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This piece from Salon has been in my “must get to” pile for a several weeks, though it dates from March ‘07. It has been gnawing on my brain.

I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.

….

Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she told me. “It was for the guys on my own side.”

….

Yet, despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues. As Pickett told me, “It’s like sending three women to live in a frat house.”

The private war of women soldiers

Nothing new, sadly.

A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. And in a third study, conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the military, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.

The private war of women soldiers

This bit really gets me:

Spranger and several other women told me the military climate is so severe on whistle-blowers that even they regarded the women who reported rape as incapable traitors. You have to handle it on your own and shut up, is how they saw it.

The private war of women soldiers

A quick Google search… well, almost makes me cry.

Hoyden about Town has a post on the topic.

No Fish No Nuts has a rundown of several military rape cases. Based on that research I calculated a quick “here is what rape is worth” list according to the military.

• Rape a man and you 12.5 years per man.
• Rape a woman and you get 1.19 years per woman.
• Children fair better than women but not as well as men. Rape a kid and get 7.5 years per child.
• Teenage girls though… well, they are sluts anyway right? And oh so sexy hot. They’ll only get you 30 days.

And this isn’t even taking into account things like parole and the number of counts of rape per victim.

So why is this eating me alive, other than the obvious?

I think, it is this: these are the people crying ‘honor’ and ‘integrity’. These are the people nominally charged with protecting our freedom– life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet that noble sentiment isn’t even upheld internally? The protectors of freedom trample their own? I can’t think of much that is more sad.

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Tante Judy und Tante Jane streiten sich um Muttis Gunst und Liebling. Außerdem: Weihnachten mit Zuckerstande und Zipfelmütze.

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We seem to be eating ourselves alive.

A WorldNetDaily article from March describes the concerns some US religious groups have over a particular piece of ‘hate crime’ legislation. The Bill in question this time around is H.R. 254. The concern is that the legislation “could be used to make criminals of those whose religious faith doesn’t endorse homosexuality” and that it essentially opens the door to a kind of thought policing.

While there is a strong strain of faith based persecution complex in the article– Christians are in no danger of being persecuted in this country but, in fact, typically do the persecuting– mostly I agree with them. This legislation is a bad idea. The bill in question, the David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, is effectively an attempt to legislate against particular attitude, particular beliefs. That is really quite frightening.

This bill does not stand alone though.

105th Congress: H.R. 3081: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)
106th Congress: H.R. 77: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)
106th Congress: H.R. 1082: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)
107th Congress: H.R. 74: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)
108th Congress: H.R. 80: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)
109th Congress: H.R. 259: Hate Crimes Prevention Act (Status: Dead)

Thankfully, those bills are all dead but not all of them are. I’ve already commented on H.R. 1592, the Matthew Shepard Act.

What this means in no uncertain terms is that prosecution of a crime is at least partially dependent upon the opinions, the convictions, and the beliefs, of the person who committed the crime. There is no way to reasonably spin this as anything other than prosecution for ‘thought crime’. The law cannot concern itself with the underlying motivation for the crime, except for the issue of self-defense.

Human Rights and Matthew Shepard

And…

Yes, these acts are tragic. Yes, it is bigotry. But I cannot support ‘extra’ prosecution because of the opinions the criminals might hold. It is fundamental to my political principles, and I thought it was fundamental to the spirit that birthed the United States, that people get to believe whatever they want. This law spits in the face of that idea.

Human Rights and Matthew Shepard

I took a bit of abuse over that one, but I stand by the sentiments. The law has got to focus on actions, not on the contents of people’s heads. The latter is nothing less than thought crime legislation. I have criticized the weird logic of gay hate, against some very peculiar paranoia in several forms, and defended gay marriage– not once but twice and three times and four times and more times in fact. But I cannot get behind thought crime laws.

Law must 1) protect a person’s right to do whatever that person desires so long as 2) that behavior does not infringe upon another person’s ability to do the same. What a person thinks is not part of the equation. And it mustn’t be allowed to become part of the equation.

