Hope for Zimbabwe - Robert Mugabe is gone

... sadly only for a month. Mugabe is gone on a 92,000 US$ junket shopping trip (courtesy of funds from the Zimbabwean Central Bank) to Malaysia and Singapore with his wife and kids. Quite remarkable, considering that the death toll resulting from an entirely preventable cholera outbreak is ever increasing. While there are food shortages in the country, caused by Mugabe and his cronies' idiotic policies, he and his spendthrift wife will burn thru taxpayers' monies in Singaporean shopping malls. To describe all of this as shameless is probably an understatement. It is a sad indictment of these countries that they welcome international pariahs such as Mugabe and his wife.

Religious Freedom

It has long been suggested by godless people like myself that religious freedom these days has been perverted into meaning that religious organisations are entitled to discriminated against people of other or no faiths. It also seems to have become a free-for-all for religious groupings to go after women's reproductive interests, gay people, as well as anything else that their respective ideology fancies discriminating against.

Well, a good South African friend of mine has drawn my attention to this article in the Washington Post. It's about a formerly Muslim person's legal right (or otherwise) to change her prejudices toward Christianity. The Malaysian woman in question has decided that she's now a Christian. While that religion's institutional representatives are also suitably misogynistic, they're arguably not as bad as organised Islam. The Malaysian courts now have to decide whether the woman may still be judged by Sharia Islamic courts or by the civil courts of the country. The Malaysian Constitution prohibits Muslims from swapping that ideology for another ideology..