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Rubio “Abortion Will Destroy America”

Helfyre — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:26:15 +0000

February 2, 2012

Rubio: ‘America cannot truly fulfill its destiny unless’ it ends abortion

By Caroline May – The Daily Caller Published: 11:14 AM 02/02/2012 | Updated: 11:23 AM 02/02/2012

By Caroline May – The Daily Caller

Sen. Marco Rubio – Lynne Sladky/AP/File

WASHINGTON – While chatter about a potential Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio vice presidency has reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of the GOP Florida primary, the rights of the unborn appeared to be the only thing on the mind of the Sunshine State’s freshman Republican senator on Wednesday night.

Rubio delivered red meat to a pro-life crowd of hundreds attending the Susan B. Anthony List’s fifth annual Campaign for Life Gala.

After taking a few digs at the age of his congressional colleagues and President Barack Obama’s teleprompter, Rubio jumped straight into the spiritual and philosophical foundations of ending abortion in America.

“The issue of life is not a political issue, nor is it a policy issue, it is a definitional issue. It is a basic core issue that every society needs to answer,” he said. “The answer that you give to that issue ends up defining which kind of society you have.”

Rubio criticized those who back away from the pro-life fight because it “makes us uncomfortable,” explaining that while other issues — like jobs, the debt, and the economy — are important, abortion is more than a political issue.

“This is an issue that, especially for those that enter the public arena and refuse to leave our faith behind, speaks to more than just our politics,” Rubio said. “It speaks to what we want to do with the opportunity we have been given in our life, to serve and to glorify our Creator.”

The Catholic senator explained that irrespective of an American’s view on abortion, the belief that Roe v. Wade was a bad legal decision should be universal.

“It is perhaps the most egregious and devastating example of a court that has decided that because a political branch will not deal with an issue they think is important, they’re going to step in and make a policy decision and literally create a Constitutional right,” Rubio said, reinforcing the point that Americans should reject Roe v. Wade “on legal grounds alone.”

The religious condemnation of abortion is central to Rubio’s pro-life stance.

“Virtually every faith condemns the practice of abortion, recognizes that life is a gift from the Creator and compels followers to believe that as well, as a basic tenet of their faith,” he explained.

According to Rubio, all the arguments in favor of abortion can be easily knocked down. The most common, he explained, is that of the right of a woman to do what she pleases with her own body.

“But there is another right, and that is the right to live. And so when you analyze this issue on a pro-life vs. pro-choice basis, what we basically have are two rights that are in conflict with each other,” he said.

“And we as a society must decide what to do when two rights are in conflict with one another.”

While the pro-choice community argues that the right to choose trumps the unborn’s right to live because it is not viable on its own, Rubio explained, the viability argument is a slippery slope.

“They say, ‘Well, they are not viable without the support of the mother.’ That also cannot be a good argument, because a newborn isn’t viable without the mother either. A 1-year-old child, a 2-year-old child — leave a 2-year-old child by himself, leave a 6-month-old child by himself, they are not viable either,” he said, joking that 19-year olds probably shouldn’t be left alone either.

Rubio insisted that in the struggle between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn, the deck is stacked against the unborn because they cannot vote. He urged the audience to be the voice for those who cannot speak.

“The way we look at [human rights atrocities] in history and condemn them — this era will be condemned for this, I have no doubt about it,” Rubio said. “Our job is to accelerate the process of getting there, to ensure that sooner rather than later — God willing, in our lifetime — we can arrive to a consciousness in this nation that this is wrong, that the right to life is a fundamental one that trumps virtually any other right I can imagine, because without it none of the other rights matter.”

Rubio compared today’s pro-life movement to abolitionism, the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage.

“At the end of the day our nation can never truly become what it fully was intended to be unless it deals with this issue squarely,” he said. “America cannot truly fulfill its destiny unless this issue is resolved. It’s that important.”

Rubio explained the importance of the task in religious terms, saying that he will one day need to answer to God for his actions and failing to fight against abortion — after all the gifts God has bestowed on him — is simply not an option.

“America is great because God has blessed America. And America has always honored that blessing by being an example to the world. … There is nothing that America can give this world right now more important than to show that all life — irrespective of the circumstances of its creation, irrespective of the circumstances of its birth, irrespective of the conditions of that they find themselves in — all life, in a planet where life is increasingly not valued, in a planet where people are summarily discarded, all life is worthy of protection. All life enjoys God’s love,” Rubio concluded to a standing ovation.

Sufis Persecuted In Libya Along With Christians

Helfyre — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:19:02 +0000

Wherever Sharia experiences a resurgence, the observable effect is that tolerance decreases and harassment of all kinds increases. Muslims are certainly not immune, especially if they belong to sects at variance with the dominant practice of the country, such as Sufis, Ibadis (also facing persecution in Libya), Ahmadis, or Shi’ite minorities in Sunni countries and vice-versa.

