That seems to be the opinion of this expecting grandfather. He’s a lawyer asking a (female) judge for a provisional recess in case his grandson turns out to be a boy.
Should the child be a girl, not much will happen in the way of public celebration. Some may even be disappointed, but will do their best to conceal this by saying, “as long as it’s a healthy baby.” My wife will run to Philly immediately, but I will probably be able to wait until the next weekend. There will be happiness, though muted, and this application will be mooted as well.
However, should the baby be a boy, then hoo hah! Hordes of friends and family will arrive from around the globe and descend on Philadelphia for the joyous celebration.
Joyous celebration about chopping off some skin from a baby’s penis. Thank you, religion.
I think he’s trying to be funny, but he just comes of as a sexist asshole. Seriously, imagine being this guy’s granddaughter and Googling Grandpa’s name years later. Nothing says “I love you” like “Well, I gueeessss it’s okay you’re a girl, though I really wish you were a boy.”
I love the judge’s response:
Mr. Epstein will be permitted to attend the bris, in the joyous event that a son is born. But the Court would like to balance the scales. If a daughter is born, there will be a public celebration in Court, with readings from poetry celebrating girls and women.
Sad it takes an order from a judge to celebrate the birth of a baby girl.
(Via Butterflies and Wheels)
There’s nothing like violating the rights of a child for your own irrational fear of an imaginary blood-god. Yay, religion.
Girls are icky! That’s why God makes her impure for twice as long than for giving birth to a boy. (Lev. 12)
WhatAFuckingDouche.
The judge is awesome. The prospective grandfather appears to be a total twit.My daughter was the best thing that ever happened to me – until my son came along; now they’re 1st equal. I can’t understand the mentality of any parent or grandparent who would prefer one gender over another.
Depending on the religion, (I’m a recovering Orthodox-Chassidic Jew,) wives might get beaten for giving birth to daughters. Religion is evil.
Words cannot explain what a jerk that guy is! For the child’s sake I do hope it’s a boy, or a girl will be forever living with the guilt that there’s nothing she can do to please her grandfather and other relatives.
It’s funny that you posted this today. I was going through God is Not Great and came across the part that certain Orthodox mohels place the baby’s foreskin in their mouths during circumsision. Ick and ick again.
Isn’t there a prayer for men that states “Thank God I am not a woman’?
Instead of focusing on the, ahem, less then pleasant terms one could use for the grandfather, lets give Judge Kimba Wood a great big virtual hug for making a point about celebrating the birth if it’s a girl. Actions such as that are what will lead to change for the better, not calling the grandfather a douche or other such comments.
Is this China or something?
While it’s not something that I would wish on anybody, the funniest outcome possible would be for the child to be a boy who is transgender and transitions to female while the grandfather is still alive.Yes, I’m transgender…
yeah … i think there was … something like “be glad that you were not born a woman”
Yes indeed. It’s something along the lines of “Thank you for not making me a slave. Thank you for not making me a Gentile. Thank you for not making me a woman.”There’s a women’s version of the same prayer substitutes “Thank you for making me according to your will” for the third line. How disingenuous.
Yes, it’s in the morning prayers:ברוך… שלא עשני אשהYou thank god for giving you a penis. Women thank god for “making me according to his will”.
Yep, that’s called Metzizah B’peh. Yummy!
Worst. Prayer. Ever.I may be biased. >.>
What a prick, I’m surprised the Judge’s reaction was so neutral, in her position I would have been irked. Still, I think she had the proper reaction.
Actually, assuming that the society in fact treated women as their religion otherwise specified, the sentiment is perfectly rational.Shame they couldn’t be bothered to fucking do something about it.
The official explanation – make of it what you will – is that women, like slaves and cripples, are not required to perform the time-bound mitzvot because God recognizes that icky girl stuff doesn’t necessarily happen on schedule. So the prayer is along the lines of, thanks for making it mandatory for me to say how cool you are, three times a day.
It’s all fun and games until the baby catches herpes from the mohel and dies.(The mohel doesn’t put the foreskin in his mouth. He puts the penis in his mouth after circumcision to suction away the blood.)
Meh. It’s a baby. Who cares.
I love that judge.(And yeah, the lawyer was probably trying to make a cynical remark. Doesn’t excuse going along with it; it’s like the guy in the xkcd strip saying “pix plz” in order to be funny.)
As I recall, was she not one of the judges raked over the coals by the GOP when Clinton was trying to find an attorney general? Good on her. She doesn’t owe the religious Right anything.
