A lawmaker from Russia says gay athletes and sports fans could face prosecution when visiting Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Fascism strikes again.

The atheist hatemongers at the Swedish Humanist Association are at it again. Of course, it’s about male circumcision, their favourite “human-rights violation”—all of which can be derived from Jews and/or Muslims. This time, they use a tweet from Canadian author Kelly Oxford to make some scornful laughs at the expense of ethnic minorities:

But, as most knowledgeable people understand, Kelly Oxford is targeting the mainstream American tradition of male circumcision and not the religious practice the Swedish Humanists try to criminalise with xenophobic slander.

Ironically, Kelly Oxford has recently tweeted something that really should annoy Sweden’s angry atheists:

Oops! Wasn’t religion to blame for everything?

BuzzFeed has collected pictures from what should have been peaceful Pride events in Russia. Horrific!

I don’t have any photos of my own, but QX has published some pictures of the parade through Stockholm earlier today. When I see pictures like these, I always regret not going myself.

Putin is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews, Stephen Fry writes.

It’s not really news that racists are stupid—but still!

From Pink News:

Today, when asked if he was fighting a war against gay people, Mr Milonov replied: “It is a shame and it is a sin but it is a personal choice. It is not normal but a person cannot be punished in Russia for being homosexual, or to live with a dog, with a horse, with a sheep, whatever.”

Asked if he was indeed comparing being gay to bestiality, the politician said:“Homosexuality is one of the sins for us and it means we should not teach our kids that sin is okay.”

Here we go again. Homophobes love this analogy. Loving someone of the same sex is a sin comparable to raping animals.

(Photo from Wikipedia.)

Patrik Lindenfors of the Swedish Humanist Association writes on the organisation’s blog that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a document against cultural relativism. I’m not entirely sure what he means by cultural relativism in this article, but normally the blog he writes argues against the rights of parents—that is, parent of a religious minority—to make decisions for their children. To allow minorities to maintain their culture is usually labelled cultural relativism on this particular blog, so I guess that’s what he means.

Anyhow, I think Lindenfors forgot to read the full text of the declaration. In Article 26, we learn that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Oops! So much for the ban on religious schools!

To make things even more complicated, Article 29 states that the declaration “may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

What are these purposes and principles? Well, amongst other things, to “develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” (Charter of the United Nations, Chapter 1). Still, Lindenfors makes a sarcastic remark about all people belonging to national cultures, as if a close reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would somehow lead to the conclusion that individuals are not recognizable by culture.

The truth is that the United Nations is all about cultural relativism. Its very foundation is the notion that no one nation has the right to interfere in the business of another. This is sometimes problematic because it makes the UN incapable of tackling ongoing genocide and oppression, as long as no national border is crossed.

However, most such oppression derives from the idea that governments have the right to force a certain culture upon its citizens. This is what we see right now in Northern Africa, where some militant Islamists want to outlaw Christian minority.

So, when Patrik Lindenfors and his fellow atheists want Sweden to make their values into laws banning religious practice, they do precisely what so many oppressors have done before them. Why? Because allowing people to maintain their culture without government interference would be cultural relativism! The problem is that the Swedish Humanists are not alone in thinking that their cultural values is the ones that should be enforced on others.

The full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available here.

He is right! If we truly want to fight poverty, we should embrace free trade. Too bad so many governments and activists refuse to see it.

From Pink News:

In an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio station, Dmitriy Kiselyov was asked by a reporter whether he was aware of recent incidents, such as one during which a gay man was raped with a beer bottle and murdered, after admitting he was gay.

He responded: “Our [Russian] problem with homosexuals is that they behave in a provocative, victim like way. They deliberately provoke situations, so that they become victims. Nobody prevents them from loving each other the way they want to. They are aggressively foisting minority’s values on majority. It is likely that society would counteract this. Naturally, right? In various ways, including brutal ones. Since they are brutally foisting this [on others]. Wanna fight? Get it, then. So what?”

It seems the situation in Russia is getting worse by the hour.

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This is not this first time Dmitriy Kiselyov says homophobic things.

“The Government of Denmark has issued a warning to Russia over the recently passed gay propaganda law in the run up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics,” Pink News reports.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is certainly not democratic,” Eric Trager of Washington Institute for Near East Policy says in an interview with Michael Totten. “Its view of Egyptian politics in one in which it should control everything. For example, while it is willing to pursue power through elections, once it comes to office its goal is to establish an Islamic state in which it and its institutions control the Egyptian bureaucracy and institute its version of Islam while sidelining and oppressing all opponents.”

It’s very similar to what happened in Germany in 1933. Not that the Nazis were primarily motivated by religion, but their method of using democracy to implement dictatorship. What every sound democracy needs is a constitution that keeps the government—and, in the case of Egypt, the army, too—in control.

Read the interview in full at the World Affairs Journal.

It’s Friday night, and the sunlight is about to leave the sky above me. Shabbat shalom!

