religion

• Privacy
  • Agents at the U.S. border can search your laptop without cause, on the legal grounds that they already have an exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows them to search any paper documents you have with you. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s JFK Airport will start using a new technology to electronically strip-search passengers. Privacy advocates are concerned.
  • An atheist soldier sues the U.S. Army over personal threats because of his choice of religion. Privacy—and freedom of religion—advocates are concerned.
• Politics
  • A college student utterly pwns John Ashcroft during a campus appearance. If you haven’t seen this one yet, go read it; it’s amazing.
  • How does the Democratic primary end? There are three possibilities, and none of them are good for the future of the party.
  • On the other hand, if Clinton somehow manages to win, it’s payback time in Clintonland.
• Culture
  • Sun Myung Moon, worldwide cult leader and lesser-known owner of the right-wing Washington Times, was crowned as the Second Coming—in a U.S. Senate office building.
  • Richard Dawkins’s open letter to an unsuspecting victim of Ben Stein’s awful creationist propaganda film Intelligent Design-informed exposé of Charles Darwin, Expelled.
  • In Alabama, an experiment in gay hand-holding in public by the newsmagazine 20/20 generates an emergency call to 911 by a concerned citizen under the impression that laws were being broken.
  • Textbooks cost too much. What can be done about it, realistically?

The odious John Hagee, supporter of John McCain, has added yet another stupid set of assertions to the racist and ridiculous things he’s done lately, like organizing a ’slave sale’ and calling the Catholic Church ‘the great whore’. Now, I know it’s unfair to hold candidates accountable for every last thing said and done by their supporters, as people are doing with Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, but the difference here is that Obama has repudiated Farrakhan while McCain appears to be sticking by Hagee and his endorsement. (There’s a serious double standard with how the media are handling both of these cases, but what else is new.)

And now, Hagee apparently believes that Jews are responsible for their own suffering and persecution:

“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day. …

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come … it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people.”

That was me, sorry. My personal rebelliousness and disobedience brought on God’s wrath, and made Him send John Hagee and Louis Farrakhan to earth to let me know just how bad I was for eating a California roll with real crab that one time, or for driving to Seattle yesterday on the Sabbath. My bad.

This is not a new idea, theologically speaking—the Bible provides this justification over and over when bad things happen to the Jewish people, notably in the Book of Lamentations (check out 1.8, 3.39–47, and 5.16–18 for some typical examples). However, nobody except religious nuts and douchebags takes this ‘line of reasoning’ seriously. Kingdoms and countries are always getting sacked by other kingdoms and countries. This is the human race we’re talking about, people. What a douchebag, this religious nut Hagee.

(Hat-tip: AMERICAblog.)

Update: Josh Marshall has video and analysis of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Tex.) both totally blowing it on McCain and Hagee on television today.

The BBC is reporting that twelve men who had been Coptic Christians, converted to Islam, and re-converted to Christianity will be afforded state recognition of this choice:

The decision overturns a lower court ruling by a lower court, which said the state need not recognise conversions from Islam because of a religious ban.

Translation: Islam forbids apostasy, and many countries impose the death penalty if Muslims convert to any other religion (though see this recent article in the Guardian for a very interesting perspective on recent religious permissiveness in Egypt). However, it is very important to note that what is making the apostasy of these twelve Christians in Egypt possible is the fact that they were originally Christians before they converted to Islam:

This suggests that Egyptians born Muslim will still be unable to convert to other faiths and have those conversions recognised on their identity cards. Many Muslims believe that converting from Islam is wrong, and some believe it is punishable by death.

What a shame. It should be one’s own decision what religion to profess, if one wants to profess any at all, and the state has no business denying people the right to change their minds—and especially should not be allowed to execute them if they do. This issue goes to the heart of free speech and freedom of belief. This particular ruling is worthy of congratulation, but it is worth very little if total freedom of belief is denied.

For the past day or two I’d been working on an essay about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his recent remarks that seemed to imply ‘that some aspects of Muslim Sharia law could become part of British law.’ Of course, as is so often the case, Dr. Williams said nothing of the sort, but made it very easy for various parties—notably the media, who love a good controversial headline—to misinterpret what he had said. The full text of what he actually said, if you can parse the highly technical and academic language, is up at the Archbishop’s website. I was going to go through the relevant bits and try to pick them part, but now that I’ve read today’s Language Log, I’ve discovered suddenly that everything I could think of had been written by Geoff Pullum, with at least twice as much erudition and snark as I could manage on a good day.

Pullum’s key opinion is that Dr. Williams is an unsuitable leader for the Anglican church because he cannot ‘do the demanding job of holding this figurehead position without causing his church to fall apart in social and political discord.’ He further points out that Dr. Williams also took a number of positions on homosexuality that caused dissension in various sizable wings of the church. ‘The people who say he lacks the leadership skills for his job are basically right,’ says Pullum:

Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus. I hate to say it, but the calls for his resignation are not unjustified. He should be the holder of an endowed Professorship of Theology and Law at some top-ranking university. He should not be a prominent church administrator, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Absolutely true, but I have a few caveats to add: First, would there really be no controversy if Dr. Williams were a professor somewhere, and not the Primate of all England? Just think of Ward Churchill and the media furor that surfaces whenever he opens his mouth. Furthermore, is it the case that religious leaders should not voice their political opinions? In other words, is it appropriate for a religious leader to use his religious pulpit as a political bully pulpit? (I have a very strong personal bias against this, but from a conceptual point of view I’m not sure what the answer is.)

But finally, this doesn’t address the underlying issue: to what extent should the secular state accommodate religious law? Back in 2004 there was a controversy in Ontario in which it was proposed to include shari’ah law in the Arbitration Act, which would make decisions rendered by shari’ah courts regarding private disputes legally binding. This had some Muslims, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, worried that this would create a ’slippery slope’ and end up hurting Muslims more than it helped them. What do you do, for example, to prevent people—notably women—from being ‘coerced’ into using a system in which they might run the risk of unfair treatment? And what do you do when your religious law comes into conflict with established civil law? (And it is important to note that this is not just a Muslim concern; Jews, especially of the more Orthodox varieties, have many of the same problems with their own shadow court system, especially with the agunah problem).

Of course, there are no easy answers here: after all, this is one of the central post-Enlightenment questions in the Western world. But hopefully the current case of Dr. Williams can provide another data point and perspective in the current conversation, if we can get past the stupidity and sensationalism brought about by the media.