In Australia there’s every sign the law regarding abortion is about to relaxed, naturally the Catholic Church (and no doubt others) are up in arms about this. Their reponse looks very familar:

1) Lying: The law won’t require all doctors to perform abortions like the church is insisting it does - it simply obliges them to refer a patient seeking one to a doctor that will.
2) Misdirection: It is a violation of religious freedom to give women rights! This is a varariation on the ‘bigots have a right to be bigots!’ line we get whenever treating gay people as anything other than second-class citizens comes up.
3) Taking Hostages: The church is threatening to close emergency departments if the law passes. It’s not that they want to drag sick people into this you understand, it’s that they’ve decided to lie about what the bill entails in a way that means they’ll naturally have to stop providing vital services out of sheer moral conviction.

We’ve seen this before in the UK, with the outright lying over the embryology bill and with the Catholic Church threatening to close adoption services rather than consider giving children to gay couples. While I’m picking on the Catholics today, they’re not the only church to try the trick of taking money to run public services out of the goodness of their heart - until they find the government doesn’t consider the right to discriminate part of religious freedom and they’ll threaten to close them. I can’t take the idea that these public services attest to the moral willing of the church when they are continuously used as threats against the government. They seem to be considered as much political assets as public services.

Naturally this applies to one of my main problems with religious accommodation - faith schools. Take how the Church reacted when Amnesty took a side on abortion - they didn’t sideline Catholics schools into only taking part in campaigns that are unrelated to potentially funding abortions: they banned them outright. It seems all the church has to do is replace ‘political’ with ‘moral’ and any action they take is justifiable. The Catholic Church is undeniably a political body that’s antiquated and downright immoral moral sense will bring it into conflict with the government more and more in the future – schools should not be a football in this fight. If they want to protest they have to do it the same way as everyone else protests what’s done with public money - through the democratic process.

What happens when the government starts requiring schools step up and provide outstanding sex education? Considering that some people at the top have this kind of opinion on exactly how regressive and useless sex education should be, is it that outrageous an idea that some bishop might just let it slip that good Catholics couldn’t possibly abide with such a law and the government is forcing them because of their strong moral backbone to close schools?

I think it’ll happen, I think it’ll be a shortlived idea because it will directly effect thousands of ordinary Catholics who aren’t quite as regressive as their leadership, but can we really afford to leave schools out there as a political football given the church’s history with similar public services it’s running?

Why? The fact that she’s SEVENTEEN should be enough. For those who seem to be saying it’s justifiable because of Palin’s support of abstinence education over actual sex education, really there are enough examples of the horrific failure of that idea than picking on one kid. Statistical evidence should always trump anecdotal evidence, especially as there’s hardly any evidence to connect the two stories other than in a “we really really wanted to talk it” way. I’m deeply suspicious of any argument that seems to making up excuses to shame a kid on the world stage for the heinous sin of getting pregnant.

Yes yes, Republicans would say if the situation were reversed that it speaks to the matter of Obama’s character but that forgets that we don’t think that, we don’t spit ‘born out of wedlock’ like it’s a curse word. Least last time I checked.

Perhaps I’m hopeless out of touch, but I think it’s possible for Democrats to be more assertive, combat smears and be tough on the Republicans terrible record without actually becoming them. In 2000 Bush’s Campaign spread the idea that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child, that is an really low moral standard to try to follow. If we say that anything Republicans have done in the past is justifiable politics for us now then we create a horrific world. Obama is right on this: kids are out of bounds. The people that are saying otherwise are really scary people to have in the camp.

We currently live in the world where a teenager’s pregnancy is seriously talked about world-wide as the most important issue in who becomes the most powerful person on Earth - that is a Republican’s wet dream for so many reasons. It plays right into the hands of those who would much rather be talking about this than the last eight years of a Republican government.

In other news, the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee used to be part of a group that wants Alaska to secede from the Union. This might rank a tad higher in ‘Palin stories drawing attention away from the rotting elephant in the room’ game we seem to be playing.

Watch as the ultra-feminist sisterhood back away in horror from Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new running mate.

Mrs Palin is technically female, but she’s enthusiastically married, hates abortion and thinks criminals should not be the only people allowed to own guns. She’s everything Hillary Clinton isn’t. In short, she’s the wrong kind of woman.

