Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Right wing Republicans keep on saying that it’s okay to deny same-sex couples equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Constitution because same-sex marriages are inherently unnatural. The idea is that anything unnatural is therefore ungodly. Of course, these Republicans don’t spend their time attacking unnatural things like cars, or light bulbs, or chewy granola bars. Their righteous wrath is oddly restrained to just same-sex marriage.

The scientific truth is that same-sex marriages are not really unnatural at all. There are many examples of same-sex reproduction in nature. In fact, in many species, three are no males at all – only females who breed with each other. Then there are hermaphrodites, like snails, and even fruit trees. Oh, the immorality!

Today there’s a report of research by Lindsay Young, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. Her studies have included observations of lesbian albatrosses setting up long-term nesting relationships with each other that involve considerable physical intimacy.

Same-sex marriage occurs in nature, it seems. Therefore, same-sex marriage is natural. By the standards of right wing Republicans, that ought to mean that evangelical churches should start pushing Congress to make same-sex marriage legal across the United States.

How likely do you think that is it happen? Maybe the right wing Republicans’ efforts to deny equal protection under the law to same-sex couples doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s natural. Maybe they’re just jerks.

Here’s a clue to understanding the language of Homeland Security: If you want to discover the torture devices they’re developing for use against prisoners, search for the phrase, “nonlethal weapon”.

Case in point: The LED Incapacitator.

The LED Incapacitator is a special kind of flashlight that is designed to emit light in certain patterns and wavelengths in such a way as to force people to vomit.

The blog Mind Modulations says of the LED Incapacitator that it could be used to bring “a bad guy” into custody.

Substitute “criminal suspect” for “bad guy”. This LED Incapacitator may be nonlethal, but it is a form of physical and psychological attack.

The same blog relays the idea that a larger could be used against “a mob”.

Substitute “group of protesters” for “mob”, and you see another way in which this kind of attack technology can go terribly wrong.

We know that our government follows the Joseph Lieberman school of torture: That so long as you don’t leave a permanent mark, you can inflict whatever kind of suffering you want to against prisoners and criminal suspects.

The LED Incapacitator is one more instrument of torture that can be used by the Homeland Security goons against us.

Liberals may decry Republican double standards, citing the proliferation of prostitution whenever the Republicans are in power. I say,  bring back the hookers.  It lets the interns off the hook.

There were many who said that Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions were a personal problem and had nothing to do with the way he was able to govern the country.  I thought that too, until I became part of the federal government through the United State Peace Corps.

Think of this: Monika Lewinsky was an employee, an intern.  Bill Clinton was her boss.  Is any employee ever really free to turn down the boss?    And when the CEO of a corporation is doing something, can the rank and file ever really say there is anything wrong with someone else doing it?

The culture within the federal government during the time I was associated with it said no.  If you turn down one of those Washington types, the current wisdom went,  your career wouldn’t last. Maybe that’s why the Peace Corps publicizes it’s surveys about “feelings” instead of the actual number of assaults or its fifty percent attrition rate, which they try to hide from the public.  Sexual harassment within the agency is a totally taboo subject–the people most likely to do it are the same people responsible for reporting and stopping it. Maybe that’s why Peace Corps volunteers feel pressured to find a romantic interest with local clout as soon as they are in country. Or why the Peace Corps–and Chris Dodd–worked so hard to defeat the Peace Corps Safety and Security bill that would have established an Ombudsman for volunteers as well as an independent Inspector General.

Can you imagine–the IG, the guy responsible for oversight of the agency, reports to the agency’s director.  That might be all right for agencies where those making judgments have some job security in the form of civil service protection, but Peace Corps is under a five-year rule. Most employees have their contracts renewed every two and a half years, up to a maximum of five years, a good formula for producing rubber stamps.

Bill Clinton didn’t just have an affair, like former President Harding and presidential hopeful McCain.  He got involved with an employee, and he got away with it, creating a predatory atmosphere for female employees throughout the federal system.  His actions paralyzed his administration and its ability to enact any of its ideals in his second term.  Hillary Clinton did not have any good options.  If she stood by her man, she would be an enabler of something corrosive in the political system.  If she didn’t, she would lose everything she had worked for in her entire political life, as well as the opportunity to make a difference in the future with her considerable talents. I have nothing but admiration for the way Hillary Clinton has carried herself and served the country.  But I have a bad taste in my mouth about bureaucrats who are sexual predators and the corporate cultural that lets them get away with it.