Those who would go after Christians and Jews will eventually come for their fellow Muslims who for whatever reason are found ideologically impure. “Freed from Gaddafi, Libyan Sufis face violent Islamists,” by Tom Heneghan for Reuters, February 1:

(Reuters) – Freed from Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year dictatorship, Libya’s Sufi Muslims find themselves under renewed pressure from violent Islamists who have been attacking them and their beliefs as heretical. The desecration of graves belonging to Sufi saints and sages in recent months have put the peaceful Sufis on the defensive, prompting some to post armed guards at their mosques and lodges to ward off hardline thugs.

But the birthday of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad, one of the highpoints in the Sufi calendar, is on Saturday and Libyan Sufis are determined to take their traditional processions through the streets to show they will not be cowed.

At a meeting of Sufi scholars to plan the celebrations, Sheikh Adl Al-Aref Al-Hadad said even being driven out of his zawiyah (Islamic school) late last year by Islamists known as Salafis would not deter him from marching.

“I’m worried but I’m not afraid,” said Al-Hadad, whose Tripoli school was stormed by armed men who burned its library, destroyed office equipment and dug up graves of sages buried there. They turned the school into a Salafi mosque.

On January 13, extremists crashed a bulldozer through the walls of the old cemetery in the eastern city of Benghazi, destroyed its tombs and carried off 29 bodies of respected sages and scholars. They also demolished a nearby Sufi school.

Sheikh Khaled Mohammad Saidan, whose Dargut Pasha Mosque faces Tripoli’s port, said most Islamists in post-Gaddafi Libya disagreed with Sufis, but peacefully. “But there are no police around and you never know what some people might do,” he added.

Sufi lodges from around Tripoli will march on Saturday through narrow alleys of the walled old town, waving flags and chanting poems in praise of Mohammad to the beat of cymbals, drums and tambourines.

To the puritanical Salafis, these practices amount to bida (innovation) and shirk (idolatry), both grave sins that must be stopped, by force if necessary.

Sufism, a mystical strain in both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, dates back to the early days of the faith. Apart from their prayers, Sufi devotions include singing hymns, chanting the names of God or dancing to heighten awareness of the divine.

Revered saints, scholars and holy people are buried in shrines and some are honored with annual pilgrimages. While many Islamic scholars say this is admissible, puritanical schools of Islam such as Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis or the Afghan Taliban consider it heretical. [...]

Libya’s Sufis also worry they are being outflanked politically. Many new religious officials have Salafi leanings, they say, and are appointing Salafi imams to mosques vacated by pro-Gaddafi preachers. Salafi preaching is now widespread on Libyan television and radio, they say.

Salafis have also begun denouncing traditional imams to the authorities, prompting them to be replaced by hardliners. “About half the imams here have been replaced by Salafis,” said one imam at a large Tripoli mosque where Salafis in the congregation are campaigning against celebrating Mawlid.

Political parties are starting to form, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Libyan Salafis have not yet announced if they plan to launch a party and contest elections, as in Egypt….

9 Year Olds Being Forced Into Marriage In U.K.

Helfyre — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:50:27 +0000

Nine. There’s that number again. Now, everyone knows only the greasiest of greasy Islamophobes retail the notion that the practice of marrying girls as young as nine has something to do with Muhammad marrying Aisha when she was six and consummating the marriage when she was nine, and he was six times her age at fifty-four. So, all of these people continuing the practice in the remotest, most undeveloped areas Afghanistan and Yemen out of Islamic piety must actually be reading American or European blogs, right?

Wrong. For example, there is Sahih Bukhari 7.62.88: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with ‘Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).”

It is Islam’s own texts and traditions that cause the practice to persist in places far removed from one another, and to appear where it had previously been unimaginable — for example, Britain. “Islington girls forced into marriage at the age of nine,” by Pavan Amara for the Islington Tribune, January 27:

An alarming number of under-age girls – some as young as nine – are being forced into marriage in Islington, according to a leading campaign group.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) claim that at least 30 girls in the borough were forced into marriage in 2010.

The practice was condemned by the Imam of Finsbury Park Mosque, who said such marriages were against Islam and “unacceptable”.

He pledged to invalidate any marriage which he said were carried out by “back-street Imams”.

IKWRO, which made headlines last month when they revealed there had been almost 3,000 “honour-based” violence cases in 2010, has shown the Tribune records which revealed at least three 11-year-old girls and two nine-year-olds had been forced into marriage with older men within Islington. The oldest girls involved were 16.

They have warned that hundreds of Islington girls could be suffering sexual, emotional and physical scars as a result of the child marriages every year and are calling for teachers, social workers and police to be better trained to spot and manage the abuse.

Information from the Ministry of Justice, following a Freedom of Information request, revealed that 32 Forced Marriage Protection Order applications were made for children under 16 in Britain last year.

Six of these were made for under-16s within Islington at the Royal Courts of Justice, although these were not necessarily made for Islington residents.

At the Islington court, “five or fewer” orders were made to protect children between the ages of 9-11.

The orders are a form of injunction that threaten legal punishment if marriage takes place due to emotional or physical force.

In most cases, the children fear they will be killed if they reveal the truth to anybody, while others believe they will be separated from their families and taken into social services’ care.

Dianna Nammi, director of IKWRO, explained that the girls are married in a mosque’s sharia court. This means they are not legally married according to British law, rendering the Home Office unable to recognise or prove the abuse.