Which just goes to show that ultra-feminists are not actually interested in promoting women because they’re women. They pretend they are, but really their agenda is a campaign against marriage, in favour of abortion and for every other disastrous liberal and socialist cause that ever existed. In which case, they really can’t go on pretending that their opponents are women-hating bigots. Not least because they are the bigots - merciless when it comes to a choice between their own convenience and the life of an unborn baby.

‘Their own convenience’ - Yes he really is that much of an ass.

Right-wingers have for years created the concept of the ‘ultra-feminist’ - who are not only hairy, scary man-haters but are venomously unmarried and go around deliberately destroying other people’s marriages (which is why they find so much common ground with the dreaded gays). I have to say scorning feminists for failing to match up to a fictional standard of horribleness is really quite inspired.

The idea that feminists should always vote for a woman and that women who don’t understand that are betraying their own is a profoundly sexist outlook. See, men are complex beasts capable of rationally judging the issues and making an informed decision about their vote, on the other hand women should just check for breasts and any feminists who look past those to see what the candidate thinks about real issues are traitors.

So no, feminists don’t blanket vote for women - they look at the issues, and surprise, someone who thinks that abortion is not even justifiable in cases of rape and incest does not win the feminist seal of approval. They would much rather there be a government that has a decent approach to women’s issues than a government with a woman in it. As a rule in the States women are generally more leftward leaning and so the fact they’re not flocking to Palin is not a surprise because she is really really conservative.

Now have ‘feminists’ abandoned her? Are they not going to call out the sexist crap because they dislike her politics? No. In fact it says a lot that there’s already responses up against the sexism that’s already emerged. This angle is why it might possibly be a smarter pick for McCain than I initially thought because it gives the most base misogynistic parts of Obama’s base another chance to shine (and oh how they will).  Sure Palin can’t convince many of Clinton’s female supporters to vote McCain (as mentioned, because women actually care about issues), but her presence in the race might make them look long and hard about the company they’d be keeping as an Obama voter and keep some at home. It ruthlessly divides Obama’s supporters by reminding them of the hatred that comes from the some of his most vocal supporters directed at female politicans using attacks that would equally apply to all woman. It’s a nice trick because if it pays off he can sit back at take the high road in defending Palin against the attacks that Obama never spoke out against when his supporters were attacking Clinton.

So yes, feminists defend all women against sexist crap, even when they disagree with them, because they understand that a sexist attack that is left to stand against one woman hurts everyone. But doing some actual research and discovering woman rejecting Palin but defending her from sexist attacks would be asking a little much, after all, it might ruin his nicely cliched worldview. The fact that women are actually human beings who have more interests than just ‘is candidate a woman’ is apparently a little complex for Peter Hitchens to digest.

The one snag is that I had to keep using ‘they’ there rather than ‘we’, this ecumenicism leaves out one the largest single groups in the world: The non-believers. We are consistently left outside the largest tent in history.

The problem isn’t the idea that we can put differences aside and learn from each other and work together to accomplish great deeds - It’s that the very notion of inter-faith projects is phrased in ways like “faith has special qualities”, “faith makes us better people”, “faith inspires us in ways that nothing else can”, which are all nice, fluffy ecumenical stuff for the religious but directly offensive to those who thought they were doing well enough as human beings without faith. The inter-faith movement is rooted in something that is fundamentally demeaning to the morals and achievements of a growing (but already sizable) portion of the human race. It’s not that we lack language capable of drawing together every kind of person, the humanist tradition has a lot of it, it’s that those running this show either still labour under the misconception they’re still the only game in town or don’t seem to care that they’d come closer to achieving their goals by including non-believers.

I am for some reason on the mailing list of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. They recently started an initiative called Faiths Act, working with Malaria groups to fund getting a million mosquito nets. What can I possibly find fault with here?

As many as three million people die of malaria each year, most of them pregnant women and children under five living in Sub-Saharan Africa. One child dies every 30 seconds. Their deaths are preventable.

Across much of Asia and the rest of the world, malaria continues to strike, and doesn’t discriminate between religions.

