Eideard

The ideal

Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.

As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear program, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences…

Iran’s religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences.” Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.

The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police…

Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: “We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls.”

Iran has fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television.

Just to give you an inkling of what lies ahead for any nation that decides that theocracy is needed to “improve” society. There truly ain’t anything as foolish as some silly git who thinks puritan life was so wonderful in the good old days.

In a step few politicians would take, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle…declared the nation’s decades-old war on drugs a failure…

“Rather than invest in detaining people in the Cook County Jail at almost $150 a day . . . we need to invest in treatment, education and job-skills training. That’s the only way . . . we are going to reduce crime and stabilize our communities,” she said…

“We all know that the war on drugs has failed to end drug use. Instead, it’s resulted in the incarceration of millions of people around the country, and 100,000 here in Cook County on an annual basis,” she said. “Drugs and the failed war on the drugs have devastated lives, families and communities. For too long we’ve treated drug use as a criminal justice issue, rather than a public issue, which is what it is.”

Academics, religious leaders and social-service providers spoke out, but Preckwinkle was the sole politician to address the crowd, which cheered her on.

Kathleen Kane-Willis, director of Roosevelt University’s Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, kicked off the rally by citing recent statistics indicating Illinois leads the nation when it comes to putting far greater percentages of African Americans behind bars for drug crimes than whites.

“The sad thing about the war on the drugs is that most people know it has failed,” added Rev. Alexander Sharp of Protestants for the Common Good. “They just don’t have the courage to say so…”

Preckwinkle’s call for more treatment and less punishment was in keeping with her statements on the campaign trail, when she often talked about diverting drug users into treatment programs. She said she now is working with the courts, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the sheriff’s office to find ways to do that.

“If 70 percent of the people in the jail are there for non-violent offenses, and 83 percent of the people who walk through the door have illicit drugs in their system, clearly the issue we’ve got is around addiction as much as it is around criminal justice,” she said after making her speech. “It is a public health issue.”

American politicians lead the Western World in hypocrisy. Moralizing based upon myth, laws carrying sanctions better suited to the Dark Ages, characterize the unproductive foolishness that our jurisprudence and book of laws has become.

Most drug use should be decriminalized. Take crime and drug cartels out of the equation altogether – and treat simple addictions for what they are. A product of many causes from genetic sensitivity to social and economic despair.

Mid-year is when lots of new laws seem to kick-in throughout the Industrial West. That includes silly as often as useful. It appears Italy is attempting to corner the market on not-very-useful:

“Castles made of sand slips into the sea – eventually”

Bans on kissing while driving a car, feeding stray cats and building sandcastles are among a rash of new laws Italians say threaten to turn the country into the ultimate nanny state.

More than 150 “public security” laws have been introduced since Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, granted extra powers to local councils to help them crack down on crime and anti-social behaviour.

In the latest episode in the fight to maintain “public decorum”, Vigevano, a town near Milan, this week slapped fines of €160 each on a young couple who dared to sit on the steps of a local monument.

“It was really hot, so we just sat down for a moment,” said Giada Carnevale, 24. “The only other alternative in the piazza is to go to a bar but there they charge you €5 just for a drink. We were just chatting – we weren’t eating or drinking or smoking.”

But the town’s mayor justified the fine, saying the council spent precious time and money each month cleaning up after idlers on the steps.

Passionate Italians caught kissing in a moving car in the town of Eboli, south of Naples, face a €500 fine.

The coastal town of Eraclea, near Venice, prohibits the building of sandcastles on the beaches because they can “obstruct the passage” of people strolling along the strand…

On the island of Capri, wearing noisy wooden clogs is banned.

In Bergamo, you can be fined €333 for feeding the pigeons, while Venice punishes the same offence with a €500 penalty. The town of Cesena on the Adriatic Coast extends the ban to feeding feral cats.

The Italian press has slammed what they claim is a return to the bureaucratic straightjacket of the Mussolini era.

The chuckle for me has been the erratic attempt by rightwingers to characterize nanny state laws and political correctness as a leftwing phenomenon.

While both sides of the aisle have their petty adherents to PC, the lead in “moral rearmament” has been a steady theme of rightwing politics for centuries. Especially with dependence on fundamentalist religion.

