Neat/infuriating articles from around the country/world:
[Neat]
Muslims in Las Vegas, Part I:
A Straight Path Through Sin City
“What happens here, stays here,” winks the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority in a national advertising campaign. The cityscape is awash in straightforward invitations to adult frolic. Seminude vixens beckon from freeway billboards, taxicab placards and newspaper racks, taking seductive bites out of apples, coiling themselves around serpents, posing seven across, hip to bare hip, buttocks flexed.
What’s a good Muslim to do?
“Lower your gaze,” an imam intoned in his sermon, or khutbah, before prayers one Friday last spring. “Especially you young brothers. Out there” Ñ he pointed vaguely in the direction of the Strip Ñ “you must lower your gaze.”
There are about 10,000 Muslims in Las Vegas, and they come from all over. In the mosques on any Friday, one can find well-to-do doctors from the Indian subcontinent, barrel-chested circus tumblers from Tangier, cabdrivers from Compton, war widows from Kabul.
[Infuriating]
Obtaining Cheney Rally Ticket Requires Signing Bush Endorsement
The Albuquerque Bush-Cheney Victory office in charge of doling out the tickets to Saturday’s event was requiring the endorsement forms from people it could not verify as supporters.
State Rep. Dan Foley, R-Roswell, speaking on behalf of the Republican Party, said Thursday that a “known Democrat operative group” was intending to try to crash Saturday’s campaign rally at Rio Rancho Mid-High School. He added that some people were providing false names and addresses and added that tickets for the limited-seating event should go to loyal Bush backers.
[Infuriating]
Vatican Letter Denounces ‘Lethal Effects’ of Feminism
Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said Saturday on Vatican Radio that the aim of the letter was to critique two current strands in feminism: one that emphasizes “a radical rivalry between the sexes” and the other that seeks to “cancel the differences between the sexes.”
The letter argued that “the obscuring of the difference . . . of the sexes has enormous consequences,” including inspiring ideologies that “call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.”
While assaulting what it said were the bases of feminist ideology, the letter tried to tackle the practical difficulties and inequities that feminists also decry. It appeared to attempt to strike a balance between a Catholic ideal of women raising children at home and the reality that many work outside the home.
Women ought not be stigmatized for desiring the life of a homemaker, the letter argued. “Indeed, a just valuing of the work of women within the family is required,” it said. Women who choose to work in the labor force should be awarded a proper schedule and “not have to choose between relinquishing their family life or enduring continual stress,” it said.
