Someone called Daisy Khan* had a really fatuous piece at Comment is Free on Thursday about “Islamophobia” in the US.

She started by making the issue entirely one of terrorist violence. There isn’t much, she said. Therefore, no issue.

But terrorist violence is not the only issue. It’s much more complicated than that. There is also the issue of women’s rights, and the issue of gay rights, and the matter of apostasy, and then there’s blasphemy. You’d never know any of that mattered from reading Daisy Khan.

Our allies in the interfaith and civil rights communities are working to counteract the fabricated opposition to Islam that is gaining strength in America today.

To counteract opposition to Islam? Really? We’re not allowed to oppose Islam? At the beginning of the piece, Khan talked about demonization of Muslims, which is another matter – but here at the end the problem becomes opposition to Islam. Opposition to Islam is itself a civil right, and one that millions of people around the world don’t have – like Hamza Kashgari for example. (He doesn’t even have the right to make a questioning comment about Mo, let alone oppose Islam.)

We are allowed to oppose Islam, and there are reasons to oppose it. What happened to Hamza Kashgari today is one such reason: one “Muslim country” summarily extradited him to another “Muslim country” which he had fled to escape being executed for “blasphemy.”

You’d never think that kind of thing was possible from reading Daisy Khan.

We know that the bulk of the American public recognises the truth of Islamic moderation and tolerance.

The what? The truth of what? The truth of Islamic what?

If there is a truth that Islam is noteworthy for moderation and tolerance, then why the fuck did Malaysia extradite Hamza Kashgari to Saudi Arabia under arrest for “blasphemy” for saying he questioned Mohammed in some things? What, exactly, does that have to do with moderation and tolerance? How dare Daisy Khan talk about “the truth of Islamic moderation and tolerance”?

H/t Eric.

*By which I meant only that I didn’t know who she is, and possibly should have. I meant it as a sort of signal not to expect me to know who she is…probably in case I made any stupid assumptions about her.

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

Malaysia has deported Kashgari back to Saudi Arabia.

Police confirmed to the BBC that Hamza Kashgari was sent back to Saudi Arabia on Sunday despite protests from human rights groups.

Mr Kashgari’s controversial tweet last week sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats.

That’s the BBC doing it again – his tweet “sparked” more than 30,000 calls for him to be executed (or “responses” as the BBC put it). It’s just a little bit his fault for being controversial. Just ever so slightly.

Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.

Slightly random, since Kashgari didn’t actually “insult” Mo. But the BBC wants to make sure everyone realizes it blames Kashgari just a little.

Mr Kashgari apologised and deleted the tweet, but when he continued to receive threats, he left for Malaysia.

The two countries do not have a formal extradition treaty but Malaysia has good relations with Saudi Arabia as a fellow Muslim country, says the BBC’s Jennifer Pak, in Kuala Lumpur.

Ah yes, how cozy and communitarian and ummah-ish – a fellow Muslim country that executes people for “insulting” a “prophet” who’s been dead for 14 centuries.

“The nature of the charges against the individual in this case are a matter for the Saudi Arabian authorities,” Malaysia’s home ministry said in a statement.

But he wasn’t in Saudi Arabia - he’d left it. Countries don’t automatically extradite people to countries that have insane disgusting rights-violating laws. Lots of countries won’t extradite murder suspects to the US because the US has the death penalty.

This is loathsome.

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

There was, unsurprisingly, mixed reaction to the Bideford council ruling. But one reaction stood out – a Tory councillor’s, at that.

Imran Khan, a Conservative councillor on Reigate and Banstead Borough Council, welcomed the ruling.

Mr Khan is a Muslim but said he was not particularly religious.

“Religion has no place in politics. The High Court judgement is a victory for everyone who believes that democracy and religious freedom is the cornerstone of Western free society.

“The judgement clearly states that councillors are welcome to pray before meetings, thus respecting religious values.

“Under the old regime I had to wait outside the room while everyone else was praying. This meant that it appeared I was being late or just plain rude to other people’s religions as I walked across the floor afterwards,” he added.

Bishop of Exeter, please give that your careful attention. Please think again about your reaction.

The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said he would encourage councils in his area to continue holding prayers before the start of their statutory business.

He added: “I think it’s a great pity that a tiny minority are seeking to ban the majority, many of whom find prayers very, very helpful, from continuing with a process in which no-one actually has to participate.”

Think about it from the point of view of the tiny minority, you big bully.

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

The decision on Bideford Town Council’s opening prayers gave another opportunity for people to talk crap.

The National Secular Society and an atheist ex-councillor won a test case ruling that Bideford town council, Devon, was acting unlawfully by putting prayer on meeting agendas.

It is understood the ritual dates back in Bideford to the days of Queen Elizabeth I, and the council has recently voted twice to retain it.