With her 5-week-old daughter crying in a bathroom at Nordstrom, and not knowing how to get the baby to latch on to her breast, Garima Nahar found herself surrounded by other women. Some offered tips, but one woman told the new mother to cover up or turn the other way.

“I had to kind of hide my tears and just be brave in front of her, because, you know what, ‘I have a crying baby and I don’t want to deal with you right now,’ ” said Nahar, a software manager in Chicago, Illinois.

Women across America have felt uncomfortable in public situations when breastfeeding their children. Sarah Hood of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who works in advertising, got stares when breastfeeding her son in the open.

Working mothers like Nahar and Hood have had to carefully tailor their schedules so that they can pump milk in the middle of the day, and avoid stares when they put bottles in the communal refrigerators. Some have to use a bathroom stall to pump milk, as there is no other space available.

Nursing mothers will now get additional support, thanks to page 1239 of the health care bill that President Obama recently signed into law. It requires employers to provide “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk.” Only companies with less than 50 employees can claim it’s an undue hardship…

A recent study in the journal Pediatrics showed breastfeeding a child for the first six months of life would save nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year. That’s because breastfeeding reduces the risk of certain illnesses such as pneumonia, according to the study. Much of the cost comes from excess premature deaths, the study authors said.

Part of the question takes us back to what bloody century does our nation belong to? Not the part that studies and learns, not the part that marches towards health and happiness? It seems to be the loudmouthed crowd that Congress seems to listen to at least as much as the lobbyists paying their country club bar bill.

RTFA. It’s long and useful. It’s amazing that this is a tougher question to deal with in the 21st Century than the centuries which felt women shouldn’t have the right to vote or equal opportunity at a job.

I’ve worked for more than a decade in the field of HIV prevention. That means working with sex and drugs — two areas where there is no shortage of good science, and an abundance of ideology.

The science tells us, for example, that making clean needles universally available to drug injectors can more or less wipe out HIV transmission in this group. The ideology tells us that providing such services for injectors is tantamount to condoning an illegal behavior that wrecks lives and families and increases crime. If you were running for election, faced with the choice of paying for clean needles and health services for injectors or with putting more cops on the streets and cells in the jails, which do you think would play best with the voters..?

The fact is that many of the most effective public health policies have been put in place by governments that Americans think of as ideological, even undemocratic.

Iran has one of the world’s better prevention programs inside its jails, and sterile needles are available to injectors from dispensing machines around Tehran. The Kyrgyz Republic gives clean needles to prisoners. China makes needles available to injectors through pharmacies at subsidized prices…

At the local level, though, things often look different. Many cities, realizing that they would have to pick up the pieces of the nation’s failed war on drugs, have scraped out their pockets and provided services to injectors. The result has been a huge decline in new HIV infections among drug users and their sex partners; the burden on the health system has of course fallen, too…

This disconnect between national and local policies is instructive about the way democracy works. At a national level, politicians seem to respond to what they think the electorate wants to hear. Ideology and rhetoric rule. At the local level, however, they are more likely to respond to what the electorate really needs — workable solutions to real problems. The only workable solutions are the ones that are based on good, solid, scientific evidence.

In my little corner of public health, the Obama administration is following through on its promise to put the science back into policy. Since the ban on federal funding for safe injecting programs was dropped in December, the sky has not fallen, and if the government falls, it certainly won’t be because of this small piece of pragmatism.

Yes – when science goes up against ideology, Ideology usually wins!

At least, when you’re in a nation where religion trumps reason, superstition cranks up more votes than knowledge, sophistry overrules scientific research.

Ayman Najafi, 24, a marketing consultant who lives in Dubai, and Charlotte Adams, 25, an estate agent from North London, were said to have been touching each other and kissing passionately as they dined with friends in a beachfront restaurant.

They were arrested and sentenced to a month in prison after which they were told they would be deported.

But the pair told a hearing at the Dubai Appeal Court on Sunday that they were the victims of a “huge misunderstanding” and had simply exchanged a friendly greeting.

“We kissed each other on the cheek as a greeting, nothing more,” Mr Najafi told Judge Aysar Fouad. Miss Adams pointed at her cheek to show where contact had taken place.

The latest incident took place when Miss Adams and Mr Najafi met along with four other friends for dinner at Bob’s Easy Diner on the beachfront at the Jumeirah Beach Residence complex on November 27.

