United Arab Emirates Court Sentences Teenage Gang Rape Victim To Prison

The weak, cruel, unjust, and barbarically stupid misogyny of laws in the Islamic world never ceases to sicken or anger me: A court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has convicted an 18 year old girl (”LH”) to one year in prison for “consensual sex.”  The UAE court convicted her because she agreed to be alone [...]

David Vitter Confronted By Rape Victim About His Vote Against Rape Victims’ Rights To Sue Haliburton

A month ago we highlighted the unconscionable decision of 30 Republican senators to vote against Al Franken’s bill which would assure that those who were raped in connection with their employment at Haliburton’s would have rights to sue Haliburton.  In this tense exchange, a rape victim confronts one of those senators, David Vitter. A transcript [...]

30 Republican Senators Vote Against Rape Victims’ Rights To Bring Charges In Court

Yesterday, 30 Republican senators opposed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would prohibit federal defense contractors like Halliburton/KBR from getting money “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”In other words, 30 GOP senators want to deny rape victims their day in court. Just stupefying and [...]

Perspective On Polanski

Sendai Anonymous has all you need to set you straight on Polanski.  And then a little bit on the stupefying injustice to which Polish hypocrisy related to this matter sinks, (Sendai Anonymous, it’s worth noting is Polish, so this matter hits particularly close to home.  She’s also a woman, so that’s also part of why [...]

Influential Iranian Imam Supports Interrogations Using Rape

The following quotes from Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, with whom Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is said to “regularly consult,”  are graphic, sickening, and devastating to anyone with a conscience.  Read at your own discretion: Asked if a confession obtained “by applying psychological, emotional and physical pressure” was “valid and considered credible according to Islam,” Mesbah-Yazdi [...]

Pat Condell Excoriates The Left For Not Standing Up To Islamism

There is a lot to chew on in this latest rant from Pat Condell on the need for the tolerant to be more intolerant of intolerant religions than they are intolerant of denouncers of intolerant religions.  While Condell’s  attack on multiculturalism is too broad and at times his rhetoric is cringe-inducingly counter-productive, I do share [...]

Jimmy Carter Breaks With Southern Baptists Over Views Of Women

Good for President Carter: After more than 60 years together, Jimmy Carter has announced himself at odds with the Southern Baptist Church — and he’s decided it’s time they go their separate ways. Via Feministing, the former president called the decision “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted women be “subservient [...]

“Wedding” Young Girls So They Can Be Executed

This story out of Iran is nightmarish and devastating to read: He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.” In the Islamic Republic it is illegal [...]

Kantian Reasons To Lie To The Murderer At The Door?

Michael Cholbi thinks he has some: First, the lie is not meant to advance the happiness either of the liar or of the potential murder victim, but to thwart the abuse of the victim’s autonomy that her murder would represent. Hence, if lying to the murderer is manipulation at all, it is manipulation in the [...]

Challenges To Evolutionary Psychology

Interesting arguments.  I’m not sure how many of them threaten the credibility of either evolutionary psychology or sociobiology as disciplines themselves , rather than specific morally and politically unpleasant theses advanced by particular theories derived by scientists working within those fields.  And these arguments force evo psych and sociobiology to incorporate a view of the [...]