News from Texas.

A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed...

The original report claimed to show that 4% of 18-24 year olds surveyed in 2018 told YouGov they were Christian and went to church at least once a month, rising to 16% by 2024…

… [A]cademics [had] questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England’s own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.

In 2012 and 2014, [HOA president Tara] Howie took plea deals in New Jersey for stealing $800,000 from wards in her care while working for a guardianship attorney. She was sentenced to a total of 9 years in prison.

Right now, she’s facing criminal charges in Orlando for stealing over $500 worth of merchandise from Target.

Plus she just stole all their homeowner fees! Shocker.

Dumb parents help the head of their charter school reportedly steal all of its tuition money. Even Madoff only promised 10 to – TOPS – 20%, but the good people of Croft School just kept forking it over to the head guy until the school went bankrupt.

Just as my sympathy for Madoff’s idjits was limited, so my sympathy for these people is … not so much.

Lawyer Marc-André Fabien on behalf of the [Hasidic Jewish] Hamshuchas Hadoirois International Association, which is active in Canada and the U.S., said there can be no secular state in Canada because Canada is a constitutional monarchy that is a parliamentary democracy which derives its authorities from a British sovereign — the King — who gets his power from “divine authority.”

So, he said, “it is unconstitutional for the Canadian parliament and all of its legislatures in the provinces to declare that the state is secular, or lay, without a constitutional amendment.”

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Curious to see Monsieur Fabien defend a regime in which no Catholic, let alone a Jew or a Muslim, can get anywhere near the throne. All praise divine Anglican authority!

Like oy my aching MS, gotta visit my mom, I’m a mental wreck, it’s an Islamophobic conspiracy…

And of course he can still appeal blah blah.

But as a career rapist who enjoyed practically killing his numerous prey, the eminent Oxford don Tariq Ramadan – for years one of the highest-profile, most respected, representatives of Islam to the West – was eventually going to be found guilty.

You recall – if you read this blog – that Oxford took forever to dump him… Kind of an Epstein thing. Boys will be boys.

He got 18 years. We’ll see whether he serves any of them.

Another Don DeLillo death.

Go here for more DeLillo deaths.

Presentations before the Supreme Court continue.

Ol’ UD agrees with this position, of course; yet she’s certainly alive to the argument that it’s not the job of government to police and ban all visible forms of patriarchy.

Quebec however proposes nothing of the sort – it asks only that in public sector locations and among people with public sector, public facing jobs, the hijab (and other visible religious clothes/jewelry) be left at home or put back on when you’re no longer in the classroom or courtroom etc. When you are, in other words, acting as a representative of the government, you ought not be in overt conflict with the government’s official secularism, a form of secularism supported by strong majorities of Quebecers. A NYT commenter from Montreal says it well:

[O]nly certain civil servants in position of authority are banned from wearing religious attire or accessories. The law therefore specifically deals with judges, crown prosecutors, the police and teachers (the short list is attached as an annex to the law). Doctors, nurses, people working at various agencies, all can wear hijabs, crosses, kippah or anything else they want. The law provides that when the power of the state is exercised through an individual working in such capacity, that person must be religious-neutral.

And yes – one crucial ground of civic secularism is human rights/human dignity. Whether France or Quebec, people have correctly perceived that – oh, take your pick – women can’t be priests, women must be hidden, women must be denied access to Torah learning, men thank God daily that He didn’t make them women… It’s not Quebec’s fault that much of Islam (Ultraorthodox Judaism ghettoizes itself so is perceived as less troublesome) makes a lot of noise about the offense to God that is woman. The Afghan Taliban seems able to justify caging its women by reference to religious texts.

So it’s understandable that a seriously secular state looking at ongoing brutal hijab enforcement by Iran’s theocracy etc etc would reasonably conclude that influential forms of religion represent a threat to the equality of men and women. The history of religious abuses of women has understandably sensitized secular states to certain overt religious behaviors within the boundaries of the state.