No that’s right, it doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t discriminate between religious and non-religious either. This is an issue for all (and would be even if it was only Muslims dying). What is the point of being so ecumenical that anyone who believes anything is inside under the tent, without bringing non-believers into the action? We have money and consciences too. We can save more people together than alone.

Unfortunately it’s not just poor wording in the emails, the Faith Foundation’s mission statement is fundamentally opposed to the ultimate ecumenicism of bringing atheists into the fold.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.

Faith is vitally important to hundreds of millions of people. It underpins systems of thought and of behaviour. It underpins many of the world’s great movements for change or reform, including many charities. And the values of respect, justice and compassion that our great religions share have never been more relevant or important to bring people together to build a better world.

But religious faith can also be used to divide. We have seen throughout history and today we still see how it can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a response to these opportunities and challenges. We will use the full power of modern communications to support and step up efforts at every level to educate, inform and develop understanding about the different faiths and between them.

At the same time, the Foundation will use its profile and resources to encourage people of faith to work together more closely to tackle global poverty and conflict. By supporting such inter-faith initiatives, the Foundation will help underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution.

The very language of the mission statement is designed to make the religious feel better about them, but again, is directly exclusionary to non-believers. Do I not share a similar sense of respect, justice and compassion? The next line is a tad ironic, because the foundation has moved past divisions between faiths to find the one division that’s apparently truly important and worth keeping: the division between the faithful and the nonbelievers.

This seems to be the problem with the Faith Foundation in its present form: it encourages selfless acts for its own selfish ends. Its primary goal isn’t to help people, but to show that faith can help people – that is the first line of the mission statement. This is frustrating because there is a real role for an organization that can pick an important issue and mobilize communities and people (both religious and non-religious) world-wide around it. I didn’t know about the Malaria No More project, now I do and there are a few more bed nets in circulation (here’s a link for anyone who feels like giving). More can be helped if we reach out to all than try to prove petty and self-serving points.

If the Foundation’s role is to be an inter-faith talking shop, then hey, atheists and humanists should be at that table too. I am often annoyed (to put it extremely mildly) when world religious leaders go out of their way to insinuate that people who don’t believe in God are inferior moral beings and responsible for the evils of history (despite any inconvenient facts to the contrary) - It’s quite clear they don’t understand us and need to be educated. Or again, if the Faith Foundation’s role is to coordinate large scale campaigns, then again, there are enough non-religious communities springing up that it’s worth reaching out. For the love of all unholy, use us.

So the question for Tony Blair would be: Is it more important that we ‘underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution’ or make a tent just a little bit larger and bring a bit more understanding to the world and a few more hands to healing it’s scars? I can’t see how any ‘inter-faith’ project couldn’t accomplish it’s goals better if it scrapped it’s ‘inter-faith’ credo and brought everyone into the tent.

Let’s consider the situation: you are running a free service that costs you a lot of money and you can’t afford to run it any more. Do you:

A) Explain this to your customers and offer a premium service where people can pay for the service themselves (If you’re feeling daring you might throw in a little margin for yourself).

B) Shut down the service completely with no warning.

Naturally, Twitter goes down aisle B. Whilst the number of people willing to pay might be far smaller than the overall user base, I suspect it’s still a significant one. This is unimportant because the two rules of Twitter are a) No messages over 140 characters  b) Under no conditions make any money ever.

I can only speculate that once there are some real numbers on the page Twitter looks a whole lot less attractive to investors than the vague, cutting-edge, may-be-big-profits-someday-if-only-we-find-a-killer-app nothingness that they currently seem rely on.

On a selfish level, I’ll confess to a little satisfaction when a religion takes an unambiguously stupid and harmful stance because it makes the argument that they’re an anachronism far easier, but that is a profoundly selfish take because it ignores the fact that the flat out evil policies and doctrine of the church make real people’s lives worse (and often shorter). Ignoring for a second the whole “condoms will kill you” thing; the Catholic Church has an official position that Homosexuality is wrong and should be condemned - They also run schools with gay children in them. Why on earth is this tolerated?