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A post at TruthinContext got me thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed and I’d like to beg that it stop. The following snippet is what did it. The quote is out of context, I admit, and the snippet I’m quoting isn’t really key to the post. It is peripheral. Nonetheless, this bit is what caught my attention. It caught my attention because it is such a common assertion. I’m seen it time and again.

“I have found myself in a couple of dialogs on atheist blogs. I have found the conversations enlightening, they tend toward ad hominem attacks and to fallacious reasoning, but what does one expect when they so violently deny the truth and the one who is Truth.”

The Truth IN Context: What’s The Difference?

I am one of those atheist bloggers and my experience with ad hominems seems to be quite different. In my experience the ‘faithful’ dive into a thread with a predicable pomp and exhibit generally bad behavior. After having this pointed out to them over the course of several exchanges, those that stick around then settle down and the conversation becomes much more productive.

I really hate this dynamic, thus this post. I’d very much like to skip that initial bluster and just get to the productive part. It annoys me to no end to have to spend three or four posts smacking someone around until they stop attacking my intelligence, my sincerity, my honesty, my integrity… Apparently, if I don’t swallow the mythology whole then there is something wrong with me and consequently it falls upon the Christian– it is the duty of the Christian– to be insulting. Hmmm… something is wrong there and yet that is the conclusion that my six-odd years of observation lead me to.

To be fair, it isn’t just the Christians. The defenders of any evidence-less and faith based ‘theories’ are prone to the same pattern. I’ve seen it with astrology. I’ve seen it with homeopathy. I’ve seen it with creationism of various stripes. In fact, this latter is the hands down stronghold for such nasty behavior. It has to be something about having to defend a position for which there is no evidence, or for which there is slim evidence to be very generous. Having to defend a position but having no evidence that is meaningful to a non-believer must be terribly stressful. In a way, I sympathize.

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Honestly, it is the first round of freshman, mostly, college papers I’ve seen in years. The subject is relativism. Of the papers I’ve seen so far, easily one in ten argue…

No.

Much too generous.

Start over.

Of the papers I’ve seen so far easily one in ten contains assertions in support of ethical relativism. Some of them contain quite strong assertions in favor of it. What is even more bizarre is that most of these defenders of relativism defend individual relativism, not cultural, and most tow the same basic line– that we can’t decide who is right or wrong so we just act how we feel like and, effectively, settle things by force.

I’d love to quote some of these papers but that would be wrong. I’m not even going to identify the school or the class title or the section number… or even the damned state. But ya know what? If I did quote from these papers, these damned relativists would be telling me that I shouldn’t have done so– telling me that my decision was wrong.!

Arghhh…..

I’d love to walk into that class and tell them that I’d posted every single paper online, complete with sarcasm, ridicule and whatever other snark I can manage. It isn’t that I’d actually like to do it. I’d just like to tell them that I’d done it and then listen to the whines of “that’s just not right” and “that’s wrong, man” and “you violated this or that principle or something”. Then I’d explain that if in fact they are relativists– individual relativists– as they argued in their papers then I am justified in posting their papers online. I am justified for no other reason than simply that I felt like it was the right thing to do.

I’m sure the complaints would quickly shift from individual relativism, which most argued for, to cultural relativism as they start to appeal to university policy or state law. I could then point out that most of them rejected cultural relativism as strongly as they embraced individual relativism. “People should do what they want even if the culture disagrees because I don’t stuff in my culture so cultural relativism is wrong” or some such teen angst fueled rot.

So, to all the relativists I’ll likely never get to confront directly, “Imagine that you are walking down the street late at night, someone grabs you and rapes you brutally. Can you honestly say that that rapist is justified in committing that rape just because that rapist is physically capable of doing so?” Is that really what it is about? “Oh, yeah, I don’t like the rape and all but you know people have the right to believe what they want and do what they want and stuff and we can’t judge anybody cause we all have our own opinions and they aren’t the same and hopefully, you know, somebody would stop the rape but like nobody has to unless they want to but if they felt strongly about it they would.”

Jesus Fucking Christ! I don’t have a glass-half-full attitude toward life, the universe and everything in general, and I am even less optimistic about humanity, but this crap is making me suicidal.

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