Tag: Taliban

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At Large Opinion

Oh, My God!

Ginni Thomas (Photo: Wikimedia | Gage Skidmore)

It really is unbelievable, when you think about it. You have to wonder how this can possibly be happening in 2022. Women are being treated like chattel — their bodies controlled by the state as though they were livestock, their gender and sexuality no longer their own.

I’m talking, of course, about Afghanistan’s autocratic Taliban rulers, who last week ordered all Afghan women to wear body-covering burkas in public. The decree further mandated that women leave their homes only when necessary, even when wearing a burka. Male relatives will also face punishment — including possible jail time — if women in their family violate the dress code.

It was seen as a hard shift by the Taliban government, one that confirmed the worst fears of human rights activists. It is a cruel and absurd level of oppression and misogyny, but what do you expect when government and religious ideology are combined? It’s so distressing.

Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the Supreme Court (where six of the nine justices are Catholic) appears to be ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and thereby legalize religious-based laws banning or restricting abortion in 26 states (and counting). Seventy percent of Americans oppose making abortion illegal again, but this is a case where “majority rule” is truly a joke. As Republicans learned long ago: Control the judges and you control the law.

The problem, of course, is not necessarily that the justices are Catholic — liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor is Catholic, for example — the problem is that the five judges in question have been vetted and brought to the fore by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, which opposes abortion rights. Presidents G.W. Bush and Donald Trump (both of whom lost the popular vote) followed their recommendations, and here we are. It’s been the Federalists’ stated goal to overturn Roe v. Wade for 50 years, and it looks like they’re about to succeed.

John Gehring, Catholic program director at the Washington-based clergy network Faith in Public Life, was interviewed by the AP: “The Catholic intellectual tradition has produced giants of liberal thought as well, but in recent decades the right has done a better job building institutions that nurture pathways to power.” No kidding.

And let’s not forget the Evangelical Christians’ contribution to this pending fustercluck. David Talcott, professor of philosophy at King’s College and an expert in Christian sexual ethics, told vox.com: “Conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals have become allies of certain kinds, each defending the interests of other, a theological and philosophical overlap between the two.” Indeed.

I’m no religious expert, but I am sure of one thing: What we’re talking about here is, at its core, sexual repression. Abortion is just one spoke in the traditional religious shame-wheel that also includes opposition to sex without marriage, LGBTQ rights (including gay marriage), contraception, masturbation, etc. — pretty much anything involving fun sexy-time — because their god has decreed that sex is not for f**king around. It’s for baby-making. The guilt is just an added feature, not a bug.

It’s no accident that when contraception became readily available to women via the pill, the sexual revolution followed, and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. The religious right and their Republican groomers have been working to turn back the clock ever since. Can’t have women acting all uppity, after all. They need to learn their place and make some damn babies. The conservatives played the long game — stacking the courts — and it looks like they may finally pull it off. Much to their regret, I predict.

There are two principal theories about the now-infamous leak that made Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary majority opinion public: 1) A liberal justice or associate leaked it to provoke alarm among progressives and arouse the base for the midterms. 2) A conservative justice or associate leaked it to prevent any of the five in the majority from being able to back away from their initial opinion on subsequent votes.

Ironically, both results will probably happen. As for the leaker? If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Mrs. Clarence Thomas.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

American Idiot

Was it only a little more than three months ago when President Trump was loudly disparaging countries that hadn’t controlled the coronavirus — like China, Italy, Greece, and Germany? When the president of the mighty United States was smugly banning travel from China and the European Union?

Well, yes, actually, it was. I know it’s hard to keep up with such things when every day brings six new scandals, but on March 12th, in a nationally televised speech, the president unilaterally and abruptly announced that the United States would ban travelers from Europe, following an earlier ban on travel from China.

At the end of his 10-minute speech, Trump added this amazingly arrogant and stupid prediction: “The virus will not stand a chance against us.”

Actually, COVID-19 now stands a better chance against the United States than against any other country on the planet. Along with Brazil and Russia (two other countries with incompetent leaders), the United States is now a raging epicenter for the COVID pandemic. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases — and 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. The infection level in this country is rising at an unprecedented rate, as several Republican governors scramble to close down their states after arrogantly and stupidly opening them for business as infection rates were rising — following our “stable genius” president’s lead. 

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee gets a special “I’m Extra Stupid” award for even now not allowing the state’s mayors to require masks in their cities. (And for pushing through an illegal and unenforceable abortion ban bill. But I digress.)

Science is so overrated, apparently. Karma, unfortunately, is not.

Thanks to this administration’s incompetent response to the global pandemic, my wife, a French citizen, can no longer go visit her family — nor can millions of other Americans who want to do business or take vacations or visit family in Europe. Now, we are a shithole country, banned from traveling to civilized societies.

Several other significant stories have broken recently, collapsing on top of each other like a tower of Jenga blocks, each a stunner that would have destroyed any presidency before this one.

The president’s personal lawyer, aka Attorney General Bill Barr, has been stepping all over the justice system — getting friends of the president out of stiff sentences, releasing them from jail, and firing the attorney general in the Southern District of New York (who happened to be handling several cases involving Trump and his allies). Barr’s behavior was so egregious it caused longtime Justice Department prosecutors to turn whistleblower. But, meh, now it’s just another small explosion in Trump’s media minefield. A mere diversion.

