Sex & Violence – News Syndication

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – Conservative groups such as Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood have won majority votes in the new government. These groups were previously banned from elections or relegated to the political fringes. Western media have placed emphasis on the potential offered by some Egyptian women’s rights groups, while alarmists say that women’s rights will be taken back to the “dark ages.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern that women were being “largely excluded from the transition process and even harassed in the street,” and that “the best-organized political parties supported few women candidates in the recent elections.”

Omaima Abou Bakr, a professor at Cairo University, looked upon Egypt’s long, checkered past and assured that “We go through different historical periods with different kinds of challenges.”

Women have won only eight seats – less than two per cent of the country’s parliament, despite a law that guaranteed 64 seats to female candidates.

While many worry about women being disenfranchised from political participation under conservative religious leaders, the physical violence against women in Cairo’s streets in December was perpetrated by ostensibly secular officials.

“This violence, these virginity tests, women having their veils snatched from them – the real threat of physical violence is coming from the military police, whereas the threat coming the Islamists is a quiet marginalization,” Abou Bakr said. 

Sanaa al-Banna, granddaughter of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, told Al Jazeera that “the revolution has been definitely good for segments of Egyptian women who first voiced their grievances and succeeded in mobilizing thousands, and later on millions, of Egyptians around primarily humane demands.” However, while women “paid the price, they shared little of the gain.”

Those gains have gone, ironically to Islamist parties.

“They [the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists] lived in a cave when young ladies … were shouting against dictatorship in the streets, on Facebook and Twitter,” said al-Banna.

“The Egyptian woman has participated in both the initiation and continuation of the revolutionary surge that pushed Islamist parties to power.

“The revolution has been good for women in the sense that we all know that Egyptian women of all social classes participated, were out on the streets, so it has been good – for Muslim or Christian or Copt – because we rediscovered our capacity to participate in street uprisings and politics,” said 54-year-old Abou Bakr. It had been especially empowering for the younger generation of Egyptian women, she added.

Mozn Hassan, an expert in constitutional reform in Cairo doesn’t think women will lose much in the new government, but worries that they won’t gain much either.

“The struggle will be, on a social level, the trial of all social conservatives to make us lose [the progress] we have been struggling hard for years to gain,” she said.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic online) – Officials in Manila have put the death toll at 15, but rescue coordinators and local officials put the figure at much higher.

Military chiefs say that 43 people were confirmed killed, but officials warned dozens of others were believed to be injured or missing in remote, mountainous areas.

“Heavy equipment we’ve requested from the provincial government has not arrived yet, because the roads and bridges are impassable,” Alvin Futalan, the police chief of Guihulngan town on Negros says.

“We are using our hands and shovels to search in the rubble,” Al Jazeera’s Marga Ortigas told the AFP news agency.

Thirty-nine people alone were reported killed in Guihulngan, a coastal city of 100,000 people that was close to the quake’s epicenter. Many buildings in the center of the city had collapsed, while landslides had buried some homes completely.

The city’s 42-man police rescue squad has been joined by hundreds of army troops and volunteers in clearing debris in their search to find people still believed to be missing.

“The army (troops) had to walk about 30 miles from the last stop reachable by vehicle to reach us,” Fatulan said.

Seismologists said more than 700 aftershocks battered Negros during the 20 hours following the initial quake, which stuck at midday on Monday.

Negros Oriental Governor Roel Degamo said he feared there could be more unreported casualties. “Sadly, we expect the death toll could still rise,” Degamo said.

Colonel Francisco Zosimo Patrimonio, an army commander in Negros, said a landslide buried dozens of houses in another town near Guihulngan.

“Local officials there have a minimal estimate of 40 adults missing (with the) number of children missing undetermined,” he said.

Telephone communications in some parts of Negros were cut off, leaving information from remote regions unobtainable.

Cebu, the Philippines’ second biggest city with 2.3 million residents and a popular tourist destination, was 50 kilometers from the epicenter and shook violently during the initial quake. No deaths were reported there.

The Philippines sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a belt around the Pacific Ocean where friction between shifting tectonic plates causes frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity.

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – The recent move by the Obama Administration in general and the Department of Health and Human Services, in particular, mandating the provision of contraception, abortion and sterilization services by Catholic Hospitals, Organizations and Institutions has unleashed a firestorm of reaction that goes far beyond the boundaries of the Catholic Church.

Days later the President tried to backtrack with a quasi-compromise that did nothing but increase the level of angry responses.

On Tuesday, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reported that they were among the over 100 college presidents, academics, religious leaders and journalists who signed a letter, entitled “Unacceptable,” which denounces President Obama’s “accommodation” to the contraception mandate for failing to “remove the assault on religious liberty.”

“The simple fact,” the letter states, “is that the Obama administration is compelling religious people and institutions who are employers to purchase a health insurance contract that provides abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.

“This is a grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand. It is an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”

This issue is not going to go away any time soon. The President has made it clear that no issues of conscience on the part of the Christian citizenry in the United States is going to stop his assault on the life of the pre-born. His claimed concern about “women’s health” is a subterfuge.

While there are some who have tried to be critical of the Catholic bishops during episode, no group of religious leaders has cried out so powerfully, accurately and for a sustained period of time as our bishops.

In a letter to their brother bishops in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal-designate Dolan, USCCB president, along with Cardinals DiNardo and Wuerl joined their voices with Bishops Lori and Blair to continue to call for unrelenting action on the part of the American Church.

“We remain fully committed to the defense of our religious liberty,” they wrote, “and we strongly protest the violation of our freedom of religion that has not been addressed. We continue to work for the repeal of the mandate.

“We have grave reservations that the government is intruding in the definition of who is and who is not a religious employer. Upon further study we are very concerned that serious issues still remain and we have found numerous problems which we will raise in this letter.”

To be honest, my greatest concern is not for our bishops but the cadre of Catholics in the pews who may not take seriously this incredible assault on our religious liberty, moral conscience and health.

Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, many of our brethren may have fallen asleep and on their way to experiencing the death of the freedoms. This is a time when we must cry out with a Scripture that is quoted in the breviary readings for Holy Saturday, “Awake, O sleeper and rise from the dead!”

An Issue of Religious Liberty

Make no mistake of what we are facing. The president and his administration are requiring that people of faith deny their deeply held religious and moral convictions – and violate their conscience – to comply with initiatives imposed by the government.

If this sounds familiar, just look back at sixteenth century England when Henry VIII required Catholics to accept his authority on divorce. What they ended up with was a state church.

This can and will affect more than Catholics. If this can happen in healthcare, it can happen in other places as well, where the government can mandate a policy in contradiction to Christian convictions. Leaders from across Christendom have joined in sounding the alarm.

In the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, Jordan Sekulow, Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice wrote, “The Obama Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decision to force religious institutions to provide insurance coverage for abortion pills is nothing short of a war on religious liberty. And President Obama did nothing to change this fact with his latest ‘accommodation.’

“This is not just an assault on life, or even Catholics, it is a direct attack at the heart of religious freedom and free exercise – the very essence of the First Amendment.

“Make no mistake; this regulation is not just about contraceptives. The regulation at issue will …