Catholic Child Abusers

No, I'm not not talking about the priests who are forcibly sodomizing little boys. That deserves attention, undoubtedly, but I'm talking about mental abuse. This kind of bullshit.

It wasn’t until her seven-year-old son asked her if he’d burn in hell that Marjorie Kirsop became concerned.
But this fall, when five-year-old Sarah Kirsop declared she had converted to Catholicism ...

Let's pretend for a moment that I, as a public school Grade 2 teacher, actually did what us "militant" atheists are accused of doing every day - and tried to force everyone to our non-religion.

Imagine, Mrs. Baptist's children came home and said:
"Mommy, Mr. DTK told us in school today that Jesus is a fairy tale. Did you know that? He even showed us parts of the bible that are wrong!"

I'd be fired in a day, union or no union.

So how come the only school board in the town of Morinville, Alberta - a school board which is officially a public school board - is allowed to teach hellfire and brimstone to the children of non-believers?

Riddle me that.

Bunch of jerks.

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Catholics Oppose Gay Marriage

Big news there, I suppose.

They have a website though, now.

Their points, in order.

Natural marriage is the foundation of a civilised society.

My tendency here is to simply add the suffix [citation needed] to the text. The foundation of our society, last I checked, was freedom. Freedom of the speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly ... that sort of thing. The Taliban have marriage. The Vikings had marriage. Soviet Russia had marriage. Marriage - whether forced, voluntary or some combination thereof - has been around for a long time and I don't know of any correlation between its prevalence and level of civilization a society has.

Same-sex unions, as pseudo-marriages, involve gravely sinful acts that are never defensible, and the very assimilation to marriage damages marriage itself.

We're just going to ignore that "pseudo-marriage" phrase, as you're assuming your conclusion here. (i.e. see above, [citation needed]). Gravely sinful acts? I direct you to read your bible for all of the other "gravely sinful" acts. Like eating lobster, crab, oysters or clams. Or weaving two kinds of fabric together. Or sewing two different crops in the same field. Or accidentally seeing your father naked or your wife while she's menstruating.

Also, I think you're using the word "assimilation" incorrectly. Good try, though. Big words can sometimes be impressive.

The law is a great teacher, and it encourages or discourages behaviour.

True that. You're 1 for 3, quite respectable in major league baseball. The law should serve as a guideline for ethics by, for example, demonstrating that everyone has equal rights and that one group of people can't force their morality on another unwilling group.

Government-backed same sex civil unions would encourage and normalise homosexual behaviour, and it would harm natural marriage, children, adults, and homosexuals themselves.

That's a lot of claiming you're doing there.

Yes, it would normalize homosexual behaviour. Why is that bad? What we've seen, with celibate priests for instance, is that making sex forbidden can cause some pretty harsh overreactions and perversions. I'd rather have gay people feel normal, not just for those reasons, but because there's really no reason for people who engage in consensual sex to feel bad about it.

Also, I'm living in Canada. We've had Evil, Gay Sex Marriages for years now and there's no evidence that it's destroyed or harmed Holy, Opposite Sex Marriages. Perhaps you could provide evidence.

And yes, the adopted kids of gay people turn out just fine.

The law should promote behaviours that are beneficial and prohibit (or at least not endorse) those that are destructive.

Did you read the link above? The study is pretty clear: "...the vast majority of studies show that children living with two mothers and children living with a mother and father have the same levels and qualities of social competence."

You'll have to explain how the Evil, Gay Scourge is destructive.

Therefore, the law should promote natural marriage, and it should provide no option for government-backed same-sex marriage or civil unions.

Therefore, nothing. None of your points above were accurate depictions of reality. Therefore, your conclusion is unsupported.

Meanwhile, take off that shirt. I believe you're wearing a shirt made of two types of fabric woven together and - while your god is explicitly in favour of bigotry and brutal punishments in that vein - he really doesn't like clothing made of two fabrics woven together.