Sorry, but I can’t join in this celebration. I can’t see any reason to celebrate the birth of ANY child to deeply religious Abrahamic parents. The fact that the child will almost certainly be brainwashed into a belief system that values blind obedience to an invisible vindictive tyrant above reason and compassion far outweighs any “miracle of birth”, which, to be truthful, happens far in excess of the frequency that would provide maximum human happiness; the current population is 6.88 billion and counting, with a majority of that number living in conditions of poverty, disease, and oppression. The sacrifice of rational thought and human decency at the altar of holy woo-woo is one of the primary causes of this situation. A better ruling would have been that if the child is born a girl, she should be given over to responsible parents that wish to adopt a girl. Perhaps a pair of lesbians, given the results of the recent study mentioned in this blog…(…assuming the grandfather’s implied representation of the parents is an accurate one…)
really? my mom once said to me of one of my friends who’d given birth to two healthy daughters: “oh. so he’s going to make her keep trying until they get a boy?” and she was right. years ago. i just spent the weekend with my newest “nephews” and mom was totally right. my sister’s asshole hubby? pressured her to have (twins, even!) as many as it took so he could claim a son. she was weak and let him get her pregnant at 40, despite the fact that she’d told him and me that she wanted to stop being reproductively active after the first two (girls). the Patriarchy is Real, my friend. even in this modern day.
That’s really terrible. I know it’s common (I recall some countries take it so far that the female birth rate is a fraction of the me) but its prevalence doesn’t make it any less horrid.
would it be cruel (for the baby, not for him) to wish him twin girls?
Religion is evil and stupid…. without women giving birth to daughters there would be nobody to give birth to anyone!
Best licence plate I ever saw on an SUV:Y3SONS
I recall that my wife was completely disgusted when one of my cousins expressed disappointment that she was having “another” girl. I felt the same way and not just because I have two daughters. There’s nothing all that special about males, why the hullaballo when one of us is born?
Well, there’s a difference between wanting boys and wanting a boy when you’ve had multiple girls. Having at least one of each is something a lot of people want, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
One thing I love about the judicial branch. Sometimes judges are wrong, sometimes they’re idiots, but they are the one person in the world who is essentially paid not to put up with anyone’s bullshit. This judge was brilliant, she knew that letting this guy attend his religious ceremony was pretty much a necessity, but she wasn’t going to let his sexist B.S. stand. I hope it’s a girl, and that the judge has the resulting courtroom ceremony posted on YouTube.
Start by giving your children her/his mother’s name
I just can’t help the feeling that some one is being Poe’d ” rel=”nofollow”>
I can’t help the feeling that some one’s getting Poe’d
I agree…as long as they’re also wishing that their third will be a hermaphrodite…
Even if there is something wrong about wanting one of each, it’s certainly not on the same level as this. And the term is intersexed child.
Eh.This post was sort of tongue-in-cheek.The point was that preference for a “normally” sexed child is no better than preference for a male or female.Whether we used “intersexed child” or “hermaphrodite” we commit the same sin, lumping all who have a mixture of both typically male and typically female characteristics into one category. I hesitated to use the term for that reason. However, brevity prevailed as I did not think it that important to differentiate in this context, because most people, whether or not they prefer one “pure” sex to the other, are just as reluctant to parent an XXY as they are to parent an XXX, etc.Intersexed child= 2 words, 16 characters including space. Hermaphrodite = 1 word, 13 characters. Not derogatory in any way. (Technically, if anything, complimentary; both Hermes and Aphrodite were Gods…) Also, the term does not imply that a person is “both fully male and fully female”. I have never interpreted the word that way, nor do I believe that any other person likely has, so claims that the word is misleading based on that implication are inaccurate. Explanation triggered by political correctness= 171 words, 1037 characters including spaces.I’m not a big fan of political correctness.As far as wanting one of each- nothing wrong with that. I don’t even have a big problem with somebody having a preference for a child of one sex over the others, as long as (1) that preference is not based on an errant premise of superiority of one sex over the others, (2) that preference is exercised through adoption, so that unwanted or “less wanted” children are not conceived, and (3) such adopted children are treated with the full respect and love that every child deserves.
The orthodox jewish community is actually split on this, some even holding (the only rational position) that it should be prohibited under any circumstanceshttp://www.ou.org/index.php/je…Still, I guess it’s official: A good number of Orthodox Mohels can legitimately be referred to as bloodsuckers, cocksuckers, or bloodsucking cocksuckers…(No intended offense to cocksuckers here; the use of the word cocksucker as a derogatory term is directed solely at those who consider it one, along the same lines of, e.g., tracing a Nazi’s family tree and being able to legitimately apply the term Jew…)
Every time I hear about this it shocks me. I think my brain just refuses to absorb something so disgusting.
The problem is that ‘hermaphrodite’ has and is very often used in a hurtful way. I know a few intersex people and none of them are too keen on it. One of my best friends had her genitals surgically altered as a baby because the doctor told her parents that she was a hermaphrodite, but it could be fixed.