“They are still expected to carry out their wifely duties, though, and that includes sleeping with their husband,” she said.

“They have to cook for them, wash their clothes, everything. They are still attending schools in Islington, struggling to do their primary school homework, and at the same time being practically raped by a middle-aged man regularly and being abused by their families. So they are a wife, but in a primary school uniform.

That’s not being “practically” raped. The practice will diminish when the law comes after the “husbands” and families with the force with which they would pursue child molesters and human traffickers. This is rape, and it is human trafficking.

“The reason it doesn’t get out is because they are too terrified to speak out, and also the control their families have over them is impossible to imagine if you’re not going through it. The way it is covered up is so precise, almost unspeakable.”

Ms Nammi said that one 13-year-old had to sneak out of a maths lesson to contact the group, because she was being monitored so closely by her family.

“Her teacher didn’t notice because she said she’d gone to the toilet, but when she got home that day she was beaten,” she said.

“Her father knew she hadn’t been in maths because he had sent an uncle to spy on who she was talking to through the classroom window.”

Ms Nammi said that the girls are married off to family friends or family members to stop them from losing their virginity to anyone not chosen by their father.

As young as nine. Heaven knows they’re all going to become wild party animals at age 10.

However, the incentive is also often financial.

The financial aspect supports the human trafficking angle:

“The girl automatically becomes her husband’s property, so he takes financial responsibility for her,” said Ms Nammi.

“In fact, often the husband has to start contributing to the girl’s family, so it becomes a way of bringing in another salary.

“Who are girls going to tell? Often they feel like teachers at school won’t understand what their families are like. They will think they’re like Western families, and won’t understand that if they pass on anything at all that they’ve been told to the family, then the girl will be killed. So they just chose not to tell at all.”….

Defense secretary Panetta: Pakistan must have known someone of interest was in bin Laden compound

Indeed. It defies imagination that a secretive group holed up in a meticulously controlled compound in close proximity to the Pakistani military never made them wonder who their neighbors were. Panetta’s observations echo what he said after the bin Laden raid in May: either the Pakistanis were incompetent, or complicit, though Panetta now seems to be leaning more toward the latter assessment.

“Pakistan knew where Bin Laden was all along, Leon Panetta admits as he reveals intelligence source for Osama raid,” by David Baker for the Daily Mail, January 28:

Pakistan officials must have known that terror chief Bin Laden was holed up in a remote compound in Abbottabad, claims Pentagon chief Leon Panettta.

The Defence Secretary has publicly hit out at the Pakistani government who he says ‘must have had some sense’ of Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

He said he remains convinced they must have known someone of interest was hiding out in the safe-house in an interview for CBS’s ’60 Minutes’, but added he has no proof.

The explosive interview, to be broadcast tomorrow, also saw Panetta acknowledge for the first time that Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi had provided key information about the former Al Qaeda frontman’s whereabouts.

Afridi ran a vaccination program for the CIA to collect DNA and verify Bin Laden’s presence in the hideout and Panetta confessed he is ‘very concerned’ for the doctor who has been charged by Pakistan with treason.

Since the May 2 attack on Bin Laden’s compound, last year, Pakistani leaders have continued to deny they had any idea Bin Laden was staying in the city.

This is despite revelations that he had been hiding at the site for as long as five years.

For months the CIA knew of his presence there and spied on him from its own top-secret safe-house next door to the terror leader’s fortified compound, before Navy Seals were sent in. [...]

Shortly after the raid security forces announced they had arrested 40 people in Abbottabad, suspected of having connections to Osama Bin Laden.

This gave rise to growing accusations the Pakistani government must have been aware he was using the base as a safe house, given the network of support he had there….

“Nappy Headed Hoes” Now PC. Really?

Helfyre — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:47:04 +0000

Jan 27, 2012

Brent Bozell

Remember when Don Imus saw his cushy CBS Radio and MSNBC career go up in smoke in 2007 when he tried very early one morning to make one of his fake misanthropic jokes about the Rutgers women’s basketball team being “nappy-headed hoes”? Black activists demanded his firing. Advertisers fled. The corporate suits, appalled and fearful of the terrible publicity, canned him.

But if you’re a black rapper, terms like this advance your career. The female rapper Nicki Minaj has a very hot new video called “Stupid Hoe.” She uses that same term to snap at other women — “We ship platinum, them b—-es are shipping wood / Them nappy-headed hoes, but my kitchen good.” (Don’t hurt your brain trying to make sense of it.) Minaj even threw the n-word in the lyrics: “How you gon’ be the stunt double to the nigga monkey?”

The video broke YouTube records by clocking up 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours on the site and 11 million over the weekend. But outrage from our elites? Hello? Anyone? So far, the silence is deafening from America’s major race-card players.

Back in 2007, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton — the dynamic duo of racial correctness — met with CBS chairman Leslie Moonves to demand Imus be given the boot. When they won, Jackson called the firing “a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation.”

Sharpton added: “It’s not about taking Imus down. It’s about lifting decency up…We cannot afford a precedent established that the airways can commercialize and mainstream sexism and racism.”

