Now that I’m actively collecting odd and/or disturbing news stories about the religiously inclined, I find myself in the position of having so much material to write about that I don’t know where to start, or how to condense it all into a blog entry that won’t run on for too many pages.
Let’s warm up with links to the story about the priest who disappeared while flying under party balloon power and the story of the priest in Russia who was tricked into blessing a strip club. Then of course there’s the tale of magical penis theft from Brazil and the conference where Muslims are trying to push the idea of moving the international date line to Mecca. Best quote from that particular farce:
In a clear support for the call, Islamic scholar Yousuf al-Qaradawi said Islam, “unlike other religions, never contradicted science”.
Since “Jedi” is apparently now a religion as well, I can even include the story about the drunken Darth Vader’s arrest on assault charges.
Now on to the fundies’ favorite subject to try not to think about – or at least, to try to hide from everyone else how much they’re thinking about it: sex.
I’ve written once or twice here about the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex education program, and it’s been back in the news again lately. House democrats convened a panel this week to discuss the elimination of this program, and were told of its many shortcomings by members of the American Public Health Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This was not enough for at least one republican in the room, though:
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.
I suppose that if parents truly believe that institutionalized ignorance is the solution to the problems of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, they should be allowed to opt their children out of real sex ed classes, but I don’t want my tax dollars spent to support an anti-educational agenda.
LaVern Jordan, founder of the Parkway Christian School in Texas, knows a little about sex. Or, at the very least, he’s eager to find out about it – so eager, in fact, that it seems he solicited sex from a student’s mother in lieu of tuition fees, and was caught on tape doing it. Sadly, the comments on this YouTube video are full of Christians screaming that he’s being persecuted for being a Christian.
Speaking of persecution of Christians: Mount Vernon, Ohio middle school teacher John Freshwater made the news over claims his first amendment rights were being violated when administrators told him to remove all religious items from his classroom; these included a bible on his desk and a copy of the ten commandments on the classroom door. A large group of student supporters responded by bringing bibles in to sit on their desks during class, and a rally was held in his honor.
I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting a bible on his desk in a school setting, so long as that bible in no way becomes part of the curriculum he’s teaching. So I fully support him unless, of course, there’s more the story. For instance, I’d have a problem if he were to promote creationIDsm in class by, I dunno, including anti-evolution propaganda pamphlets in the course material or doing something totally goofy like throwing a bunch of Legos on the floor and asking the students how they could possibly randomly assembled themselves. I mean, really, the way this guy is being harassed for his faith, you’d think he’d done something totally inappropriate like, just to make up some random, cruel example, using an electrical device to burn crosses into his students’ flesh.
The fax stated, “We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. … We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”
Oh, what will those poor, harried Christians be persecuted for next?
For people who are so afraid of death that they need to pretend it’s only a temporary state, the religious sure are in a hurry to send other people to theirs early. Another child, this time a fifteen month old, has died because her parents wouldn’t seek medical attention for conditions that are easily treatable by antibiotics. One imagines those same parents would have no problem marching in a rally shouting, “abortion is murder!”, but neglect of the living is just fine as long as it’s done in God’s name.
Christianity has no monopoly on the death-for-God notion, though. In fact for the most part they’re not very good at it. The BBC this week published an article about the imposition of the death penalty under Islam for people who leave the faith, and the London Times ran a story about a gay Iranian whose partner was executed for his sexual orientation and who now fears for his life because the Dutch government denied him the political asylum he requested to help avoid a similar fate himself.
I’m guessing the gay marriage thing is still off a little in the future for the middle east.