Another ex-hijabi post, this time from a convert.

One poignant detail:

People will often tell you that a Muslim woman can wear whatever she wants in the privacy of her own home, but even there I felt myself being monitored.  Crossing the living room in t- shirt and shorts would immediately prompt my then husband to close the curtains, so I had to choose between comfort and having natural light in the room. 

That sounds so stifling. I have a horror of any kind of stifling.

I got a tweet asking me to share this and it’s well worth sharing, so here it is.

National Campaign: STOP the National Schools Chaplaincy Program

They have that? Yes, they have that.

Since 2006, the federal government has used taxpayers’ money to pay for religious missionaries to access schools throughout Australia, including public schools.

Despite a recent budget that targeted education, health, and funds designated for children with disabilities, the current government has extended the National Schools Chaplains Program (NSCP) at a cost to the taxpayer of $670 million since its inception, and removed funding for non-religious welfare workers in schools. Poorly resourced state schools, in particular, desperately need properly qualified and experienced teacher aides, counsellors and social workers. That money has, instead, been diverted towards evangelists.

Reasons why our schools need properly qualified people with no religious agenda include:

• The NSCP was initiated by religious lobbyists. No research has identified any need for chaplains in schools. Public schools in lower socio-economic areas, however, are in dire need of more resources.
• Most chaplains have been recruited by fundamentalist religious organisations, whose agenda to ‘make disciples’ of children has been well documented.
• Religious fundamentalists often hold negative views towards homosexuals and other members of the LGBTI community, do not advocate safe sex, and do not always advocate full equality for women. Properly trained, experienced and regulated teacher aides and counsellors are far better qualified to care for the emotional needs of young people.
• Nearly 3/4 billion dollars has been spent on or allocated for chaplains since 2006, money that could have resourced the educational needs of children, in addition to evidence-based programs that demonstrate effective results in assisting vulnerable young students.
• The NSCP has been criticised by teachers and mental health experts, including organisations such as Sane Australia, the Australian Psychological Society and by the ACSSO, the peak body representing the parents of state school students.
• Religion in schools is divisive. In particular, In particular, faith-oriented chaplains, usually Christian, are not appropriate in multicultural Australia, where a typical state school is made up of students from many different backgrounds, including families of no faith.

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A skeptic wrote a taking-stock how-can-we-improve post soliciting suggestions on how to make a better skeptical “movement.” Suggestions and advice came in. One piece of advice was:

Treat your allies better than you treat your opposition. This doesn’t mean anyone who claims to be on your side gets a blank check. It does mean you should keep their intentions and goals in mind when someone is imperfect.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. Then I laughed some more.

Update Ok I thought it was obvious what was so funny but it’s not; sorry.

Reasonable people – which self-proclaimed skeptics are a subset of – are not supposed to treat allies well and the opposition badly. That’s neither ethical nor epistemically sensible.

(Actual war is the exception here, but then that’s what makes war such a shitty thing, isn’t it.)

Saying you should “keep their intentions and goals in mind when someone is imperfect” about “your side” only is simply to embrace the fundamental attribution error in a permanent bear-hug. It’s groupthink elevated to a principle. It’s cognitive dissonance treated as a tool rather than a distortion.

The Ex-Hijabi Fashion Photo Journal is a success already, it was a success before Marwa had even posted anything. Now that’s an idea with legs.

Heina has a post.

I usually answer, with a smile, that I was happy. In fact, it was one of the happiest days of my life. It was the day I took my first permanent, documented, public step as an ex-Muslim ex-hijabi. 

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Collected from your comments on the several pertussis posts I did over the weekend. There are also a couple about asthma, because the terrifying inability to draw a breath is common to both. There are also a few about watching loved others suffer through the horrible illness.

carlie:

The loss of herd immunity can kick you in the ass even if you’ve done everything you can. My husband got pertussis last year – even though he was vaccinated, it can apparently wear off as you age. Usually not a huge problem, unless there’s suddenly a surge of cases of it from assholes who don’t vaccinate. He was sick for months. Didn’t break any ribs, but the coughing did such a number on his muscles that it was almost as bad. We’re also in a weird transitional time now in that it’s not supposed to be around, so isn’t necessarily treated seriously enough. It took two visits to his doctor to get it properly diagnosed, and then when he ended up in urgent care later because he was sure he had broken a rib (it was that painful), they refused to believe that he had pertussis until they got his actual records. [Read more…]

You know CFI’s Keep Health Care Safe and Secular campaign? You can help.

If you have a story of health care being interfered with or messed up or both by religious meddling or pseudoscientific bumbling, you can write it up and send it to me and I’ll publish it here. It will be one post which I’ll update if and when a new story comes in, so it can be just a paragraph if that’s all you need. (If a lot comes in I’ll do more than one post if the first gets too long.) CFI is collecting such stories, so the more the better.

Let’s do this.

This is from last March, but it’s so special it deserves resurrection. It’s about a Republican Maine state legislator, one Lawrence Lockman. He has said things. A muckraker called Mike Tipping, an activist with Maine People’s Alliance, found some of the things.

Perhaps the most inflammatory was a press statement from 1995 in which Lockman says “If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

Where to begin, eh? I guess just skip over the obvious brutality and contempt, to zoom in on the idea that rape is the “pursuit of sexual freedom.” That strikes me as a stunted and also perverse understanding of freedom.

 

The Saudi Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa was in DC last week and he took the opportunity to set everyone straight about human rights in the Kingdom.

Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa has denounced international rights groups for attacking the Kingdom’s judiciary, saying laws in this country are based on divine precepts contained in the Holy Qur’an.

“Any attack on the judiciary will be considered an attack on the Kingdom’s sovereignty,” he said recently.

Speaking to American lawyers, legal consultants and academics in Washington, Al-Eissa said many people have misunderstood Islamic laws because they follow biased information and ignore cultural differences. “This is the reason for rights organizations making big mistakes in their reports,” he said.

The minister tried to counter misconceptions about various Shariah punishments such as beheading, cutting off hands and lashing. “These punishments are based on divine religious texts and we cannot change them,” he said.

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Via Ron Lindsay on Twitter, I’m reading Scalia’s dissent (joined by Thomas) in a case decided today, ELMBROOK SCHOOL DISTRICT v. JOHN DOE. It starts on page 10.

Some there are—many, perhaps—who are offended by public displays of religion. Religion, they believe, is a personal matter; if it must be given external manifestation, that should not occur in public places where others may be offended. I can understand that attitude: It parallels my own toward the playing in public of rock music or Stravinsky.

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