Category: Religion

The Middle East is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

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It appears that ISIS is threatening to make war on Hamas in Gaza.

While it is clear that this is a bad thing for the ordinary folks, the complexity of the situation leaves me profoundly puzzled:

One bomb hit a Hamas security checkpoint in northern Gaza. A few days later, another exploded in a trash can. Another blew up next to a Gaza City high-rise, and a small one targeted a chicken store owned by a Hamas intelligence official, Saber Siyam.

The four attacks in May — among at least a dozen this year, documented by a local human rights group — were aimed not at infidels, collaborators or criminals but at the ruling Islamist group, Hamas. The suspected perpetrators were Hamas’s emerging rivals: extremist Islamist groups that see Hamas as insufficiently pious, and that vow loyalty to the Islamic State.

While the extremists are unlikely to challenge Hamas’s firm grip on the Gaza Strip in the foreseeable future, they complicate matters by occasionally shooting rockets into Israel that could touch off a wider conflagration, if the rockets kill or maim Israeli citizens.

They could also seek to join forces with the far more dangerous, deadly branch of the Islamic State in neighboring Egypt’s Sinai Desert, possibly derailing the slowly improving relations between Hamas and Egyptian authorities that have recently led to the Egypt-Gaza border crossing’s being opened for brief moments for the first time in years.

“We will stay like a thorn in the throat of Hamas, and a thorn in the throat of Israel,” said Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, the spokesman for the groups supporting the Islamic State, using a nom de guerre for security reasons.

Gaza has always had pockets of Islamists considered extreme even by the deeply conservative version of Islam practiced in much of the coastal enclave. Those extremists — known regionally as salafi-jihadis — have sparred with Hamas in the past, most notably in 2009 when a militant preacher declared an Islamic state from his mosque. More than 20 people were killed in the ensuing confrontation.

As near as I can figure, the net result of these developments is that Hamas and Iran are likely to join forces with Israel to fight ISIS.

This is so screwed up.

I Wish that I Were This Good a Jew

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Baci Weiler, a woman in New York City with a buzz cut and wearing baggy trowsers and t-shirt, was was approached by a Chabad Lubovich representative and lent her Tefillin* so that she could pray.

In Orthodox Judaism, Tefillin are only to be worn by men, so Ms. Weiler posted the picture of this (Since deleted) to Facebook:

This happened last friday at a chabad table. Apparently, buzzed hair + baggy t-shirt + charedi lack of any concept of fluidity in gender expression = egalitarianism. Tefillin with a bracha [blessing], administered by a chabadnik! bimheira beyameinu [Hebrew for “it should come speedily in our time].

It should not have been a big deal, and no one but her FB friends should have seen it, but at this point, through the vagaries of the Internet, it ends up getting some mainstream coverage. (The Jerusalem Post picked it up.)

Well. Baci Weler was horrified at the idea that the Chabadnik who offered her Tefillin was being subjected to mocking, and she offered the most sincere and spiritual that I have ever read:

Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself…

 Two days ago, I posted a couple of photos of myself putting on tefillin at a Chabad stand in Union Square. Watching these photos spread, I’ve had time to reflect on their implications. These thoughts are still not fully formed, but I hope both my critics and supporters read them carefully and charitably.

 The encounter itself was brief, shocking, and personally significant. I did not plan or initiate this interaction. I was approached and misgendered. Being seen as a man, despite being a woman, was paradoxically validating: for just a minute, I was no longer an Other – the mechitza that has frustrated me for years dissolved. As he carefully wrapped the tefillin shel yad around my arm, I felt connected – to him, to God, to tradition, to the Jewish people. It was a powerful moment, but also painful and wrong – because it was under false pretenses. Though his mistaken assumptions – products of the harmfully rigid gender roles with which he grew up – instigated the encounter, I let it continue without correcting him. Though I didn’t force him to do something wrong, I allowed him to do something he presumably would have been uncomfortable doing given complete knowledge of the situation. Despite our ideological differences, I owed him this basic level of respect as a fellow Jew and as a human. For that I am sorry.