Anyone who cares about the right of secular states to maintain their sense of what state neutrality means should take some interest in the drama in Ottawa this week. The Court is hearing challenges to Quebec’s existing, and expanding, restrictions on religious garb in certain public sector jobs.

For UD, the matter is plain:

“With public service come responsibilities, among which is refraining from advertising one’s faith,” writes one local commentator. More precisely, another observer asks:

“How would an immigrant of Palestinian origin, contesting a conviction, feel in front of a judge wearing a kippah? Inversely, how would a young driver wearing a kippah feel faced with a policewoman wearing a hijab who just gave him a ticket?” 

Just as importantly, the public realm of a secular state should, by definition, express the state’s secular convictions, which crucially involve the equality of women and men. Burqas (still legal outside of Quebec), and full-body veiling with most of the face veiled, are worn only by women and – scandalously – female children. Muslim boys and men would of course never hide themselves because they are a superior breed, not subject to the strictures which must hide the identity of girls and women.

Myriad forms of gender apartheid remain rampant in many Muslim communities. Recall the history of segregation even in British universities. And it still ain’t over.

For a truly egalitarian polity, public sector restrictions on private faith advertising seem to UD a no-brainer. We’ll see how the Canadian Supreme Court rules.

Problem is that draping much of your face and all of your body – and the faces and bodies of your little girls – under robes and hijabs is already social segregation — self-segregation. You have already decided that public life demands what you call modesty, that babies/girls/women cannot be ethical and pious without withholding their physical being from the world. Further discussion here.

And especially from men. Many of you raise your daughters to feel that they must hide themselves from always-rapacious men. Many of you insist on gender apartheid – girls-only swimming, etc.

Your position represents extremely graphic social segregation; and indeed Quebec’s insistence that at least in certain public-facing jobs you join the egalitarian crowd mirrors the attitude of the majority of the province’s citizens.

You have the effect of demoralizing democracy. Your rock hard faith that women are inferior and must be hidden demoralizes democratic public life. Only a foolish democracy would enthuse about diversity without thinking hard about whether the behavior of any particular group threatens in a significant way its foundational value of human equality.

If your religiosity is such that you cannot occasionally doff a hijab for the sake of the democratic public square, you are living in the wrong social world.

This morning’s increment, under an early spring sun and no clouds, included trimming dead grass mounds (the birds use the stalks for their nests), shaping viburnum buds, and raking (with care!) garden litter. I removed a wren’s nest in progress on a window sill on the deck — I’ve been watching the bird approach the house with twigs in its mouth, and I felt sure she was flying all the way up to the gutters with it — and felt some guilt as I did so.

But mainly I felt, as Harold Brodkey wrote, douceur:

Perhaps you could say I did very little with my life, but the douceur, if that is the word, Talleyrand’s word, was overwhelming. Painful and light-struck and wonderful.

“At no time [during which a 12 year old student brandished a loaded gun at school] were students or staff in danger,” Christine Stephens, a Redlands Unified School District spokeswoman, wrote in a news release that detailed how employees handled the situation.

Carl Baker, a Redlands police spokesman, wrote in a text message: “The gun was loaded and capable of being fired.”

Stephens, asked by a Southern California News Group reporter to clarify her comment, wrote in an email: “When we stated that ‘At no time were students or staff in danger,’ we were referring to the fact that the situation was quickly identified, contained, and managed by school administrators, District Safety, and law enforcement.”

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Oh. OK.

Note changes on the right hand column over there: I now start with commentary about University Diaries, then comes Archives, then Categories, and that’s that. UD thanks Carolyn, her blogmistress.

However. Reflecting on sexism and sexual abuse on the left, in the wake of the Chavez revelations, this op/ed writer notes that the behavior knows no ideological boundaries.

Or religious – this blog has published a zillion stories about clerical sexual abuse.