Let’s get that out of the government offices and back into the brothels where it belongs.

The sadistic absurdity of the refusal by George W. Bush and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to admit that waterboarding is torture has been exposed to the unkind spotlight of reality again, this time by the Bush Administration’s own Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell. McConnell, who along with Mukasey is given the authority by the Protect America Act to conduct massive, unsupervised operations of electronic spying against the American people, has told the New Yorker magazine that yes, by golly, if he were subjected to waterboarding, he would personally regard it as torture.

However, McConnell refused to provide an official legal opinion stating as much. That would subject lots of people in the U.S. government to criminal prosecution, he explained.

How sad that Michael McConnell’s only moral scruples are exercised to protect people who conduct techniques that he regards as torture.

How can American citizens sit so contentedly with such a person as their nation’s Spy-In-Chief?

Spam Alert

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…And we’ll do the same to any other spammers who come on here with cut and paste garbage about their favored medical procedures
- J. Clifford

A follow-up to the story of the Saudi government punishing a rape victem located here.

News Article

Saudis defend punishment for rape victim
Wed Nov 21, 9:19 AM ET

The Saudi judiciary on Tuesday defended a court verdict that sentenced a 19-year-old victim of a gang rape to six months in jail and 200 lashes because she was with an unrelated male when they were attacked.

The Shiite Muslim woman had initially been sentenced to 90 lashes after being convicted of violating Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes.

But in considering her appeal of the verdict, the Saudi General Court increased the punishment. It also roughly doubled prison sentences for the seven men convicted of raping the woman, Saudi news media said last week.

The reports triggered an international outcry over the Saudis punishing the victim of a terrible crime.

But the Ministry of Justice stood by the verdict Tuesday, saying that “charges were proven” against the woman for having been in a car with a man who was not her relative.

The ministry implied the victim’s sentence was increased because she spoke out to the press. “For whoever has an objection on verdicts issued, the system allows an appeal without resorting to the media,” said the statement, which was carried on the official Saudi Press Agency.

The attack occurred in 2006. The victim says she was in a car with a male student she used to know trying to retrieve a picture of her. She says two men got into the car and drove them to a secluded area where she was raped by seven men. Her friend also was assaulted.

Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts according to the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Judges have wide discretion in punishing criminals, rules of evidence are vague and sometimes no defense lawyer is present. The result, critics say, are sentences left to the whim of judges. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light sentence to death.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack avoided directly criticizing the Saudi judiciary over the case, but said the verdict “causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment.”

“It is within the power of the Saudi government to take a look at the verdict and change it,” McCormack said.

Canada’s minister for women’s issues, Jose Verger, has called the sentence “barbaric.”

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the verdict “not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators.”

I’m sorry, but you can try to make any excuse you want to explain away this type of behavior but I can’t view this sort of thing as anything less than the most outrageous, disgusting, immoral perversion of justice that I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

Every so often I’ll see something that can fill me with such disgust and outrage it becomes difficult to express my feelings. This is one of those times.

And to anyone who claims that the members and writers of Irregular Times give Islam a free ride while harping on Christianity, I’m about to prove you wong.

Female rape victim gets 200 lashes and jail
From correspondents in Riyadh
November 16, 2007 07:15am

A COURT in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail.
The 19-year-old woman – whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms – was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

Saudi Arabia enforces a strict Islamic doctrine known as Wahhabism and forbids unrelated men and women from associating with each other, bans women from driving and forces them to cover head-to-toe in public.

Last year, the court sentenced six Saudi men to between one and five years in jail for the rape as well as ordering lashes for the victim, a member of the minority Shi’ite community.

But the woman’s lawyer Abdul Rahman al-Lahem appealed, arguing that the punishments were too lenient in a country where the offence can carry the death penalty.

