The Russian threat

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Epicurus stayed clear of politics, but I thought this a good story, and rather clever:

“Ukraine would like foreign assistance from the United States and its allies in its standoff with Russia; but outside of providing defense weaponry, the country would prefer the U.S.to just stay quiet.

“When they start saying that tomorrow, you’re going to have war, just take into consideration that the first thing we do not need in our country is panic,” said Oleksii Danilov, leader of Ukraine’s security council. “Why? Because panic is the sister of failure.” He added, “That’s why we are saying to our partners, ‘Don’t shout so much.’ Do you see a threat? Give us 10 jets every day. Not one, 10. And the threat will disappear.” [The Week, The New York Times, 29 Jan 2022)

Having children, or not

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Of the childless Americans aged 18 to 49, 44% now say they are never likely to become parents. More than half of the respondents who didn’t plan on having children cited personal preference, 17% cited financial obstacles, and 14% attributed their decision to the state of the world or climate change. (Pew Research Center, Dec 2021).

My comment: “More than half cited personal preference”: this is very vague. I suspect it stems from a mish-mash of reasons, the most threatening being what climate change will bring. There is a constant drip, drip of news about flooding, hurricanes, rising sea levels, melting ice etc, which is certain to become worse. Is it responsible to put a child in a position to confront this uncertain and threatening future? Potential parents might not articulate this, but very probably it is a major reason for remaining childless. The climate threat gnaws away at peace of mind. I love my sons and would never be without them, but at the back of my mind I do wonder if, had I known then what I know now………….

Femicide

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It’s nearly ten years since the most extensive European survey yet attempted on the extent of violence against women. The conclusion was basically: “every day and everywhere”. Has anything improved? The killing of a young woman has convulsed Ireland in recent days, and reignited a broader debate about male violence. The Irish prime minister and president attended school teacher Ashling Murphy’s funeral on Tuesday. She was strangled while out running at a popular exercise spot in daylight.

Most women who die violently are killed by male partners or ex-partners. Systemic culture change to address underlying misogyny is what’s missing, campaigners say. Tolerance of street harassment, online intimidation and other ‘entry-level’ abuses of girls and women feed the context in which extreme acts of violence are rooted.

The pandemic has exacerbated gender-based violence across Europe, even in societies where equality is advanced, such as Sweden. In 2020, 444 women in 10 EU countries were murdered. The murder of Sarah Everard last year caused outcry in the UK but 80 more women were killed in the subsequent months. In Greece a woman dies at the hands of a man every month. In 2021 female murder victims there were reported to have been shot, strangled, suffocated, beaten and drowned.

The term femicide is increasingly used to describe men killing women because of their gender, to distinguish it from other forms of homicide. But there are no agreed legal definitions and in many countries femicide is not recognised as a separate crime. Spain claimed a European first last month by broadening its definition of gender-based killings to include murders of women by men where was no prior relationship between the killer and the victim. “We have to repair the machista terror that kills women simply because they are women,” Spain’s equality minister Irene Montero said.

Clearly, there’s a long way to go, but being able to count all the dead women would be a start. (Catherine Butler, Associate Editor, The Guardian)

My comment: Epicurus was unusual for his time because he treated women exactly as he would men, inviting them to his garden, eating with them and exchanging views with them. I realized that women were quite as intelligent (if not more so) than men, with views worth hearing and ideas worth respecting. The idea of a patriarchy was anathema to him. Bravo! ( On this blog I have frequently advocated a female-run world, where we men could sit around all day drinking wine and eating chocolate, with no serious responsibilities. If women want to run the world, let them! Bravo!)

The backlash against rightwing evangelicals

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Some sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals.

What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? These can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash agains the religious right.

Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion into public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.

People do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. In a 2002 article, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”

Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements, where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.

But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.

Similarly, those who associate with the religious left do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president, with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times: “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”

Finally, new research finds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.

Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out. Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.

Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.

Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.

(Ruth Braunstein, author of the above, is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab., 25 January 2022).

My comment: In contrast to the American political evangelics, who see themselves as supporting their racially based views against immigrants, blacks etc, British evangelicalism seems gentle and tolerant and is easily recognized as a loving variant on the message of Jesus. I must say this: My sister is a British evangelical and is a wonderful example of tolerance and acceptance.

