Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1903

Damn That Spam

From the October 20 issue of the New Yorker:

(Artist: Liana Finck)

Absurd Anti-Gay Group’s Tweet Sparks #WhenIMarryMyself Twitterstorm

On Monday afternoon, the National Organization for Marriage, one of the biggest anti-LGBT groups on record, basically broke the Internet with this tweet:

That tweet — When #marriage is redefined, what prevents a person from “marrying” his/herself? — was accompanied by a link to a story about a woman named Grace Gelder who held a “self-marriage ceremony” as a symbolic gesture of self-acceptance and self-love:

 I’d been essentially single for almost six years and built up this brilliant relationship with myself. Nevertheless, I was aware of getting into a rut, where a relationship with someone else seemed like too much hard work. So I really wanted to pay tribute to this adventurous period of self-discovery but, at the same time, look forward to a new phase. …

I really don’t see it as any kind of feminist statement, but creating a wedding of this kind on my own terms felt incredibly empowering.

Of course, NOM made it into a gay thing. And in response, the hashtag #WhenIMarryMyself trended nationwide, forcing us to reflect on how different our lives would be if we all put a ring on… ourselves.

I don’t have to explain why this is maybe the most hilarious, desperate argument any conservative group has ever made against marriage equality. Instead, here’s a roundup of the Internet’s most glorious reactions to NOM’s utter confusion.

Makes Thanksgiving easier.

Not gonna lie, this is my dream proposal. What a way to make sure I get what I’ve always wanted!

Can I get some of those without applying for a marriage license?

Important question.

Okay, I laughed out loud.

Finally, a loophole that works!

One mind is better than two.

Claim what is rightfully yours!

The scary part is that this will be their next argument.

Wishing you all a joyous self-wedding!

Cardinal Advocates Shunning Gay Family Members so Adults Don’t “Scandalize Their Children or Grandchildren”

Conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke (below), Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, recently spoke with anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews.

While LSN focuses largely on attacking abortion rights, it devotes a fair amount of time to disparaging the LGBT community and their rights as well. Cardinal Burke’s interview was an exclusive conversation about a presentation given during the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, in which

… the Priolas [the presenters] asked and answered a question about what parents should do in the case where their son wants to bring his homosexual partner to a Christmas dinner where their grandchildren will be present.

The Pirolas’ response, which they held up as a model for the manner in which the Catholic Church should deal with same-sex relationships, was that parents should accept the participation of the son and his homosexual partner knowing “their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family.“

While many of the bishops and cardinals in attendance approved of the presentation, it didn’t sit well with the shun-and-shame crowd. LSN interviewers asked Cardinal Burke how he would deal with that “difficult situation,” particularly with the potential for — brace yourself — children to witness the existence of gay couples:

How should Catholic parents deal with a difficult situation like this:

when planning a Christmas family gathering with grandchildren present, parents are asked by their son, who is in a homosexual relationship, if he can come and bring with him his homosexual partner?

Cardinal Burke responded:

This is a very delicate question, and it’s made even more delicate by the aggressiveness of the homosexual agenda…

By which, it seems, he means the outrageous suggestion that shunning gay family members isn’t loving or kind. (You know, all the stuff that Christianity claims to be about…)

However, he declares, since “reason… and also our faith” teach that “homosexual relations are intrinsically disordered,” the answer is, of course, no. Those gay couples would not be welcome at the Christmas gathering.

We wouldn’t, if it were another kind of relationship — something that was profoundly disordered and harmful — we wouldn’t expose our children to that relationship, to the direct experience of it. And neither should we do it in the context of a family member who not only suffers from same-sex attraction, but who has chosen to live out that attraction, to act upon it, committing acts which are always and everywhere wrong, evil.

Cardinal Burke doesn’t think that families should cut all ties, however. For good reason:

And so, families have to find a way to stay close to a child in this situation — to a son or grandson, or whatever it may be — in order to try to draw the person away from a relationship which is disordered.

And we know that with time, these relationships leave the person profoundly unhappy. And so it’s important to stay [as] close as one can. But, that particular form of relationship should not be imposed upon family members, and especially upon impressionable children. And I urge parents or grandparents — whoever it may be — to be very, very prudent in this matter and not to scandalize their children or grandchildren.

Burke doesn’t seem to see the irony that his own life’s work has been to tell people, including “impressionable children,” all about supernatural beings and hordes of vengeful demons…

As for any suffering that might arise from these demonstrably harmful shunning practices? Burke has an answer for that as well. A typically pious, religious answer.

It certainly is a source of great suffering, but striving to do what is right and good always involves suffering. And in this case, it surely will. But that suffering will indeed be redemptive in the end.

In other words: what we’re doing might be terrible, and it might cause measurable harm… but it’s all for the best because it’s what God wants.

