International Blasphemy Rights Day: Aisha Was a Teenage Dirtbag

Mallory Ortberg at The Toast has a whole series about the dirtbags (especially the teenage ones) of history, fiction, and mythology: Zeus, Teddy Roosevelt, Lord Alfred Douglas (as in Oscar Wilde’s Bosie), Anne of Green Gables, John Milton, and Hamlet, to name a few.

I humbly posit that Aisha, a woman mostly known as Muhammad’s child bride, had something of the teenage dirtbag to her.

This isn’t to say that she was a bad person. Far from it. This is more to say that she had quite a spark to her.

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International Blasphemy Rights Day: Aisha Was a Teenage Dirtbag
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#TwitterTheocracy: How Anti-Blasphemy Laws Are Tools of Oppression

Recently, the case of Meriam Ibrahim made international headlines. The story was that she, a pregnant Christian woman married to a Christian, was being accused of apostasy and sentenced to death for it. Some but not all of the articles about it mentioned the most troubling fact about the case: she is not even a apostate in that she was a Muslim and then defected from Islam. Instead, her absentee father was a Muslim and, by Sudanese law, this automatically makes her a Muslim, despite being raised a Christian by her Christian mother.

A case of a born and raised Christian being accused of apostasy from Islam and sentenced to death for it shows that anti-apostasy laws are a brutal tool that can be used to enforce tyranny on anyone, whether they are an apostate, a theist of another religion, or a non-apostate atheist.

Continue reading “#TwitterTheocracy: How Anti-Blasphemy Laws Are Tools of Oppression”

#TwitterTheocracy: How Anti-Blasphemy Laws Are Tools of Oppression