from the Meydaan Stop Stoning website:
URGENT: A Man and a Woman Schedule To Be Stoned on Thursday, June 21
The news about the scheduled stoning of a man and a woman in Takistan, Ghazvin, was spread through mobile phone messages and the Internet. The office of Showraye Tameen of Ghazvin province has issued the order to stone and man and a woman in public.
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Excerpted from the Women’s Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran (WFAFI) Newsletter:
AKI Italian News Agency – May 15, 2007 Iranian health minister Kamran Bagheri Lamkarani has presented a reform under which men and women would be divided in public hospitals under a new moralization campaign which kicked off last month. Under the new provisions, women would be treated only by female doctors and nurses and male patients would only be in contact with medics of the same gender. This follows a rigid interpretation of Sharia law which forbids physical contact between men and women. A major problem with this change is the higher number of male medics compared to women, although 67 percent of medical students in Iran are today women. However, the ministry has said the change could be gradual.Agence France Presse – May 15, 2007 Iranian police have prevented 50 women from boarding flights in their ongoing crackdown on dress styles deemed to be out of line with Islamic dress rules, officials said Sunday. “Fifty badly-veiled women were prevented from boarding domestic and international flights for failing to respect Islamic dress rules,” said the head of airport police Mamoud Bot Shekane, according to the Fars news agency. He said that the airport police have handed out “17,135 warnings to women who are not fully respecting the Islamic veil and 850 of them have had to make a written pledge to respect the veil more.” Out of these, the cases of 80 women as well as 50 men have been sent to the judicial authorities, he added. Iran’s police have been enforcing a nationwide crackdown on slack dressing for the past three weeks – a regular pre-summer event that has been pursued with increased vehemence this year. Women in Iran are obliged to cover all body contours and their heads, but in recent years many have pushed the boundaries by showing off naked ankles and fashionably-styled hair beneath their headscarves.
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On July 29, 1994, Paul Hill assasinated 2 abortion providers, John Britton and James Barrett. He (Hill) will be honored by 3 organizations Children Need Heroes, StreetPreach, and Paul Hill Memorial in Milwaukee, WI at the end of July with events that include “activities at our two remaining killing centers” and a “reenactment of 7-29-1994.”
The StreetPreach site offers the following above its announcement of this revolting event:
“Many people do not realize that Jesus was a street preacher. So was his cousin John the Baptist. The Bible speaks of many street preachers who took God’s message of repentance and salvation to all sorts of people (i.e. Moses, Jonah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Peter, Paul, Stephen, etc).”
Call me cynical, but somehow I don’t think Paul Hill Days would have met with Jesus’ approval.
The Whore-ifying Impact of Media Misogyny
Lucinda Marshall, @ 2007
In an unfortunate recent interview, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather offered his take on why CBS news has taken a plunge in the ratings, opining that, “(T)he mistake was to try to bring the ‘Today’ ethos to the evening news and to dumb it down, tart it up in hopes of attracting a younger audience.”
No mention of Charles Gibson’s past on Good Morning America and of course Rather stipulates that he has the highest regard for Katie Couric. Uh huh. As columnist Ann Althouse pointedly asks,
“1. Is Rather insinuating that having a female newscaster is part of the process of “tarting up” the news? I know he doesn’t precisely make that connection, but, to me, it’s just glaring that the word “tart” means prostitute.
2. Why on earth does it matter what time the news is on? If something is wrong for the evening news, why isn’t it just as wrong for the morning news? I think what is unstated is that only women are watching those morning shows, so the standards are lower.”
It is worth remembering that when Couric was hired, there was all this hoopla about her credentials and America being ready for a woman news anchor. And now CBS’ Les Moonves says that numbers show that just a few months later we’re not? Oh and by the way, let’s also not forget that CBS’s numbers were already in the toilet when Couric took over the evening news slot.
Access to Emergency Contraception in the Military: Dems Wimp Out
Beccah Golubock Watson has an excellent analysis of the recent defeat (no it wasn’t voted down, it just wasn’t voted on at all, same result) of Rep. Michael Michaud’s amendment to restore access to emergency contraception for women in the military. She writes,
“For reasons that remain unclear, Michaud withdrew the legislation the next morning. According to Castellanos, it was purely a logistical snafu: “Key supporters had to be in their districts.â€? But sources close to the issue tell a different story: The legislation, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, with bipartisan support, was dropped by a Democratic leadership unwilling to go to bat for pro-choice issues. Despite Michaud’s confidence that the votes were there, Democratic leadership wasn’t so sure, and they didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. The legislation might not have sunk, but they jumped ship anyway.”
Reminder to the Dems:Â Might be worth taking a moment to remember who put you in office in the first place…