On The “Compassion” In The Catholic Bishops’ Letter To Congress Against Gay Rights

Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation.  Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that [...]

Workshop To Teach Public School Teachers How To Proselytize In School

Because no legal or moral principles matter more to some fundamentalists than their drive to evangelize: “Every day, 55 million American children and their teachers show up for school. For the nearly 90% who attend a public school, the ACLU and other anti-Christian organizations have systematically stripped almost every vestige of Christianity from their schools. [...]

Multicultural Human Rights

Johann Hari makes the argument that we have the right to stand up for the rights of those in other cultures without fear that we are not “multicultural” enough: Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don’t know, who have a different culture or colour [...]

The Rise Of Islamo-Erotica

(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art.  Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]

Is Shari’a Law “Inevitable” For UK Muslims?

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims it is: Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4′s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social [...]

Cults Of Inerrant Leaders

Glenn Greenwald summarizes an atrocity of institutionalized injustice, whereby the executive branch of the United States has the power to abduct and torture innocent people with impunity: The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning [...]

Should Church Vandalism Be Considered A Hate Crime?

That’s essentially what New York state senator Jeffrey Klein is arguing when he explains proposed legislation to make vandalizing a house of worship a felony. And I agree with him.  Desecrating the grounds of institutions that represent specific subset communities is not simply attacking the specific owners of that property but sending a threatening message [...]

Lars Vilks, Recently Attacked At Speech, Joins “Kill Lars Vilks” Facebook Group

After he drew Mohammed with the body of a dog, an Al-Qaeda front organization put a bounty on Lars Vilks’s head: $100,000 for killing him and $150,000 if it’s a death by slit throat.  He was recently attacked at a talk he was giving when he showed photos of his controversy riling drawings. Now he [...]

Angry Atheist Debate About A Mosque Near Ground Zerosts

Saturday I put together a large post highlighting a spectrum of thoughtful and/or provocative opinions on the recently approved plan to build a mosque a couple of blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York.  That day, for the sake of balance, I wanted to find someone who could [...]

8: The Mormon Proposition

8: The Mormon Proposition, a new movie out in theaters next Friday and available on DVD in July, explores the way that a tax exempt organization has waged a “secretive, decades-long campaign against gay rights”: Thanks to Richard for the link. Your Thoughts?

U.S. Bishops Argue Employers Should Be Allowed To Consider Being Gay A Fireable Offense

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter addressed to the United States Congress people opposing ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act For the sake of clarity, permit us first to state two basic tenets of Catholic Church teaching on this issue. First, persons with a homosexual inclination “must be accepted with respect, compassion, [...]

Justice Stevens’s Legacy On Liberty

Cliff Sloan, a former clerk of retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, makes a four part case that he was the greatest (non-chief) Justice in American history.  His second point of evidence is Justice Stevens’s vigorous defense of personal liberty, including his contribution to the long overdue overturning laws criminalizing gay sex: Second, Justice [...]

American Academy Of Pediatrics Reverses Support For Female Circumcision “Compromise”

The American Academy of Pediatrics had proposed permitting American doctors to ritually “nick” the clitorises of girls whose parents want to maintain their customs in America.  The thinking was that this compromise would prevent such parents from going underground to have a fuller mutilation of the clitoris carried out instead.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that [...]

Burqa Banning: A Religious Or Cultural Issue?

Another thoughtful and passionate debate on this difficult issue from the land down under: Your Thoughts?

ZJ Defends “Everybody Draws Muhammad Day”

Your Thoughts?

Mikey Weinstein: Saving The U.S. Military From God

Foreign Policy has a profile of Mikey Weinstein who tirelessly works to combat the efforts of fundamentalist Christians to co-opt the U.S. military for purposes of religious recruitment and religious crusades: Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He [...]

Teachers Suspended For Sprinkling “Holy Water” On Atheist Colleague

Last weekend I discussed the incident in which a teacher accused two other teachers of bullying her over her atheism by threatening to sprinkle her with “holy water” (in the form of a bottle of perfume).  I agreed with the atheist teacher’s assessment that she was being bullied but did not think the passive aggressive [...]

Should Religions Be Exempt From Laws Otherwise Applicable To Others?

ProfMTH explores the issue with a wealth of information, siding against such exemptions: The second video is chock full of legal information.  The most interesting bit in here is where he discusses Antonin Scalia’s strong case against religious exemptions and Sonia Sotomayor’s general support for them. 1. Regarding Christian Legal Society v. Martinez– –the decision [...]

Teachers Accused Of Bullying Atheist Colleague

South Florida News reports: The district is looking into whether the women at Ely High School tried to bully the counterpart into becoming a believer. “The students whom I interviewed said that’s absolutely untrue,” said Fort Lauderdale attorney Johnny McCray, who represents both teachers, Leslie Rainer and Djuna Robinson. He says the two didn’t have [...]

Nigerian Witch-Hunter Tries To Silence Critics

Below is the just the first two parts of the British documentary “Saving Africa’s Witch Children”, which exposes the horrendous child abuse carried out in Africa under the pretense of exorcism, followed by today’s New York Times article relaying the denials and excuses offered by Helen Ukpabio, a dangerous promoter of these heinous practices: [Helen] Ukpabio’s critics [...]

The Best Of Shepard Smith: Taking On BP, Torture, Anti-Vaxers, Glenn Beck, Joe The Plumber, & More

FOX News’s one passionately sane and moral voice last week went after BP executive Tony Hayward for his flippant attitude towards the ecological disaster his company has recently wrought.  The man is an oasis amidst his network’s cynical demagoguery and sincere lunacy. And, of course, there is his passionate denunciation of torture from over a [...]

Saudi Girls Pepper Spray Religious Enforcers

On the heals of the story we highlighted the other day in which a Saudi Woman attacked a member of the Saudi Commision for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for harassing her over her clothing, Ashaq Al-Awsat reports another heartening incident along the same lines: Dammam, Asharq Al-Awsat- Members of Khobar’s Commission [...]

Frenchwoman Rips Off Muslim Convert’s Burqa

The Telegraph calls it “burka rage”: A 26-year-old Muslim convert was walking through the store in Trignac, near Nantes, in the western Loire-Atlantique region, when she overhead the woman lawyer making “snide remarks about her black burka”. A police officer close to the case said: “The lawyer said she was not happy seeing a fellow [...]

The Simpsons On South Park’s Mohammed Depiction Problem

via Your Thoughts?

Atheist In Liverpool Sentenced To 6 Months In Jail For Blasphemy

In late 2008 Harry Taylor was arrested for putting anti-religious leaflets in a prayer room in the John Lennon airport in Liverpool.   The specific charge was an Anti-Social Behaviour Order.  Here are a few of the images for which he would be going to jail for 6 months were his sentence not suspended for [...]