Then CNN broke a story from Trump officials who had witnessed the president’s phone calls with foreign leaders. Here’s a sample: “In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior U.S. officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers, and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the president himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

“The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that the president was often ‘delusional,’ as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders.”
CNN.com

One final detail: Our president called German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid.” Merkel, it should be noted, has a doctorate for her thesis on quantum chemistry.

Okay, so Trump screwed up the coronavirus response and got us banned from Europe; his AG is deconstructing the Justice Department; he’s stupid, ill-informed, and abusive on phone calls with foreign leaders. A pretty devastating week, right?

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that little thing where Trump was informed that Russia had set up a cash bounty hunt with the Taliban on U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan — and ignored it.

The president at first denied he’d been informed about it. The next day, The New York Times, citing two U.S. intelligence officials, reported that the information was in Trump’s daily briefing on February 27th. The White House spokesperson then responded that the administration was still considering its options.

The United States has become a banana republic, run by a narcissistic grifter, the kind of guy who blithely posts a video of a man shouting “white power” and then goes to play golf. We have a vice president who again this week praised the president’s response to the pandemic as “wonderful.” We have an administration run by incompetent toadies and lobbyists. And we have the entire leadership of a major American political party marching in lockstep with it all, as if blindfolded.

I’ve run out of faith that the American democratic institutions that have guided the country past the pitfalls of nefarious leaders and human inadequacy for 250 years are going to put the brakes on Donald Trump. Except for maybe the election process. Maybe. At this point, our only hope seems to be to survive this idiot until November and vote him out, along with his corrupt enablers. Only then can we begin the long and painful recovery from this unprecedented disaster of an administration.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Aquarius Revisited

Bianca Phillips’ article about the hippie commune, the Farm (“The Old Age of Aquarius,” November 22nd issue), showed that despite declining numbers of people, the 1960s countercultural ethic is still thriving in Tennessee.

What is more amazing is that many of the 1960s’ revolutionary, radical ideas are now mainstream, including solar energy, soy products, natural childbirth, recycling, spirituality, earth consciousness, and a healthy mistrust of the government’s immense power. All of these are now a part of the fabric of society.

If mainstream society would whole-heartedly embrace the guiding principles of the Farm — love and compassion — in all of its endeavors, then the 1960s cultural upheaval will not have been futile.

Randy Norwood

Memphis

The Shelter

Thanks to the Flyer and Bianca Phillips for highlighting one of the malfunctions associated with our city-run animal-disposal facility, aka the Memphis Animal Shelter (“Sheltered Life,” November 22nd issue).  

Unfortunately, the shelter’s euthanasia policies are just the tip of the iceberg. As a foster-home provider for rescued animals, I have been repeatedly let down by our city’s shelter policies. First, they do not respond to injured or loose animal reports consistently or in a timely manner. Second, animals may be adopted to whoever is willing to pay the small fee, without regard for eligibility. Third, owner-surrendered animals are immediately destroyed. (Shelter spokespeople say they must assume something is wrong with the animal since the owner is relinquishing it, so it is never made available for adoption.)

I realize that the shelter is overrun with animals and lacks resources (including but not limited to leadership and the support of the city government). But the fact that over 1,000 animals are killed per month in that facility is a shameful reflection of our city’s crime, poverty, and low education levels. A high percentage of dogs that are euthanized are bully breeds used for fighting operations. Until tougher penalties for dog fighting are instituted and spay/neuter is encouraged citywide, the Memphis Animal Shelter will continue to serve as a death-trap for thousands of animals each year.  

In the meantime, Memphians have a social and civil responsibility to adopt homeless animals and donate money they might have spent on designer dogs to one of the city’s volunteer-run rescue organizations.   

Jessica Leu
Memphis

The Surge

I believe all Americans want the surge in Iraq to be a success. If it succeeds, Iraq can stand on its own and our brave military men and women can come home. Unfortunately, the more we learn about what the president is planning, the more obvious it is that we are headed toward an open-ended commitment to Iraq. 

President Bush initially failed to deploy enough troops to ensure a victory. Now we learn our tax dollars are going to pay more than 70,000 Sunnis to patrol their neighborhoods. The Iraqi government was supposed to do this, but they fear arming so many who oppose the current government — and who might use the weapons to attack the Shiites who are in charge.  

The invasion has created two hostile opposing forces in Iraq, and we are arming and training both sides! It appears that Bush has not learned the lesson he should have learned from his father. When the first Bush administration armed the Taliban, they created a monster that finally turned on us. It was the Taliban who protected and assisted bin Laden. Now, more than six years after 9/11, that monster is still alive and making propaganda tapes for the world to hear.

After a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans have been killed and maimed in Iraq and after close to a trillion dollars of American treasure has been spent, the real mastermind of 9/11 is still alive and planning more attacks.

The president claims he is spreading democracy. I say he is spreading something else. How does he explain the hundreds of Saudis in Iraq who are terrorists? He has called the Saudi princes friends for years. These same friends are silent when a Saudi woman who was raped is punished with 200 lashes. I fear democracy is far from the minds of those Bush has befriended in our name. Saudi princes and Shiite politicians are only interested in power, not freedom and democracy.     

Jack Bishop

Cordova