This post assumes cis- and hetero- normativity because, in the context of the Abrahamic religions, gender and orientation variance from the cis-het norm isn’t exactly a topic that is heavily covered by the canon.
In case you haven’t seen it yet but don’t want to watch the video (which is inexplicable as Garfunkel and Oates are hilarious), The Loophole is a humorous take on the real-life phenomenon of certain purity-pledging, vaginal-virginity-obsessed Christians having anal sex as a way to avoid tampering with the mythical hymen. The question-asker is wondering if Muslims also have anal sex as a way of avoiding premarital vaginal sex.
In a word: no. But there is another phenomenon regarding anal sex that I uncovered in my research for my talk on LGBT people in the Muslim world.
Y do peopel say that christians aren’t marginalized in any way???? you can go to anyone and say that you believe in marriage before having sex and everyone will look at you like you’re crazy!! can you guys stop saying that we aren’t marginalized? yes in the past we had more power but not anymre
Today marks the third day of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. This weekend, concerns over the Muslim World Cup players made their way across the internets. I happened across posts of the Vox and Mashable links and observed much speculation and questioning regarding the rules of fasting during Ramadan, as well as talk of exemptions to fasting.
Dan Arel’s piece on atheists and the prison population has been making the rounds, along with the seemingly inevitable assertion that the statistics prove that atheists are no less (and perhaps) more moral than theists.
I understand the impulse. Truly, I do. But that doesn’t make it any less problematic.
Tarico: How long did you wear hijab, and what did it mean to you at the time?
Dadabhoy: I wore hijab for a decade (ages 8 to 18). I started wearing it because I was always a people-pleaser; it seemed like the right thing to do to please my parents, many of my older relatives, my teachers at my religious school (a headscarf was part of the uniform for the Islamic girls’ school I attended in London for a year), and, of course, Allah. I was also a very literal and devout child. I wanted to make sure that I obeyed Allah as much as possible.
Join Dale of Mad Art Lab along with me in our conversation about the next issue of Ms. Marvel (available at comic book stores or through Comixology). We will be having the conversation this Wednesday, March 19th, at 7pm PDT, the day the comic is slated for release. We’ll be using Google Hangouts on Air and will be on for about half an hour. You can view it via Youtube both during and after the broadcast; we will be creating a transcript as well. Questions can be tweeted during the conversation or emailed beforehand to heinous.heina[at]gmail[dot]com.
Like every comic-book-related thing, this idea has an origin story.
Consider two examples of crowdfunding projects aimed at atheists.
Just before the holidays, Secular Student Alliance announced that it would be matching funds donated to the Los Angeles-based Women’s Leadership Project. As stated on its Indiegogo page,
Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) fills a vacuum in a school district that has few programs that specifically address the intersection of sexism, racism, misogyny and heterosexism in the lives of young women of color. The program is designed to redress the normalized violence that young women of color encounter on a daily basis and has trained hundreds of 10-12th students to question and challenge the normalization of violence against women and advocate for safer school-communities.
As the project is run by secular author and activist extraordinaire Sikivu Hutchinson, along with Diane Arellano, it has a heartily humanist bent to it. The campaign ended last night having raised just over its $1500 matching funds goal.
As one atheist-aimed project reached its end on January 6th, another had begun earlier in the day. This one was for Ryan J. Bell, the pastor who decided that, for 2014, he would try being an atheist in the sense that he would live as if there were no god. An interesting thought experiment, to be sure, but after the announcement of the experiment, the man lost his sources of income with his perhaps unsurprisingly irate Christian employers. A GoFundMe campaign was created in response which asked for $5000. By the end of its first day, it had raised triple that amount.
When I re-posted the link to the WLP project last night, I got responses that attempted to explain why it didn’t garner as much attention and raise as much money as the fundraiser for Ryan J. Bell. There were the “well, what did you expect?/Welcome to reality where page views and click-bait rule” type; these express a sense of capitulation and resignation to the status quo that I do not share. However, most of them were more along the lines of “Oh, I never heard of this so it must not have been promoted enough.”
I am not suggesting that the disparity was on purpose on the part of anyone involved. I am not suggesting that anyone promoting one fundraiser and/or not promoting the other is an evil, awful person in any way. I doubt that anyone deliberately looked at the one and then the other and said “meh, those lower-income female students of color can fend for themselves, I’m going to give my money to a white male Christian.”
Via http://www.ryanjbell.net/about/
That’s precisely the problem. So many of us don’t critically examine to what we pay attention and why, to whom we give our money and why, of what sort of news we keep abreast and why, about what we find out and why. We fail to recognize the disturbing patterns indicating structural injustices that emerge when we consider all the factors at hand and how these sorts of situations play out.
Obviously, fundraising isn’t a zero-sum game. There is more than one cause in the world that is worthy of attention and money. As someone who has suffered financially as a result of religion, I don’t begrudge Mr. Bell the money he will need as he figures out what to do in this brutal American economic climate. In the end, thankfully, WLP did exceed its matching funds goal.
Why do I bring this up?