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What's With All Those Pregnant Christian Teens?

Ever wondered why we have so many pregnant Christian teens?

Wonder no more.

You see, "Sexual relationships, while enacted privately, are public property." That's why birth control is so very, very bad. If people use birth control, the rest of us have no way of monitoring their behaviour and measuring their sinfulness.

How do you know if two married people are keeping their marital vows? (by the way, for you non-religious folk, you should know that Christians are required to have lots of sex). Why, it's the babies! The babies prove they're doing it right!

And how do you know if unmarried teens are being sinful, dirty miscreants? Why, it's the babies!

See how clear everything is when you outlaw contraception? The babies tell you everything. That's why contraception is bad. It lets you keep your sexuality to yourself, almost as if it were your own private business and not a responsibility of all of society.

Hm.

I suppose I should have stopped at "However, I salute their stupidity."

That was probably a red flag right there.

But if you're wondering why we have pregnant teenagers, look no further than that mentality. It's the mentality that birth control is a worse sin - by way of being premeditated premarital sex - than having a baby you can't possibly raise properly. You see, sex without birth control could just mean you got carried away. But sex with birth control means you planned it, you evil bastard.

Makes me glad to be an atheist. It means I don't have to rationalize stupidity like this. It also means Christians have no business invading my privacy to judge how I live my life.

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Idiocy? Banning Religion.

It's just the stupidest thing you could possibly do. You can't get rid of a religion or a culture by banning it. You'd think that people in Quebec would realize that all that does is drive it underground, romanticize it and make it stronger.

But the Quebec government is going to ban the niqab on government premises. It's the worst possible thing.

First of all, the women who wear these things are supposedly the victims of the a male-dominated religion. Let's just grant that for the sake of argument. So what are you doing to these victims? You're forcing them to choose between government services and the wraths of their evil husbands. Brilliant!

Second, it's a cultural thing. These women are acclimatized to feel naked if they don't cover their faces. I can't speak on their behalves directly, but it might just be like walking around topless for them. Do you know what the cure is for that feeling? Education. It may in fact be the case that certain women will never, despite everything our society offers, get used to the idea of baring their faces in public. So what? I doubt their daughters will feel the same.

What is logically necessary?

If a woman wants a government service that requires identification, she must be able to prove her identity. That's it. If that means showing your face, temporarily, then that's what they'll have to do.

Women who want a credit for a course involving public speaking must be willing to engage in public speaking. Otherwise they don't get the credit.

But to tell a woman to drop her culture and walk around naked (from her point of view) is simply ridiculous. I don't care how frightened you are of Muslims or brown people or people with funny accents, you don't get to run their lives like that. It's just not how we do things here.

I'll be perfectly honest. As an atheist, I feel that pretty much every religion is a curse on the human race. The subject of enlightening people is always a matter of concern. But this isn't the way. This just won't work and we should know better than to try.

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Child Saved From Catholic Education

That's what I would have titled this article, which 9news in Denver chose to label: "Gay couple's child denied re-enrollment at Catholic school".

I mean, seriously, why would you want your kid to be raised in a school where they would teach him that his loving parents are terrible sinners who deserve to burn in hell if they don't repent from their love for each other?

No. The hazards of being raised Catholic are numerous and awful. It makes me happy to hear that one more child has been saved the misery.

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They Ought To Push a Law Against Premarital Sex

Seriously. A Congressman in the U.S. was (not quite) excommunicated because he took the position that abortion ought to remain legal.

Church asks Kennedy to forego Communion.

In case you're not a Christian, here's how it works: symbolically eating Jesus gets you in to heaven; not symbolically eating Jesus means you can't go to heaven; if you're Catholic, it's not symbolic, you're really eating Jesus. Communion is where you eat a cracker and pretend really, really hard that it's Jesus.

