Sickening: The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns. The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns. Most of the abuse [...]
via PZ Myers comes a vital video by Chloe Heintz: UPDATE: Now there’s a follow up interview with Chloe from CBSNews.com Your Thoughts?
Rachel Maddow covers the remarkable story about Wyoming State Representatives Lisa Shepperson and Sue Wallis making a small government conservatism argument against a paternalistic proposed abortion law: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Wallis is the mother of 7 and the grandmother of 1. More about her can be [...]
A moral and legal dilemma: When a B.C. couple discovered that the fetus their surrogate mother was carrying was likely to be born with Down syndrome, they wanted an abortion. The surrogate, however, was determined to take the pregnancy to term, sparking a disagreement that has raised thorny questions about the increasingly common arrangements. Get [...]
ProfMTH explores legal definitions that define sex acquired through fraud as rape: I have argued before, formally speaking, deception is a kind of force. Laws which treat procurement of sex through fraud as a form of rape seem to stem from similar considerations of the relationship between at least certain forms of deliberate deceit and [...]
Cultural variation is amazing: Your Thoughts?
Feministing: Sister Margaret McBride has been demoted from her position at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, AZ after participating in the approval of an abortion for a critically ill patient in 2009. McBride was part of the hospital ethics committee that approved an abortion for a patient with pulmonary hypertension, which can be [...]
Full video of Sandel’s talk: Your Thoughts?
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Zombietime has the excerpts from new “science czar” John Holdren’s 1977 book, in which he advocates the following: • Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not; • The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food; • [...]
From Feministing, worth reading in full: But then the argument goes: surely for the women who choose to wear the burqa, the garment is a choice not a tool for suppression. This argument obscures the fact that there is a pervasive, sexist propaganda in many Muslim communities in favor of the burqa. Many women are [...]
Via 538 Warner (1991) and Warner and Steel (1999) study American and Canadian mothers and fathers. The authors’ key finding is that support for policies designed to address gender equity is greater among parents with daughters. This result emerges particularly strongly for fathers. Because parents invest a significant amount of themselves in their children, the [...]
A youtube point-counterpoint on this topic (on which I am still interested in your thoughts). Click here for Njustus’s stab at the topic and my attempt to play devil’s advocate against him. Pro-ban: Anti-ban: Your Thoughts?
Njustus has kindly accepted my gauntlet to readers to offer on the possibility of the French government outlawing women from publicly wearing burqas. And his reply is a good one: From a Lockean ’social contract’ perspective, I believe the state should have the power to regulate the wearing of burqas if it can offer a [...]
France, which has already banned headscarves in schools, purportedly as an effort to separate church and state, is now considering banning the burqa in public since it represents servitude and indignity for women (according to Sarkozy). Click here for the full story and links to perspectives on the option. Would the effects of this be [...]