I’m still waiting for that list of “anti-Semitic organizations as designated by the FBI” Sage Rat.
CMC fnord!
I don’t recognize the case and would need a cite for the specific details before I could form a specific opinion about it. I have read of cases where clothing stores’ firing sales assistants for wearing hijabs was held to violate federal antidiscrimination law, for example. But I’m not familiar with a case about a Muslim sales assistant not being willing to wear the store brand(s) for reasons of modesty.
Personally, my own general preference for clothing store employment policy is the same in the case of hijab-wearers or modest dressers: As a shopper, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether a sales assistant wears a headcovering or not, or wears the store brands or not, or maintains some specified level of “modesty” or “immodesty” or not, or is slender or plump or whatever. As long as they look reasonably clean and tidy so I’m not worrying about what sort of gunk they’re getting on the clothes, can give practical help and reliable advice about items and brands, and handle their inventory and their cash registers in a competent manner, I couldn’t care less about the specifics of their appearance.
If a clothing store wants to present their garments as part of a certain predetermined “look”, that’s what the shop-window mannequins are for. The job of a sales assistant, on the other hand, is to help customers. I’m not super impressed with a retailer who’s demanding that their service-job employees receiving service-job wages are required to provide free labor as clothing models at the same time, while also submitting to rigidly dictated criteria for their appearance and their wardrobe.
Did you read my cite in post #625 about what the ACLU has to say about the FBI’s “policy” regarding CAIR?
I don’t believe that I mentioned anything about human rights.
Do they even exist in Egypt in any meaningful way? The link says that there was no arrest warrant and that she was not given information about where Hoda was taken.
But, by similar token, let’s say that I pick up a box of lard. The box proudly proclaimed, “Zero Carbs!” It’s technically true, but the statement that lard is carb free is an advertising gimmick to falsely make you believe that other lard isn’t. It is a sort of lie, trying to catch people who don’t know better.
Should there have been a warrant? Is that novel? Should there have been a location reference? Being pissed off about how the police operate doesn’t mean that they operated in an unreasonable fashion for their area.
The daughter approves of murder. The mother is, purportedly, a leader in a section of the Muslim Brotherhood - an organization that is likely active in terrorism but also sometimes a very useful ally and it depends on country and location which is which… Do we have any reason to believe that the daughter’s ideas on the sanctity of life - regardless of race and religion - are out of alignment with her mother? What do you actually know about Hoda Abd al-Moneim? Egypt’s police seem to believe that she is a threat and it is not inconceivable that they have some information guiding that choice.
Supporting Hoda is very questionable minus greater information. I’m pretty doubtful that, if Omar asked someone in the CIA if it made sense to advocate for this woman or it might come back to bite her, that they would tell her to go ahead.
And that’s without even considering hanging out with the daughter and taking a selfie.
If Steve King takes a picture with a neo-Nazi, because the neo-Nazi’s dad was wrongly convicted of jaywalking and sentenced to five years hard time, wouldn’t you wonder to yourself, exactly what relationship of King’s it was that brought him into this particular bit of special pleading? Aren’t there other injustices in the world? Did King really need to hang out with the skinhead son and completely gloss over the fact that the son has a “Death to blackies!” about section on his Twitter account? Isn’t there some way for him to have bypassed that step and advocated for the jaywalking dad independent of the son?
I personally find it better if my sources are written independently of one another. If the person is writing about Hormuud without mentioning Omar then I do not need to worry that it was written as an attack on Omar by some person at the VOA who has some personal animosity against her. Whether VOA checks out or not, it’s still safer.
Who contacted Omar to ask for her to write a defense piece for Hormuud? Why, of all things happening in Somalia and the world is that the one that she decides to support?
Let’s say that it’s a person she knows who is affected by telephony outages because of military actions. Does that person contact her and complain, “The telecommunications company Hormuud is being attacked by the military, you must defend them!”? Or is it more likely that an average, every day person would simply say, “The military keeps destroying all the frickin’ phone lines! Make them stop Omar! I can’t call my mom! What if she’s hurt and I need to go help her, but she can’t call me to all for help!?”?
What person, not associated with Hormuud, is liable to specify that company and ask specifically for a defense of that company? No one. Even an employee of the company is unlikely to ask for help for the company unless they’re high up in the totem pole. So who at the company does she know?