So the Catholic Church is upset that Kennedy supports abortion rights and wants to keep him from eating Jesus because the Catholic Church thinks abortion is murder and murder is a sin.

There's a problem, though. (Okay, there are lots of problems, but let's focus on just one).

What if all the Congresspeople simply didn't pass any legislation pertaining to abortion? What if no bills were ever even raised? Wouldn't the Church have to excommunicate all of the Catholic legislators for the sin of not even trying?

I'd think so, just in the name of ethical consistency (not the Church's strong suit, I admit).

The Church also believes that premarital sex is a sin. Should not the Church also be cracking down on any Congressperson who isn't actively trying to pass bills to ban premarital sex?

I don't see that happening though. Know why?

Because it would be stupid, that's why, and people don't like being laughed at.

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Evil Muslims: What the Media Won't Tell You!

I got in to this discussion about the Fort Hood killings. Apparently the media are hopelessly remiss in not telling us how the Islam is the religion of evil. Heck, just look at the Koran (or Qu'ran, but let's not get all "literate")! Evil!

Sure, whatever. I have no doubt that, being a religion, it's full of hateful stuff: genocide; murder; rape; whatever. I can say the same thing about the Christian bible and that whole "Judeo-Christian" philosophy that some people think exists.

So why doesn't the media tell us how evil Islam is?

Well, first of all, it does. Second of all, it does tone it down a bit. There are two reasons for this

1) We've been trained to have a completely unreasonable reticence about criticizing religion. "Hm, a fourteen year old girl is pregnant and claims to be a virgin ... that's, um, totally reasonable." Somehow, it's acceptable for religious people to spout off the most ridiculous notions and it's taboo for the rest of us to call them on it.

2) The United States already has a lot of simmering anti-muslim attitude. Remember on September 12 when Sikhs were getting beaten up? Double-plus ignorance with a backflip, Batman.

The problem is not Islam or Christianity or Judaism or any other religion. The problem is that the people who devote themselves to these religions do so and abrogate their own moral filters. What do I mean?

The bible says to kill homosexuals. Do you? No, you don't.
The bible says to kill witches. Do you? No, you don't.
The bible says not to wear mixed fabrics. Do you? All the time.

See how that works? If your religious text tells you to do something completely stupid and immoral, you ignore it. You still call yourself Jewish, Muslim or Christian, but you don't obey the stupid, immoral rules. There's a bit of cognitive dissonance, but you can live with that. You've been trained to believe that your religion is right, but you have a moral centre which prevents you from blanking out.

Some people don't have that moral centre. Some people blank right out and do whatever their priest, imam or rabbi tells them their holy book says. Go smash a plane in to a building. Drive Magog and Gog out of the Middle East. Seize the Promised Land. Help the Jews seize the Promised Land so Jesus can return.

All of those examples are stupid and immoral and yet many, many people support the stupidity and immorality. That's what religion does. It tells you to obey without thinking. And that's where I disagree that humanism falls in with other religions. If a humanist leader told his followers to strap on suicide bombs, he would be turned over to a psychiatric hospital.

So rant on all you want about the evils of Islam. Hell, I might even agree with you on some of the finer points. But really, there's nothing especially evil about it that I can't find in any other mainstream religion.

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Banning Burqas? No.

No. That's not Canada's job.

I agree that the burqa is a backwards, ancient, misogynistic piece of clothing. I agree that it places the responsibility for sexuality on a woman rather than sharing that responsibility.

I agree with pretty much every feminist who says the burqa is a bad idea and that the world will be a better place when women don't feel obliged to wear it - either out of religious need, fear of punishment or to protect themselves from the eyes of potential rapists.

But we're not going to make a law against it. Forget it. Even at the behest of progressive Muslims, we're not going to outlaw it.

Canada is a a free country. You wear what you like as long as it isn't dangerous. Until we have giant burqa crime-sprees there's no need to outlaw burqas as a security risk. Society has no right or reason to interfere here.