Lots of things date back to the days of Queen Elizabeth I; what of it? In the days of Queen Elizabeth I church attendance was mandatory and you had to pay a fine if you didn’t go. Is that a good arrangement? Miss that, do we? The mandatory attendance was also, of course, to one church only, all others being outlawed. Mosques and temples weren’t even thought of.

In short, Britain under the Tudors was a theocracy and that was that. No muttering there in the back row, or we’ll have your arm off. Council prayers shouldn’t be seen as a cozy old custom but as a vestige of an authoritarian godbothering society of a kind that pretty much no one in the UK wants to live in now.

Harry Greenway, a former Tory MP and ex-chairman of the National Prayer Breakfast, said: “I trust this ruling will be quickly reversed. If people do not want to attend prayers of this nature, they can stay away instead of meddling and busybodying with other people’s beliefs.

…

“Non-believers are not harassed in this way by believers. Why cannot the non-believers show the same kind of tolerance? I find this ruling puzzling in the extreme.”

The same kind of tolerance as what? How would believers go about harassing non-believers in this way? By telling them to stop not praying? Non-believers can’t show the same kind of tolerance because tolerance of not doing something is not the same as tolerance of doing something. A nuisance is not comparable to the absence of a nuisance. Cigarette smoke is not comparable to no cigarette smoke; loud music at 3 a.m. is not comparable to quiet at 3 a.m.; and so on. Non-actors are not making the nuisance, so other people are not “tolerating” anything by not hassling them; people who are making the nuisance are the ones requiring some kind of “tolerance.” Not all kinds of nuisance should be tolerated. It’s quite simple really.

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

Eric has an excellent post on a Telegraph article by Peter Mullen fuming about the terrible dreadfulness of the C of E in the matter of women bishops and priests. One thing in Mullen’s article snagged my attention right out of the gate.

There is now no doubt that the Church of England will consecrate its first  woman bishop within the next couple of years. This will happen without any statutory provision for those who in conscience cannot accept women’s  episcopacy. The significant minority of clergy and laity who oppose this innovation will simply be told to like it – or lump it and go elsewhere.  Thus tens of thousands of traditional and faithful Anglicans will be unchurched.

What a ludicrous thing to complain of. When was it ever otherwise? Was the Church of England until recently run like a democracy? Were significant minorities of clergy and laity who didn’t like something the church decided until recently not told to like it or lump it? 

Of course bloody not! It’s a church.

Funny that someone who makes such a point of being reactionary and kind of oblivious should have fallen for this trendy modern idea that Everybody is Special and no one should ever be told to like it or lump it (except people who think there should be women priests and bishops, of course).

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

One of the things “faith” is good at doing – giving people a feeling of righteousness about doing something poisonous and horrible. Like the woman whose daughter

who suffers from bipolar disorder and limited cognitive abilities, went missing last Monday.  For more than 48 hours, we had no idea where she was.  Without all the gruesome details, after she was found, it came to light that she’d been brutally and repeatedly sexually assaulted.

A nurse gave the mother Plan B and told her she had 24 hours to use it.

But no. The woman decided not to give it to her daughter.

If the being that had done this to my daughter had been in front of me at that moment, I likely would have killed the bastard.

But Plan B is a whole other thing, isn’t it?  It’s about taking the life of an innocent child.

…

My daughter, though, you see, is adopted.  For all I know, she herself is the product of rape.  Her birth [mother] was known to prostitute herself, and for women in that life, rape is common.

And even if this wasn’t the case, what child deserves to die due to a parent’s sins and brutality?  Taking an innocent life is wrong – I know it, and every genuinely honest person on the face of the earth knows it.

She’s in a glow of righteousness, because she’s pretending to think a few cells are “a child.”  She’s in a glow of righteousness because she’s more concerned about the non-existent child than she is about her real, existing daughter…Or because she’s not but she’s forcing herself to sacrifice her daughter’s interests for the sake of the non-existent child anyway.

“Faith” can do this and I’m not sure anything else can. Ideology can beget monsters but not of quite this kind.

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

Libby Anne did a great post on disagreement the other day – on the value of it, and especially the value of being allowed it. She hasn’t always had that, you see.

Growing up on the line between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, in a family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, disagreement was not allowed. Or to be more specific, disagreement simply did not happen. I have to be completely honest, the first time I learned that mainstream couples are okay with not agreeing with each other on everything regarding religion or politics I was shocked. Coming from my background, that made no sense. 

As a child and teen, I never disagreed with my parents, or with my church. Why would I? What we had was truth. When I reached college and began asking questions, my parents and my church had no ability to agree to disagree. Why? Because if I disagreed with them, then I disagreed with truth, and that meant I was flat wrong.

And that means you can’t find anything out for yourself (you can only be told things), and you can’t explore.