(Image via Wikipedia)

“Psychic” Sally Morgan Fires Family Members After Video Surfaces of Them Threatening a Skeptic Outside Her Show

Just a couple of days ago, I posted about how people close to Sally Morgan (a.k.a. Psychic Sally) threatened a skeptic who was warning people about how her tricks work outside her shows. To recap, she is one of those people who claims to have the ability to speak to the dead (a la John Edward). And, for a price, she’ll speak to your deceased loved ones.

Mark Tilbrook sees her as a con artist who takes money from vulnerable people despite having no supernatural powers whatsoever. So he has stood outside the performance center at some of her recent events, handing out leaflets like the one below, urging audience members to keep their minds open and to be on the lookout for telltale signs that nobody is “crossing over” at all:

This week, Tilbrook released video of himself standing outside one of these events and receiving death threats and a barrage of homophobic comments from both Morgan’s husband and son-in-law:

You can read more about the aftermath here.

Today, Morgan issued a statement on her website saying her husband and son-in-law have been fired:

Today Sally Morgan made a firm decision to sack her husband John Morgan and Son in Law Daren Wiltshear after recent video footage shows them using violent and threatening behaviour.

As of today John Morgan no longer holds his position as Sally’s Personal Manager and Daren Wiltshear no longer holds the position of Tour Manager. Both John and Daren will have nothing more to do with Sally Morgan’s business, including her live shows, which they will no longer be attending.

Sally Morgan added “I have come from a family background that has always been very accepting, many of my friends are gay and I have always felt happy that I am often referred to as a gay icon through my work. I am utterly ashamed and devastated at the behaviour of my husband John and Son in Law Daren and neither of them will have anything to do with my work, my business and right now I honestly have no idea what is going to happen to my marriage”.

There will be many more important decisions being made over the course of this week.

So… that had to be an awkward conversation with them…

Let’s hope she’s telling the truth. Given the moral bankruptcy of what she does for a living, it’d be nice to see her taking the high ground for once.

That said, this is also a pretty easy way to deflect the negative attention off of her so that she can go right back to ripping people off through cold readings. And since you can’t really distance yourself from family members like you could other employees, it’s hard to believe her husband and son-in-law will suddenly have nothing to do with her business at all. Even if they don’t attend her live shows, it would be very easy for them to work behind the scenes.

Okay. Cue all the jokes about how they should have seen this coming.

(via Tim Farley. Large portions of this article were posted earlier)

In New York, Man From Ivory Coast Allegedly Sodomized His Wife, Then Performed Genital Mutilation On Her

A bizarre and disturbing story, via Opposing Views:

Moussa Diarra, 48, an African native, wanted to have anal intercourse with his 24-year-old wife. When she refused, he forcibly sodomized her before attempting to circumcise the woman around 9 p.m. Sept. 14 at his Manhattan apartment, the New York Post reports.

The victim called police about a week after the assault. Diarra, who is a native of the Ivory Coast, where male and female circumcision is widespread, was arrested on Sept. 23, according to court records.

There are African countries, such as Nigeria, whose Christian populations engage in female genital mutilation (FGM) on a scale equal to or greater than Muslims perform FGM in their families and communities. That’s not the case in Ivory Coast, where, a U.S. State Department report says,

The practice is prevalent among Muslim women, and is also deeply rooted in traditional Animist initiation rites in western, central and northern Cote d’Ivoire.

The practice on village women is strongly linked to the survival of local secret societies and mask-cults at the heart of village spiritual life. The clitoris is thought to possess power and its removal during initiation gives that power to the village spirits and traditional spiritual leaders or masks, without which the spirits/masks and the entire village would die.

Attempts to eradicate the practice, or even to transform it from a physical to a symbolic act, are perceived as threatening to “assassinate the people” of the village.

More about what exactly took place in the Diarra household, and why, should come out at trial. The suspect is scheduled to appear in court on October 27. He faces charges of forcible sex act, aggravated sexual assault by compulsion, attempted assault with intent to disfigure or dismember, and assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon.

He maintains that the allegations are false, and says he doesn’t know who cut his wife.

Friendly Atheist Podcast Episode 24: Monica Snyder, Secular Pro-Life

Our latest podcast guest is Monica Snyder of the group Secular Pro-Life, a group that seeks to unite pro-lifers, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. She has worked with the group since its inception in 2009.

We spoke with Monica about where she fits in among both the pro-life and secular worlds, how she was rejected from volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center because of her beliefs, and why merely focusing on contraception access may not be a viable strategy for her organization.

This episode is sponsored by Be Secular. Readers of this site can get a 10% discount on products by using the promo code “Friendly”!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, get the MP3 directly, check it out on Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below.