There is a problem pretty much everywhere in the British school system with homophobic bullying (I’ve always felt that terms a little misleading, it’s not so much fear as it is hate) with 2/3 of gay students reporting problem but it can’t be coincidence that in faith schools this goes up to 3/4. Whilst a leap from one high figure to another may not be that impressive an indictment it’s more worryingly that significantly fewer pupils (23%) feel able to report abuse in faith schools and it’s hard to see how doctrine like this is in any way conductive to an environment where pupils feel comfortable trusting schools to react and deal appropriately. The issue isn’t that it’s the staff are doing the bullying (although this does happen) but that they won’t step in in the same way they would with other kinds of bullying and don’t address the issue with their students. Think: Is this kind of stance more or less likely when the heads of your religion say you should be condemning these young freaks?

The Stonewall report on the matter has some examples of how this plays out outside the magical world of percentages:

“It’s a Catholic school…and we are told ‘gay people will go to hell because the Bible condemns it’… It’s horrid, you just want to go and cry at some of the remarks made by the teachers. It’s just not fair.” - Matthew, 18, single sex Catholic school (South East)

“PSHE was about AIDS – the teacher didn’t contradict that it was a ‘gay disease’ and implied what gay men did in bed was disgusting.” - Rachel, 18,independent secondary school (Greater London)

“The response from friends was supportive, but the school teachers did absolutely nothing about it.” - Paul, 16, Catholic secondary school (North West)

“As I was in a Catholic school, part of my R.E. GCSE, we had a topic about homosexuality and the Catholic church. We were basically told that being gay or bisexual isn’t a sin, but the sexual act is. Thankfully our teacher was young and pretty much only saying what she was told to say. She allowed us some debate on the subject because it seemed that she didn’t agree with the Vatican’s view even though she was a devout Catholic herself.” - Ruth, 18, Catholic Secondary School (West Midlands)

There’s some hope in that last one (and there are other quotes that show good handling of the issue by schools in the report) but it’s a tad depressing the official party line seems to be a variation on ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin” - the idea that being gay is fine, but gay acts are bad seems to pass for enlightened and kind thinking in some circles - “Well, they’re not doomed from the get-go per se, they just have to resist their sinful urges because…um…they’re sinful and our loving god will punish them for it.” And they call us the immoral ones. A theme recurring in religion is to create imaginary crimes which it can then forgive and fix (I can’t help but feel because it’s answers to real problems tend to be so deeply unsatisfiying) and that’s all this is: An imaginary crime we let our ‘moral guardians’ punish children for.

I mean, a female Prime Minster? Just the thought is hilarious! Like that would ever- OH WAIT.

Perpetrators of rape have been discovered not to have sound religious background, a study conducted by the International Centre for the Advancement of Reproductive Health( CIFARH) has shown.

Executive Director of CIFARH, Professor Innocent Ujah, who disclosed this at an orientation workshop by the Student Union Government of the University of Jos, said majority of the people that responded to the research questionnaire distributed by the agency on sexual violence in the country, agreed that most rapists do not have sound religious backgrounds while only 11 percent said otherwise.

Must be true, surveys prove it. Wait, truth isn’t democratic you say? But have a questionnaire here that clearly says most people say it is! Also the article tells us that rape can be prevented avoiding ‘indecent dressing’, so it’s all ok because the victims are almost as much to blame as the atheists.

In fact, now I think about it, this is the same approach the creator of the Panorama about evil wifi took: ““There is an mainstream accepted view on this and I think it’s a role that Panorama can play to question that mainstream cultural norm.” Apparently there’s a class of people out there who really think there is nothing unjustifiable if they’re doing it whilst sticking it to THE MAN. If I claim that global warming is actually caused by a decline in the number of pirates worldwide, then the fact that no one agrees with me means I’m being repressed! If I make a documentary about it, I’m immune from requirements to check my facts or represent my interviewees honestly because I’m fighting the man! I don’t have time to do things the hard way, you know they’d only make up new ‘facts’ to prove me wrong anyway.

If Channel Four really wanted to produce a documentary on the minority view on climate change, the absolutely least they could have done is pick someone to do it who hadn’t previously got them into trouble for lying and misrepresenting in a documentary. This would, to me at least, seem a REALLY REALLY important thing to do. The fact that they didn’t tells us they didn’t give a damn about accurate science coming out, they just wanted to stir the shit a bit - they contribute to the debate in about the same way that pissing in the well raises the water level.