In the new verdict issued on Wednesday, the Al-Qatif court also toughened the sentences against the six men to between two and nine years in prison.

The case has angered members of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite community. The convicted men are Sunni Muslims, the dominant community in the oil-rich Gulf state.

Mr Lahem, also a human rights activist, said yesterday the court had banned him from handling the rape case and withdrew his licence to practise law because he challenged the verdict.

He said he has also been summoned by the ministry of justice to appear before a disciplinary committee in December.

Mr Lahem said the move might be due to his criticism of some judicial institutions, and “contradicts King Abdullah’s quest to introduce reform, especially in the justice system.”

King Abdullah last month approved a new body of laws regulating the judicial system in Saudi Arabia, which rules on the basis of sharia, or Islamic law.

This is the kind of people who the USA supports. We’re allies with Saudi Arabia even though the majority of the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 were from there and we’re even sending them military equipment.

When I first read this, I admit, I found I could easily renounce an anti-violence ideal if it meant I could deal some Old Testament type punishment on the people involved with this story, but right now it’s making me feel sick to my stomach.

Religion of peace my achin’ ass.

I’ve been browsing through some fundamentalist religious quotes on Fundies Say The Darndest Things and from what I can tell most of those quotes can be broken up into five basic categories:

-Anti-Evolution
-Anti-Homosexuality
-Anti-Abortion
-Anti-other religions
-Miscellaneous

Now, while I could go and tackle each and every one of those points and their reasons behind them, I want to focus on the Anti-Homo part of it during this entry.

I’ve heard many justifications for this type of bigotry and they’ve come in many forms from calm explanations to near hysterical SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS-LOCK!!!1!111!!

But whatever form it takes on it always seems to come back to one thing: “Its an abomination against God” and to support this stance and their own bigotry they’ll site Leviticus 18:22. However most of these same people, when you point anything else out they’ll say that the New Testament did away with the Old Testament and therefore the Old Testament is now invalid. Except, just now to confirm what I was already pretty sure of, I looked up the book of Leviticus, and guess what I found?

Leviticus is a part of the Old Testament.

Now, rather than use the point of eating shell-fish to counter their argument and show them as hypocrites, I’m just going to start pointing out what they already believe; that Jesus’ sacrifice rendered the Old Testament obsolete (seeing as they seem so intent on ignoring Matthew 5:18-19 and Luke 16:17 when it suits them) and that therefore Homosexuality must be just fine so long as those damn homos except Jesus as their savior. After all, the Old Testament is invalid according to them, right?

Now, if they somehow claim that homosexuality is a sin and yet the Old Testament is still void, I feel I’d be well justified in pointing out their hypocrisy.

Tonight I was researching various topics on paganism and ancient revivalism when I came across a Wikipedia article about a group of pagans in Greece who were trying to gain equal rights in the eyes of the Greek government. It seems that prior to 2006, all religions except Christianity, Judaism and Islam had been banned. An Athenian court seems to have overruled that.

The story regarding this can be found here (I may post a separate diary entry about this later).

When I read about their desire to be allowed to worship in the Parthenon, I looked it up on Wikipedia for clarification. The article listed pollution hazards and I found myself curious enough to read on. It seems that acid rain from the growth of Athens and the exhaust from cars has caused irreparable damage to the sculptures in the Parthenon.

Pollution is a bad thing, not only for the harm it does to ourselves and our environment but for the harm it does to our history. When historical landmarks and wonders of the ancient world are threatened by our pollution, isn’t it time to do something?

I see this and then I see conservatives calling for less restraints put on pollution control and I find it hard to believe that they could be so caviler and arrogant not to see the harm that is already happening. Is there nothing at all more important than grabbing for that extra dollar?

This weekend, the Roman Catholic Church diocese for Buffalo and Western New York announced that a large number of their churches would be closed as part of a program entitled, “Journey in Faith and Grace.” Non-Catholics may not be familiar with that phrase, which comes from a Latin term that can also be translated as “A Whole Bunch of Our Priests Had Sex With Little Boys and then We Had To Settle in Court and so No One Wants To Give Our Churches Money Any More”.