Recently in Religion Category

President Nicolas Sarkozy says that burqas are "not welcome" in France, and supports a ban on women wearing the burqa in public.

[He] said the Muslim burqa would not be welcome in France, calling the full-body religious gown a sign of the "debasement" of women.

In the first presidential address to parliament in 136 years, Sarkozy faced critics who fear the burqa issue could stigmatize France's Muslims and said he supported banning the garment from being worn in public.

"In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity," Sarkozy said to extended applause at the Chateau of Versailles, southwest of Paris.

"The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement -- I want to say it solemnly," he said. "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."

Banning the burqa doesn't further women's rights - it limits them. Now, obviously there's a difference in Islamic women's dress from the hijab to the burqa - but legally banning any of them erases all agency from Muslim women. (I'm especially wary of Sarkozy's comments and this potential ban given that France banned headscarves from public schools in 2004.)

If you're interested in hearing Muslim women talking about the hijab, here are a couple of interesting vids.

UPDATE: Jill has more.

Related posts: Only citizenship for some: France denies citizenship to Muslim woman
Malaysian women speak out on hijab

Check out this interesting guest post by Dr. Ana Nogales, a health and human rights advocate, on the power of women's stories, as understood through her own mother. This is one more voice to our continued exploration of generational issues, leading up to the conference this fall at the Omega Institute. We are publishing a series of guest posts as a fun way of initiating some of the speakers--who are generally new to blogging--into our exciting online community. Please make them feel welcome.

My mother never told me her whole story. She relayed pieces of it here and there, but I could tell that her pain was much greater than her measured words revealed. After marrying my father in a quasi-arranged marriage just before World War II, the two of them left Poland for South America. My mother never saw her parents again. She talked about the love she had for her father but said almost nothing about her mother. I gathered from the little she told me that her mother, my grandmother, was neglected as a child and never had a voice in her family. In our family, my mother had a voice but most of the time it was a voice of negativity. I believe that the reason for this was that my mother was never able to overcome her family's tragedy.

It was only in the last few months of her life that my mom was able to speak from her heart. She spoke of how it was in her family when she was growing up--that girls and women knew their place and couldn't deviate from that--and how the attitudes of her elders were passed on to her. She also opened up about my Jewish family's ordeal in Poland and how painful it had been for her to leave her family behind. I had known the outlines of her story but not her feelings about all that had happened. It was so important for me to finally receive the missing pieces of that story, because it was part of my own history as well.

Today, sadly, there are too many women whose voices are silenced due to discrimination and violence against women. Sometimes we keep our stories to ourselves because we don't want to burden our children with the pain of the past. But such silence doesn't allow the younger generation to learn from what their elders went through--and to strive to create change. This is why it is so crucial for grandmothers and mothers to reach out to the younger generations and share their stories, however painful they may be, so that our personal and cultural histories are not lost. And it is equally important for younger women to keep asking their mothers and grandmothers to relay the stories of their lives. As we engage in this process of intergenerational dialogue, we can begin to connect to each other at the soul level--and work together toward the goal of women's empowerment.

Bio after the jump.

Check out the books: Poems from the Women's Movement by Honor Moore and The Little Book of Meaning by Laura Berman Fortgang.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

Check out this awesome ongoing blog dialogue between Letha Dawson Scanzoni, 72, and Kimberly B. George, 27--thus the snazzy name of the blog, 72-27. They are both self-identified Christian feminists and discuss everything from labor division in the home to violence in Pakistan to chickens. Don't miss it. A long excerpt from super smart Kimberley:

I wanted to begin this letter by letting you know that I have been thinking a great deal about that first article you linked in your last post (the BBC article that talked about women reportedly confessing the sin of pride more than men). It so happened that when I got your letter I was reading Feminist Theory and Christian Theology by Serene Jones. (Dr. Jones used to be a professor at Yale Divinity School, and now she is at Union Theological Seminary.) Her book gave me a news lens for seeing some of the important issues in Reformed theology, particularly the weighty idea of "pride equals sin" within that tradition.

Jones explains that Calvin, similar to many preachers today, focused on pride as being one of the most damaging aspects of the human condition. Pride was a brazen, over-inflation of self that offended God, or so Calvin and others have said. It was the essence of sin and to be avoided at all cost for a healthy spiritual life.

Dr. Jones questions where women--and other marginalized people--fit in this tradition. It is one thing for the most powerful people in society to promote these ideas around pride: perhaps Calvin's deepest struggle really was this grandiosity of self that he describes. Certainly, many of the preachers I have listened to seem to struggle with pride a great deal, so it makes sense to me that they would define sin in terms of over-inflation of self.

And yet these preachers and theologians are often white heterosexual men with tremendous spiritual authority who are at the top of the power structures in society. Of course they struggle with pride. They are simply reading the Bible and writing their theology out of their lived experience. They are being honest with what they know-- they just are not seeing from the vantage points of those not sharing their pedestal. Perhaps they have no idea of the "view from below" or have no sense of what it means to hold the kind of power that they have. (Indeed, they might even deny that a power structure exists, so far are they from understanding marginalization)

So, what happens when all those messages about the sin of "pride" are communicated from a position of power to those who are disempowered and marginalized? What happens when the promoters of this theology are in an entirely different position of status and voice than those "below" them?

This blogs represents just the kind of dialogue that I hope will be happening in person at the upcoming Omega Institute conference next fall, Women & Power: Connecting Across the Generations. Don't forget to get those scholarships in.

