From Freethinker. I’m so sorry I didn’t get to meet these guys when they were proselyting atheism in town. I especially love the old geezer hitting them with a rake, as if to cast out the devils on his holy lawn.

Ann of Ornamental Illness criticized bloggers who have focused on the odd hairstyles and clothing of FLDS people and families like The Duggars. The Real Problems points out forced conformity, overpopulation, ignorance & lack of education, and the effect it may have on our future political stability.

If there was a family of 20 that were independent-minded with a low-carbon-footprint and not out to overpopulate the world with the agenda of spreading their religious zealotry and creating more voters who will eventually vote in representatives who would make all birth control illegal, I wouldn’t have quite as big a problem with it. But independent-minded and religious fanatics are anathema. We as a country are so scared of terrorists that go boom, but what about this silent terror right here on our own soil cleverly packaged into a “gosh gee whiz, what a well-behaved large family”? Shouldn’t we be concerned that as these kids are becoming young adults they have no education, no experience dealing with anyone outside of their family or tight-knit sect, no marketable skills or trade and no hope for college, not because they made bad choices and dropped out of high school, but because this was done with their parents’ moulding and blessing?

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Straight Scotch makes a case for human rights appeals to religious leaders in Human Rights - Human Wrongs. (found via Stumbleupon)

In some Nation States the perverse intertwining of faith and politics leads to rape victims being stoned to death, to ’submissive wives’, to women being denied access to power and authority. No appeal to statutory legislation will help them - they cannot embrace their faith as equals, they cannot participate in society as equals. The fate and level of ‘rights’ afforded to a woman in many instances is not enshrined in law, it’s on the lips of an Imam, a Priest or Pastor. There will be no such thing as Universal Human Rights until we have Universal Equal Rights.

I always enjoy Pat Condell’s rants. This in particular seems to be one I missed, but was worth catching up on.

Reading True Monsters from Pharyngula pointed me to this case: ‘My daughter deserved to die for falling in love’, The Observer.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British soldier in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Because she fell in love.

A friend criticized me for writing about the atrocities of Islam. She accused me of looking at the world through a western lens, of trying to force my own culture and beliefs on other people. What am I supposed to do instead? Sit around and let it happen? Turn a blind eye? Accept this as part of their ‘culture?’

PZ Myers put it so plainly, why Islam needs to stop:

Abdel-Qader Ali is a coward and a monster, the warped product of a bestial ‘civilization’ that treats half its members as chattel and the other half as little better than junkyard dogs, brutes who will maintain the savage order by denying love and individuality and murdering anyone who does not precisely fit their mandated roles.

Abdel-Qader Ali is not an aberration, not some random psychopath who committed an evil and then, all alone and despised, tries to justify it. No, he’s part of a whole culture that favors this violence.