Like King and the neo-Nazi, you sort of have to wonder how this particular message got to King. Of all wrongful arrests in the world, why is this the one that connected through and was followed up on?
Chairman Mao believed strongly in the equality of the sexes (by the standards of his time). That almost everything he did was horrible and evil doesn’t negate the things that are provably good.
The trolls are the ones looking for accusations to make. They will almost certainly identify the majority of problematic things that Omar has done. Most of those are stupid, overwrought, or stretch the complaint far beyond anything reasonable.
But if it checks out, it doesn’t matter where it came from.
Omar had a lady who advocates the murder of Jews in her office, in Washington DC, put her arm around her, snapped a selfie, and posted it to the wide public. The right wing did not use a mind control raygun to force her to do that. They didn’t mock up the picture, hack into her account, and post it.
As said, even if we accept that Hoda was a sweet ol’ granny just being tormented without cause by those nasty police officers, you have to blow by the “chillin’ with the murder-lovin’ antisemite in your office” in order to raise that defense. I don’t see a reasonable way to do that. There are plenty of human rights violations in the world. Why did you pick this one? How did you even hear about it? And why did you decide that it made sense to handle it in this way?
Even if we accept that there was not meant to be any indication of support for the whole “Death to the people of Israel!” thing, it’s still a really bad decision.
I don’t understand the relevance of this rant to the issue of freedom of religion in the US. AFAIK the government does not, and constitutionally speaking may not, discriminate between individuals’ religious beliefs based on how “recognized” they are. If a Muslim woman is allowed to cover her face with the niqab because of her religious beliefs, then a Jaina monk from some obscure sect gets to cover his face with the muhapatti because of his religious beliefs, even though her religion is far better known than his.
You may perhaps be thinking of the Department of Defense’s list of recognized religions? AFAICT the point of that is that the DoD is required to respect the civil rights of all servicemembers but cannot provide literally unlimited options for chaplains and other religious services. Because servicemembers are so often in isolated environments and/or on foreign territory, they depend on the military rather than on their local communities for religious support. So the military has to designate a finite list of religious denominations that it recognizes and provides support for, or else things would just get totally crazy with the North Lincoln Street Walterville Missouri Synod Lutherans demanding a separate chaplain from the South Lincoln Street Walterville Missouri Synod Lutherans and so forth.
If what you’re complaining about is that a religious believer wearing a face covering for religious reasons “gets more leeway to do things” than some rando just putting on a Lone Ranger mask for shits’n’giggles, I don’t agree with you. People in general regard their religious beliefs as much more serious and important matters than their idle whims to walk around in a Lone Ranger mask just because. It’s reasonable for the government to recognize distinctions between “doing things” for serious religious reasons and “doing things” for an idle whim that doesn’t really matter to you. But that doesn’t require the government to identify a list of “recognized religions” to apply to civilian life, and AFAICT the government does not in fact have any such list.
The list has the most groups for the convenence of the servce member concerned and for the convenience of the military as you say. Also, the military’s list isn’t all that finite. On their list, IIRC, is a nifty category: “Other”. You can pack a lot of outfits into that one.
That should read “the most common groups”.
Yes, that’s what I’m complaining about and I don’t agree with you.
They have the right to think that and I have the right to think they are stupid.
No it’s not. It really isn’t. Someone who has baseless, irrational ideas about the metaphysical nature of reality should not get greater rights than I have because I don’t have those baseless, irrational beliefs about the metaphysical nature of reality. It’s this fundamental assumption that I really find offensive and galling. And I know I’m not the only one. This is exactly why people create “religions” like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
And this does have real world implications beyond thought experiments about Lone Ranger masks. In some states, people can exempt their children from vaccinations based on their religion but not based on “I’m an atheist and I just don’t want my kids to get vaccinated.” And this may well be something that “really matters” to the atheist parent. We may not think either type of parent is making a terribly good decision, but to say one decision is legally allowed and the other is not is total fucking bullshit. :mad:
I was just taking Superdude’s word for it. A lot of your post reads like you didn’t read his, and therefore didn’t understand that it was what I was responding to:
Yes it is. It really is.
Well, that was a fun discussion. :rolleyes:
In the first place, an idea doesn’t have to be “baseless” and “irrational” about “the metaphysical nature of reality” to qualify as “religious”. Governmental accommodations for religious belief are just a practical acknowledgement of the fact that what people call their “religion” generally reflects what is most important to them in a serious and meaningful way. There’s nothing wrong with making allowances for that.
