Via Christopher Moyer – women tennis players are given their own special court to play on.

…the revered Stade Roland Garros, which first hosted a national women’s  tennis tournament in 1897, had turned a court bright pink and set up an on-site salon and spa for female sportswriters in honor of “Ladies Day.”

Well good good good good. And female surgeons will get their own special bright pink OR, and female pilots will get their own special bright pink cabins, and female judges will get their own special bright pink robes.

More from Joanne Gerstner, who was there.

The carpet is hot pink. The tennis court is rose pink. The champagne is pale pink. The nail polish is cotton candy pink. Even the hair dryer is flamingo pink.

The French Tennis Federation declared Thursday to be its first “Ladies’ Day” at the French Open, and somebody thought it was a genius idea to go heavy on the pink to drive the theme home. Because all females love pink and live to be Elle from “Legally Blonde.”

…

I was welcomed into the Village de la Femme, aka a little tent setup on Court 4 by the eye-searing pink carpet. Two guys wearing baby pink polos guarded the door to prevent male interlopers. When I got onto the court, there were little chalets where we ladies could get our nails done, a blowout, a coffee/juice/pink champagne bar and massages.

So this was the definition of Ladies’ Day at a place where Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, Serena and Venus Williams, Suzanne Lenglen and other amazing female athletes showed their muscles, sweated and made their mark? Nope, no recognition of women as making up half the athletes at the French Open.

Gee, I guessed CFI missed an opportunity by not draping everything in pink bunting for the Women in Secularism con.

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

The panel I did at Women in Secularism with Rebecca and Jen and Sikivu is now posted.

In case you look at it, just a note – I’m really not as furious and grim as I look, that’s just the way my face goes. In my head I’m actually as mostly-amused as Rebecca looks (and is).

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

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

There’s a report that the women in Pakistan haven’t been killed after all. That would be a relief! Thank you for not killing some women for singing and dancing at a wedding. You are very kind.

Pakistani campaigners say they have made contact with two out of five women previously feared murdered for singing in a wedding video.

Dr Farzana Bari met the two women after travelling with officials to a remote village in north-west Pakistan.

The team did not meet the other three women, but said local elders had given assurances that they were also alive.

Well good. I’m glad there’s one less horror in the stack of horrors.

After several hours climbing, human rights activists – travelling with local officials – say the two women appeared relaxed, and did not show any signs of physical ill-treatment.

“If these two are alive, I believe the others are as well,” campaigner Farzana Bari told the BBC’s Orla Guerin in Islamabad.

Dr Bari said that the other three women were at a more remote location that could not be reached easily.

Good. I hope they flourish.

She said that she believed there had been no death sentence from a tribal council, but there was a real risk to the women because the wedding video had been widely seen.

“There’s a strong tradition in this area of taking the law into your own hands,” she said. “The authorities should keep on monitoring the women. There is still a risk, we cannot relax.”

Best wishes. Fingers crossed.

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

Ed has a great post replying to a hilariously absurd one by John Loftus wondering what the Freethought blogs “mission statement” is. That question is swiftly answered: there ain’t one.

Ed points out a certain confusion.

On the one hand, if several FTBers agree on a subject and each write about it expressing a similar perspective, that’s bad and it’s obviously all orchestrated behind the scenes; on the other hand, when we disagree we’re drowning each other out and undermining atheism in the process.

Don’t I know it. I’ve just seen a little knot of people on Twitter agreeing with each other that FTB thinks as one and is horribly messily anarchic. If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it a million times: someone saying “this one FTB blog said something bad; FTB is bad terrible horrible awful.” Apparently what one FTB blogger says, we all say. We’re One Big Giant Robot, with multiple limbs but only one brain. But also anarchic. Bastards!

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

Hilarious headline department:

Pope praises Britain’s Queen Elizabeth’s “noble vision” of a Christian monarch

You don’t say!

Well he would, wouldn’t he. She’s praised his “noble vision” of a Christian pontiff, too, for the same kind of reason. They’re colleagues. They both work in the unelected unaccountable head of an absurd hierarchy business. They both draw their illegitimate magical pseudo-authority from a non-existent “god.” They both wear expensive outfits when appearing to worshipful crowds. They both tell people what’s what, based on nothing in particular.

In a message released Wednesday by the Vatican, Benedict said the British monarch has over the past 60 years been an “inspiring example of dedication to duty and a commitment to maintaining the principles of freedom, justice and democracy.”

Oh? What has she done in the way of maintaining the principles of freedom, justice and democracy? I don’t say she’s opposed them, particularly, but what does she do that makes any difference to them? Nothing I can see, except that her performance of monarchy is an implicit rebuke to democracy in the broadest sense.

Ah well, it was just a formula, like a Mother’s Day card.

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

Another petition for you, via the New Humanist:

We call on the Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay to withdraw their complaint against Indian Rationalist Sanal Edamaruku

You bet; I certainly call on the Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay to do that. Seriously? Edamaruku investigated a claim that a little statue of Mary was leaking tears, and he found that it was seepage from sewer water under the statue. That’s not a crime, to put it mildly, and the Catholic archdiocese has no business complaining about it.