 Beyond this, my post was interpreted as personally mocking him, and for that I am also sorry. This was not my intention. The post is a separate entity from the encounter itself, and its goal was dual: on one level, I was knowingly making a sharp, ironic political statement – a criticism of a religious ideology with which I fundamentally disagree. It transcended the human interaction and presented us as caricatures of our respective religious identities. I am not retracting this criticism, but I don’t want to be lauded for encouraging that kind of dehumanization. On another level, and more importantly, the photo – also separate from the encounter itself – is powerful because it depicts an instance of accidental pluralism and of shared joy in the mitzvah of hanachat tefillin. It is a serendipitous glimpse of the world I wish I lived in: a world where both he, a bearded chabadnik guy, and I, a buzz-cut egalitarian girl, could be “frum”, regardless of gender or labels, equally bound by mitzvot. I’ll end as I did before: Bimheira Beyameinu.

I don’t think that I would ever achieve this level of Kavanah.†

Ms. Weiler might want to consider the Rabbinate as a career.

H/T Failed Messiah.

*Boxes that contain scripture, and are placed on the non-dominant arm and head in order to conduct certain prayers.
†The spiritual focus and awareness required for prayer to “take”.

Today’s must read

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Charleston and Amalek.

It’s an essay by my brother, Bear who Swims, on Dylann Root and the ethics of whether or not he can/should be forgiven by his victims.

At his bail hearing, some of the relatives of the victims, driven by their faith, stated that they had forgiven him.

My brother suggests, convincingly IMHO, that Torah forbids such forgiveness:

I cannot criticize this on their part, and would not deny them the right to do this.

This forgiveness by the survivors may be very helpful to them, in an existential way. It can help them to choose to continue on with their lives as real people, and not as victims and exemplars.

For them, as they bear the direct consequences of the act, this is a supportable moral choice. I will say that to me rage would also be a supportable moral choice. Whatever helps them.

………

But it is arrogant for the rest of us to speak about forgiveness.  Who are we to forgive, who have not ourselves been injured.

I am not, here speaking about the terrorist*.  He is an irrelevant detail.  Forgive him, if it makes you feel good.

Consider instead, Amalek.

In Torah, Amalek is a nation related to the Israelites, but an implacable enemy — see D’varim (Deuteronomy) 25:17-19**.  In later rabbinic writing, the term is used to describe all implacable evil.

The greatest of the crimes was

he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary

This passage is one of those sections of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) that makes ‘modern Jews’, itchy, as it goes on to say:

thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget

as it doesn’t seem speak about how we would like the world to work.

However, I will suggest that this message of non-forgiveness is applicable and to the world today.

I would embrace and extend this, and apply this to people who seek to subjugate and destroy other people using scriptural justifications.

Think that Christofascists and gay marriage, ISIS and basically everyone else,  the domestic terrorists who murder abortion doctors, or the Hindu nationalists in India.  (I would note that the death toll from Hindu nationalism dwarfs that of the other three)

Not only should there be no forgiveness for people like this, but there should be no attempt to accommodate their sensibilities.

Their views are a perversion of what it means to being a civilized human being.

In any case, go read his full essay.

Pope Frank Pisses off Conservatives Again………

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The Pope, and one would assume the Pope’s Peeps, are working on an encyclical about the economy and the environment, and it has gotten leaked.

Has come out strongly in favor or accepting the science of global warming, as well as condemning shot sighted politicians:

Pope Francis has endorsed the science behind global warming and denounced the world’s political leaders for putting national self-interest ahead of action. Now, Catholic priests are gearing up to spread the word.

The 192-page leaked draft of a papal encyclical, published Monday by the Italian magazine L’Espresso, is an attempt to influence the debate before United Nations climate talks scheduled for the end of the year in Paris. Father Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, said the text was not the final one, which will be officially released midday local time Thursday by the Vatican.

The encyclical, entitled “Laudato si (Praised Be) on the care of our common home,” is a call to action in the form of a letter to the church’s bishops. With fossil-fuel emissions and temperatures at record levels, the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Catholics is adding his voice to calls to rein in greenhouse gases.

“International negotiations cannot progress in a significant way because of the positions of the countries which privilege their own national interests rather than the global common good,” the pope wrote. “Those who will suffer the consequences which we are trying to hide will remember this lack of conscience and responsibility.”

Francis squarely put the blame on humans, writing that many scientific studies show “the greater part of global warming in the last decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) emitted above all due to human activity.”

Reducing emissions, he wrote, demands “honesty, courage and responsibility, above all by the most powerful and most polluting countries.”