And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

“Pray For Us,” Says Lawyer for Nuns Who Are Accused of Decades of Child Abuse in Native-American School

When the topic is Catholic pedophilia, we tend to think of the perpetrators as priests — men. This upcoming child sexual abuse trial in Montana has only female defendants, though.

[T]he Ursuline Sisters of the Western Province will defend themselves against allegations that 11 sisters who served at the St. Ignatius Mission church and school on the Flathead Indian Reservation from the 1940s to the early 1970s physically, sexually and emotionally abused boarding and day school students.

While about 5,000 priests and deacons in the United States have been accused of sexual abuse since 2003 in cases stretching back into the 1950s, the best estimates of U.S. women religious accused of abuse — not counting the 11 in this case — is around 88, according to Bishop-accountability.org, an online archive established by lay Catholics to track abuse claims.

An Ursine nun. (Close enough, right?)

The Montana padres, in a 2011 suit, were hit with similar charges:

A separate lawsuit against the diocese… alleged the diocese covered up abuse by its priests; that case led to the diocese declaring bankruptcy and it is in the final stages of settlement. The diocese agreed to $15 million in compensation, at least $2.5 million for future claims, a public apology and publication of the names of abusive clergy members.

The lawsuit against the Ursuline sisters came after the accused nuns declared for years that they are open to a settlement; negotiations, however, proved fruitless.

The plaintiffs claim that

[T]he Ursulines and the diocese knew or should have known about the alleged abuse and asks for unspecified damages. It alleges the Ursulines “engaged in a pattern and practice of sheltering, and protecting nuns, who it knew or should have known, were engaging in sexual abuse,” and transferred sisters in and out “to ensure that children did not complain of the abuse and/or that parents did not discover the abuse.” …

Given the number of plaintiffs and the seriousness of the allegations, a judgment could spell financial ruin for the Ursuline congregation.

Their attorney, [John] Christian, would only say, “Pray for us.”

It would appear to be a little late for that.

Salman Rushdie, in Speech, Assails “New Age of Religious Mayhem”

Novelist Salman Rushdie picked up another major literary award (the PEN Pinter Prize) the other day and minced no words about the Islamist ideology that has literally threatened his life for the last quarter-century.

It’s pretty brave, if you ask me. The death threats are ongoing, and yet Rushdie appears in public and speaks out.

Rushdie voiced his fears that the language of “jihadi-cool” is seducing young British Muslims, many via Twitter and YouTube, into joining the “decapitating barbarianism” of Isil, the group also referred to as Islamic State or Isis. …

Rushdie defined “jihadi-cool” as “the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry,” saying: “It’s hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today.”

Rushdie then had some choice words about the favorite slur of his detractors.

“A word I dislike greatly, ‘Islamophobia’, has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.

And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims… “It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.

I can’t, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, led towards acts of extreme bestiality, believe themselves to be fighting a just war.”

The author made sure to say that he won’t give other religions a free ride either.

“[M]ore than one religion deserves scrutiny. Christian extremists in the United States today attack women’s liberties and gay rights in language they claim comes from God. Hindu extremists in India today are launching an assault on free expression and trying, literally, to rewrite history, proposing the alteration of school textbooks to serve their narrow saffron dogmatism. But the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia.”

What really sticks in radical Islam’s craw, Rushdie alleged, is modernity.

“Modernity itself is the enemy – modernity with its language of liberty, for women as well as men, with its insistence of legitimacy in government rather than tyranny, and with its strong inclination towards secularism and away from religion.”

We now are, he said,

… “too frightened of religion in general, and one religion in particular — religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god… in which the narrow pseudo-explications of religion, couched in the new – or actually very old – vocabulary of blasphemy and offence, have increasingly begun to set the agenda.”

(Image via andersphoto / Shutterstock.com)

If Catholic School Employees Had to Live By The Bible, They’d All Get Fired

Marriage equality may have swept the nation last week, but LGBT people are far from equal. Even in places where LGBT individuals and same-sex couples are granted some array of legal rights, religious institutions routinely fire LGBT teachers after they come out or get married.

The most common explanation is that gay teachers aren’t upholding Catholic ideals when they pursue or “flaunt” their relationships. When they get hired, teachers at these schools are often asked to sign agreements stating they’ll abide by “Catholic principles.” If someone gets outed as LGBT, administrators use these documents to claim a breach of contract, then send the gays on their way.

In practice, the terms of these contracts don’t do much except ban same-sex relationships, ignoring a host of other prohibitions the Bible sets. In an excellent op-ed for the New York Times titled “The Church’s Gay Obsession,” openly gay columnist Frank Bruni explains why that’s such an issue:

Repeatedly over the last year and a half, I’ve written about teachers in Catholic schools and leaders in Catholic parishes who were dismissed from their posts because they were in same-sex relationships and — in many cases — had decided to marry.

