Evening News Reads: Islamic Law, Polygamy and “Fukushima-ed” Washington…

Photo: Bert Hardy 1957

Evening everyone!

The news today out of Washington DC has me so pissed (Take a look at the comments on both of today’s earlier posts and you will see what I am talking about.)   I just want to ignore that swamp for now. So if my commentary seems a bit bitter…you know why.

Today on Juan Cole’s blog, he writes a statement that bothers me. I always read his blog, and respect him so much…but now that Libya is doing away with the law that prohibits polygamy, it should be of great concern, because it goes against women’s rights.  And even if it is a part of the Islamic Law that Cole is discussing…there is something wrong with any person, country, or government, or religion that advocates for polygamy…and that is what bothers me.

I understand the point of Cole’s article. If a US Republican Presidency does not have a problem with Islamic Law in Iraq, what reasons can a US  Democratic Presidency have for their negative reaction to Islamic Law in Libya…But I am disturbed by this paragraph in his latest article.  Islamic Law not a problem in Bush’s Afghanistan & Iraq, but a Problem in Libya? | Informed Comment

Polygamy is legal in Iraq with a judge’s permission, and Iraqi legislators have been considering making it easier for men to take more than one wife in order to have the country’s vast number of war widows supported.

Okay, in other words…the extra wives are taken out of pure concern for women’s welfare.  Oh, what considerate souls these men have…taking in poor widows as sex slaves wives, trapped in a life of servitude, out of the goodness of their hearts.  Maybe I am a bit touchy today, but Cole seems to pass this “excuse” for polygamy as a legitimate reason. He ends the post with this…

So far, Jalil has said nothing that was not said repeatedly by his predecessor, Qaddafi. He has said nothing that is not in the constitutions and/or legal practice of Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is no hand-wringing about those two “liberated” countries and Islamic law or sharia. I guess if secular, communist Afghanistan was made fundamentalist by Reagan and Bush, or if the relatively secular Baath Party of Iraq was overthrown by W. in favor of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Call Party and the Bloc of Ayatollah Sadr II, that is unobjectionable and not even reported on. But if there’s a Democratic president in the White House, all of a sudden it is a scandal if Muslims practice Muslim law.

Okay, let me just say that I have come to the conclusion that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (including any of the other minor parties involving the color Green, Liberty or Tea) should change their party slogans to, “Fuck off and die.”

But, back to Cole…the reason GOP presidents have not had issue with Islamic Law, that includes polygamy, is simple…the GOP have been on an anti-women crusade for years. And polygamy is one thing, that I feel goes against the rights of women. Most of the time polygamy is forced on the women, who more than likely are just girls, trapped in a life that is degrading and perpetuates a society that feels women are nothing more than objects…to be collected as the older ones get less desirable and have more difficulty doing their chores.

I guess my over-sensitivity stems from dealing with crap like this:

Push for ‘Personhood’ Amendments Is New Tack in Abortion Fight – NYTimes.com

A constitutional amendment facing voters in Mississippi on Nov. 8, and similar initiatives brewing in half a dozen other states including Florida and Ohio, would declare a fertilized human egg to be a legal person, effectively branding abortion and some forms of birth control as murder.

With this far-reaching anti-abortion strategy, the proponents of what they call personhood amendments hope to reshape the national debate.

“I view it as transformative,” said Brad Prewitt, a lawyer and executive director of the Yes on 26 campaign, which is named for the Mississippi proposition. “Personhood is bigger than just shutting abortion clinics; it’s an opportunity for people to say that we’re made in the image of God.”

Or reports of immigrant women being taken advantage of:

Immigration Detainees Fear Rape and Death » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union

The Department of Homeland Security assumes that mass detention is the key to immigration enforcement. But in fact, our detention system locks up thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Throughout the next two weeks, check back daily for posts about the costs of immigration detention, both human and fiscal, and what needs to be done to ensure fair and humane policy.

Every year for at least the last four years, an officer, guard or other employee at an immigration detention center in Texas has been criminally prosecuted for sexually assaulting an immigration detainee. Every time, the government issues a press release about the prosecution and trumpets its efforts to protect detainees and punish bad actors — the implication being that sexual assault in detention is limited in scope and due merely to the actions of a few bad actors.

But it isn’t.

Government documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act and made public last week contain nearly 200 allegations of sexual abuse of immigration detainees jailed at detention facilities across the nation since 2007 alone. While more complaints came from facilities in Texas than any other state, allegations have come from nearly every state that houses a detention center. And because sexual abuse is something that is widely underreported, there can be little question that the information we have thus far received is only the tip of the iceberg. What is clear is that the sexual abuse of immigration detainees is a widespread problem and that immigration detainees are particularly vulnerable to abuse.

Or, politicians that don’t give a flying fuck about half of the country’s population:

Mississippi Dem Unsure What Personhood Does, Still Supports It | Mother Jones

…the push to pass state-level constitutional “personhood” amendments to ban abortion (among other things) by defining life as beginning at conception. Previous initiatives have fallen short, but Mississippi’s personhood movement, which was initiated by a one-time Christian secessionist who backed a plan to create an independent theocracy in upstate South Carolina, has a decent chance of passing this November—at least if its high-profile endorsers are any indication:

Mississippi will also elect a new governor on Nov. 8. The Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, is co-chairman of Yes on 26 and his campaign distributes bumper stickers for the initiative. The Democratic candidate, Johnny DuPree, the mayor of Hattiesburg and the state’s first black major-party candidate for governor in modern times, says he will vote for it though he is worried about its impact on medical care and contraception.

