Lounge

If you don't mean this is reprehensible from a moral point of view ("for their own protection", what kind of protection?), you tell me from what point of view you find this reprehensible.

Protection from becoming the victim of sexual molestation. I am sure there are a lot of parents who could take their parents to such an exhibit or teachers who could too and it would bring no harm. Because perhaps the parents explain it in a good way or the students have respectable parents who wouldn't harm their children. But chances are out of the 25 or 30 students in that class there is at least one who may come from a home environment where they are being molested and the teacher doens't know about it. Now if you teach those kids that a nudity is normal and ok way for a man to appear and a girl goes home and her stepfather exposes himself in that manner and she thinks it is perfectly normal (when he simply is doing it for his own sexual enjoyment) then that is not protecting the children. While there are a few people in the world who think that sex with children is OK, I think most people would agree that it is wrong, regardless of their religion (or lack thereof) or nationality. And if we desensitize children to what are common behaviors and states of undress of molesters, we are making them more likely to fall prey to those molesters. Now in Europe, maybe nudity is not necessarily a sign of a molester, but here in the US, most likely if a person exposes themselves to a child, that person is probably someone you don't want around your kids. It's the cultural context that makes it appropriate or not.

I've used the expression 'prude' to refer to you because I don't know what other expression to use to refer to a person who thinks that an "image showing a woman in a shower in an ad for body lotion and the like" (supposedly an ad that would be viewed in American TV or published in an American magazine where American standards of morality apply) is some sort of soft *porn*.

Of course, as pictures alone for their original purpose, they aren't soft porn, but in the context of the girl cutting out the pictures for her father's pleasure, it was "soft porn." Basically, she was looking for pictures where lots of bare skin was revealed (as I said, she instructed the rest of us what to look for so I have no doubt what kind of pictures she wanted), and nothing in a woman's magazine could really be called porn, but I am sure he wasn't enjoying the pictures for the products advertised, so he was enjoying it for the nudity aspect.

4 witnesses are required whether the one committing the crime is a man or a woman. No difference.

By the way, on a different tangent, although not totally unrelated, has anyone noticed how popular Moodle is among evangelical Christian schools in the US?

Well Nicole, I don't have a thesis to write but I'm very busy as well (although seeing the extension of my posts many people might not believe me). I think this thread is dying out because basically now everybody knows how everybody thinks about these issues and we are not going to change the way the other sees things no matter how long we go on. I try to keep an open mind with basically everything. But just because a mind is open, it doesn't mean everything has to get in. I just don't think, at least not at this moment in my life, that my mind can accept your world view. Before I leave this thread, though, I just wanted to say a couple of things about what you said in your message.

I honestly thing you are mistaken when you say that there are very very few gay people in Egypt. In Egypt there is about the same proportion of gay people that there is in any other country in the world.  The vast majority of homosexuals, if not all, are born homosexual and there is nothing they can do to change that. It is not a matter of chosen identity or lifestyle.

You are a homosexual no matter what lifestyle you choose for yourself. In the West there is a different lifestyle for homosexuals than in other cultures, but the proportions of homosexuals independently of their lifestyles are the same or similar in all cultures.

It is not a matter of sex, either. You don't even need to have sexual relationships with people of your own sex to be a homosexual. And I have to agree with you: you can engage in sexual relationships with people of your own sex and still be heterosexual. Prisons are full of people like that. And from what I've been told, countries where there are very strict rules about what women can do and their sexual freedom is highly restricted are full of men like that, too. But it is also true that whether you have sex or not has really nothing to do with whether you are homosexual or not. Homosexuals can abstain from engaging in sexual relationships with people of the same sex the same way that, for instance, catholic priests can abstain from engaging in sexual relationships with women (many of them don't abstain, whether it is women or whatever). But that doesn't make them less homosexual. The same way that abstaining from sex doesn't make a priest cease to be a heterosexual, if he is indeed heterosexual, or from being homosexual, if he is homosexual. 

They calculate that about 10% of the population are homosexual. I don't know whether the figure is right, but I'm totally sure that a certain percentage of the population is born gay and that this percentage doesn't vary that much among different countries.

Just a personal story to illustrate what I'm saying. Just about a month ago my mother told me that one of my childhood friends, the boy who lived downstairs from me in my parents' apartment building, was living with a man. I was totally shocked. Not from a moral point of view but because I would never have imagined in a million years that X could be gay. He had been married to a woman for a long time and he had children (who are now 16 and 18 years old) and all that jazz. OK, my mother knew because she had seen him holding hands with his partner in his father's funeral. His sister told my mother that in fact X had recently come out of the closet and had gone to live with this man. X's mother, however, refuses to admit her son is gay and she simply refers to them as friends. Now, the sad but interesting thing is that X has been severely depressed since I have memory. He has attempted to commit suicide (and close to succeeding) many times and he has been taking very strong medication for a long time.

Well, I can't be sure that the two things are related but, when I finally managed to talk to him, he told me that he's known all along; that he has been attracted to men all his life but that he just could not bring himself to admit it. He thought there was something wrong with him and that it would go away. He didn't want to make his parents unhappy. He was afraid to fail them as a son. He was afraid of how they would react (his father was a fairly violent man). He has been profoundly unhappy all this time. Now he's 46 years old and he says that he has decided to be who he really is and the hell with everything else.

I think this is a really sad story. It is painful for me to think what this poor guy has had to go through and to see that he has had to wait for such a long time to accept himself. And we are talking about Spain!, the country where Almodovar is a public and well respected figure. But in Spain, as in the US and in all European countries, there are still many people that haven't come out in the open like my friend has. My sympathy goes to all those millions of Xs that live secret and miserable lifes, above all to those who live in present day Egypt or in many other places where it is even more difficult for them to be who they really are. It is so difficult that even people like you think they don't exist.

As for the proper way to apply the Sharia, what you say reminds me of what my communist friends used to say when they heard somebody criticize human rights abuses or genocide in countries like USSR, Pol Pot Cambodia, Cuba, China, etc. etc. "Well, these countries are not really communist. If you read Marx, you'll see that this is not the type of society that he envisioned. These people are not really faithful to real socialist principles" yadah, yadah, yadah. You know, for a long time I thought "Mmh, it is true, if you really read what Marx or other communist/socialist theorists say, communist countries should be like paradise where everybody lives happily and gets what s/he needs, and there is true democracy". With time I've come to think that the problem was at the very base. If you build the political organization of your society on principles such as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and on an ideology which has such a profound lack of understanding of what human beings are like, then you are likely to wind up with the kinds of regimes, nastyness and human misery that are typical of so-called communist countries.

Are they true communist countries? Of course not. But where are the true communist countries? They don't exist. The same way that true Islamic countries or true capitalist countries don't exist, either. If you criticize any of the very criticizable aspects of capitalist societies, you will also get people who will tell you: "this is not the fault of capitalism. If you read Adam Smith, you will see that he doesn't talk about any of this and that true capitalist principles are not applied. If you really let the market totally free without any intervention from the state, all of these injustices and inequalities would disappear".

In the case of the Sharia, all I can say is that I don't give a damn whether you need 4 or 500 witnesses to indict someone as an adultress or as a homosexual and have them stoned to death. What is unacceptable for me is a law that can condemn someone to death (or to anything) for being gay or for being "unfaithful" to their spouse. If that is acceptable for you, and it seems that it is, be my guest, you are entitled to have your opinions. But my mind, no matter how open I want it to be, does not accept that as something that is good or desirable for any human community.

Josep M.