Every time, more than a few readers weighed in to tell me that these people had it coming. If you join a club, they argued, you play by its rules or you suffer the consequences.

Oh really?

The rules of this particular club prohibit divorce, yet the pews of many of the Catholic churches I’ve visited are populous with worshipers on their second and even third marriages. They walk merrily to the altar to receive communion, not a peep of protest from a soul around them. They participate fully in the rituals of the church, their membership in the club uncontested.

The rules prohibit artificial birth control, and yet most of the Catholic families I know have no more than three children, which is either a miracle of naturally capped fecundity or a sign that someone’s been at the pharmacy. I’m not aware of any church office that monitors such matters, poring over drugstore receipts. And I haven’t heard of any teachers fired or parishioners denied communion on the grounds of insufficiently brimming broods.

We talk about this all the time in the context of Biblical opposition to homosexuality. For starters, many argue that the Bible says virtually nothing negative about same-sex relationships. Still more point out that some passages could actually be interpreted as condoning same-sex relationships (but everyone has their own take on that).

But those who do justify their intolerance with scripture tend to overlook plenty of other rules the Bible has set. Especially guilty of this are the institutions that fire people for being LGBT and then try to hide behind arbitrary guidelines so they don’t look like bigots.

Bruni spoke about this with Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College. She added that supporting the death penalty is against Catholic teaching, yet few Catholic leaders have spoken up during heated national conversations about the topic.

“The bishops have picked up gay marriage ever since the 2004 presidential election as a special cause that they are against,” Cahill noted. She said that they were “staking out a countercultural Catholic identity” that doesn’t focus on “social justice and economic issues.”

“It’s about sex and gender issues,” she said, adding that it might be connected to the disgrace that church leaders brought upon themselves with their disastrous handling of child sexual abuse by priests. Perhaps, she said, they’re determined to find some sexual terrain on which they can strike a position of stern rectitude.

“They’re trying to regain the moral high ground, no matter how sure it is to backfire,” she said. Having turned a blind eye to nonconsensual sex that ravaged young lives, they’re holding the line against consensual sex that wounds no one.

Divorce? Premarital sex? Mixed fabrics? Shellfish? Shaving your beard? All outlawed by the Bible, but considered pretty morally lukewarm. And, as Bruni pointed out, nobody gets fired for having a lobster dinner with their second wife. If it’s written in the Bible, shouldn’t it be part of a “Catholic code of conduct,” too?

Maybe not. Homosexuality is the flashiest abomination to call out and punish, even though it doesn’t get much special attention in the Bible. And even then, it’s not necessarily being gay that gets you booted out, but “acting” gay, like proclaiming your love for someone else through marriage. Because homosexuality is cool when you keep it quiet, but as soon as you register at Crate and Barrel, you’re a threat to society. Right?

It’s crucial to remember that in many cases in which the church has punished same-sex couples, their homosexuality and even their same-sex partnerships were widely known and tacitly condoned for some time beforehand. What changed was their interest in a civil marriage, suddenly made possible by laws that are evolving more humanely than the church is. The couples in question stepped up and made loving commitments of a kind that the church celebrates in other circumstances. For this they were spurned. It’s shameful.

And it contradicts Catholic principles apart from those governing same-sex relations, as [Rev. James] Martin observed in a column in the Catholic magazine America earlier this year. Catholic teaching, he wrote, “also says that gay and lesbian people must be treated with ‘respect, sensitivity and compassion.’”

Bruni and Cahill hit the nail on the head: Time after time, the church makes an exception to its otherwise lenient Bible-following in order to condemn homosexuality, particularly homosexuality that takes a tangible, committed, perfectly legal form. And in many scenarios, it can mean a person is out of a job for something as traditional as getting married or having a baby.

What’s happening amounts to persecution. And it’s occurring not because the workers in these situations called any special attention to themselves or made any political fuss. No, they just loved in a fashion displeasing to many church officials, whose concerns with purity are spasmodic and capricious.

Martin said that those officials weren’t ferreting out and flogging people who fail to pay fair wages to their employees or to be charitable to the poor, which are mandates of Catholic social teaching.

“If you’re going to apply these litmus tests, apply them across the board,” he said, not recommending as much but making the point that if that happened, “We would empty out Catholic institutions of all of their employees, and no one would be able to present themselves in the communion line.”

This is a wake-up call for all kinds of change. Marriage equality and protection from workplace discrimination are critical, but they can’t fix the casual Catholic homophobia that locks qualified people out of entire career opportunities. We need religious institutions to abolish random qualifications for employment and recognize that virtually nobody lives entirely under the Bible’s recommendations.

And if they can’t be bothered to stop their selective discrimination, they need to at least own up to it.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Church Sign of the Day

Seen in rural Oklahoma.

Is that your considered legal opinion, pastor?

(via Reddit)