The best quote is the simplest one, that comes at the end of the article.

[Mr. Elmasry] believes those women should have the freedom to decide whether they wish to cover their faces, and that a ban would limit freedom of expression.

It's not for you and me to decide.”

You can close the case right there.

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Catholics Fire Transgendered Teacher

Of course it's wrong to fire someone for that.

It's also wrong for a public institution to fire people for:
a) living with a boyfriend or girlfriend before marriage
b) being gay
c) not going to church often enough
d) being the member of the wrong kind of church
e) not having your children baptized Catholic

But as far as I can tell, the permission that the province has granted the Catholic Church to control a publicly funded education system includes the permission to discriminate in hiring and firing practices.

They can discriminate against you and you have no recourse.

The problem isn't the Church. I expect ignorant, deluded, power-hungry idiots to behave this way just to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having reason and logic invade their rose-tinted bubble.

The problem is that we allow them to control public education and allow them to educate people on our dime. If we continue to allow this, everything they do is in our name. If we continue to fund them, their cruelties, discriminations and other abuses become our fault.

End this stupid farce.

Take the power of public education away from the Church. Take away their funding.

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We're Winning

The Catholic Church is closing three churches in Ottawa.

I won't pretend I'm jumping with glee or anything, just smiling and nodding in appreciation of a population that is slowing wising up to reality.

Of course we're also getting in to more "New Age" nonsense to backfill for the people who apparently have some kind of supernatural void when religion is taken away, and it does lead to the death of innocents occasionally, but closing churches will always make me hopeful.

“When I was a kid, you never missed a weekend church service. You just had to be there. Today there are hardly any kids going to church. Families used to have six or seven kids, but not anymore.”

Well, that really tells the whole story, doesn't it?

The church used to work pretty hard at opposing birth control; hard enough that their parishioners really didn't use birth control. By 1982, 91% of Catholics were actually okay with using birth control. In 2005, in the U.S. 75% of Catholics felt the Church should change its position. The Church won't, naturally. And now the demographic is playing out. People are having two or three kids instead of seven or eight.

Worse yet is the tendency in modern times to reduce the strictness of child raising. Children, even at very young ages, are not forced to go to church. They're given the choice. And a lot of them say, no, I'd rather sleep in.

Quite simply, the Catholic Church no longer has the frightening stranglehold of "The Devil Will Get You" that it used to have and its parishioners have wandered in to rationality.

It's a lot like third world countries, really. If we would just stop propping up crazy right-wing dictators, they actually do quite well all by themselves. By the same token, former Catholic families quickly become non-religious if they aren't constantly brainwashed.

Score one for the good guys.

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Now I'm Defending Religious Expression

Of course I am.

You've got the right to express your religion in your self-employed, private workplace. I can't imagine it any other way.

Apparently this secular Jewish fellow can't, though, according to Montreal bylaws.

I'm not a big fan of religion. It reeks of despotism and mindless obedience. But if you're choosing to be mindlessly obedient, that's your thing. As long as you stop swinging your fists at my face and your mezuzah isn't a fire hazard, it's really none of my business how you waste your time.

He hangs family pictures and religious/cultural artifacts around his cab. A Christian will hang rosary beads around his mirror. A Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are welcome to do the same as long as they're following laws about keeping the road visible from the driver's seat. Followers of the IPU can hang punctured red socks.

I can't imagine that this "Montreal bylaw" which says cabbies can't have objects or inscriptions in their cabs that are "not required for the taxi to be in service." could possibly be constitutional.

If he were a public servant, employed by the government, I could see invoking a rule.

If he were posting religious passages demanding the death or mutilation of others, I could see invoking a rule.

But in his cab? His private cab? Tiny, religiously inspired texts calling down blessing of protection?

No. There's no need to push this guy around.

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I Don't Remember Voting For Your God

There's a pretty strong contradiction there, isn't there, when you're listening to the Right Wing?