Hey Catholic archdiocese of Bombay – I say the guy named Yeshua who was executed by the Romans 20 centuries ago is still dead, because dead people stay dead. Come and get me!

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

Katha Pollitt reports bad news about the woman in Indiana who is being prosecuted for murder because she attempted suicide when she was 33 weeks pregnant.

The state Supreme Court has refused to review charges of attempted feticide and murder against Bei Bei Shuai. Just before Christmas 2010, Shuai, who was thirty-three weeks pregnant, attempted to kill herself by consuming rat poison after her boyfriend, father of the baby, abruptly announced he was married and abandoned her to return to his family. Rushed to the hospital, she had a Caesarean section, but her newborn daughter died after a few days of life. (Here’s my column on the case.) Despite amicus briefs from eighty respected experts and relevant medical and social organizations—the state of Indiana, for reasons best known to itself, will do its best to send Shuai to prison. Potential sentence: forty-five to sixty-five years. The only good news is that after spending 435 days in jail, Shuai is now out on bail.

Indiana? You’re being disgusting.

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

Stairs to no end reminded me of something: one of my favorite last-two-minutes of the ’90s tv show Northern Exposure, which had a lot of glorious final two minutes. I’m slow, so it took me awhile to remember that I might be able to find it, and by golly…

Chris the DJ-autodidact-ex-con has spent the episode preparing a surprise winter celebration thing for Cicely, and that celebration thing is the end of the episode. Check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2TPMoP01Sc

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

Via Stewart, a fantastic (in both senses) video “inspired by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Richard Dawkins.” It needs to go viral.

“Not to ask questions is to live life asleep.”

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

At least people are making a stink about the “work programme” that makes people travel for four hours in the middle of the night then throws them out at 3 a.m. to stand waiting for 20 minutes and then be ordered to sleep under London Bridge, in order to wake up refreshed a few hours later, change their clothes outside in public, then work for 14 hours in pouring rain with no toilet access, and then take the tube to camp out in a swamp in Essex. No food provided. Oh and for all this? No pay, either. I know you already know, but it’s worth reciting it all over again. Such a deal. Bus, night, sleep outside, dress outside, work double shift, no toilets, no food, tube to Essex, camp in swamp, no pay.

Ministers are being urged to look into reports that unemployed people hired as unpaid stewards for the Diamond Jubilee ended up having to sleep outside.

Volunteers from the government’s work programme spent part of the night under London Bridge before Sunday’s Thames pageant, the Guardian said.

Is “volunteers” the right word? It doesn’t sound like the right word, given the part about “if you refuse this gig you don’t get the Olympics gig, which actually pays a wage.”

In a statement, managing director Molly Prince offered her “sincere apologies”, but accused the newspaper of trying “to sensationalise an unfortunate logistics planning problem”.

Again – I would like to know how much time Molly Prince has spent lying down under a bridge at 4 a.m. to prepare for working a double shift in the rain with no food or toilet access or pay.

She added: “There was no intention to exploit anyone or indeed supply cheap labour.”

No? What was the intention then? Since the labour was not paid at all, what else could one call it, and what else could the intention possibly be?

But Lord Prescott has written to Home Secretary Theresa May calling on her to urgently investigate what happened.

“If the allegations are true, it is totally unacceptable that young unemployed people were bussed in to London from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth and forced to sleep out in the cold overnight before stewarding a major event with no payment,” he wrote.

“I am deeply concerned that a private security firm is not only providing policing on the cheap but failing to show a duty of care to its staff and threatening to withdraw an opportunity to work at the Olympics as a means to coerce them to work unpaid.”

Quite so. Not “volunteers” and not so much “cheap labour” as free labour.

Close Protection said the unpaid roles were a trial for paid positions at the 2012 Games, for which it also has a contract to provide stewarding.

That’s fascinating; since when is that legal? Since when do companies get to demand that people do a job unpaid as “a trial” before doing it for real?

Oh no wait, I know, these were “internships.” Yeah that’s it – these lucky young people had “internships” being stewards for Big Events in London. That puts the whole thing in a completely new light.

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

Adam Lee asks a question.

All these data points show that, while there’s no necessary connection between atheism and progressive political views, in practice it usually does work out that way. I leave it up to you, readers, to weigh in on why that is.

That’s an interesting question, and one that I think about sometimes. Maybe I should make that my talk at TAM. Or maybe I should make my talk at TAM be about sexism in the skeptic/secularist/atheist community. Or is there something even more guaranteed to be annoying that I could talk about? Locker rooms, gossip, naming names, evidence, slut-blaming, feminist-blaming, women-blaming, the economy and its relationship to registration for skeptic cons?

It’s between talking about the most guaranteed to be annoying thing I can think of, and just not going. I can’t make up my mind. Given that the head of the organization that invited me has recently gone out of his way to make me feel (to use the technical language) “unwelcome,” it has to be one of those.

Here’s what I think is one answer to Adam’s question: atheism is the rejection of god, and god stands for hierarchy and obedience. Atheism is inherently opposed to arbitrary hierarchy and demands for obedience. That by itself makes atheism tend progressive.

You can say “but libertarianism.” True. But then libertarianism is partly progressive.