Sumner Redstone, chairman of the CBS Corporation board and its chief stockholder, had told Newsweek that he had expected Moonves to “do the right thing.” Translation: Bye-bye, Imus.

It seems rather clear that Imus deserved some punishment, even if his dismissal might be excessive. So why were the reverends applauded universally for their activism?

Because all of their fuss wasn’t about “public decency” or “degradation” or media companies “mainstreaming racism and sexism,” not really. It was about race, and about how whites can’t say “indecent” things about blacks, not even in jest. But blacks can use those very same words — however they wish — with the ugliest of intentions, if desired, with impunity. Where are Jackson and Sharpton over “Stupid Hoe” now? Cricket, cricket.

Safe S&M . Is There Such A Thing ?

Helfyre — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:53:38 +0000

Saturday, Jan 28, 2012 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

When safe words are ignored

Women in the bondage and kink scene are speaking out about sexual assaults in the community, and calling for change

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/Juanmonino)

Topics:Love and Sex, BDSM, Editor’s Picks

Maggie Mayhem is dressed like a kinky dictator. Standing onstage at San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, her olive-green military cap and knee-high-heeled boots belie the vulnerable subject at hand.

“The first time I was ever raped,” she starts, her throat tightening around her words, “it was actually on a date with somebody from my local S/M community.”

The 27-year-old sex educator and fetish model has never before publicly shared the story of her sexual assault, but the purpose of this evening’s event, a “consent culture” fundraiser, is so that she can start telling it, again and again. Her mission, along with fellow activist and sex worker Kitty Stryker, is to raise awareness about what they say is widespread abuse within the BDSM community and a tendency for players to either turn a blind eye or actively cover it up. They’ve developed a workshop meant to combat the problem and want to take it on the road.

We’re talking about real abuse here, not the “consensual non-consent” that the scene is built around, as Mayhem’s story of her first assault makes clear. As an 18-year-old freshmen and member of a kinky student club at the University of California, Berkeley, Mayhem helped raise money to bring a prominent BDSM educator to campus for a workshop. Afterward, he singled her out for a private “play date” and she was flattered. “I thought this was the best person I could start to learn from,” she says.

The scene that they negotiated was “fantastic,” Mayhem says, but then things took a turn. “I found myself tied up and unable to get away when that individual decided that he was going to have sex with me,” she says, tears welling in her eyes, “even though we’d specifically negotiated against it, even though I was saying that it needed to stop, and even though he was not wearing a condom at the time.”

For the most part, she kept the experience to herself, but on the rare occasions when she did tell people in the community about it, she says, “I got one response … which was people saying [things like], ‘I don’t do drama. This is a respected person in the community. I’m very sorry that you had a miscommunication during your scene that made it not very fun for you, but I don’t want to hear about it.’”

As she pushed deeper into the scene, trying to put this experience behind her, she had countless more encounters where her boundaries were blatantly ignored. As she gained experience, she started to talk more confidently and openly about these experiences – but, again, she got the “I don’t do drama” line. At the same time, she realized that such abuse was prevalent: “It started to look more like a systemic issue,” she says. As Stryker wrote last year in an essay for Good Vibrations magazine, ” I have yet to meet a female submissive who hasn’t had some sort of sexual assault happen to her.”

BDSM has long been a target of criticism from outsiders, but these two are devoted members of the scene. Stryker argued in her essay, “I Never Called It Rape,” that the community is so “focused on saying how BDSM isn’t a cover for abuse that we willingly blind ourselves to the times that it can be,” she wrote. “How on earth can we possibly say to society at large that BDSM is not abuse when we so carefully hide our abusers and shame our abused into silence?”

At one point during the event, Carol Queen, an infamous sex educator and co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture, takes the stage and tells a story about how her partner, Robert, had been alerted a few years back by various insiders that someone was drugging girls and raping them at local play spaces. “Robert actually acted to try to stop that guy and the pillars of the community, some of them, did not feel very good about that,” she says. (The scene, which not only faces outside criticism but also serious legal threats, is “really invested” in not talking about this, Stryker explains.)

Queen, a guru of progressive Bay Area sexuality, also reveals that despite still being a submissive woman, she “doesn’t play anymore” or “go out to community dungeon spaces,” in large part “because of issues we’re talking about here.”

The problem spans from unwanted overtures to rape, say Mayhem and Stryker. “When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into ‘the BDSM community’, I can’t actually count them,” Stryker wrote in Good Vibrations’ magazine. “As I reflected on the number of times I’ve … been pressured into a situation where saying ‘no’ was either not respected or not an option, or said that I did not want a certain kind of toy used on me which was then used, I’m kind of horrified.”

Beyond black-and-white cases of rape, there is a cultural disdain for safe words, they say. “When I was a submissive,” says Stryker, now a dominant in both her personal and professional life, “I felt the pressure to not safeword because I felt like that made you a bad submissive.” That’s because she witnessed submissives who used their safe word being criticized as “difficult.” At the “consent culture” event, Stryker asks the audience, “Is it the fault of the submissive who didn’t safeword when they should have or is it the fault of the dominant who didn’t notice that their submissive didn’t safeword [when they should have] or is it the fault, as I think it is, of the community that makes it complicated?”

