Throughout this column’s run, there’s been plenty of mentions about the inherent sexism of organised religions. Looking at it through a strictly sociological lens, it makes sense why it happens. The original scriptures – the template which has led to today’s incarnation of religion – were written by men during a time when women were property and mystical beasts who occasionally farted out children. Think for a moment about how progressive values have permeated over the past 50 years, think about where we were as a society in the 1960s. Now multiply that murky mental comparison between people of this day and that day by a factor of 40 and you’ll get roughly the mentality of the folks who wrote the scriptures.
So this week’s news that universities in Iran – supposedly under the direction of the Iranian government – have made the call to restrict women from majoring in 77 different subjects, including math and chemistry, isn’t so much of a shock as it is inevitable. When the fairer halves account for 60 percent of the college graduates in an extremely-religious country, something has to change. Someone has to give their life away, marry dumbass dudes, make dumbass dinners and pump out dumbass kids, right? Instead of adding incentives to urge males to catch up, they’ve opted to simply remove the troublesome portion – the property, the strange beasts shitting out tiny tykes.
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This is the kind of thing that happens when you believe – as Muslims, Christians and Jewish folks do – in the creation myth of Adam and Eve. There’s really no other way to read that story and not think that, with Eve, God created the first blow-up fuck doll. Two millennia of generational telephone later, this is what you get.
Onto the roundup!
– The Philippines signed a cease-fire to end their 40-year-long struggle against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (yes, MILF) by working towards giving them their own autonomous region in the southern part of the country. During those four decades, over 120,000 people were killed.
– Over 1,000 pastors preached to their congregations on Sunday about politics in a somewhat round-about way of challenging the IRS’s tax code amendment that prohibits tax-exempt organizations from doing so.
– In Texas, the home of a gay couple was defaced with the words “Leave or Die Fags” painted on their front porch. The couple blames a change in the town’s countenance towards homosexuals after a pastor recently took out an ad in the local paper “warning residents” about the gay agenda.
– “The Children of Mary,” a group of nuns from Ohio, have put together one hell of a 12-minute magnum opus all about contraception use. Among the societal negatives from sperm-blockers: They make women degrade themselves, they turn men gay and they literally kill people. Related: A new study shows that, of course, giving out free birth control leads to fewer abortions.
– Sorry everyone, the recent news that Chick-fil-A was changing its ways and no longer supporting opponents of same-sex marriage turned out to be erroneous, as president Dan Cathy reiterated his love of only “Biblical families.”
– Georgia Republican Representative Paul Broun, an actual official elected by citizens, believes evolution and the Big Bang are both “lies straight from the pit of Hell.”
– Pope Benedict’s former butler, the guy who stole and leaked some of the Vatican’s most confidential documents, was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
– The German portion of the Catholic Church decided that members who fail to pay the “church tax” when the collection plate gets passed around are not eligible for sacraments or official burials.
– The super-Islam Moroccan government blocked a ship owned by Women on Waves, an organisation that travels to countries where abortion is illegal, picks up ladies who want to get one, sail them out into international waters and performs the procedure.
– Abu Hamza, the one-eyed, hook-handed hate preacher responsible for inspiring one of the September 11th hijackers, is in New York to face charges of kidnapping tourists in Yemen back in 1998. The whole trial’s sure to be a shit-show.
– Thirty-four people were killed after a series of bombings took place in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo. Al-Qaeda is believed to be responsible.
– In southern Afghanistan, a bomb blast killed an American soldier. Elsewhere in the country, a suicide bomber killed 19 people.
– Israel spotted a drone just hanging out in their airspace, spying or whatever, and shot it the fuck down. As of now, no one’s sure whose drone it was, but you can be sure if it’s coming from Iran (who unveiled armed drone technology in August of 2010) then things are about to get even nastier in the region. Iran, meanwhile, said that a requirement of them starting to think about putting the kibosh on their own nuclear desires is that Israel must first sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Which, yes, of course Israel should.
– A Republican candidate for the Arkansas’s House of Representatives, Charlie Fuqua, wrote a book called God’s Law: The Only Political Solution. According to Charlie, the Man Upstairs believes: There should be no minimum wage, executions for anyone not rehabilitated after two years in prison, prayer in schools and hey, let’s kick all the Muslims out of the country.
– Stanley Porter, pastor of an Alabama church, was sentenced to a decade behind bars after he was convicted of sodomising a 15-year-old boy after choir practice.
– After getting popped by the cops for a DUI, San Francisco’s Roman Catholic archbishop Salvatore Joseph Cordileone got all jokey about it with his congregation. Also of note, Cordileone hates same-sex marriage.
– Despite recently completing the requirements necessary to become an Eagle Scout, 17-year-old Ryan Andresen won’t get the badge because he recently came out as gay, a big no-no in the extremely bigoted Boy Scouts of America organisation.
– And Our Person(s) of the Week: The folks at the religious-based organisations United Methodist Women, Sojourners and Rabbis for Human Rights, who are putting their belief differences aside in order to fund the placement of pro-tolerance ads next to the horrendous Muslims=Savages ones popping up all over New York City’s subway system. That’s some good work there, believers.
Previously – A God-Awful Small Affair