In the U.S., where public opinion has been split on climate change, the Conference of Catholic Bishops has been holding workshops to discuss the encyclical with its members. A coalition of church groups, the Catholic Climate Covenant, will provide inserts on Francis’ message to go in church bulletins around the U.S. and is e-mailing suggested homilies to priests.

Additionally, this document will a call for independent and rigorous studies of pesticides and GMOs:

On the subject of GMOs Pope Francis states; “It is difficult to give an overall judgment on the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO), plant or animal, for medical purposes or in agriculture, since they can be very different and require different considerations.”

He continues; “Although we do not have definitive evidence about the damage that transgenic cereals could cause to humans, and in some regions their use has produced economic growth that has helped solve some problems, there are significant problems that should not be minimized. In many areas, following the introduction of these crops, there has been a concentration of productive land in the hands of the few, due to the gradual disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of cultivated land, have been forced to retreat from direct production.

“The most fragile among them become temporary workers and many farm workers migrate to end up in miserable urban settlements. The spread of these (GM) crops destroys the complex web of ecosystems, decreases diversity in production and affects the present and the future of regional economies. In several countries there is a trend in the development of oligopolies in the production of seeds and other products needed for cultivation, and the dependence deepens when you consider the production of sterile seeds, which end up forcing farmers to buy (seeds) from producers.”

“No doubt there is a need for constant attention…to consider all ethical aspects involved. To this end it is necessary to ensure a scientific and social debate that is responsible and large, able to consider all the information available and to call things by their names.

“GMOs is an issue which is complex, it must be approached with a sympathetic look at all its aspects, and this requires at least one more effort to finance several lines of independent and interdisciplinary research… as we have seen in this chapter, the technique is unlikely to be able to …self-limit its power.”

To my mind, what is most significant here is that he is clearly laying the groundwork for aggressive push-back against Big Ag, Monsanto and their ilk, as being harmful both to the environment, and to most economically disadvantaged.

I hear wing-nut heads exploding, and it pleases me.

Deliberate Destruction of Public Schools in East Ramapo by Orthodox Jewish Community Hits the New York Times

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The NPR program This American Life covered this a few months ago, but it is nice that the concerted effort to destroy and asset strip the public schools in East Ramapo has found its way into an editorial in the New York Times: (Full disclosure, Sharon* graduated from a public high school in the East Ramapo school district)

New York State has a proud tradition of local decision making in public education. However, students in the public schools in East Ramapo, about 30 miles north of Manhattan, in Rockland County, are being denied their state constitutional right to a sound basic education by a board that has grossly mismanaged the district’s finances and educational programs.

When there is overwhelming evidence that a local school board has persistently failed to act in the best interests of its public school students, the state must act. The Legislature will adjourn on June 17, so time is running out.

East Ramapo is a divided community. Of the roughly 32,000 school-age children enrolled in schools in the district, about 24,000 attend private schools, nearly all of them Orthodox Jewish yeshivas. Of the more than 8,000 children in the public schools, 43 percent are African-American and 46 percent are Latino; 83 percent are poor and 27 percent are English-language learners.

The East Ramapo school board, dominated by private-school parents since 2005, has utterly failed them. Faced with a fiscal and educational crisis, the State Education Department last June appointed a former federal prosecutor, Henry M. Greenberg, to investigate the district’s finances.

Mr. Greenberg’s report, released in November, documented the impact of the board’s gross mismanagement and neglect. Since 2009, the board has eliminated hundreds of staff members, including over 100 teachers, dozens of teaching assistants, guidance counselors and social workers, and many key administrators. Full-day kindergarten, and high-school electives have been eliminated or scaled back. Music, athletics, professional development and extracurricular activities were cut.

………

While slashing resources in its public schools, the school board vastly increased public spending on private schools. The cost of transporting children, including gender-segregated busing, rose to $27.3 million in 2013-14 from $22 million in 2009-10, a 24 percent increase. Public spending on private school placement for special education students grew by 33 percent between 2010-11 and 2013-14, and the district placed students in private schools when appropriate spaces were available in public ones.

The report also exposed disturbing practices by board members. The board conducts 60 to 70 percent of its meetings in closed-door executive session. It does not tolerate, and is overtly hostile to, the complaints of public school parents, students and community members. Public protests against the board are now commonplace.