This is similar to the feeling of claustrophobia and exasperation I always have when religious apologists talk about the questions that science can’t answer but religion can.  No it can’t. The answers religion gives aren’t answers; they’re pseudo-answers, and dead ends. They’re not fascinatingly complicated and difficult, they’re short cuts.

When you believe you have absolute and final truth, and that having that truth is necessary to keep you from eternal torture and send you to the bliss of heaven, you lose the ability to agree to disagree. You also lose the ability to look beyond what you have and consider other ideas.

This was one of the biggest problems I faced when I started to question the things I’d been taught. Disagreement was not accepted. It was not okay. It could not be tolerated. This put me on a collision course not only with my family but also with the friends I grew up with and the church I grew up in. I had gone from one of them to an outsider overnight.

It makes me twitch just to think about it. It’s the death of thinking, and I can’t stand that idea.

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

Guest post by Rieux.

There is a very real chance that this decision has cemented marriage equality in California permanently. Yes, it’s possible that five flaming assholes on the Supreme Court will jump in and take it all away—but to my eyes that outcome doesn’t look nearly as likely as previous commenters think it is.

To explain, in inordinately long-winded fashion:

Court decisions striking down homophobic marriage laws always make for terrific reading. Goodridge in Massachusetts, Varnum in Iowa, the Marriage Cases in California state court, and the federal district-court decision in this case, Perry, are all inspiring examples of jurisprudence—I find it hard to avoid tearing up while reading them. This is what law, legal rhetoric, and legal institutions are supposed to do for human beings; decisions like those make me feel that my profession is an honorable and valuable one.

The current Ninth Circuit opinion (I just finished reading the majority; I’ll get around to the dissent some other time, bah) evokes some of the above emotions, but not really the tear-jerking ones: this is an honorable decision as well, but more than that it’s a careful, even crafty decision.

The majority decision is by Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt, who happens to be the same judge who found in favor of Michael Newdow and held that public-school teachers and staff can’t lead students in a Pledge of Allegiance that includes “Under God.” Reinhardt wrote the initial (2002) decision in Newdow’s favor, and then after the Supreme Court overturned that decision in flagrantly absurd and cowardly fashion (fabricating a new rule of law out of thin air to decide that Newdow didn’t have standing to bring the suit in the first place), he wrote a scorching 123-page dissent when Newdow’s subsequent attempt to bring the case with new plaintiffs was rejected by the other two judges on the Ninth Circuit panel. You’ve got to imagine that Reinhardt has a hell of a bone to pick with the Supremes, and it really looks to me like he’s structured this decision (with, it appears, an assist from the attorneys for the intervenor-plaintiff City and County of San Francisco) in such a way as to make it difficult for Roberts and company to take the case up in the first place.

As a quick primer on how these processes work: Ordinary cases in U.S. federal court are filed in one of the eighty-nine U.S. district courts; the Perry case, here, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Once a district court makes a final judgment on a case before it, the losing party has the right to appeal to the applicable Circuit Court of Appeals. Appeals from all of California’s district courts (as well as eight other western states’ and two Pacific U.S. territories’) go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—which, to my understanding, is the biggest and busiest of the twelve federal circuit courts. There are numerous judges in each circuit court, but each appeal from lower courts is heard by a panel of only three judges, who then issue a decision. Tuesday’s outcome in Perry was a 2-1 majority decision, with Reinhardt and Judge Michael Daly Hawkins in the majority and Judge N. Randy Smith (“N. Randy”?) in dissent.

After that, the next step for the losing party is to request a hearing in front of “the en banc court,” which means in front of all of the judges of the circuit court. In the Ninth Circuit, that’s currently forty-four justices. For logistical reasons that might be self-evident, such a request is seldom granted. It’s a common request, though, because it’s a necessary prerequisite to the next step, which is….

Petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari (“cert” for short), which is to say asking the Court to take up the case and review the circuit court’s decision, whether it was en banc or the far more common three-judge panel*.

Anyway. The Supremes get a huge number of cert petitions every year, and they accept only a small fraction of them. A very large proportion of the petitions they accept, moreover, stem from issues on which one circuit court of appeals has ruled one way and another circuit court has ruled in a different way (creating what’s called a “circuit split”); in that situation, the notion is that the nation needs the Court to step in and resolve the discrepancy. A circuit split isn’t an absolutely mandatory condition for the Court to take up a case, but it’s the most common and uncontroversial one.

And that’s where Reinhardt’s craftiness in putting together his decision comes in: unlike the courts in Goodridge (Massachusetts), Varnum (Iowa), and even the district court in this litigation (N.D. Cal.), the Ninth Circuit majority opinion in this case doesn’t even directly hold that denying marriage equality to gay and lesbian couples is, in and of itself, unconstitutional. It seems likely that Reinhardt and Hawkins would have been willing, and maybe even happy, to issue such a ruling—but if they had done so, that would immediately create a circuit split, because one other federal circuit (mine, ugh) has already held that bans on same-sex marriage don’t violate the U.S. Constitution. See Citizens for Equal Protection v. Bruning, 455 F.3d 859 (8th Cir. 2006).