The police were called at around 2am by an Emirati woman sitting at a nearby table with her children and claimed her daughter had been upset by the display of affection…

“My daughter told me that the accused were kissing on the mouth,” she said…

At the appeal hearing on Sunday, their defence lawyer Khalaf al Hosany said the couple admitted kissing each other on the cheek but denied any intention to break the law…

But their pleas of not guilty to indecency were rejected and they were sentenced to a month in prison followed by deportation.

Apparently there’s another round of sentencing in a couple of weeks and they have expressed hopes for more understanding at that hearing. Frankly, if Dubai wishes to continue to be a tourist destination for travelers from around the world they had better get their morality coppers into the 21st Century – or give up on the idea.

Fifty-two unmarried couples could face charges of sexual misconduct and jail terms after being caught in hotel rooms by Malaysia’s Islamic morality police.

Scores of officers conducted raids on budget hotels on New Year’s Day in the western state of Selangor.

Those detained in the early hours of New Year’s Day were mainly students and young factory workers.

The Muslim couples are expected to be charged with the offence of close proximity, or Khalwat.

Under Malaysia’s Islamic Sharia Law, couples who are not married to each other should not be in a secluded area or confined space, which could give rise to suspicion that they were engaged in immoral acts.

A spokesman for the Selangor State Islamic Department says they chose New Year’s Day because many people are known to commit this offence when celebrating a major holiday.

Har!

Brit Hume turned evangelist on Fox New Sunday, in a segment with panelists predicting the future for Tiger Woods after Woods’ notable “transgressions” (now a 2009 top euphemism, along with “Appalachian Trail,” as a signifier for “mistress.”)

Hume forecasts Woods will recover as a golfer but

…Whether he can recover as a person depends on “his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world…”

Woods got similar advice from A. Larry Ross, minus the slap to Buddhism, in a column recently at Huffington Post. Ross, spokesman for Rev. Billy Graham and Rev. Rick Warren, is a veteran of evangelism talk. It was a column on grace and the God of “second chances.”

And Jews have advice, too. Rabbi Irwin Kula told the Jewish Journal that the Nike spokesman — and the rest of us — should learn from the patriarchs that you can’t “just do it” when “it” is wrong.

Will religious blowhards ever cease their papier maché punditry before the world of ordinary people. When Britt Hume starts opposing wars of aggrandizement and greed – I might give him a listen.

Planting time in a Buenos Aires backyard
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. The decision follows a case of five young men who were arrested with a few marijuana cigarettes in their pockets.

The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.”

Supreme Court President Ricardo Lorenzetti said private behaviour was legal, “as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger. The state cannot establish morality“…

Argentina’s move follows rulings by several other countries across the region, including Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia.

The aim of such moves is to enable police to focus their efforts on the big criminals in the drugs trade rather than dealing with petty cases, says our correspondent, Candace Piette.

But it also marks a shift a dramatic regional shift to the decades-old US-backed policy of running repressive military-style wars on the drug trade, she adds.

Another chunk of South America makes a political and legal decision – independent of the “morality” of the United States.

One summer night in 2007, a pair of 13-year-old northeastern Pennsylvania girls decided to strip down to their skivvies to beat the heat.

As Marissa Miller talked on the phone and Grace Kelly flashed a peace sign, a third girl took a candid shot of the teens in their white bras.
It was harmless, innocent fun, the teens say.

But the picture somehow wound up on classmates’ cell phones, and a prosecutor has threatened to charge Miller and Kelly with child pornography or open lewdness unless they participate in a five-week after-school program followed by probation.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to block Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. from filing charges, saying that the teens didn’t consent to having the picture distributed and that the image is not pornography, in any event.

Skumanick said he would fight the lawsuit. “Frankly, we just wanted to protect these kids…

The ACLU’s lawsuit claims…the photos are protected First Amendment speech.

Basic premise #1: people who think images distributed electronically are like carrying a single copy to show a friend and, then, bringing it back home safely are too ignorant for polite description.

Basic premise #2: 19th Century moralists in cop suits are about as useful to the process of moderating communications between human brings as a cast-iron gag. The all-seeing eye of someone who’s growing old awaiting his turn to run for governor.

UPDATE: The ACLU and the girls won their case and the judge has ordered charges dropped. Bravo for common sense.