April 2012

Indonesia to ban mini-skirts over “links to rape”

Cliquea aquí para Español.

News of Note: ‘You know what men are like’: Indonesia to ban mini-skirts over links to rape

Indonesia’s powerful religious affairs minister believes that mini-skirts are pornographic and should be banned under the country’s tough new anti-porn laws.

Minister Suryadharma Ali has been appointed to run Indonesia’s new anti-porn taskforce, announced by president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono earlier this month.

He told reporters in Jakarta yesterday that before deciding what they must ban as pornography, the taskforce would consult widely to come up with “a set of universal criteria”.

However, “one [criterion] will be when someone wears a skirt above the knee,” according to the Jakarta Post.

“Pornography is something that we can feel … but we have to make the criteria,” said Dr Suryadharma.

Wanting to be or feel sexy is an entirely justifiable and natural human behavior. This reminds me of a conservative high school’s dress code, not something that an actual country would enforce on its citizens. With the growth of anti-women and anti-other fundamentalism, how soon will we see this type of repression on Main Street USA.

Indonesia’s new anti-porn taskforce must not have heard about the fallacy of slut shaming, so aptly in the hands of our SlutWalk advocates, who assert that no one asks to be assaulted no matter how s/he appears to their rapist, or murderer. Blaming the victims of rape for dressing sexy is simply absurd and offensive and deflects an act of violence to something akin to a sex act gone awry.

Stories like this reveal the astounding depth of sexual repression our world must still conquer. With laws like the one being pushed in Georgia to exchange the words “rape victim” with “rape accuser” in all state law, we have a  long way to go to assure a world where no one even conceives such a vile thought, or mounts a task force to tell us how we must dress to not incite the insane violence of rape?

*Creative Commons Image by: “Applegurl“

in Global Sexual Freedom Watch / News of Note  by 05 Apr 2012 0 comments

Employers ask job seekers for Facebook passwords

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News of Note: Employers ask job seekers for Facebook passwords

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

What about relationship status, sexual orientation, and religious belief? I don’t expect all the details of someone’s personal life to be completely agreeable with every employer and I certainly don’t expect them to use all the information they obtain in an unbiased way. The work environment is one that demands neutrality and tolerance. When companies pry into the private lives of their employees, they are venturing where they were never intended to go.

It is naive to believe anything online is private? We live in a world that is becoming more transparent everyday. If the truth about each of us is forced onto the table, how will society react? I don’t think it is reasonable for employers to ask for Facebook passwords during interviews but I do believe it is inevitable. Are you ready to show the world your true self?

Creative Commons image by: jakeliefer

in News of Note  by 03 Apr 2012 0 comments

The new legal theory that enables homophobic evangelizing in US schools

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News of Note: The new legal theory that enables homophobic evangelising in US schools

Last month, 8,000 public high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, went home with fliers informing them that no one is “born gay” and offering therapy if they experienced “unwanted same-sex attraction”.

The group behind the flier, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), isn’t the kind one expects to find represented in student backpacks. Peter Sprigg, a board member of PFOX who doubles as a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, recently told Chris Matthews that he believes “gay behavior” should be “criminalized.” PFOX president Greg Quinlan told another talk show host that gays and lesbians practice “sexual cannibalism.”

The Family Research Council is a documented “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Truth Wins Out (TWO), a high-profile organization fighting anti-gay religious extremism, has covered the Montgomery school fliers, and even filed a lawsuit recently against PFOX and Greg Quinlan for defamation — Quinlan resorted to accusing TWO Executive Director, Wayne Besen, of threatening his life. Such an obvious attempt to smear TWO should only serve to further paint PFOX as the bigots that they really are.

I can only imagine the amount of bullying and self-loathing that these fliers generate. Kids are discovering their own sexuality in high school, discovering who they are.

Over the past 20 years, legal advocacy groups of the religious right – a collection of entities that now command budgets totaling over $100m per year – have been pushing a new legal theory, one that has taken hold of some parts of the popular imagination and that has even been enshrined in recent judicial rulings. The essence of the theory is that religion isn’t religion, after all; it’s really just speech from a religious viewpoint. Borrowing from the rhetoric of the civil rights movements, the advocates of the new theory cry “discrimination” in the face of every attempt to treat religion as something different from any other kind of speech.

These religious groups do not have the ability to distinguish between religious dogma and rational thought. Freedom of religion is great because it also gives us freedom from religion. We need to actively label the intolerance that these groups spew as religion, and never allow them to sneak into public schools.

I like to imagine a future that is more progressive. With hate groups like PFOX finding ways to teach their backwards ideas in public schools, the future we all want to see protected is being undermined. If you have experienced similar intolerance or bigotry, we would be happy to add your story to our continuing coverage of this most important issue.

in Key Issues / News of Note  by 01 Apr 2012 0 comments