Complicating things further, there are the times when a scene doesn’t have a clear start, so a safe word is never negotiated (although there are universal safe words, like “red” or the exceedingly obvious “safe word” that any experienced dom should recognize).

Mayhem and Stryker don’t expect much sympathy from the outside world about the problem of pushed boundaries within a scene that eroticizes pushing boundaries, but they did hope for a better reception from the people within their own community who are throwing these play parties. It’s their discussion of the pressure to not safeword that has courted the most controversy within the scene. One critic, Janet Hardy, author of several popular BDSM books, including “The New Bottoming Book,” tells me, “My general thoughts are that it is tremendously important to build a safe word culture but that bottoms have to hold up their share of that responsibility,” she says. “A bottom who refuses to safeword when he or she has actually withdrawn consent has just turned me into a rapist or assailant without my consent, and that is not OK.”

Hardy, co-author of the bible on polyamory, “The Ethical Slut,” doesn’t deny that sexual assault is a problem in the community, but she takes issue with arguments about the social pressure to not safeword. It has “some of the flavor of the kind of victimhood that we see from some second wave feminists,” she says, “and I don’t want to get too deep into this because I’m going to get myself into trouble, but you know where I’m going with this.”

Another detractor wrote in response to a recent interview Stryker did in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

A bottom/sub MUST investigate who they are seeking to play with. They MUST insist that their safe words are honored. They should, when playing with someone new or unfamiliar, have someone they trust be present to look out for their safety. A bottom/sub should never play with someone the first time in a private location (someone’s home, hotel, etc.). If public play spaces are not available, try to set an arrangement where there will be someone to look after their best interests.

Stryker considers such criticisms “very victim blame-y.” She explains, “[There's] this belief that if I make sure I get references, have a safe call [a scheduled check-in with a friend to make sure things haven't gone awry] and negotiate using a checklist, I’ll be safe,” Stryker tells me. “But then you find out that you can do those three things and not be safe anyway, and that’s terrifying. You realize how vulnerable you are.”

Despite it being a marginal sexual community, these debates clearly echo conversations about consent that routinely happen in the world at large. Hardy says, “These things tend to happen by their nature in places where there are only two witnesses. To what degree can the community line up behind a problem when it’s one person’s word against another’s?” (Ah, the old “he said, she said” quandary.) Just as so often happens with assaults on college campuses, alcohol and other intoxicants are frequently blamed. “Standard BDSM gospel has it that you don’t play when impaired, but a lot of people do,” says Hardy.

No matter the context, victims of assault tend to engage in the same second-guessing of themselves. “It can be really confusing,” Mayhem says during her speech. “Was that a scene, what was that? Should I have expected that? Was it my business to go that far and then stop? Is this just how it works?” That sounds a whole lot like the more familiar, “Was I dressed too provocatively? Should I have been out that late at night? Did I lead him on?”

In many ways, the kink scene seems light-years ahead of other sexual communities when it comes to issues of consent. They have checklists that tirelessly detail personal limits and safe words meant to bring things to a screeching halt if ever someone’s boundaries are crossed. That’s theory — just like “no” means “no” for non-kinksters — but it’s not always so in practice.

Tortire Clinis Over

Helfyre — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:30:19 +0000

This is the beginning of the end — the end of women suffering physical and emotional abuse (and even torture and sexual assault) in Ecuadorian clinics trying to “cure” them of being lesbians.

All around Ecuador, countless women were being held against their will in hundreds of these so-called clinics. For ten years, a group of brave women in Ecuador who call themselves Fundacion Causana tracked down survivors, documenting their stories and bringing them to light. But the situation wasn’t changing.

Then, something incredible happened. A petition that Fundacion Causana had started on Change.org calling on the Ministry of Health to take action was signed by more than 113,000 people around the world. Suddenly, officials were ready to meet with Fundacion Causana and take responsibility for the violence against women and LGBT Ecuadorians happening on their watch.

Now, the Ecuadorian government is working hand in hand with Fundacion Causana to eradicate these clinics from Ecuador, free the women trapped there, and run a national public awareness campaign to fight homophobia.

Sometimes, it takes a decade of fearless commitment before starting a petition on Change.org tips the balance. Sometimes, a movement is sparked by one person starting a petition. But almost everyday now, there’s a victory.

Gay Rights Film Shakes Turkey

Helfyre — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:15:59 +0000

Gay honor killing film shakes Turkey up, enrages Islamic supremacists

“Islamist daily Vakit called it ‘homosexual propaganda’ by a gay lobby bent on ‘legitimizing perversion through their so-called art.’” Remember, they’re talking about a film about an honor killing. Vakit doesn’t seem to mind the honor murder; it’s the immorality that upsets them.

“Gay ‘honor killing’ movie shakes Turkey up,” by Ece Toksabay for Reuters, January 20 (thanks to Anne Crockett):

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – On a hot summer’s day in 2008, 26-year-old physics student Ahmet Yildiz was shot dead when he popped out from his Istanbul apartment to buy ice cream.