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

Check your wallets, by which I mean various rights and freedoms and capabilities. North Dakota might pass an amendment to its constitution called the Religious Liberty Restoration amendment, and you know what that means. Religious liberty to deny children medical treatment, to hit them with sticks, to say that HoMoSeckShuals are evil, to refuse to provide women with abortions or contraception even when that is your job, to teach children that genocide is good and total obedience to “God” meaning to whatever is in the bible is mandatory. It means a lot of horrible fundamentalist shit dressed up as Religious Liberty and allowed to proceed, no matter how illegal it would be in any other context.

…opponents argue the measure is both unnecessary and potentially dangerous — and could raise new ways for people to define their own extreme religious views.

Gladys Cairns, the former administrator of North Dakota Child Protective Services, says she worries that criminals will hide behind a religious cloak.

“If I were a defense attorney, I’d be making sure that my client would be doing that,” she says.

It’s not as if this never happens.

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

The last one sounded like a joke but wasn’t, this one sounds like a nightmare and is. You know the Good News Club, the after-school program run by evangelical whack-jobs? They’re teaching children the glories of genocide.

This fall, more than 100,000 American public school children, ranging in age from four to 12, are scheduled to receive instruction in the lessons of Saul and the Amalekites in the comfort of their own public school classrooms. The instruction, which features in the second week of a weekly “Bible study” course, will come from the Good News Club, an after-school program sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The aim of the CEF is to convert young children to a fundamentalist form of the Christian faith and recruit their peers to the club.

There are now over 3,200 clubs in public elementary schools, up more than sevenfold since the 2001 supreme court decision, Good News Club v Milford Central School, effectively required schools to include such clubs in their after-school programing.

Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in that horrific decision.

In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”

And now we get children being inspired by stories of genocide.

The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that “the Amalekites were completely defeated.” In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:

“You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left.”

“That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.

Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

“The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.”

The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.

And this is an after-school program – which means it’s done on school property, in the school building – which means children are going to think of it as part of school, and true.

The CEF and the legal advocacy groups that have been responsible for its tremendous success over the past ten years are determined to “Knock down all doors, all the barriers, to all 65,000 public elementary schools in America and take the Gospel to this open mission field now! Not later, now!” in the words of a keynote speaker at the CEF’s national convention in 2010. The CEF wants to operate in the public schools, rather than in churches, because they know that young children associate the public schools with authority and are unable to distinguish between activities that take place in a school and those that are sponsored by the school.

In the majority opinion that opened the door to Good News Clubs, supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas reasoned that the activities of the CEF were not really religious, after all. He said that they could be characterized, for legal purposes, “as the teaching of morals and character development from a particular viewpoint”.

As Justices Souter and Stevens pointed out in their dissents, however, the claim is preposterous: the CEF plainly aims to teach religious doctrines and conduct services of worship. Thomas’s claim is particularly ironic in view of the fact that the CEF makes quite clear its intent to teach that no amount of moral or ethical behavior (pdf) can spare a nonbeliever from an eternity in hell.

It makes me so sick and so furious I can’t even deal with it. You fix it; I’m going to go smell the flowers.

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

This sounds like a joke, but apparently isn’t.

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Are you kidding me? Not just no pay but told to sleep outside under a bridge? 

Well happy jubilee to you too.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government’s Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

Happy Big Society.

Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London. A spokesman said the unpaid work was a trial for paid roles at the Olympics, which it had also won a contract to staff. Unpaid staff were expected to work two days out of the three-day holiday.

The firm said it had spent considerable resources on training and equipment that stewards could keep and that the experience was voluntary and did not affect jobseekers keeping their benefits.

[One of the workers] said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. “We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them,” she said. “We followed them under London Bridge and that’s where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing.”

I suppose they should be grateful they weren’t made to sleep actually in the Thames.

Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for well-paid work at the Olympics.

Molly Prince, managing director of Close Protection UK, said in a statement: “We take the welfare of our staff and apprentices very seriously indeed.”

No you don’t.

“The staff travelling to the jubilee are completing their training and being assessed on the job for NVQ Level 2 in spectator safety after having completed all the knowledge requirements in the classroom and some previous work experience. It is essential that they are assessed in a live work environment in order to complete their chosen qualifications.”

Hey you know what? Workers should be paid for training. That’s one of the expenses for the employer. Period.

“The nature of festival and event work is such that we often travel sleeping on coaches through the night with an early morning pre-event start – it is the nature of the business … It’s hard work and not for the faint-hearted.”

And the pay is zero, so only the truly dedicated and strong need apply!

One wonders how much time Molly Prince spends sleeping in a swamp and working a 14 hour shift for bupkis.

The charity Tomorrow’s People, which set up the placements at Close Protection under the work programme, said it would review the situation, but stressed that unpaid work was valuable and made people more employable…

“Tomorrow’s People believes strongly in the value of work experience in helping people to build the skills, confidence and CV they need to get and keep a job and we have an exemplary record going back nearly 30 years for our work with the long-term unemployed.”

Oh shut up. Work experience is one thing, dumping people out to sleep under London Bridge at 3 a.m. is another.

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