Bodies of fetuses, newborns clog Harare’s sewers

From CNN:

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — The corpses of at least 20 newborn babies and fetuses are found each week in the sewers of Zimbabwe’s capital, some having been flushed down toilets, Harare city authorities said, according to state media Friday.

Town Clerk Nomutsa Chideya said the babies’ remains were found among a wide variety of waste and garbage cleared by city council workers unblocking sewers and drains in Harare. “Apart from upsetting the normal flow of waste, it is not right from a moral standpoint. Some of the things that are happening now are shocking,” the state Herald, a government mouthpiece, reported Chideya as saying.

Acute shortages of revenue and gasoline in the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1980 have crippled public utilities and garbage collection services across Zimbabwe.

Hospital fees and charges for scarce medicines have soared. Church and charity groups blame economic hardships for an increase in illegal back-street abortions.

Chideya said workers removed at least 20 tons of sand from sewers every day. Inflation is running at 613 percent and many impoverished Zimbabweans, unable to afford cleaning materials or detergents, use sand to scour cooking pots and household dishes.

Salt is also used as a substitute for toothpaste.

Plug: Feminists for Life, which addresses the reasons that women choose abortion, including sponsoring the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Service Act, which would provide funding to student parents before, during, and after pregnancy in areas like student health care and family housing.

Islamic law as applied in Pakistan

I had a meeting on the Hill today with a native of Pakistan who works with the Center for Human Rights in Pakistan. (Surprised? The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief of the Commission on Human Rights, Asma Jahangir, is also Pakistani.) He was a compelling speaker and I believe we will be working together at some point. In Pakistan:

• A woman cannot be raped if she is married. A married woman in a non-Muslim marriage may by abducted, raped, and then declared to be divorced, forcibly married to her rapist, and declared converted to Islam and subject to Islamic law. Then her rape is not considered rape. I have to say, this was the only item that was shocking to me, as I had never heard it before. The speaker called this forced conversion by rape.
• Conversion away from Islam is considered apostasy, and is punishable by death.
• If a woman is raped, in order to justify the charge, according to Islamic law, she must find 5 Muslim male witnesses. If she cannot, having made the charge and admitted to having sex outside of marriage, she is guilty of adultery and can be jailed. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of rapes in Pakistan are never reported.
• Honor killings are common.
• There is a very severe anti-blasphemy law, whereby the Penal Code punishes “defiling the Holy Qu’ran” with life imprisonment and the “use of derogatory remarks in respect of the Holy Prophet” with the death penalty.
• Some Islamic scholars have published articles discussing why anti-blasphemy laws are actually un-Islamic.

Anti-blasphemy laws

Corrections:

After a meeting with the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in Doha, Qatar, Islam Online reported that Norway assured him Norwegian law clearly prohibits blaspheming or lampooning religions in any form of expression, including the use of photographs. The Penal Code of Norway, like those of several other European states, does currently punish a person who “publicly insults or in an offensive manner shows contempt for any religious creed or for the doctrines or worship of any religious community lawfully existing here.” However, the provision has not generally been applied by the courts. Demonstrators in Oslo have been demanding that the long dormant law be put back into effect. Reports that the law was just put into place are unfounded, and if you saw an earlier version of this post and read that, I apologize for any misinformation. The story has been picked up also by Turkish Weekly, but given that the law has been in place for some time, I believe it is inaccurate.

(Speaking of dormant laws, did you know that blasphemy is still illegal in Massachusetts? Well, it is. The US Supreme Court struck down a similar law in New York long ago, however, so if anybody tried to enforce it in Massachusetts, they would not get very far.)

Anti-blasphemy laws can be found in several other European states. These laws will likely come back into use, at least in Europe. Forget the fact that they are now illegal under numerous human rights conventions (litigating this is going to cause such a firestorm). They have no idea what they are getting themselves into by invoking these laws. I’d like to know who is going to decide what blaspheming actually is, because it’s not quite like pornography (“you know it when you see it,” according to the US Supreme Court). If governments start to enforce these laws, there is a legitimate Christian theological argument that everytime someone says “Oh my God!” or “Jesus Christ!” and they are not actually speaking to God, that’s blaspheming. Half my friends would be paying fines or going to jail if they said it in Norway, Finland, Spain, or other countries that have similar laws. Every day. I’m not interested in living in that kind of world, even though when I hear those things I find them offensive (to God whom I worship–it’s not about me). Out of control.

My friend Eric comments: “I think the other thing that is interesting is the collision of two political worldviews. The Norwegians (like a lot of northern Europeans) have a governing system based on consensus, an agreement to compromise one’s own principles for the (assumed) greater good of society, and an unspoken predicate of almost total ethnic and cultural homogeneity. When someone yells as loud as the extremists have been, the Norwegians assume that they’ve actually caused an incredible amount of harm to have occasioned such a reaction.”

