- Soaps Celebrate Same-Sex Marriage – am inclined to laugh at the ridiculousness of the soap opera genre, but the simple truth is that for millions of Americans, this is their first glimpse at an actual, same-sex ceremony. The episode is an important step in demystifying gay marriage and allows people to say, in many cases for the first time, “Ahhh, so that’s how it works. That’s not so strange after all.”
- The Blame Game – anyone who isn’t just cynically using the occasion of a woman’s gruesome murder by her husband’s hand to advance an anti-Islam or anti-religion agenda needs to rethink their argument—because if they really care about the victim at the center of this crime, or any of the millions of women hurt or killed by domestic violence every year, they won’t mask the real culprit behind a cheap, and misplaced, shot at a single religion.The real culprit is undeserved male privilege and the resulting second-class personhood of women.
Patriarchal religion of any stripe is merely a symptom of that global menace. And using it as a scapegoat, or suggesting somehow that if the religion itself were eradicated it would take gendered violence with it, effectively provides an excuse for not looking the source dead in the eyes. It’s a handy way of absolving oneself of any responsibility, too—it’s just that religion; there’s nothing I can do about it except hate that religion.
The Links for February 17th from 10:54 to 10:59 by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.