The main suspect in the killing, a fugitive still wanted by Turkish police, is Yildiz’s father, who could not accept that his only son was in a homosexual relationship.

The case, widely believed to be Turkey’s first gay “honor killing”, has inspired a movie “Zenne”, which opened on January 13 and explores gay sexual identity and prejudice in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey.

“We had the movie idea in mind right after our dear friend Ahmet was killed,” said Caner Alper, writer and co-director of the movie. “His story needed to be told.”

Yildiz was born into a wealthy religious family in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, in Turkey’s impoverished and conservative southeast, but moved to cosmopolitan Istanbul during his university years, seeking more freedom as a gay man.

In Istanbul, Yildiz started a new life and made new friends; he also began a gay relationship and eventually moved in with his boyfriend, who witnessed Yildiz’s murder from the window of their apartment on the Asian side of the city divided by the Bosphorus Strait.

In the movie, Yildiz’s character is encouraged to come out of the closet by a male belly dancer, or zenne, and a German photographer who has moved to Istanbul after a personal crisis in Afghanistan, where he accidentally caused the death of several children during a photo shoot. Both are fictional characters.

In real life, Yildiz’s coming out as a gay man was seen as an affront in his deeply patriarchal and tribal family, even though his parents adored him, a cousin, Ahmet Kaya, told the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.

LOOKING FOR A “CURE”

Yildiz’s father had urged him to return to their village and to see a doctor and an imam to “cure” him of his homosexuality and get married, but Yildiz refused.

“Ahmet loved his family more than anything else and he was tortured about disappointing them,” Kaya was quoted as saying in the foundation’s report.

After he was killed, the family did not claim Yildiz’s body for a proper Islamic burial — an indication of the deep shame the family felt and that they had ceased to consider him one of their own. He was buried instead in a “cemetery for the nameless.”…

Remember this? Pamela Geller and I dedicated the Aqsa Parvez Memorial Grove in Israel, in memory of a girl whose father and brother murdered her in an honor killing and who was then buried in an unmarked grave.

Islamist daily Vakit called it “homosexual propaganda” by a gay lobby bent on “legitimizing perversion through their so-called art.”

Despite being the only suspect, Yildiz’s father is still at large and is being tried in absentia.

Friends and activists, who have attended some of the hearings wearing masks bearing Yildiz’s portrait, say the authorities lack the will to find the perpetrator.

Alper and Mehmet Binay, co-directors of the movie and together as a gay couple for 14 years, said they heard their friend Yildiz receive death threats from his family over the phone.

Yildiz filed an official complaint but failed to receive any protection, they said.

“Honor killings,” or crimes carried out against mostly women and young girls seen to have tainted the family’s name, are not uncommon in Turkey, particularly in poor and rural areas.

The European Union, which Turkey wants to join, has repeatedly urged Ankara to take a tougher stance against such crimes.

MILITARY PRACTICES

Turkey is often held as an example in the Middle East for marrying Islam and democracy, but Turkish gay activists say Ankara’s human rights record is far from perfect.

One practice particularly abhorred by rights groups is the method by which gay men can be exempted from the required 16-month military service: they have to prove their homosexuality in medical tests and are compelled to provide photos of them having sex with other men.

In the movie, two characters undergoing one such examination are forced to wear make-up and dress in women’s clothes, while doctors perform anal examinations.

According to Article 17 of the health regulations of the Turkish Armed Forces, homosexuality is considered a “psychosexual deviance.”

“Turkey is going through a democratization process, and the army needs to enter this phase, too,” said Binay.

“We don’t live in a dream world and we don’t expect it to happen all of a sudden in such a deep-seated institution, but at least they could stop the humiliating practices against gay men.”

Turkish rights groups reported 24 killings of gay and transsexual individuals in the last two years. In most cases, courts reduced the sentences or the perpetrators were not found….

Steve Tyler’s Ex Walks In March For Life

Helfyre — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:14:11 +0000

Rock star Steven Tyler’s ex-fiancée to talk about her abortion at March for Life

by John Jalsevac

Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:00 EST
Comments (0)

January 20, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Thirty-five years ago a 16-year-old Julia Holcomb was engaged to be married to Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler. But after she became pregnant with his child the relationship spiraled downward, until she was pressured into aborting their child.

Holcomb, who is now the mother of seven children and fiercely pro-life, kept that abortion, and her relationship with Tyler, secret for 35 years, until Tyler published an autobiography last year making what she says are scurrilous claims about their relationship.

Holcomb decided that it was time to break her silence, and published a candid memoir on LifeSiteNews.com in cooperation with Rachel’s Vineyard, telling her side of the story.

Julia Holcomb and Steven Tyler

“I had to become Silent No More right in my own home, I had no choice,” said Ms. Holcomb, whose life hit a low point in 1975, when she nearly died in an apartment fire and was then convinced to abort her baby at five months.

Click “like” if you want to end abortion!

Holcomb says that the abortion haunted her for many years. Since going public with her story, she has become a spokeswoman for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign – a network of men and women who regret their abortions and who publicly speak out in favor of life.