Heard and overheard

I went to C.F. Folks for lunch again today. That would be 4 days in a row.

• “Do you want anything?”
  “I’m not on the preferred list today. I’ve been waiting forever and [gestures at me] she already has her food.”
  “Look at her. She’s young. She’s pretty. She’s wearing a nice outfit. She looks nice.”
  “The service is lousy.”
  “She has hair. You don’t.”

• A well-dressed older woman sat down next to me at the counter, “Nice to see another woman here. This is a very macho place.” I looked around and realised there wasn’t a single other woman around, and that every other time I was there the place was full of men, too. I never noticed. I wonder what it means that I never noticed.
• So Art, the owner, who told the guy next to me that he didn’t have hair (which was true) leans over my bowl of peach cobbler, “You almost finished the whole thing, you little Porker!” He said it just like it sounds in your head.

Lunch reading: disappointing fiction from the New Yorker this week, A Shinagawa Monkey by Haruki Murakami. Best line: “A life without a name, she felt, was like a dream you never wake up from.”

Boys of Baraka

We went to see this last night.

On democracy across borders

People talk about democracy like it’s the holy grail. I had always thought that one man, one vote, seemed inadequate. Jefferson called it first: there is the danger of tyranny of the majority. And I always thought that we keep saying democracy, but what we really want is something else. What I thought the something else was depended on how cynical I was feeling at the time.

I believe both even more so after the Palestinian elections.

Palestinians didn’t vote for a terrorist organisation. They voted against corruption and an ineffective Fatah. Let’s face it, those extremist Islamists that instill fear in you when you worry about an Islamic law-governed Middle East? They’re the ones who showed up first after the earthquakes in Pakistan with aid while the sitting government did nothing and the rest of the world did even less. And Hamas was the one that promised a clean government in Palestine, and backed it up by going into communities and actually helping people instead of making a power grab.

The people spoke, but now we don’t like what they have to say. This headline really worries me: U.S. and Israelis are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster. (“The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.”). And it’s ironic, so ironic, to me, that this administration is saying now that Hamas didn’t earn that big of a mandate at the polls because of the narrow spread. Let’s remember that Al Gore got 1 million more popular votes than our sitting president, but we decided in the end to respect the rule of law, our electoral system, even if it does seem counterintuitive that President Bush is the fourth sitting president to have lost the popular vote (the others were John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison). Mandates my foot.

One-man, one-vote democracy does not work just on its own. To make it effective, we need to promote real freedom (even the freedom to choose what’s wrong–barring the usual limits regarding violence, obviously), individual dignity (regardless of what you believe), community responsibility (so we don’t look to government for every fix), an ability to dialogue over difference, ethics enforcement, and the willingness to take some punches on your own for these things, too (you can’t really protect someone else’s freedom of speech unless you’re willing to be insulted yourself someday). These aren’t things that we can monitor at the polls.

When I was studying law in Europe, I took this class on transitional legal systems in Eastern Europe. People can adopt the appearance of democracy, human rights, and free economies, without ever effectively having those things. We used human rights and liberalised markets as prerequisites for economic aid and foreign investment to former Soviet countries, and they adopted the kool-aid, right? They made it look good for all the UN and human rights monitors. But the mindset that you can depend on law to be fairly enforced, that you can get a competitive price for your potatos even if the government knows you need them, that the public square is someplace where your voice would actually be heard, that you could actually help shape your society–the things that make free societies work–those things were missing. And with all the human rights conventions that they adopted to show that they were getting in line, and all the market liberalisation, for years, and even now in some cases, in these countries, real justice took place in the black market–and that’s how you got your groceries, too. You can use whatever vocabulary you want, but it doesn’t mean you know what it means.

I can’t resist my usual rant about faith and the inadequacy of the law. You can go to church neatly dressed every Sunday, confess your sins to a priest, wait until you get married to have sex, lead your children in saying prayers before every meal, and never really know who God is. You can even say that you believe that Jesus died for your sins, and never know the freedom of grace.

In Palestine, clearly what some want is an Islamic state. We’ve got to face that. Can we respect state sovereignty and still expect religious freedom for the minority believers in those countries? The fact that the Qu’ran is clear that you cannot convert someone by force (hey–it’s only stating the obvious) gives me hope that there is a potential dialogue available. We have to try, because we’re not going to stop people from living out their faiths in the public square–and even at the polls.

Ohio Bans ID

Via Howard Friedman, Ohio’s Board of Education voted today 11-4 to eliminate a passage in the state’s science standards saying that students should be able to “describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory,” presumably to prevent the teaching of intelligent design. Three board members who voted in January to keep the plan were absent for today’s vote. Supporters of the eliminated passage said they would seek another vote later. Said board member Michael Cochran, “We’ll do this forever, I guess.”