The report proposed the appointment of a state fiscal monitor, who would oversee all of the board’s financial and educational decisions and have the authority to override the board, when necessary, to protect the interests of the public-school community and improve education outcomes for public-school students. The report also recommended additional state funding to restore essential staff and services, but only if a monitor was in place to make certain the money was used effectively and efficiently to benefit all of the students.

A bill in Albany — introduced in the Assembly by Ellen C. Jaffee and Kenneth P. Zebrowski and in the Senate by David Carlucci, who all represent parts of the school district — would implement a fiscal monitor for at least five years. It is a crucial step toward reversing the district’s disastrous decline and repairing the deep rifts in the community. The New York State School Boards Association has found that the measure “respects the democratic electoral process by leaving the elected board of education in place.”

………

In recent weeks, in response to a lobbying campaign by the school board, momentum for the bill appears to have slowed. Advocates for the local school board and some leaders in the Orthodox community have accused supporters of state oversight of having anti-Semitic motives.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The legislation is not about punishing one group because of its religious beliefs; it is about acting to make sure that the civil rights of a community of overwhelmingly low-income minority children are not denied and that their constitutional right to a sound basic education is enforced.

Note that, in response to claims of antisemitism, the ADL has come out in favor of appointing a state monitor.

The context here, particularly when reviewing the This American Life coverage, is that the  East Ramapo school board (יש”ו) is attempting a genteel form of ethnic cleansing directed at the poorest and least powerful amongst them, with the board chairman literally telling non-Jews to leave town.

It is disgusting, and it is against Halacha.†

The members of the school school board are both miserable excuses for human beings, and bad Jews.

As an aside, this also is not, “Good for the Jews.”

Any plans to expand or build a Yeshiva in any other town will likely be viewed with the same enthusiasm as constructing a toxic waste dump next to a town reservoir, and the longer that this goes on, the worse this will get.

One reform that is not mentioned, and should be considered, is to move the dates of the school board elections to the same time as the Congressional elections. (Currently they are held in the spring of odd numbered years).

Higher turnout would mitigate against sh%$ like this.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†Jewish religious law.

Francis Fixing What John Paul II Broke

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Over 30 years ago, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated at the orders of right wing politician Roberto D’Aubuisson.

It is almost certain that this was done with the active agreement of elements within the Reagan administration, and the passive acquiescence of the Holy See in Rome.

John Paul II was determined to extirpate what saw as left wing elements in the Church, and making noise about Romero’s murder was inconvenient when viewed through the lens of this agenda, (on edit) and so the silence on the assassination.

Well, Pope Francis just Beatified Archbishop Romero:

The Salvadorean archbishop Óscar Romero was beatified on Saturday, the final step before sainthood, 35 years after he was shot dead at the altar by a rightwing death squad for denouncing the oppression of the poor by the military dictatorship.

Roman Catholics from around the world mixed with former Marxist rebels from El Salvador’s brutal civil war as more than 250,000 people gathered in the capital to celebrate the country priest who confronted a US-backed government.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, sent by Pope Francis, officiated the ceremony that followed decades of debate over whether Romero had rejected Church doctrine by embracing radical, leftwing rebels.  [Actually the record shows that he was no fan of the rebels either, he opposed violence on both sides]

………

Born in 1917 in a mountain town near Honduras, Romero apprenticed as a carpenter as a boy before entering the church, where he rose through the ranks, appearing to be a quiet conservative.

But soon after being appointed archbishop in 1977, he became a staunch critic of the military government after it began killing, kidnapping and arresting priests who had been organising peasants and supporting workers’ rights.

His sermons, often broadcast on radio, riled rightwing extremists. But he ignored multiple death threats, remaining defiant up to his murder while giving mass in the chapel of a San Salvador hospital.

“In the name of this suffering people, whose cries to heaven become more deafening each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,” he said in a speech to government soldiers the day before his death.

This, along with the sainthood for John XXIII, show a clean break for this Pontiff with his reactionary predecessors, though his longest term impact might be on cleaning up more mundane corruption in the finances of the Papal bureaucracy and the Vatican bank.

Time will tell.

Michelle Bachmann May be Right About the Rapture

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I can think of no stronger indicator for the Apocalypse than the fact that, for the 2nd time in as many months, Donald Trump has seized the moral high ground.

Of course, this is an extremely low bar, as the competition is Pamela Geller:

Donald Trump was asked on “Fox & Friends” this morning for his opinion on the shooting outside Pam Geller’s “Draw the Prophet” contest, and he didn’t mince his words.