Abortion: a matter solely for the mother (long but worth it!)

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A note to all the participants of last Friday’s antiabortion March for Life rally, in Washington DC:

I hope you’re preparing to make condoms rain from the sky. Buckets of them. Craploads, hurled from the cargo holds of the biggest planes you can find. Also, birth control pills. I hope every time a teenager opens her locker at school she finds 60 packs of Yaz.

“You have been holding these marches since 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, and guess what? You might have finally done it. You stacked the courts. Your lobbying efforts and voting patterns jammed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court’s bench during President Donald Trump’s term — never mind the hypocrisy of stonewalling Merrick Garland and then replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That same court is now preparing to issue rulings that might overturn the precedent that guaranteed women control over their reproductive futures. So, congrats?

“I hope you’re ready for your odious brave new world. I presume each and every one of you is planning to adopt several kids. Those chia seed-size embryos that you insist on calling pre-born children eventually will be born to parents who never wanted to be parents, and someone will need to step up to the plate. Since “adoption” has been your solution, you’re up, slugger. Surely you can spare the extra $233,000 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2015 estimated it takes to raise a child from birth to age 18. (If the cost sounds steep, one of your crisis pregnancy centers might be willing to toss in a box of Huggies.)

“I hope that the 364 days you’re not attending this march, you’re marching for universal health care. Also, subsidized day care and universal preschool; I hope every Chick-fil-A sandwich will now come with a side of full-time nanny.

“Also, if your feet aren’t too tired, maybe you could mix in some marches for mandated parental leave for both mothers and fathers, and for free therapy for all of the people whose bodies and souls have been traumatized via forced pregnancy and forced birth.

“At the very least, I hope we can count on you to vote for candidates who care about these issues with the same righteousness you brought to supporting pro-life politicians.

“Truly, we can’t wait to see all the work you personally have been doing to reduce unwanted pregnancies, besides lurking outside Planned Parenthood and shouting at people who are trying to get Pap smears. (Have you been doing that work?).

“Intimate-partner violence can escalate during pregnancy — homicide is a leading cause of pregnancy-associated death — but you’ve probably already got a plan for making sure the boyfriends or husbands of these people don’t assault them upon learning they’re expecting.

“Also, I hope you’re prepared to have the talk with your 15-year-old daughter — the talk that I wish on no family, regardless of politics. The one where she tells you her boyfriend said he would wear a condom but didn’t. The one that happens 13 or 15 weeks into her pregnancy because she was afraid to tell you earlier, because she knew you believed abstinence was the only acceptable form of birth control. The one where she’s sobbing and terrified and you begin to fully realize that accidental pregnancies don’t happen to bad people, they happen to all kinds of people, and maybe not every accident needs to be punished with lifelong consequences.

“The one where you explain that there is no option but to live with those consequences. The one where you explain that you made sure of it.
Perspective: Why does ‘pro-life’ mean disregarding the actual lives of pregnant people?

“Your theme this year is “Equality begins in the womb,” which is really smart. I’m excited for you to reveal the sweeping legislation you have up your sleeve pursuant to this extraordinary dedication to equality. The immediate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, perhaps? Racial and economic justice initiatives to specifically help Black women and poor women? I hope I’m not getting my hopes up. Otherwise, I would think the theme would read: “Equality begins in the womb, and also ends there.”

“March for Life founder Nellie Gray vowed to hold a demonstration every year until Roe v. Wade was overturned, according to your organization’s website. Depending on the outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization later this year, it might be your last march for this particular cause.

“But once you have this thing you always wanted — state-sanctioned control over women’s bodies — your work is not finished. You are responsible for the pregnant people whose futures you have changed, and for their future children, and both are going to need a lot more than your prayers.
Monica Hesse, The Washington Post, Style section, 21 Jan 2022)

My comment: Bravo!! To adapt a phrase, Get your tanks out of the nation’s bedrooms! I’m sorry this is the longest quotation I have ever posted, but I believe that giving birth is the sole decision of the mother undergoing it, and no one else’s. I can imagine Epicurus saying “That is a decision for the mother. She deserves her own ataraxia. In short, mind your own business!”