As it should be: Give Science a Chance

Other related posts:

• Intelligent Design in Dover, PA
• Rome on Darwinism
• History of Science

S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G

I am on the phone with our insurance company and they are taking down all this info. After repeating myself twice, the woman on the other end reads the info back to me, and it was all wrong. I mean it was all wrong. Now, I am practised at being pretty clear and patient about these things, because my last name is one of those short Asian last names that were unfamiliar to most of America when I was growing up, so you always had to say “Just two letters, that’s it.” (I will not go into how one time a customer service representative did not believe me and sounded exasperated that I did not understand he needed the spelling of my full name and how this went back and forth several rounds until he accepted my contention that really, there was no more.)

Anyway, I think I was pretty clear and slow, but it was all wrong. My name, my birth date, my email address. I gave her my office address because I am moving. After I said for the second time, “Becket, B-E-C-K-E-T, like Thomas Becket,” she said, “Oh, right, Thomas Becket!” and then repeated back to me: “B-U-C-K-E-T Fund, right?”

Then she spelled the street name for me just to be sure: “C-O-N-N-E-C-T-I-T Avenue.” I mean, she said it like that she thought that might be how you spell it. This is the third service person I have met, since moving here and having “Connecticut” become part of my mailing address three months ago, who not only got confused, but simply did not know, how to spell Connecticut. She was really nice about it, though.

I’m concerned about the state of our country’s education. Particularly since she sounded fairly articulate and did not make any grammatical errors or use words that are not really words, suggesting to me that she is not uneducated, nor is she simply stupid. I could excuse stupidity, because some people are just born not very smart. That’s not an insult, it’s just true. But most people who are capable of getting a job working for a reputable insurance company answering calls and explaining benefits should be able to learn basic spelling by adulthood. I consider all the states in the union to be part of basic spelling.

Recent religious freedom news (Turkey, Finland, New York)

The Associated Press reports a court in Turkey said a teacher who wears a hijab outside of the classroom should not be promoted. She removes the headscarf every time she teaches in class, but the court says it’s a bad example to be setting for young people. Proving once again that secular government does not equal religiously neutral. The Prime Minister and other government officials condemned the decision. The hostility to religion in this 99% culturally Muslim country is growing, as are Islamic radicals, ironically enough.

Finland has stopped licensing private religious schools. Finnish News Agency STT reports that the Finnish government has decided to deny licenses for new private schools, as well as to turn down applications for the expansion of the activities of existing schools. Minister of Education Antti Kalliomaki said that it was not the function of schools to proclaim one single truth, religious or otherwise.

Photographer Protected Even When Art Offends Religious Beliefs. A New York state trial court decided Nussenzweig v DiCorcia last Wednesday. Erno Nussenzweig, a Hasidic Jew, filed suit against Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, a professional photographer. DiCorcia took a series of photographs of persons passing through Times Square, including Nussenzweig. Without obtaining the consent of any of the individuals, DiCorcia used the photos in a gallery exhibition, and in a catalogue that was published to go along with the exhibit. Nussenzweig’s religious beliefs are violated by the use of the photo; he believes that DiCorcia’s use of his image violates the second commandment prohibition against graven images. Nussenzweig sued under New York’s privacy law, but the court rejected his claim, finding that artistic works are protected by the First Amendment and are excluded from coverage under the privacy law:

Plaintiff argues that the use of the photograph interferes with his constitutional right to practice his religion. The free exercise clause, however, restricts state action…. There is no state action complained of in this case, only the private actions of defendants….

Clearly, plaintiff finds the use of the photograph bearing his likeness deeply and spiritually offensive. The sincerity of his beliefs is not questioned by defendants or this court. While sensitive to plaintiff’s distress, it is not redressable in the courts of civil law. In this regard, the courts have uniformly upheld Constitutional 1st Amendment protections, even in the face of a deeply offensive use of someone’s likeness…. [C]onstitutional exceptions to privacy will be upheld, notwithstanding that the speech or art may have unintended devastating consequences on the subject, or may even be repugnant. They are … the price every person must be prepared to pay for in a society in which information and opinion flow freely.

via

This is completely out of control

Protestors Rampage in 2 Pakistani Cities.

Prabhu Guptara also has a good analysis (via Tim Challies). However, Guptara does not point out that while images of Mohammed are not forbidden by the Qu’ran, and there are images of Mohammed in some Muslim temples and Islamic art, they are nevertheless explicitly forbidden by particular sects of Islam based on other legal writings which comprise the hadith, Islamic theology.

Update (15 February 2006): 3 More Die in Pakistan Cartoon Protests

Three more people were killed today, as tens of thousands of protesters, incensed at cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, took to the streets in Pakistani cities for a third straight day, clashing with police and torching western businesses, media reports and officials said. […]

Under Pakistan’s penal code, desecration of the Koran, the holy book of Muslims, is punishable by life imprisonment. Any insult to the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death.