The Iliad, Song I, 502-27:

Embrace his knees; entreat him that he give
The host of Troy his succor, and shut fast
The routed Grecians, prisoners in the fleet,
That all may find much solace in their King,
And that the mighty sovereign o’er them all,
Their Agamemnon, may himself be taught
His rashness, who hath thus dishonor’d foul
The life itself, and bulwark of his cause.
To him, with streaming eyes, Thetis replied.
Born as thou wast to sorrow, ah, my son!
Why have I rear’d thee! Would that without tears,
Or cause for tears (transient as is thy life,
A little span) thy days might pass at Troy!
But short and sorrowful the fates ordain
Thy life, peculiar trouble must be thine,
Whom, therefore, oh that I had never borne!
But seeking the Olympian hill snow-crown’d,
I will myself plead for thee in the ear
Of Jove, the Thunderer. Meantime at thy fleet
Abiding, let thy wrath against the Greeks
Still burn, and altogether cease from war.
For to the banks of the Oceanus,
Where Æthiopia holds a feast to Jove,
He journey’d yesterday, with whom the Gods
Went also, and the twelfth day brings them home.

Painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867).

It could be a quote from some angry Swedish atheist wanting to ban some religious practice, but now it’s the Russian Sports Minister defending the state ban on “homosexual propaganda”:

It is the informational protection of the young generation. We want to prevent the young generation, whose psyche has not been formulated. We want to protect them against drunkenness, drugs and non-traditional sexual relations. We want them to grow up and when they become adults they have to define what they want.

This is a law for the protection of children, but this law is not intended against anybody.

Children are always used to legitimise discrimination against minorities. Sometimes it’s a religious minority; sometimes, as in this case, a sexual minority. This is the opposite to cultural relativism—the idea that one’s own cultural norms are above others and therefor need not be criticised. And since “we” know what is best, “we” can take the liberty to force others to conform.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union has published a report on discrimination against the atheists around the world. The report contains much useful information for civil libertarians. Atheists are surely a group that is subjected to much oppression, but I still think the report lacks something by not mentioning the countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, where political atheism is the state religion. Sure, One could argue that this is a report on discrimination against atheists, but the fact is that it does address discrimination against religious people, too. For example, it says this about Israel:

Each officially recognised religious community has legal authority over its members in matters of marriage, divorce, and burial, limiting the freedom of many individuals who may not otherwise subject themselves to the authority of those religious communities. Orthodox control of Jewish family law continues to create problems for non-Orthodox Jewish families; for example practicing Jews who are not Orthodox must leave the country to marry. The government does not allow civil marriages, such as secular ceremonies performed by state or municipal authorities, or marriages performed by non-Orthodox rabbis. Secular marriages, non-Orthodox marriages of Jews, or interfaith marriages must take place abroad to be recognised by the government. As a result, several hundred thousand citizens cannot marry within their own country due to either a lack of eligibility or their desire to wed outside of the rabbinic system.

Download the report here.

Quebec’s government plans to amend its charter of rights and freedoms and ban most religious signs and symbols from public institutions such as daycare centres, public schools, hospitals, clinics, and other government buildings, Sun News reports.

The religious freedom of minorities is really threatened on all fronts nowadays.

The article continues to report that all health workers, public-school teachers, and public daycare workers will have to leave their religious symbols at home when they go to work. But, as if by a coincidence, the government has no intention of removing symbols of Quebec’s Christian heritage. In other words, the crosses at the National Assembly and at the top of Montreal’s Mount Royal will stay in place.

So what might seem as an attempt to separate state from religion is really only about implementing a state dress-code. The symbols of government will still send the message that Canada is a Christian nation.

(Photo by Wladyslaw of the government-owned cross at Montreal’s Mount Royal.)

“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge,” Richard Dawkins tweeted. “They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

He might be right, but it still has a bad smell to it. And I understand Nesrine Malik’s frustration:

The whole process of trying to parse the painfully obvious fallacy reminded me of the task of arguing against extremist Muslim clerics when they try to denigrate non-Muslims, the same momentary sense of helplessness and not knowing where to start. The same opinion with an agenda dressed up as fact. But one usually takes academics and scientists more seriously and tries to engage. With this latest salvo, I am afraid that we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.

Richard Dawkins has a problem with religion, fair enough. But his contempt for ethnic groups is despicable.

“The first legal abortion in an Irish hospital has been carried out in Dublin,” the Guardian reports.

About time! It’s not that I don’t understand those who see abortion as murder, but it is every adult person’s right to decide over her own body.

The fascists in Tehran are back with new threats against Israel. And why this angry outbreak against the Jewish State? Because America and Europe can’t stand that the Syrian regime kills the Syrian civilians using sarin.

“The United States government took a historic step back from its long-running drug war,” Huffington Post reports. “Attorney General Eric Holder informed the governors of Washington and Colorado that the Department of Justice would allow the states to create a regime that would regulate and implement the ballot initiatives that legalised the use of marijuana for adults.”

“The artist behind a painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin wearing women’s clothes which was seized by police earlier this week, has fled Russia seeking political asylum,” Pink News reports.

Painting by refugee artist Konstantin Altunin.

Here’s an idea for an art show I haven’t come across before—nude men sitting on found objects.

“A landmark new law passed by Saudi Arabia on Monday makes domestic abuse a crime in the country for the first time,” France 24 reports. “The law, passed by the country’s Council of Ministers, prohibits various kinds of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, both at home and in the workplace.”

It is absurd that it has taken so long, but it is still great news!

One of my favourite poets has died.