Brian Kilmeade asked whether he still believed “in freedom of speech, regardless of what they’re talking about — you’ve got to think they could do without being shot, don’t you think?”

Trump replied that it’s “very terrible,” but was heartened that the police acted “very strongly” by killing the two suspects. After blaming the “weak action” of the Baltimore police for the destruction of “over 200 businesses in a single night,” he praised the Garland, Texas police for their handling of these shooters.

However, he quickly switched subjects, saying that “I watched Pam [Geller on Fox News] earlier, and it really looks like she’s just taunting everybody. What is she doing drawing Muhammad? I mean it’s disgusting,” he said in reference to the attempted shootings. “Isn’t there something else they could be doing? Drawing Muhammad?” he went on.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck cut in to say that they’d asked Geller whether there wasn’t some other way they could have exercised their freedom of speech besides this contest, and Geller told her “No, there wasn’t another way, because you have to fight back against this war against the freedom of speech.”

Trump replied by again asking, “They can’t do something else? They have have to be in the middle of Texas doing something on Muhammad and insulting everybody?”

He reiterated his disgust at the attempted shooting, as well as his belief that Geller is taunting Islamic extremists. “What is she doing?” he asked. “Why is she doing it? It’s probably very risky for her — I don’t know, maybe she likes risk?”

“But what the hell is she doing?” he concluded.

So in April, he shamed most of the Republican Presidential candidates over Social Security and Medicare, and now, this.

I do not mean to imply that “The Donald” is meaningful ethics, but rather that the morality of the right wing has descended below his level.

Pamela Geller Wanted a Terrorist Attack, and She Got One

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Well, Pamela Geller has finally gotten her wish, and trigger an attack from deranged Muslim fundamentalists:

Two gunmen were killed after they opened fire Sunday evening outside an event hosted by an anti-Islam group in Garland, Tex., featuring cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, local officials said. According to the authorities, the two assailants shot a security guard and were, in turn, shot and killed by police officers.

Officials did not name the gunmen or assign a motive for the attack. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Dallas said the agency was providing investigative and bomb technician assistance to the Garland police.

The City of Garland confirmed the episode in a Facebook posting.

The shooting began shortly before 7 p.m. outside the Curtis Culwell Center at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islam organization based in New York.

“As today’s Muhammad Art Exhibit event at the Curtis Culwell Center was coming to an end,” the Facebook posting said, “two males drove up to the front of the building in a car. Both males were armed and began shooting at a Garland I.S.D. security officer.”

The “American Freedom Defense Initiative” has, among other things, campaigned against a mosque being built in Manhattan, because ……… Muslims.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified this group, along with most of the other groups she is affiliated with.

Geller is one of the founders of that organization.

Much like issue of the Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, I defend her right to free speech, but like those Nazis, we need to understand that she is a contemptible bigot who should be shunned by all right thinking people.

Instead, I expect to see her on mainstream news media (primarily Fox, but also the others) at least a dozen times over the next few months.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Have a Nice, Big Cup of STFU!

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The Armenian Genocide is a fact.  It has been documented extensively.

So it is no surprise that Pope Francis noted this on the 100th anniversary of this atrocity.

Of course the predictable Turkish butt-hurt is also no surprise.

………

When Pope Francis used the term “genocide” on Sunday to describe the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks 100 years ago, he was not breaking new ground. Pope John Paul II had written the same in 2001, and Francis had made similar references before.

 But the timing and setting of the pope’s remarks — a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica marking the centenary of the killings, with top Armenian religious and political leaders in attendance — drew a strong international response. Armenians worldwide expressed deep gratitude to Francis, while Turkey reacted in anger.

 ………

 The Turkish government responded to the pope’s comments by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican, and summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara to express its “great disappointment and sadness.”

 Turkey claims that just half a million Armenians died in fighting when they rose up against their Ottoman rulers during World War I, and denies that their deaths constitute an act of genocide.

 That position conflicts with the views of most historians of the period, who agree that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were victims of genocide at the hands of the Turks.

 ………

 Francis said it was “necessary, and indeed a duty,” to remember the Armenians killed, “for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it!”

 Among those listening at St. Peter’s were Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and the leadership of the Armenian Apostolic Church, including Karekin II and Aram I, the two Catholicoi at the top of the church’s hierarchy.

