Red Mist Descends

I should really know better: when trying to work, don't read news that isn't sport.  I'll just find something that makes me rage too much to concentrate.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has distanced himself from the South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who described abortion advocates as "pro-death" and suggested children raised by single parents were more likely to be promiscuous and law breakers.

Bernardi’s new book, The Conservative Revolution, also argues against other "non-traditional" families including step families and same-sex families, and says the “understanding that children come into families as gifts, not commodities” is missing in the push for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and surrogacy.

It seems the Senator also likes to criticise Islam, for reasons I'm sure are completely intellectual and not xenophobic.

Airport Security Does Something Useful

This story has me conflicted.

Teenage girls who fear they are being taken abroad to enter into a forced marriage are using a simple trick to escape: hiding a spoon or any other metal object in their underwear to set off the metal detector at the airport and avoid the flight at the last minute.

On the one hand, it's a story of success: these girls are avoiding a nasty fate with a simple but ingenious idea.  On the other, they shouldn't have to.

The idea is apparently being promoted by charity Karma Nirvana, that I previously wasn't aware of.  According to the news article linked above,

Its founder, Jasvinder Sanghera, was disowned by her Sikh family at the age of 16 after she refused to marry a man in India. She set up the charity in 1993, when she was 27.

And from the charity's website,

If you’re here to tell us that we can please all cultures without causing the slightest bit of offence - well, frankly, you’ve come to the wrong place.

I'll be in the UK next month, so it should be a good time for me to send some money their way.

A Little Good News

It's always good to celebrate the small victories in life:

A Mississippi judge has kept in place a temporary block on a law that could see the state's only abortion clinic close its doors.

Of course, the idea of there being only one clinic in the whole of Mississippi is hardly to be filed under "good", but at one is better than none.

This article from the Guardian, written before today's ruling, points out that the anti-abortion groups have gotten smarter.  They've more or less realised that outright evil actions---killing doctors, bombing facilities---don't actually win for them.  If they want to succeed in their goal to end women's control over their own bodies, they need to present things with a more reasonably facade.  Hence the law that is trying to shut down Mississippi's last facility claims to be about women's health.  Of course, in a sick sense it is; it's about making it worse.

There's a parallel to another cause celebre of the religious right, creationism.  The wedge strategy is an attempt to push religion into science classes under the fraudulent banner of academic freedom, much as this law pushes religion under the pretence of health.  The only good thing about that comparison is that the attempts to push creationism have failed; I'm not optimistic enough to think the same will happen in Mississippi.

Atheism and Feminism

One of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn was that just because someone agrees with you on one thing, no matter how important that thing is, doesn't mean they can't be a complete shit in some other way.  And even knowing this doesn't stop it being disappointing when it happens.  I bring this up because I want to talk about the arguments that arose out of ElevatorGate in the skeptic/atheist community over the last eighteen months or so.

Now, after all this time I don't have too much to add to the substance of the "debate" itself.  From the links to the right, it should be easy to see that I come down on the side of Rebecca Watson and her allies in the whole affair.  Really, I want to focus more on the fact that so many self-professed atheists proved to be uninterested or even hostile to feminism from a personal perspective.