Mostly I'm talking about the conservative U.S., but you get it in Canada too.

On the one hand, we should be out there bringing democracy to the unenlightened. On the other hand, we're supposed to obey the religious edicts of their particular creed: no sex before marriage; no contraception; no abortion; crosses everywhere; evangelization. The list could go on.

If you read those posters at the anti-Obama rallies (and I'm talking about the crazy tea-baggers) you see a combination of people demanding their rights and people demanding that Christianity come to the forefront.

Obama is a Marxist, Muslim, Fascist thug! That's anti-democractic! He's taking our freedom! He's taken our rights! (not that we could name one of the rights he's taken) Now let us pray to Jesus and obey the bible-god thingie instead!

They don't actually want freedom. Religion and especially religious obedience are the antithesis of freedom.

I didn't vote for their god.

I don't even remember having an election.

He seems to be running the show though, and in an extremely undemocratic fashion.

The guy sounds like a Marxist, Communist, Fascist thug to me.

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God's Verdict

Stephen Harper, speaking on history's judgement of his term:

“To be honest with you, I am a lot more concerned by God's verdict regarding my life than the one of historians,” the Prime Minister said with a laugh, according to the article.

Er ... wow.

I suppose, if you're religious, that's the way to do things. Everlasting soul and all that crap.

But, really, it just sounds creepy coming from a politician. It makes me wonder if all this sucking-up-to-America isn't really sucking up to America. It may be part and parcel of the same belief system that led George Bush to telling people that his invasion of Iraq was a mission from god.

That's right. Harper's envy of America wasn't really envy. He wasn't really criticizing Canada for being a north-European welfare state. That was all just a cover for his jealousy of the way the United States was able to use its armies to pursue better standing at the gates of heaven.

Who cares if you ruin the country? As long as you did the will of Almighty God, I guess you're covered.

Great.

Just great.

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Stevie, My Sympathy is Limited

It's right about at that threshold I felt for the Enron employees who kept investing in their company's stock while it was going down, throwing more and more of their pensions in before the whole thing crashed.

Dave has written an excellent article saying that the issue should be dropped, that it's a distraction from bigger issues and that the Catholic Church has no business getting all moral with people. I mostly agree.

No, I'm not going to go after Harper for breaking some stupid religious rule. As far as the catholics are concerned, he was damned either way. Non-catholics aren't christians, according to the catholic church, so they have no business eating the cracker. Discarding is also unacceptable.

But I don't care.

What gets me is that the guy who is riding a frothing wave of Religious Nutbars (mostly protestant) is now going to invoke the wrath of a separate sect of frothing Religious Nutbars.

I can't pretend that I have any sympathy.

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The Pope's Hope

Dear Pope Benedict,

I heard about your address regarding the need for hope and I thought I would respond.

I guess I find it hard to be hopeful, despite your papal command that I do so. Even though everyone knows that the pope is always right, I find it difficult to simultaneously be hopeful while also acknowledging that I'm such a terrible sinner that I deserve to burn in the fiery pits of hell in endless agony.

Call me a party pooper, but that's just such a downer.

I'm also a bit conflicted about your desire for hope in Africa where, as you say, "... growing numbers of her sons and daughters who fall prey to hunger, poverty and disease". It seems like condoms and other forms of birth control would solve a lot of the problems in Africa - especially the "growing numbers" part and the "disease" part.

It seems like Africa might need more than "hope".

Maybe you could sell some of those gold relics you hide all over the Vatican and use the money to send condoms to Africa.

I'm just saying.

Greg.

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Our Soldiers are Dying For This?

We were told that the war in Afghanistan was being fought to end religious tyranny. We're fighting the Taliban. It's a worthwhile endeavour, all that bloodshed, because we're removing crazy religious dogmatists from power and supporting a moderate government that will protect innocent people from the Taliban.