 ………

 Turkey said Francis’ comments “contradicted his message of peace, reconciliation and dialogue” made during his visit to the country in November.

 “The pope’s statement, which is far from the legal and historical reality, cannot be accepted,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted on Sunday.

 “Religious authorities are not the places to incite resentment and hatred with baseless allegations,” he added.

 Francis now risks losing Turkey’s support as he seeks to defend Christian communities being persecuted by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Many Christians have sought refuge in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, as they have fled the Islamist militants.

Does anyone hear this statement, and interpret it as saying, “Nice Christians, you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to them.”

I do understand that the Turks have made a habit of denying the Armenian Genocide, which has never made much sense to me, since the government that did it, the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist almost a century ago.

I do understand why Erdoğan’s government is determined to whitewash this though.  It is very clear that his AKP party is trying to relegate the reforms of tye Young Turks and Ataturk to the dust-bin of history. 

That is why the plans to redevelop Taksim square included the rebuilding of the Taksim Military Barracks, which was a central symbol of the attempted Ottoman counter coup in 1909.

No, Just No. No Accomodations.

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Here is an interesting article in the New York Times about how Heredim (literally “fearful ones”) are disrupting air travel when they freak out about having to sit next to women on airline flights.

Sorry, but this is bullsh%$. Jews are supposed to engage the world as it is, not as if it were some long gone era.

If you want to do that, go Amish:

Francesca Hogi, 40, had settled into her aisle seat for the flight from New York to London when the man assigned to the adjoining window seat arrived and refused to sit down. He said his religion prevented him from sitting beside a woman who was not his wife. Irritated but eager to get underway, she eventually agreed to move.

Laura Heywood, 42, had a similar experience while traveling from San Diego to London via New York. She was in a middle seat — her husband had the aisle — when the man with the window seat in the same row asked if the couple would switch positions. Ms. Heywood, offended by the notion that her sex made her an unacceptable seatmate, refused.

“I wasn’t rude, but I found the reason to be sexist, so I was direct,” she said.

A growing number of airline passengers, particularly on trips between the United States and Israel, are now sharing stories of conflicts between ultra-Orthodox Jewish men trying to follow their faith and women just hoping to sit down. Several flights from New York to Israel over the last year have been delayed or disrupted over the issue, and with social media spreading outrage and debate, the disputes have spawned a protest initiative, an online petition and a spoof safety video from a Jewish magazine suggesting a full-body safety vest (“Yes, it’s kosher!”) to protect ultra-Orthodox men from women seated next to them on airplanes.

 And if you go Amish, then you do not fly.

You could also charter single sex flights, but I’d rather you just do the no modern travel bit.

If you want to be medieval, you should not do so by half measures.

This Guy is Going to Destroy Israel

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I am, of course, referring to Benyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who penchant for considering nothing but his own prospects for political power are a clear and present danger for the State of Israel.

The latest case of this is Netanyahu’s willingness to use the most polarizing issue in Israeli politics to help build a coalition, at least if reports that he will kill conversion reform in order to placate right wing parties: (This is Arutz Sheva, so a grain of salt is recommended)

Sources in Shas and United Torah Jewry said Sunday that they had reached an agreement with the Likud on rolling back recently approved rules on conversion. The changes had been designed to remove some of the power over the conversion process from the Chief Rabbinate and install it in the local authorities, where some jurisdictions would presumably be more liberal in their acceptance of converts.

With Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu counting on them to join his new government, MKs from Shas and UTJ are insisting on rolling back the laws on conversion to what they were before Netanyahu’s last government – with the Chief Rabbinate solely responsible for the conversion process, overseeing the entire process without government interference.

In the November change, the government voted to allow municipal rabbis to establish conversion courts, which were to receive administrative and budgetary backing from the state. A rabbinical committee whose makeup is specified in the decision was to oversee the courts, which would exercise their own judgment regarding each conversion.

With several cities already appointing very liberal rabbis as the heads of their committees, the government”s intent was to provide venues for converts to receive approval from authorities more easily than they would have from the Supreme Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, which until then had sole jurisdiction over conversion. The newest deal restores that situation.

This is arguably the most contentious issue in Jewish Israeli society, and, after years of tumult, they made these baby steps toward sanity.

And now Netanyahu is going to douse this issue with gasoline, and light a match because he is worried about forming a coalition government.