Full bios for Letha and Kimberley after the jump.

Remember that thoroughly researched and eye-opening book I reviewed a few weeks ago called Quiverfull? Well, despite the fact that author Kathryn Joyce wrote an exhaustively detailed and accurate portrayal, free of the kind of snark that so often seeps into subculture journalism, she is being attacked by right wing fear-mongers. Doug Phillips, the director of Vision Forum Ministries, awards Kathryn with, I kid you not, "the 2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award." The explanation:

The first mission of the book is to warn the radical left about America's real threat -- pregnant mothers who quote Psalm 127 and submit to their husbands. The second mission is to paint certain ministries and Christian parents as intolerant racists with a penchant for spousal abuse, and other even more unconscionable crimes (Message to Barack Hussein Obama: "Fearless Leader -- forget, the fundamentalists in Iraq; these prolific Christians are the real bad guys!") The idea here is to throw blood into the water and whoop the press sharks into a feeding frenzy.

But it's not just Kathryn that gets heaps of scorn, it's her publisher, Beacon Press:

None of this should surprise us, because Beacon Press, Joyce's publisher, is well-known as a purveyor of ultra-radical, pro-homosexual, feminist, anti-Christian propaganda, including such books as: The Female Man; Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions; and Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality as well as other titles too vile to name.

Score one for me. Beacon is also publishing my book about young people and social justice next year. I guess I'll be in the running for "the 2010 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award" for talking about how young lost adolescents are trying to make meaning out of justice instead of captial G, God, or rooting their identities in critical thinking, kindness, and hard work instead of pumping out babies for the Christian army.

I say congrats on Kathryn for such a powerful and, in my opinion, respectful book, and congrats to Beacon, specifically editor Amy Caldwell, for being brave enough to publish ground breaking investigative journalism. It's sad that leaders like Doug Phillips can't acknowledge the quality of a book like Quiverfull and use it as the catalyst for a dialogue among those in his community and outside of it. Until we can speak respectfully (which is what I truly believe Kathryn was trying to do) across religious lines, we will never find common ground.

Last year I attended Burning Man and wrote a piece about my experiences with what I considered the culture of unapologetic appropriation at Burning Man in the name of freedom and art. This post started a huge flame-war, both here at Feministing, along with Burning Man message boards across the country. I knew I had hit a nerve but this latest incident between the Burning Man community and the indigenous community in the Bay Area sheds more light on the point I was trying to get at.

via East Bay Express.

There was supposed to be a "private" Burner party last Saturday night at the Bordello in Oakland, complete with three hundred guests, twenty DJs spinning thumping techno and bass, dancers, a fashion show, micro-massages, raw food, an absinthe bar, and coconuts. Instead, the event ended in tears.

More than fifty Bay Area Native American rights activists converged on the historic East Oakland property at 9:30 p.m. to ensure the shutdown of popular Burning Man group Visionary Village's "Go Native!" party. The fired-up Hopis, Kiowas and other tribal members spent more than four hours lecturing the handful of white, college-class Burners about cultural sensitivity until some of them simply broke down crying. The emotional crescendo capped a month-long saga that started with a tone-deaf dance party flyer, led to an Internet flame war and a public excoriation of Visionary Village's young, neo-hippy leaders before real tribal elders in the East Bay demanded a cancellation of the event.

"Go Native?" Wow, just wow.

Thanks to Legba for the heads up!

Obama has made his final appointments to his controversial council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Sarah Posner summarizes what that means for reproductive rights:

With his council appointments now complete, Obama has given far more seats on his council to religious leaders who are anti-choice than to ones who are openly pro-choice, even though the majority of Americans favor legal abortion. There are only two pro-choicers, and they're both Jewish. Reproductive-health advocates suggested several pro-choice Christians to the White House as worthy additions to the council. By not giving them seats, though, the administration shows that it is too afraid to challenge anti-choice evangelicals by putting their pro-choice brothers and sisters at the same table.

Frances Kissling also points out that the appointments aren't just predominantly anti-choice -- they're also mostly men. Five of the council members recently signed on to a letter asking Obama not to overturn the Bush administration's HHS policy allowing health care providers to deny services (such as contraception) based on their personal beliefs. (Planned Parenthood has a letter you can sign asking Obama to follow through and get rid of the policy!)

I agree with folks who argue that religious groups can be providers of essential services without proselytizing or stepping on the rights of others. But Bush's legacy is strong. He primarily used "Faith-Based Initiatives" as a way to pander to his base politically -- not to actually provide more services to more people in need. And he supported many of these faith-based groups' decisions to only hire people of their religion or to maintain discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ people. Obama's actions are looking all too familiar.

Gotta love The Onion.

h/t to Kuj

Literally.

I know Ann already linked to this story in the WFR, but I thought it deserved a full post.

Two ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers have altered a photo of Israel's new cabinet, removing two female ministers.

Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo.

But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

See the pics above: The one on top is the original, the second is the one that was altered. Women in politics are often made invisible, but this shit is ridiculous.

A small sect of followers from the Westboro Baptist Church protested in Washington DC yesterday in front of the White House. They are famous for protesting at funerals (like of the recent plane crash victims) and other incendiary acts all framed around the empending apocalypse. The team from Campus Progress went to the protest and talked to protesters and counter-protesters.

There are a bunch of videos from the protests that you can check out here, but I thought this one, with one of the counter protesters was particularly interesting. It tackles the issue of whether or not it's even worth it to engage with these types of extremists.

What do you all think? Is it worth it to engage?