Yes, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee supports the measure, which would ban abortion even in cases of rape. DuPree fleshed out his views a bit at a debate at the Mississippi College School of Law.

Video of Johnny Dupree at that MoJo link…but if you don’t feel like watching it…

… DuPree says he also has concerns about exceptions for things like rape and incest, but thought of the ballot question as one of principle: Where do you believe life begins? But he really should have concerns about rape and incest, because the group Personhood Mississippi, which collected the signatures to put the question on the ballot, campaigned for the measure by holding something literally called the “Conceived in Rape Tour.” Brad Prewitt, spokesman for Yes on 26, told me, “you don’t execute the product of the crime, and that’s what abortion does.” Prewitt also referred to the morning-after pill as a “human pesticide” and explained that while he supports in-vitro fertilization, the amendment would require changes in the way IVF is currently handled. (For one thing, if you froze an embryo, that could be redefined as child abuse.)

Or, maybe my over-sensitivity is due to the PLUB personhood policies making birth control a crime!

Then They Came for Your Birth Control | Mother Jones

Mississippi anti-abortion activists wants to define personhood as starting when a sperm fertilizes an egg. In that case, it would likely make intrauterine devices (IUDs), which can prevent pregnancy by blocking the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, illegal. (IUDs can also prevent sperm from fertilizing the egg in the first place, and IUDs with hormones also operate much like regular old birth control pills, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anti-abortion activists.)

The measure would also almost certainly make Plan B, also known as emergency contraception or the “morning after” pill, illegal. This high dose of hormones is used to prevent a woman from ovulating, but anti-abortion groups also insist that it can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting (despite the fact that the scientists say that’s not the case). Needless to say, anti-abortion groups don’t like Plan B very much, either.

But the law could also introduce the possibility of banning any form of hormonal birth control. Generally, “the pill” (as well as the shot, the patch, and the ring) work by stopping ovulation. But some anti-abortion groups argue that there can be failures on that front, and the doses of hormone could possibly also work by stopping implantation should an egg and sperm still manage to meet up.

(This Kate Sheppard article has a link to a good legal explanation of the personhood law by Irin Carmon published in Salon. Give that article a read.)

Okay…I seem to have gotten a bit carried away there…my point being that if this bone I have to pick with Cole over his statement on polygamy is seen as a ridiculous rant, those reasons for my oversensitive reaction should be more than enough to explain my state of mind lately.

Yesterday, I posted a link to a new sushi radioactive meter plate that is being sold in Japan. I have a couple more links on Fukushima…

Fukushima Nuclear Plant Released Far More Radiation than Government Said: Scientific American

Global radioactivity data challenge Japanese estimates for emissions and point to the role of spent fuel pools

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant.

The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action. The analysis has been posted online for open peer review by the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The Scientific American article is very good…please take a look at the entire post because it discusses the results of the study in a detailed way.

Also, there have been recent news article about the debris from the Japan Tsunami that appears to be making its way to Hawaii a little faster than expected. But there looks like some feathered creatures may be hitching a ride… Secret Tsunami Stowaways | Mother Jones

As an interesting aside, monstrously huge rafts of tsunami debris may well be one of the mechanisms by which life originally dispersed to the Hawaiian Islands. 

Pallus’ rosefinch, Carpodacus roseus, native to China, Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. Credit: M. Nishimura via Wikimedia Commons.

A new analysis of the genome of Hawaiian honeycreepers reveals they’re not descended, as thought, from the honeycreepers of the Americas, but are instead a sister taxon to the Eurasian rosefinches of the genus Carpodacus.

Based on a genetic analysis, the precursors of Hawaiian honeycreepers probably arrived on Kauai and Niihau about 5.7 million years ago and continued to diverge into different species after Oahu emerged from the sea.

ʻIʻiwi, or scarlet Hawaiian honeycreeper, Vestiaria coccinea. Credit: Paul Banko, NPS.It’s possible that huge floating mats of tsunami debris—perhaps from Japan—brought the ancestors of Hawaii’s present-day honeycreepers to the islands.

Those of you who’ve spent time at sea know how land birds get blown off course and will rest on any platform at sea—ship, boat, raft, the backs of sleeping whales—as they fight to stay alive.

Maybe the current tsunami debris will transport some newcomers to the Hawaiian Islands.

Townsend’s warbler rests on boat. Credit: Andrew Revkin via Flickr.

Would we recognize them as naturally-delivered refugees?Or would we try to exterminate them as human-introduced aliens?

Hmmmm….perhaps we should put up a Cain influenced electric water shield around Hawaii as a precaution?

BTW, that MoJo article has links to some very cool animation on the currents that are taking the stowaways to Hawaii…check it out!

So that is it for me today, what are you all reading and blogging about?