Reply #48: i recall it. and you misrepresent it. as you misrepresent me here, [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

preferring your own stereotypes to actually entering into a real conversation with anyone who differs from you.

because here's how i remember that conversation: the usual suspects cheering because uganda (US pawn, stomping ground for rabid US cia/fundie types, home of the death to gays legislation -- still in the works, btw) -- uganda had just legislated 10 years imprisonment for anyone practicing female circumcision.

the cheerleaders didn't want to hear that the main such practioners in uganda were small groups of isolated tribespeople in disputed border territories, barely integrated into the state of uganda at all, living essentially tribal lives -- analogous to indians in the us in the 19th century.

and that the main effect of throwing such practioners (females of the tribes, the mothers & aunts of the girls) into jail for 10 years would be the destruction of the family & the tribe -- in the same way the canadian practice of separating children from their parents in the 19th century -- a kind of genocide.

and that, since it is obvious the US-sponsored government of uganda wouldn't give a good goddamn what some backward tribespeople did unless there were larger geopolitical/economic concerns, we can assume there are -- one of which would be some kind of ethnic cleansing or control of the area those tribes occupy.

there was also the usual argument about whether fgm was practiced by non-muslims (it is) or whether most muslims practice it (they don't).

no, nobody wanted to hear any of that. all they wanted to do was scream "you're anti-woman! you support the mutilation of women! bad, bad, bad! those people are murderers!muslims lock up their women and slit their clitorises! blahblahblahblahblah!"

spare me from such retrograde "feminism".

ps: religious tolerance is supposedly a deep-seated value of modern western cultures. supposedly. unless it happens to be a religion the west is currently at war with as cover for its conquest of every last space on the globe.