As a secular Zionist, I find this extremely self destructive, but I am not surprised:  Netanyahu ran an explicitly racist campaign.

From the perspective of normative Jewish theology, it was this kind of short sighted bullsh%$ like this that got both temples destroyed.

H/T Failed Messiah.

Indiana is in for a Lot of Well Deserved Hurt

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First, notwithstanding claims that the Indiana law is just the same as the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and other state’s laws that require a compelling state interest to interfere with religious observance, the Indiana law is far more extreme:

No one, I think, would ever have denied that Maurice Bessinger was a man of faith.

And he wasn’t particularly a “still, small voice” man either; he wanted everybody in earshot to know that slavery had been God’s will, that desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist. God wanted only whites to eat at Bessinger’s six Piggie Park barbecue joints; so His servant Maurice took that fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 decided that his religious freedom argument was “patently frivolous.”

………

That’s a good background against which to measure the uproar about the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Pence last week. I don’t question the religious sincerity of anyone involved in drafting and passing this law. But sincere and faithful people, when they feel the imprimatur of both the law and the Lord, can do very ugly things.

There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993.* Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana’s law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes. If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

 ………

So, let’s review the evidence: by the Weekly Standard’s definition, there’s “nothing significant” about this law that differs from the federal one, and other state ones—except that it has been carefully written to make clear that 1) businesses can use it against 2) civil-rights suits brought by individuals.

Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

So—is the fuss over the Indiana law overblown?

No.

The statute shows every sign of having been carefully designed to put new obstacles in the path of equality; and it has been publicly sold with deceptive claims that it is “nothing new.”

Being required to serve those we dislike is a painful price to pay for the privilege of running a business; but the pain exclusion inflicts on its victims, and on society, are far worse than the discomfort the faithful may suffer at having to open their businesses to all.

As the story of Maurice Bessinger shows us, even dressed in liturgical garments, hateful discrimination is still a pig.

The response has been outrage and boycotts:

Pence has been suggesting that there might be some tweaks made, but so far no one is buying this.

Here is hoping that the anti-gay bigots get their clocks cleaned over this.

More Evidence That Conservative Christianity Has Degenerated Into a Vehicle for Hate

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This is beyond contemptible

Once Again I need to invoke Shelby Spong‘s question, “I have quoted the controversial theologian’s question, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?”

In Tennessee, a Talibaptist cleric has equated equal rights to Satan:

A Tennessee pastor said this week that his church was “not trying to offend anyone” when it put up a sign linking “equal rights” to Satan.

 Members of the community expressed outrage over the weekend after photos of marquee outside the Knoxville Baptist Tabernacle Church were circulated online. The sign read, “Remember, Satan was the first to demand equal rights.”

 “Who was your target audience? Who were you speaking to when you put it up there?” Knoxville resident Rick Staples, asked, according to WBIR. “And when you say you’re asking for your equal rights, who’s asking for their equal rights and who are you comparing to Satan? That was very strong language.”

 Andy Henry said that the church was trying to make a statement about gay rights.

 “It’s clearly a sign that was meant to offend a particular community – the LGBT community. Because of (the church’s) lack of foresight, they ended up offending everybody who had ever fought for equality or civil rights in general,” Henry observed.

But Pastor Tony Greene insisted that everyone misunderstood the message.

 “Our sign referencing Satan demanding his equal rights to ascend into the heavens and be God was simply ‘I’ and all about that individual,” Greene told WATE. “It was not a statement against any one group in particular, you know what about the rights of the unborn babies, the rights of children, the rights of everyone?”

 He added: “My heart breaks in the dividedness of our country.”

No, Rev. Greene is not calling for unity, he is expressing a world view for which faith is indistinguishable from hate.

At its core, this is the same spirituality that we see from Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban.

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Damn! Out of Stock!

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Brilliant!

I’ve found the ultimate Passover Seder accessory, the 10 Plagues in all  their disturbing chocolate glory.

Clockwise from upper left:

  1. Blood
  2. Frogs
  3. Lice
  4. Wild Beasts
  5. Livestock Disease
  6. Boils (with a little white chocolate pustule for authenticity)
  7. Hail
  8. Locusts
  9. Darkness
  10. Death of the 1st born

All with a dark chocolate bar (it’s pareve) in the middle.

I just discovered it, and they are out of stock.

Damn!

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.