So we put up with Karzai. So we sent our boys and girls. So we dropped bombs and shot people. So over a hundred of our people have died in this endeavour. So we spent money we can ill afford to spend.

And now?

And now the sham of democracy that is the "loya jirga" in Afghanistan is passing laws that enforce the same religious tyranny that we were supposedly there to prevent.

The whole facade is crumbling. We've never been fighting for democracy or freedom. We've spent decades supporting right wing dictators in foreign countries, calling it democracy and lying to the people.

This is only the latest lie: that we are in Afghanistan for anything other than self interest.

It's time to bring our soldiers home. Not one more person should have to spend one more minute in theatre, never mind be wounded or die, for this sham.

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Combating Defamation of Religions

Once you know the name of the U.N. Resolution, it's easy to find online.

The question is, now, how bad is it?

If we adopt this resolution in to Canadian Law, what will become illegal? Will I still be allowed to say that I find Christianity ridiculous because it depends upon the debauchery of a teenage virgin and the eating of a cracker that adherents pretend is her son's flesh? Will I be jailed if I say that Judaism is based on the false premise of an Exodus from Egypt? Will I suffer punishment if I say that Islam is an unjust religion because it places such a large share of the responsibility for preventing lust upon women?

The problem comes with the word "defamation". At dictionary.com, it says, "false or unjustified injury of the good reputation of another".

False or unjustified? How do you hope to prove that? If there a billion followers of Religion X, then there are a billion different versions of X. One Christian will tell you that abortion isn't all that bad an idea in some cases. I know Muslims who drink alcohol.

And yes, I know, the devout will say these aren't Real Christians (TM) or Real Muslims (TM). They could probably argue, at that point, that I have "defamed" their religions just by attributing such opinions and actions to fake members of their respective religions.

What does the text of the resolution say, regarding defamation of religions? Most of it is actually pretty good, boilerplate, tolerance-based stuff. Most of it simply implores member States to prevent craziness. Some of it, however, goes over the line.

“Stressing that defamation of religions is a serious affront to human dignity leading to the restriction of the freedom of religion of their adherents and incitement to religious hatred and violence,

Here, we note that they never defined "Defamation" in regards to religion. Defamation of a religion, if you wanted to be technical, could happen when an Anglican attributes something to Catholicism that a Catholic says is false. Now what? Do our courts become crammed with every case of doctrinal schism that anyone feels like litigating?

“Recognizing the valuable contributions of all religions and beliefs to modern civilization

I most certainly will do no such thing. Did religion bring us some good things? Probably. Here and there. It also brought us Crusades and Jihads and almost everything that's wrong in the Middle East. It brought intentional ignorance, manipulation of the populace and people who want to wipe out scientific education and research.

“16. Underscores the need to combat defamation of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general,

This is a smooth move. Saying bad things about a religion - such as citing contradictions in its holy book or pointing out dangerous side effects of its teachings - could be considered defamation. For example, I might argue that "The Holocaust was a direct result of centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism". A Christian who doesn't feel this is fair could accuse me of this new crime "defamation of religion".

What this part of the resolution is saying is that pointing out this flaw in Catholic history is a subset of "incitement to religious hatred".

Do we understand what this means? Pointing out the violence caused by a religion will now fall under the column of a hate crime.

That's dangerous. It gives the religious people the authority to do whatever they want and be exempt from criticism on the grounds that any such criticism will be "defamation of religion" to any follower who can say that he or she did not support that action.

You can't criticize the dangers of Christianity (abortion clinic bombing, creationism in schools, the Crusades, the Holocaust) because some Christians will call that defamation. You can't criticize the dangers of Judaism (circumcision, the Promised Land) because some Jews don't support all of those effects. You can't criticize Islam for promoting suicide bombings or covering women in potato sacks because not all Muslims support that.

This is a dangerous, dangerous road they're walking with this resolution. I understand that the Muslim states are tired and angry at the fact that their citizens are the victims of such discrimination. But this is not the solution.