Instead, the Ninth Circuit majority opinion only holds that California’s decision (via ballot-proposition constitutional amendment) to take away a marriage right that had previously existed violates the Constitution. That’s a notably narrower ground than the clean’n’simple “Bans on gay marriage violate equal protection” holding that we supporters of marriage equality would like to see, but it makes the entire decision far less relevant to any jurisdiction outside of California—and therefore far less worthy of a place on the Supreme Court’s docket.

That narrower basis for the panel majority’s decision also allows Reinhardt to draw a strong parallel between this case and (what I think is) the nicest American gay-rights decision in the pre-Goodridge era: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). In Romer, the state of Colorado had passed, by ballot initiative, a state constitutional amendment providing that state and local governments were barred from recognizing gays and lesbians as a protected class in any anti-discrimination law. The Romer Court struck this “Amendment 2″ down, holding that “[i]t is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort”—laws that “singl[e] out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status,” which “raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected.” The Court concluded that the Colorado provision violated the Equal Protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, because it “classifie[d] homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else.”

The Ninth Circuit decision published Tuesday holds that Prop 8 is just Romer all over again:

The relevant inquiry in Romer was not whether the state of the law after Amendment 2 was constitutional; there was no doubt that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require antidiscrimation provisions to be afforded to gays and lesbians. The question, instead, was whether the change in the law that Amendment 2 effected could be justified by some legitimate purpose.

The Supreme Court’s answer was “no”—there was no legitimate reason to take away broad legal protections from gays and lesbians alone, and to inscribe that deprivation of equality into the state constitution, once those protections had already been provided. We therefore need not decide whether a state may decline to provide the right to marry to same-sex couples. To determine the validity of Proposition 8, we must consider only whether the change in the law that it effected—eliminating by constitutional amendment the right of same-sex couples to have the official designation and status of ‘marriage’ bestowed upon their relationships, while maintaining that right for opposite-sex couples—was justified by a legitimate reason.

 

This seems to me downright sneaky: the Ninth Circuit panel majority is openly avoiding the broader issue of the constitutionality of bans on gay marriage, which is relevant all across the country, in favor of focusing on a peculiar set of facts that currently only applies, and probably only will ever apply, in California. “Possibly you can refuse to give gay couples the right to marry, but once you’ve given it to them you can’t (constitutionally) take it away again.”

There can’t possibly be a circuit split on that issue, because it can’t currently happen in any other circuit. (Maine, which is in the First Circuit, came close in 2009… but gay couples there never actually had a chance to get married before a homophobic ballot initiative took the right away.)

The upshot is that it’s going to be substantially more difficult for the Supremes to reach down into the Ninth Circuit, grab this case, and overturn it than it would have been had Reinhardt not written the decision this way. It’s not impossible to imagine that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito would vote to grant cert here, but it’s a little hard to understand how they could argue that the panel’s actual ruling—regarding taking away a marriage right that had already been granted—is some kind of (a) pressing legal issue for the whole nation or (b) drastic departure from the American jurisprudence that the Supremes supervise.

Presuming that they do take it up, then, should we be pessimistic? Well, regarding those four guys’ votes, sure. Scalia and Thomas, especially, have made their drooling homophobia (not to mention callous disregard for Court precedent, and indeed for common decency, when it doesn’t suit their prejudices or politics—see Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)) more than clear. But it’s hard to imagine Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, or Kagan overturning the Ninth Circuit decision, given how narrowly Reinhardt drew it.

So we get to the kicker, the swing vote that everyone has been wondering about for years (I’m still wondering whether Sili was making a cute joke about this @3): Anthony Kennedy. Would Kennedy vote to uphold this decision? Conceivably not, but guess who wrote the Court’s Romer opinion in 1996? Guess who composed that whole argument about the evils of “classif[ying] homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else?” Anthony Kennedy did!

And so Reinhardt’s crafting doesn’t just limit the chances of a successful cert petition—it’s also aimed directly at appealing to the swing vote that would determine whether the Ninth Circuit decision survives. C’mon, guys, we’ve gotta like those chances. (And, not surprisingly, the right wing is already virtually burning Reinhardt in effigy again. Too bad he’s 80 years old; he’s doing an awful lot of good for the country.)

Even in the worst case scenario, the Ninth Circuit decision being overturned means that we’re back where we started in November 2008: Prop 8 back in force, and GLBs in California being shit on by the law again. That’s certainly an ugly possibility, but given the potential upside (and the fact that the worst-case scenario is awfully similar to the status quo), the outlook looks awfully sunny on balance to me.

So cheer up—this decision is great news!

*See comment 2 for amendments.

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