There have been so many relevant news articles in the past couple of weeks. Here are some of them! (Thanks Laura for finding all of these great articles!)
Stoning too excessive a punishment for adultry? How about hanging?
Scary and icky: hacker remotely searches women’s computers for homemade sex tapes and naked pictures, and tries to extort them for homemade porn.
Would you freeze your eggs to keep your having-a-biological-baby options alive, people with eggs? Apparently, many people would! Especially med students.
There have been a lot of HIV-related stories lately:
The Global Fund pledges to stop the mother-child spread of HIV. Meanwhile, in Namibia HIV positive women are accusing the state of forcibly sterilizing them. In Asia, gay men are routinely denied treatment for HIV/AIDS.
Lately there has been a slew of stories about governments and corporations setting “quotas” of women in upper levels — and naturally, there’s been a lot of debate over whether this is fair and whether it is effective. They’re complicated issues! Here’s France setting quotas for women on corporate boards, India setting quotas for women in their legislature,Iraqi women taking on a larger role in politics , and Germany setting a quota for female managers. If you poke around on Wikipedia a bit, it turns out quotas are actually pretty common, for gender and also for marginalized ethnic groups and (in India) castes.
The Supreme Court ruled that public schools can withhold recognition from Christian (or other) groups that exclude gay students. Just Friday, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, in a bid to push it to the Supreme Court.
Image from Matt Callow’s flickr.
Thank you, BBC News and Google Reader.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10691353
saw it, was about HIV, had the word “vagina” in it, figured you would all appreciate it…
“…defendant forced plaintiff to have sex with him while she cried. Plaintiff testified that defendant always told her, ‘This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I c[an] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.’”
“While recognizing that defendant had engaged in sexual relations with plaintiff against her expressed wishes in November 2008 and on the night of January 15 to 16, 2009, the judge did not find sexual assault or criminal sexual conduct to have been proven. He stated: This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited.”
http://volokh.com/2010/07/23/cultural-defense-accepted-as-to-nonconsensual-sex-in-new-jersey-trial-court-rejected-on-appeal