This year Holcomb will make her debut at the March for Life, where members of Silent No More Awareness gather annually to share their testimonies.

On Monday, Jan. 23, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building, Holcomb will publicly share the story of her abortion and how it was the catalyst that prompted her to turn her life around.

Holcomb will join dozens of other women and men from the campaign.

“In spite of everything, I do not hate Steven Tyler, nor am I personally bitter.” Ms. Holcomb said. “I pray for his sincere conversion of heart and hope he can find God’s grace, as I have.”

Ms. Holcomb also will speak at a March for Life Youth Rally, to take place from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, in the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill, 400 New Jersey Ave NW.

Christians Slaughtered In Nigeria By Islamists

Helfyre — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:09:12 +0000

At least 143 killed in north Nigeria sect attacks

Email this Story

Jan 21, 11:01 AM (ET)

By IBRAHIM GARBA and JON GAMBRELL

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KANO, Nigeria (AP) – Coordinated attacks claimed by a radical Islamist sect killed at least 143 people in north Nigeria’s largest city, a hospital official said Saturday, as gunfire still echoed around some areas of the sprawling city.

Soldiers and police officers swarmed over streets Saturday in Kano, a city of more than 9 million people that remains an important political and religious hub in Nigeria’s Muslim north. But their effectiveness remains in question, as the uniformed bodies of many of their colleagues lay in the overflowing mortuary of Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital, Kano’s largest hospital.

A hospital official there said at least 143 people died in the attacks Friday. The count included some bodies already claimed by families for immediate burial per Islamic law, the official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to disclose the figure to journalists.

Other bodies could be lying at other clinics and hospitals in the city.

In a statement issued late Friday, federal police spokesman Olusola Amore said attackers targeted five police buildings, two immigration offices and the local headquarters of the State Security Service, Nigeria’s secret police.

Nwakpa O. Nwakpa, a spokesman for the Nigerian Red Cross, said volunteers offered first aid to the wounded, and evacuated those seriously injured to local hospitals. He said officials continued to collect corpses scattered around sites of the attacks. A survey of two hospitals by the Red Cross showed at least 50 people were injured in Friday’s attack, he said.

State authorities declared a 24-hour curfew late Friday as residents hid inside their homes amid the fighting.

A Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in a message to journalists. He said the attack came as the state government refused to release Boko Haram members held by the police.

Boko Haram has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an AP count. So far this year, the group has been blamed for at least 219 killings, according to an AP count.

The sect’s targets have included both Muslims and Christians. However, the group has begun specifically targeting Christians after promising it will kill any Christians living in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north. That has further inflamed religious and ethnic tensions in Nigeria, which has seen ethnic violence kill thousands in recent years along the divide between the north and the largely Christian south.

Friday’s attacks also could cause more unrest, as violence in Kano has set off attacks throughout the north in the past, including postelection violence in April that saw 800 people killed. Kano, an ancient city, remains important in the history of Islam in Nigeria and has important religious figures there today.

Amid the recent unrest and attacks, at least two journalists have been killed in Nigeria. Journalist Enenche Akogwu, who worked as a correspondent in Kano for private news station Channels Television, was shot and killed Friday while reporting on the attacks, colleagues said. In central Nigeria’s city of Jos, Nansok Sallah, a news editor for a government-owned radio station called Highland FM, was found dead in a shallow stream Thursday, the victim of an apparent murder, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

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Associated Press writer Salisu Rabiu in Kano, Nigeria contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell reported from Lagos, Nigeria and can be reached at .http://www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP

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At least 143 killed in north Nigeria sect attacks

Email this Story

Jan 21, 11:01 AM (ET)

By IBRAHIM GARBA and JON GAMBRELL

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Other bodies could be lying at other clinics and hospitals in the city.

State authorities declared a 24-hour curfew late Friday as residents hid inside their homes amid the fighting.

Boko Haram has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

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Urban Farmers

Helfyre — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:55:33 +0000

Saturday, Jan 21, 2012 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

Urban gardens: The future of food?

It’s easy to make fun of, but as more and more farming moves downtown, eating local is taking on a new flavor

By Will Doig

(Credit: Salon, Mignon Khargie / Chee-Onn Leong via Shutterstock)

Topics:Dream City

With penny-farthings, handlebar mustaches and four-pocket vests back in fashion, the rise of urban farming should just about complete our fetish for the late 1800s. Today, you can find chicken coops on rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y., goats in San Francisco backyards, and rows of crops sprouting across empty lots in Cleveland.

That it fits so snugly into the hipster-steampunk throwback trend is what makes urban farming ripe for ridicule. (“Portlandia” has taken a crack or two at it.) But could city-based agriculture ever make the leap from precious pastime to serious player in our cities’ food systems — not just for novelty seekers and committed locavores, but for the Safeway-shopping masses?

“I don’t want to make a statement like, ‘This is the future of farming,’” says Gotham Greens co-founder Viraj Puri, sitting at his laptop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, steps away from hundreds of rows of butter lettuce. “It’s probably never going to replace conventional farming. But it has a role to play.”

If the greenhouse we’re sitting in is any indication, that role looks nothing like the 1800s.

