because hey, nobody could oppose FGM for reasons that aren’t ethnocentric or racist.

Using the word “mutilation” is counterproductive.

People who support genital cutting typically believe that a cut body is a more aesthetically pleasing one.  The term “mutilation” may appeal to certain Westerners, but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive.

Well of course they do, and that’s the problem! People in China used to think a deliberately deformed foot was a more aesthetically pleasing one, too, and that’s why little girls had their feet systematically broken and crushed, and had to be put at a distance from the rest of the household at night so that their screams of pain wouldn’t keep everyone else awake.

But I’ll let Urooj Zia reply.

Hello from Pakistan. This article has offended me and made me furious enough to leave a rant in response. Here goes:

//but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive//

What the WHAT?! So in one clean sweep, feminist voices from these communities get discounted, while barbarism gets amplified by a feminist? How does that make sense? And this ‘them non-Western women don’t deserve any better’ is racist!

Moreover, how does women controlling these procedures not make them patriarchal and oppressive?! I don’t even know how to respond to this hypocrisy!

//It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children//

No shit, Sherlock. Child abusers in ‘western’ societies don’t like being told that either, nor do rapists. Does that stop feminists in those societies from denouncing this crap? I don’t get it, why did you write this article? Why would anyone do this, why?! What makes you think that you sitting in your ivory tower deserve better than us? What are we, lesser beings? What makes you think we deserve to have our bodies mutilated? What is WRONG with you?! Feminists here have a hard enough time anyway; stop making our lives more difficult. If you can’t support our voices, don’t cut us down and don’t you dare tell us that we don’t deserve better. We bloody well do.

I’ve been following Urooj on Twitter for a long time. Urooj rocks.

Lisa Wade continues -

“Only” 10% of FGM includes infibulation. Mostly it’s not so bad really.

Women still have fabulous sex lives after FGM.

Health problems from FGM are the exception, not the rule.

It’s not cruel patriarchs.

It’s not African.

Women in the US get cosmetic surgeries on their genitals.

The obvious is obvious.

It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children.

It also turns out that girls of 5 don’t like being held down while someone slices off bits of their genitals with a razor. Next platitude?

I would be more livid, if it weren’t for the fact that almost all of the comments are disgusted. I’ll just repeat Urooj’s observation -

And this ‘them non-Western women don’t deserve any better’ is racist!

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)