If people want their beliefs about what is most important to them in a serious and meaningful way to be granted the importance of religious beliefs, they are perfectly free to classify them as religious beliefs, whether about the FSM or anything else. There is no requirement that any of them be baseless or irrational, either.
Just because your impulse to wear a Lone Ranger mask for the fun of it isn’t regarded with the same seriousness as somebody else’s sincere religious belief about covering their face doesn’t mean you’re being unfairly discriminated against. Complaining that you don’t get the same official deference for things that aren’t important to you as other people get for things that are important to them is just shallow-minded sulking.
Now you’re moving the goalposts again. Nowhere have I claimed that religious beliefs should be accepted as justification for people to do absolutely anything they want, and some religious exemptions are indeed bad. But what’s bad about them is not the fact that they get an exemption because of a belief that’s important to them while you can’t get an exemption because of a whim that isn’t important to you.
We should either both get the exemption or both not get it. Period. Anything else is discrimination and is flat out wrong.
Nonsense; there is a valid distinction between doing something for a serious and sincere reason and doing it for a frivolous or insincere reason, and the government is entitled to take that distinction into account.
That’s why, for example, the government is willing to issue a green card to an immigrant who genuinely and mutually wants to be married to a particular US citizen, but not to an immigrant whose only interest in the marriage is to get a green card. In both cases the married couple is carrying out the same action—i.e., getting legally married to each other—but their intentions in the two cases are very different.
Do you get the impression that I am not serious or sincere about feeling that I should have every bit as much right to cover my face in a drivers license photo as someone who believes in a magical sky father? Does it strike you that I don’t really care about this? You’ve seen me post for quite a while: do you not notice that I am actually unusually exercised over this?
I get the very strong impression that you have no serious or sincere reason whatsoever for wishing to cover your face in a driver’s license photo, other than your resentment that somebody who does have a serious and sincere reason for doing so is somehow “getting away with” something that you’re not.
This is the part that I referred to as “shallow-minded sulking”, and I see no reason for the government to accord it the same deference that it accords to expression of religious belief.
One could argue the sham marriage is not getting legally married as it’s a sham.
It’s exactly the same reason Michael Newdow (someone I have great respect for) spent so much time, money, and energy to get “In God We Trust” off our money. Most people will dismiss that as harmless, but I say “get your stupid fucking superstitious bullshit off our public currency!” Similarly, Muslim women: “get your stupid fucking superstitious bullshit off our public driving documents!” It’s called identification, FFS. Don’t want to identify yourself? Then don’t drive or fly. Stay in the Dark Ages, but don’t expect the government to enable your backwardness. JFC
In fact, because covering their face is a practice is something they do because they believe their religion tells them to do so, the United States is required by the First Amendment and freedom of religion to afford special attention to their desires. The United States is required to use the least possible violation of those people religious freedom to accomplish their legitimate purpose.
Even I can come up with something obvious for the driver’s license: finger prints. They will uniquely identify someone for all legitimate government purposes where a driver’s license is used for ID. If the fingerprint matches the one on the license, then you know they are who they say they are.
Having their photo without covering would be useless, as they would never been seen in public without said covering. All it does is encourage conservative Muslim women not to get driver’s licenses–i.e. exactly what happened in France when they enacted their anti-burqa law.
Even if you believe those women are oppressed, trying to make the law force them to defy their religion and their husbands is not going to work. And if I can come up with an alternative, anyone could.
Regarding the First Amendment, I don’t think this is currently the case. As far as I know, the current case law on the First Amendment is that people are not entitled to any “special attention” by the government on the basis of their religion. There are other laws providing that, like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but they exist specifically because of the cases on the First Amendment that found no such entitlement.
…So, have we proven that she fucked her brother yet, or what?
I didn’t mention a list and nor was “organization” plural but since you’re feeling picky about the exact format of the FBI’s accusation:
https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/423.pdf#page=5
III.11
But more relevant, really, is that CAIR sued the government asking for the appellation to be removed and, on the basis of the evidence, the court refused.
It’s hard to say that there is no such designation when both you and the Federal court system say that there is, on official court record.
If you’re genuinely interested in the topic, you’re free to read the documents submitted by the FBI:
https://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/728.pdf#page=6
And the opinion in the designation suit:
That’s not the argument at hand.