Gotham Greens is a 15,000-square-foot hydroponic farm on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse. It had its first harvest in June, and expects to produce 100 tons of food per year. The crops (mostly lettuce) grow in rows of white plastic tubing, their roots massaged by recycled water, under grow-lights and fans controlled by a central computer system. The system collects data from sensors throughout the room and adjusts the environment accordingly. This pampered produce will eventually end up on restaurant menus and shelves at stores like Whole Foods.

Two years ago, Forbes predicted that by the year 2018, 20 percent of the food consumed in U.S. cities will be grown in places like this. It’s safe to say that’s almost certainly not going to happen. Right now, urban-grown produce represents a minuscule slice of the food system. But there are several plausible scenarios that could make such food more commonplace in the city kitchen of the future.

Several of these scenarios are growing more likely by the day. If energy prices spike, your average grapefruit’s 1,500-mile journey to your fridge could make local food seem cheaper by comparison. Droughts are becoming more common, and soil-free hydroponic agriculture uses a fraction of the water of conventional farming and can easily be set up in urban environments. And there’s always the unforeseen Black Swan event: World War II “victory gardens” made urban farming a temporary reality for millions in the early 1940s.

But even if these scenarios came to pass, wouldn’t it still make more sense to grow on cheaper land just outside city limits, rather than right in the bustle of the city? Depends which city you’re talking about. Money manager John Hantz has spent the last few years putting together plans for a massive farm right in Detroit — not just to grow food, but to boost land values in general. “We need scarcity” in Detroit, he told Fortune magazine. By which he means, depopulated Detroit has way too much land. Turning hundreds of acres of the city into farmland, his theory goes, would make land scarcer (and greener), which would raise real estate values. It would also take dilapidated properties off the city’s hands. It’s a fairly wild scheme that some suspect is nothing more than a real-estate land grab. Still, Hantz has the city’s interest piqued.

There’s another reason to grow food right in the city. Puri says he and his partners chose Brooklyn for lots of reasons: to help create jobs, to green the area, and to avoid a commute to the country. “We didn’t select Brooklyn because it was cool,” he insists. But Brooklyn is cool — if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be used as a brand by all kinds of companies, from salsa to beer to the ubiquitous hoodies. And until we sail past peak-oil or face a water crisis, for many people, the main appeal of buying veggies grown in the city is that they’re vegetables that were grown in the city. That holds whether that city is Brooklyn, Seattle or Montreal. Which is why the Gotham Greens’ packaging is emblazoned with some version of the phrase “New York City” no less than three times — four if you count the word “Gotham” itself.

Because the fact is, locavorism is something people are willing to shell out for, and you can’t get more local than across the street. But agriculture that’s that local is also something others want nothing to do with. In November’s municipal elections in Vancouver, urban farming became a political wedge issue used by the center-right NPA opposition party, which ridiculed public monies proposed for wheat fields and chickens. The funding was minimal (and some of it was never spent), but it didn’t matter — urban farming itself was held up as a loopy liberal lifestyle being subsidized by the city.

“The same people who were opposing the wheat field and chickens were opposing the bike lanes in Vancouver, too,” says Peter Ladner, who actually led the NPA as a mayoral candidate four years ago. He’s since become an advocate for urban agriculture, and says the issue, like bike lanes, is becoming a cultural battle that’s bigger than urban farms — it’s about the definition of progress. “We have a large Asian population in Vancouver, and there’s a big concern [about urban farming] among immigrants who are moving here from places where there are chickens and pigs running around,” he says. “They moved here to upgrade their lives and live a sophisticated urban existence. They’re like, ‘Why are we going back to this?’ For a lot of people, progress means getting a nice, smooth lawn.”

“The people who are idealizing urban farming have a choice — a choice between grocery stores and greenmarkets, between cars and bicycles,” says Richard Longworth, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Last year Longworth wrote a provocative piece for Good magazine titled “Forget Urban Farms. We Need a Walmart,” blasting the idea that such farms can spur an economy like traditional businesses can. “What I object to is the hyping of their reality and potential,” he says. “There are a lot of people in this country who simply hate megafarms, but those folks are feeding the world. Locavore agriculture isn’t going to change that.”

That may be true. But urban farming may carve a path to sustainable success by creating a new type of subsystem within the larger food system — one that’s bigger than boutique but smaller than Big Agra. A company called BrightFarms is pioneering a method that aims to do just that — one that takes place directly above the stores that sell the produce it grows. BrightFarms builds greenhouses on supermarket rooftops and manages the growing operations for free. In return, the store below signs a long-term contract agreeing to buy the food that’s produced. BrightFarms estimates it can harvest up to 900,000 pounds of produce annually per acre. It’s a solution that seems custom-built for cities, places with plenty of roofs but little ground.

A lack of space on the ground is what might someday make vertical farms a cost-effective reality. But for now, large-scale towers holding rows of corn are strictly sci-fi. Nevertheless, city-based agriculture seems poised for some kind of flowering that’s more than a fad. If 2011 was the year that bike lanes became the poster child for the New Urbanism, urban farms could claim that mantle in 2012.