One of my friends is a Christian minister and he jokes that every atheist in America must have at least 3 websites apiece. He is on-point in that we godless types tend to have strong Internet presences. It’s about time that we take a good, hard look at which causes and individuals we choose to follow, talk about, and promote using these platforms. Furthermore, given that atheists tend to be in the upper income bracket of society, it is also important to look at to whom we choose to give our money.
Edited to ensure clarity on the fact that the incident with an M&S cashier was an isolated incident rather than a reflection of M&S overall policy.
As a former Muslim who has spent significant amounts of time in the Muslim-dominated parts of London, I have been following the recent Marks & Spencer kerfuffle with great interest. The short version is that it was claimed that Muslim M&S employees are allegedly exempted from ringing up customer purchases that include pork and alcohol. Said cashiers could ask that customers making such purchases join another line to be rung up by a presumably non-Muslim cashier. Thankfully, the incident was at a single store and not a reflection of overall M&S policy.
Despite the fact that the story wasn’t quite accurate in terms of M&S policy, the discussion around the matter had a lot of people defending religious exemptions to job duties. I don’t believe that such an accommodation would be at all reasonable because when one signs up to be a cashier at a store, one is signing up to potentially ring up any of the items sold at the stores, not just the ones that follow one’s personal religious dietary restrictions or other beliefs. Furthermore, if Muslim employees were permitted to redirect customers based on their personal beliefs but other employees aren’t also allowed to refuse to ring up purchases that are against their personal views, it would indicate the privileging of religious views.
That aside, there is a theological flaw in the defense of the alleged objections of the Muslim employees. Simply refusing to handle pork or alcohol hardly changes the fact that all M&S salaries are paid, at least in part, thanks to the sales of haraam items. As one of Muhammad’s sayings goes, “When Allah forbids a thing, He also forbids its price,” meaning that any money gained by the selling of a forbidden thing is considered forbidden money. Should M&S be obligated to ensure that only the profits from halaal items will go towards paying Muslim employees?
M&S has apologized and clarified its position since the story broke. Even so, ensuring that Muslim M&S employees work in the bakery or clothing departments instead of as cashiers doesn’t exactly solve the problem with haraam money making its way into their paychecks.
Had this issue been more than just a single incident, it would have been a classic case of religious folks performing their religious beliefs where convenient (and, I might add, very public) but ignoring the restrictions that they find to be too inconvenient. If they choose to follow their religion in that fashion, they are by all means welcome to do so. However, it’s rather disingenuous to cite religious restrictions as a reason to not do part of your job yet happily cash paychecks that include funds that your religion says are tainted. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Regardless, the defense of such behavior and the support of religious privilege surrounding the matter is highly troubling.
A mega-church is defined as a church that has “2,000 or more in average weekend attendance.” Seeing as Sunday Assembly can measure its attendance in hundreds, not thousands, it doesn’t quite qualify. Nor have there been enough Sunday Assemblies for there to be anything approximately approaching “average weekend attendance.” So much for the AP’s reporting choices (which have gone on to influence ABC News, Voice of Russia, Salon, and even The Raw Story).
In terms of connotations rather than strict denotation, I’m going to quote Hemant.
Atheist mega churches are just like Christian mega churches. Minus the money, staff, bands, pastoral mansions, and rockin’ worships.
Semantics aside, there’s another problem with the coverage. As many of you have alerted me to the fact, I’d be remiss in not mentioning the fact that a picture of me is trending on Yahoo News. What the Associated Press missed what that I was not only an attendee, I was the main speaker for the Los Angeles iteration of Sunday Assembly.
Yes, this out and proud atheist was invited to be the main speaker for Sunday Assembly Los Angeles, which was held this past weekend. The LA event page listed the word “atheist” and there were plenty of allusions to atheism, godlessness, and even hints of anti-theism at Sunday Assembly LA. Whatever might have happened at other locations, the Los Angeles version of Sunday Assembly had a very clear target audience: those who believe in no gods and follow no religions, including those who self-identify as atheists.
As I mentioned in my talk there, which was about people overlooked by history to whom we can be grateful, the gathering was, by far, the most church-like thing I’ve ever attended in my ex-Muslim life. It felt odd and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself when asked to clap, stamp, sing, and otherwise show my enthusiasm in a vocal way. All the same, as the picture of me that’s trending shows, I had an awesome time.
If only the the caption had managed to mention the fact that I was, as I mentioned, the main speaker for the event.
Why is this important to me? Obviously, it represents something of a missed opportunity for promotion for me. More importantly, the erasure of my name and my role in the event angers me because it’s coverage like this that promotes the notion that atheism is still a white-dominated old boys’ club. The reason I’m happy to put my name and face on things is to directly combat and challenge that idea, to ensure that both those curious about and wary of atheism are aware that it isn’t just for a certain class of people. I cannot work to do so if reporters at an event fail to recognize that one of the pictures they chose to depict the event just happens to include its main longform speaker. Such neglect contributes towards the further stigmatization and marginalization of non-white, non-male atheists.
To the contributors at the Associated Press responsible for this omission, I ask that you do your job and amend the caption to include my name and my role in Sunday Assembly Los Angeles.