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Religion and Anxiety ... Another Theory

The more conservative and religious you are, the more likely you are to subscribe to online pornography.

There's a pretty straightforward bar graph there that demonstrates the results of the survey, putting Utah at the very top of the list for per capita online porn consumption.

This leads me back to yesterday's announcement of a study that indicated religious people are less anxious when they undergo stress testing. The theory is that religion provides a certainty about life that reduces your stress levels.

I have another theory.

Of course they're more relaxed! They just finished masturbating.

It all comes together.

h/t Galloping Beaver

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Religion Prevents Anxiety?

I suppose that might be a comfort to a religious person, that his beliefs make him calmer. It would be hard to explain, I suppose, if religious people were more agitated. Why does your god want you be so frazzled all the time? I'm sure they would have an excuse.

The headlines are a bit over the top:
Religious brains more calm in face of anxiety: study
Religion protects against stress, study suggests
Believers stay calmer than atheists in trying situations, study suggests

That last one comes closest to the truth, in terms of headlines. From the conclusion of the actual study, which you can find here.

Our results indicate that religious conviction is associated with reduced neural responsivity to uncertainty and error on a generic decision-making task.

So, yes, religious people are less anxious. I don't know how far to take the significance of the results when the sample size is 28 people and only four are "non-religious", but I'll point this much out anyway: the anxiety they're measuring is the anxiety experienced after making a mistake.

Yes, you read that right. The primary and most significant conclusion of the study is that atheists and other non-believers experience a sharper pang of anxiety or stress in the milliseconds following an error.

Frankly, I find that disturbing but not surprising. It means that religious people make mistakes and don't seem to care about it as much. If you've ever studied any history, you certainly won't find it hard to believe that religious people gloss over their mistakes more easily than others.

Maybe it just takes practice. After all, if you can read all four Christian gospels with their accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ without feeling anxiety about all of the direct contradictions, I suppose you just build up an immunity to facts or something.

I'll take my anxiety over their certainty any day of the week - even Sunday

Update: A more thorough analysis The Neurocritic: Atheists Are Neurotic and Religious Zealots Are Antisocial

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Those Sexist Virgin Radio Ads

In case you're not from Ottawa, or at least Virgin Radio hasn't opened a station in your area, there's a kerfuffle around these parts over a series of ads that Virgin has pasted around town for one of its features, "The Gods of Rock".

The ads feature somewhat sad looking pregnant teenage girls and young women with the caption "Lock Up Your Daughters, The Gods of Rock are now in Ottawa". It spawned the Facebook group linked above and a pile of articles denouncing the ads for sexism. The best one I've read is probably this one mailed in to the Ottawa Citizen. You may see others as well as a whole blog dedicated to the ads.

Yes, the ads are sexist. And I can tell that, at least as far as the poster of the article I cited in concerned, many of the protests are consistent.

But there's something I have to point out because, like it or not, a lot of the people criticizing these ads are deeply hypocritical. I can't tell which people in particular without doing a lot of cross-referencing. But here are the problems with the Virgin ads:

1) they portray women as victims
2) they portray rock stars as heroes
3) they then idolize the rock stars for making the women victims

Have I got it right? I think so. It's crass and juvenile, but maybe they're hoping their target audience is too. It won't be the first time such a thing has worked.

Now let's get to the hypocrisy.

I'd like to ask the people who write angry letters about these ads a question. That question is simple.

Do you go to church?

You see where I'm going here? If you're complaining about these ads and you're a Christian, you have a lot of explaining to do. Your entire religion is based on the impregnation of a virgin by a god. You could try to argue that it was voluntary, but only an idiot believes that a 14 year old girl can give informed consent.

So, yeah, trash the stupid Virgin Radio ads. But when you're done with that, take a look at your religion and try to weather the roaring thunder of a tidal wave of cognitive dissonance.

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