“The Crucifix Creates Discrimination”

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.

The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”

Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”

Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.

Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”

Nasty Men

Early Monday morning, Ray Taliaferro of KGO-AM, dean of the left-coast lefty talk-show hosts (profiled briefly here), was prompted by recent events in Iran to launch into a four-star tirade against “nasty men” who, based on nothing more than “plumbing,” believe themselves serenely entitled to subjugate women.

Ray’s rant will be available in audio for the next two weeks here; a transcript of some of his remarks appears below.

Civil rights, civilian rights, mean an awful lot to me. And I’m troubled when I see that there are places in the world where they don’t practice individual rights. And I don’t know why not. Except generally it’s because we have a bunch of nasty men—and I mean this—nasty, backwards . . . and I could use a couple of swear words, because those are the only words that I could use to properly identify these people who like to call themselves ayatollahs, and supreme beings, and all this nonsense. When all they really are, are just like the rest of everybody else. They came out of a womb. They weren’t supreme when they came out of that womb. And if they happened to have had a vagina instead of a penis, why, they would be under subjugation as well. And not be able to practice their freedoms and liberties.

So it was just a matter of birth, for goodness sakes. It was a matter of plumbing. And that’s what just drives me up a wall.

There is no reason for women to be treated in an inequitable way by men, for pete’s sake. No reason. No reason for women not to have full and total equality with men. Everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. And if they’re not there yet, believe me, at some point they’ll get there.

Silent Spring

“But remember it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy.” Pakistani singer and poetess Ayman Udas was shot and killed by two of her brothers, who entered her Peshawar flat and fired three bullets into her chest while her husband was out fetching milk. The motive has been variously ascribed to outrage over her “sin” in appearing on television, and violating “family traditions” by marrying for a second time—Udas, divorced and the mother of two children, had remarried but 10 days before her murder. Her killers remain at large.

This One Goes Out To The One I Love

For more than 400 years, the people of the nations of Western Europe, and their far-scattered children, have cleaved to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the archetypal expression of “star-cross’d lovers” cruelly dealt by the triple doofi of family, culture, and fate.   This month in Pakistan culminated a true-life tale to rival Shakespeare’s in anguish, violence, and determined ardor. Some might like it better. First, because it’s true. Second, because rather than tragedy, it is drama, resolving (seemingly) in a happy ending. “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love”: through rape, molestation, death threats, cultural upheaval, refused suicide, courtroom wrangling, long-suffering rejection, threatened suicide, and attempted suicide, Mukhtar Mai and Nasir Abbas Gabol have apparently emerged into a happily-ever-after of female bonding, plural marriage, and separate domiciles. And, just as Romeo and Juliet has been occasionally condemned as “a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life,” wherein Romeo’s “male virility,” unopposed by Juliet’s “female code of docility,” bungs up everything through “ill-controlled, partially disguised aggression,” so too, for those so inclined, may the story of Mai and Gabol be rejected as not so happy after all.

“It’s A Man’s World, And These Things Will Never Stop”

On July 14, three young Pakistani women en route to marriage to the young men of their choice were abducted, beaten, tortured, and buried alive by their male relatives. Two female relatives—the mother of one, the aunt of another—begged for the young women’s lives. For their pains, they were shot and killed and tossed into the young women’s grave.

Media exposure has caused the government of Pakistan to open an “investigation.” The Pakistani senator who represents Balochistan province, where the murders occurred, believes such a probe not only unnecessary, but wrongheaded. In his view, the killings were justified.

“This action was carried out according to tribal traditions,” says Israr Ullah Zehri. “These are centuries old-traditions and I will continue to defend them. Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid.”

An elderly woman from the same village as the dead women declined to give her name to inquiring reporters. Her view: “It’s a man’s world, and these things will never stop.”

Life After Birth

So today we must confront the fact that the American people seem at present prepared to elevate to the apex of the executive a couple of faith-addled embryo-embracers.

It is right, therefore, to consider a country constrained by the sort of abortion and contraception policies condoned by the dynamic duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin, who would place the egg upon an altar.

To do so it is not necessary to re-examine the US in the age before Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. A more recent example is available. That would be Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu, a reign terminated on Christmas Day of 1989. In Ceausescu’s Romania, “life” was protected from the moment of conception, as McCain and Palin would protect it here. In Ceausescu’s Romania, a woman was permitted to abort a fetus only if her very life were in danger; McCain and Palin would here permit an abortion only under such a circumstance.