The Fine Legacy of Male Superiority!

Lord, what a mess!

First, you teach women that they are something shameful, or that it is shameful for them to be seen. Require them to cover themselves with a burqa. That isn't just a mess! It is criminal: a human rights violation.

Next, some of the women will choose, even when they are no longer coerced, to cover themselves. That is an obvious result. It is precisely what we hope will be the result of teaching morals: people will internalize the rules, and regulate themselves. Now we have a secondary mess: people humiliating themselves, voluntarily.

Then add the French, and the Swiss, and whomever else finds such behavior offensive. Let them pass a law criminalizing wearing burqas or hajibs. The Swiss will not allow minarets to be built in their cities. The French think that might be a good idea, too. I suspect the Swiss will not ban bell towers and spires on old, musty, empty Catholic and Protestant churches.

I wish we could send them that idiotic clan of people who call themselves Westboro Baptist Church--the ones who think dead, gay soldiers is a God-damned good idea--not because they could then be banned, but because they deserve each other. We could toss in the nut case who burns Korans--The Most Reverend Terry Jones--for good measure.

In the first place, the men and the religions ought to be blamed.

In the second place, the women who are victims ought to be blamed for acceding to their victimhood.

The French and the Swiss and everyone who agrees with such repressive laws ought to be blamed for being simple and savage.

Repressive men and repressed women.
What a fine legacy our religions have left us!

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

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