A lot of people use the word “Jew” in a hurtful way too. When I was still a believer, I didn’t try to find a new word to describe my religion. To do so would only be a victory to those who used the word that way. Nowadays, I am an atheist, but I’m sure that would not help me much if Nazis came to power in America, as they see the Jews as a “race”. So now, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, I usually answer: “Only if you’re a Nazi…”Here’s how it works: A simple word is used to describe a simple fact. Bigots use the word as if it had another meaning. Well-meaning non-bigots find a new word, not realizing that by doing so they concede a victory to the bigots, who have thereby corrupted the language to their advantage. Eventually, bigots begin to use the new word with the same bigoted meaning as the word that the non-bigots ran from. So the non-bigots come up with another word and the bigots have another legitimized corruption of the language. Negroes becomes colored people, becomes blacks. When blacks started calling each other “nigger” as a sign of solidarity, and gays began calling themselves “queer” and “fag” the game was stopped cold. Now when bigots want to use hate words for gays or blacks, they confine themselves to those that are recognized as such, rather than continuing to try to legitimize derogatory meanings of neutral words. Instead of adding new hate words to their vocabulary, bigots now desperately fight to keep the ones they had before, and that is a victory for gays, blacks, and anyone opposed to bigotry.It doesn’t only happen with hate words; discrimination is a good thing, and bigots have managed to corrupt the meaning of the word substantially. Here the game went in the other direction, yet it is still the bigots who benefited from it. If you are a discriminating person, that means that you don’t settle for less than the best; that you (presumably) make choices based on some rational criteria. A discriminating person would not choose friends, employees, etc. based on some superficial characteristic. That would be about as discriminating as only eating foods that start with the letter “P”.Since bigotry is not a particularly admirable trait, people euphemized their bigotry by calling themselves “discriminating”. Non-bigots, instead of calling them on the euphemism, naively accepted the new meaning and equated “discrimination” with “racism”. This is another victory for bigots, because there is in fact nothing wrong with being a truly discriminating person. In their propaganda, they can use the words interchangeably, and use the true meaning of the word “discriminating” interchangeably with its euphemistic meaning. While (hopefully) most people don’t fall for such word games, even a small percentage of the population can translate to a lot of people.I have in the past come across people who used the word “hermaphrodite” to describe themselves without attaching any shame or stigma to the word. Admittedly this was long ago, but if the days when the word had its neutral meaning are gone, we should be working to bring that meaning back, not to pretend it never existed. We should also probably be working toward creating objective, subjective, and possessive pronouns to describe persons that are neither purely male or purely female, and perhaps these pronouns could double as the default when sex is undetermined by context, replacing “(s)he”, “him/her”, “his/her”, and “his/hers”.
She was up for the job of Clinton’s AG but probably lucky for her was dropped to avoid any controversy. Be a fool to drop this job. She also was once a bunny:http://underneaththeirrobes.bl…
So you’re fine with using outdated words that the people to whom they refer find offensive, because fuck PC and fuck an evolving language. Do you call black people negroes?
Why should I call “black people” negroes when blacks is a single syllable? -Although to be politically correct I would of course be calling them “African Americans”, referring to a group that includes West Indian Americans, Australian Americans, etc. That said, the word negro has often been used without any derogatory implication, and I have even spoken to blacks who still use it in this manner (usually immigrants having English as a second language, but their opinion is valid, and they probably took the usage from sources such as Martin Luther King Jr. Would you edit his speeches to kill the word’s usage? –Because you would eventually have to; otherwise there would always be some black immigrants mistakenly using the word neutrally and some Americans picking up the usage from them). Of course, there are blacks who use “nigga” in this manner too, and I wouldn’t use that word to describe a black person, though the word has lost a lot of its power and I do look forward to the day when that word will be rendered totally neutral.Bottom line, you don’t speak for all blacks, nor for all hermaphrodites. E.g.:http://www.healthyplace.com/ge…http://www.experienceproject.c…I have nothing against an evolving language, but I’m totally against a devolving language. An evolving language has new words for concepts that previously did not exist. A devolving language has new and inappropriate meanings for old words, and new words for old concepts without any added meaning. I have nothing against politically correct evolutions of the language, but it is not the PC aspect of such evolutions that I cheer for, it is their improvement on the language itself. (Hence my suggestion for some new pronouns…)Marriage (in the legal sense) between gays is an example of evolving language; the word “marriage” is given a new meaning that does not contradict its old meaning, and adapts it for the modern age, making it unnecessary to distinguish between legal marriages and legally equivalent “civil unions” in legal documents. Another example is “Ms.” as a playing field leveler for women; it is a new word, but it conveys a new concept, i.e. an honorific for a woman that reveals no marital information.Hate words, when introduced, are an example of the language devolving; the speaker could as easily have used a non-hate word to express the same concept, simply by it’s context. Yet when the same hate words are morphed into neutral words, that is an evolution of the language; the speaker is effectively injecting a mockery of the hate word itself into the expressed concept. The added meaning is appropriate because there is no more concise or effective way to do that.However, let us not discuss this any more. It’s doubtful that I will change your mind, equally doubtful that you will change mine, and almost certain that this issue is much less important to both of us than many that we agree on.
I’d wish it on everybody. Might make the world a nicer place…
What really amazes me about this bloody cocksucking is all the other weird cleanliness rituals these ancient religions have. You’d think that with the information available today they could recalibrate their obsessions to something a less risky than oral genital contact with babies.