According to the [UK] Daily Mail Online:

A hardline Islamist group in Somalia has begun publicly whipping women for wearing bras that they claim violate Islam as they are 'deceptive'.

The insurgent group Al Shabaab has sent gunmen into the streets of Mogadishu to round up any women who appear to have a firm bust, residents claimed yesterday.

The women are then inspected to see if the firmness is natural, or if it is the result of wearing a bra.

If they are found wearing a bra, they are ordered to remove it and shake their breasts, residents said....

'Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of full veil and now they order us to shake our breasts,' a resident, Halima, told Reuters, adding that her daughters had been whipped on Thursday.

'They are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat.'...

Two online discussions started by parents concerned about their sons' sexuality:

• How can I tell if my son is gay?
• I'm concerned that my son has a secret girlfriend?

I'm not sure if the latter letter from the concerned parent is satire or beyond satire. Any opinions?

Photo credit: mtsofan

From CNN via The Huffington Post:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did....

Now it's clear to me why atheists are the least trusted group in America.

Photo credit: The above photo was taken at the Museo Nacional del Prado by cactusbones and posted on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

I was surprised to hear that Pastor Rick Warren considers homosexuality to be comparable to incest, polygamy, and pedophilia. I hadn't even known he'd tried all of them.

According to the Associated Press, San Diego businessman Doug Manchester "gave $125,000 to a group backing a California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage". When threatened with a boycott, Manchester said "that he welcomes gay guests at his properties but as a Catholic believes marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman".

I applaud Manchester for living by his principles and expect him to soon initiate efforts to:

• ban marriage between Catholics and non-Catholics.
• ban remarriage by anyone whose divorced spouse is still living.

Doubters who accuse him of prejudice against homosexuals, instead of being a man of consistent religious beliefs, will then have to apologize for criticizing such a principled saintly man.

On a personal note, such an amendment would dissolve my ten-year marriage to my dear husband Keith (who, unlike me, was baptized), but it is vital in a democracy that couples' freedom and happiness be subordinated to others' religious beliefs.

I saw this bumper sticker in the Google parking lot:

Don't get it? It's a reference to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenge to build a vehicle capable of driving itself and, of course, to the Christian bumper sticker, "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned."

(Other responses to the rapture bumper sticker are In case of rapture, can I have your car? and In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned. It will then recklessly careen into children at a school crossing -- killing all of them.)

After complimenting the owner, I found out that the sticker is sold by ThinkGeek.

There are a lot of jokes about Jews not getting along with each other (told only by other Jews, please), from the saying "Two Jews, Three Opinions", Monty Python's rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, and jokes such as the following:

A rescue party finally finds a Jewish man who's been shipwrecked on a deserted island for many years. They are amazed to see how industrious he's been. He's dug a well and constructed a complex system to bring running water to the sturdy house he's built from reeds, wood and leaves. He has domesticated some small animals and bred them for food. He's built a fishing raft from which he can catch nets full of fresh fish. The rescuers, however, are perplexed by two buildings, on opposite ends of the island.

"What are those?," they ask.

"Well, this one is my synagogue."

"And the other?"

"That's a synagogue too, but I wouldn't be caught dead in that one!"

I was amused by a San Francisco Chronicle article by Jason Motlagh about article "The Last Jew in Afghanistan", which contains:

The only other Jew in Afghanistan, Yitzhak Levin, died in 2005. The pair had lived together in a shabby synagogue on Flower Street throughout the Soviet invasion, a civil war and the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government, but grew to hate each other. They held separate services, had vicious shouting matches neighbors could hear a block away, and when valuable Torah scrolls went missing, each blamed the other.

As the article continues, it unfortunately becomes less amusing:

They also denounced each other to the Taliban as spies for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, prompting Taliban police to beat them with rifle butts and jail them on occasion....

The feud was so intense that Afghan police suspected Simentov of murdering Levin when he died, until a post-mortem examination proved that he had died from diabetes.

This reminds me of how my mother used to try to get me to go to the Jewish Hillel organization when I was an MIT student until the president-elect committed arson in a dispute with a suite-mate about the level of kashrut (kosherness) in the suite's kitchen.

"Choice Joyce" reposts her article "The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion", containing stories from physicians about anti-choice women who have abortions and remain anti-choice. Here's a sample:

"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'" (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)....

The medical director at a Dallas abortion clinic told this story: A white woman from an affluent north Dallas neighborhood brought her black maid in for an abortion and paid for it. While the maid was in a counseling session, a commotion was heard in the waiting room outside. The maid's employer was handing out anti-abortion leaflets to other women waiting for abortions.

The article also cites a "1994/95 survey of nearly 10,000 abortion patients [that] showed 18% of women having abortions are born-again or Evangelical Christians".

From Dan Savage's slog via my sister Andrea:

Rev. Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church to picket… JERRY FALWELL’S FUNERAL!

From the Westboro Baptist Church site:

WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like "God loves everyone".

There is little doubt that Falwell split Hell wide open the instant he died.

FYI, parody sites I found via Wikipedia's Westboro Baptist Church entry:

• God Hates Figs
• God Hates Shrimp
• Landover Baptist Church

From NewsBiscuit:

A new reality TV show plans to trick Muslim extremists into thinking they are taking part in a suicide bombing, and then secretly filming them as they explore what they imagine is the afterlife.

See the entire article.