Blog of Jeff

William Saletan’s blog about artificial hymens is an interesting mix of dark humor and insanity. The basic idea is that the Chinese have invented a neat little $30 bag of fake blood that lets a woman bleed like she is a virgin. In some countries, that’s a neat little kinky sex toy. In some countries, it can be the difference between life and death, due to certain religions’ belief that a woman must bleed on her wedding night. Either from sex or from a rock, either one will do.

The Egyptian piece comes from the following quotes from an Associated Press piece, “Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product. … Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. “This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage,” Bayoumi said. … “If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us,” commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.”

Normally, it is multi-million dollar American movies that are threatening to destroy civilization. I can understand feelings of imminent cultural collapse when they are directed at Tom Cruise. But any country that can be brought down by a $30 Chinese sex toy really ought to go ahead and collapse now, so we can go on with life in the rest of the world.

This is also a great reminder of how moral relativism can fall really, really short. Cultural norms such as an afternoon siesta are fine. I’ve got no problem with a culture that naps. But beating and killing women on their wedding nights should be universally condemned. But it’s not, because the UN human rights council is a complete farce and nobody wants to tell another culture that their practices are barbaric, primitive, and unacceptable in the civilized world. (They have feelings. They are sensitive. They have such a long and proud history of killing women. We need to support them and nurture them until they learn better. Plus they sell us oil.) It’s also another issue that all those millions of peaceful, law-abiding moderate Moslems that we are always hearing about never stand up and address. We have plenty of wacko Christians around also but we also have no problem calling them wacko. And we certainly don’t let them kill their spouses on their honeymoons.

It is also a reminder that Egypt is one of the US’ best allies in that part of the world. With friends like these …

I forgot the key part of my first blog. Here’s the actual church report. I guess I still have enough journalism training in me to recogize that I should actually include references for my blogs …

Interesting coincidences in history are on display this week. Here’s an article on Slate about a case involving the death penalty for child rapists. And now, the Pope’s visit has inspired numerous articles on how he has protected Cardinal Law and others involved with child rape in the priesthood. (Here’s one by Christopher Hitchens, for example)

So, we have people in Lousianna arguing that child rape is a crime so abhorrent as to deserve the death penalty, despite the general historical practice of only executing murderers in this country. We also have people going to see the Pope during his visit to gain spiritual sustenance and inspiration, despite his role in protecting Cardinal Law, who protected multiple serial child rapists and knowingly endangered other children by moving the rapists from parish to parish without warning residents of those parishes.

I just find it interesting that these two extreme views are on such vivid display this week. Child rape is a heinous crime worthy of execution versus it’s not that big of a deal to protect a child rapist from justice. Particularly interesting is that the first view is probably held by a much larger percentage of the U.S. population than the second, but the Pope’s visit will inspire far more numerous crowds than the supreme court case and generate all sorts of well-wishing, praise and prayers. There’s just a wealth of ironies and contradictions in these stories.

On this set of contradictions, I find myself a bit in the middle. I oppose the death penalty, primarily because of a belief that our criminal justice system just doesn’t work very well. It is too prejudiced against the poor, too racist, too prone to human errors and involves too many lawyers to be consistently correct. And I think if we are going to have the state killing people, we should have a much higher degree of confidence that the state will get the right person and not just find a scapegoat that is easy to convict.

I also have a very bottom line economic objection with the death penalty. It is too damned expensive. It costs far more to go through all the appeals processes of a death penalty case than it does to keep someone in prison for life. For those who argue that the cost could be brought down by eliminating or streamlining those appeals, I would refer back to my first point. The system makes a lot of mistakes already. If you are going to have executions, you also have to have due diligence in catching and eliminating those mistakes.

On the other hand, I’m no fan of Popes either. I still haven’t gotten over the whole “say the sun revolves around the earth or we’ll burn you at the stake” issue, the inquisition, the crusades or those other historical errors of the supposedly divine dude in the silly white hat. But those are all problems from the old days. This hiding and relocating of child rapists issue is one completely on display in the here and now. Whatever good comes from the Catholic church (and I am willing to admit that the church does a lot of good things as well and that it does truly do help many people), it is still hard to overlook the fact that high-ranking members of the church willingly and knowingly protected child rapists and even assigned them to other jobs where they could attack other victims.

So, I guess the logical endgame for this contradiction is that in America, we hate child rapists enough to kill them, but we can still love and adore the people that protect them …