Islam Vs. Boobies: You Know Who We’re Rooting For

It’s bad enough when you’ve got Pat Robertson blaming the Haiti tragedy on a “pact with the devil” or the Westboro Baptists blaming gays for 9/11, but you blame earthquakes on women showing too much hair, the fundies have really gone off the deep end…

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly…lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair.

I love the way he words that…by women not covering up, they force men to fuck them, in other words. This “prayer leader” would make an excellent lawyer.

Anyway, a blogger got the bright idea to test his brilliant little theory by dressing in “the most cleavage-showing shirt” she owns on April 26th to see if it really will cause measurable seismic tremors and encouraged others to do the same. In just one week, she had over 180,000 confirmed “guests” on her Facebook event, affectionately named “Boobquake,” and was bombarded by praise and requests for interviews. While I don’t see how anyone but a Muslim “prayer leader” could see masses of mammaries as a bad thing, she’s received a lot of criticism as well, so this is where I have to throw my two cents in…or two dollars stuffed down the front, if said cleavage is being dangled in front of my face.

A lot of the criticism, of course, is coming from women, and even though I love my feminist friends to death (I do, really!), they sometimes can get a bit carried away and forget their senses of humor. You could argue that this just degrades women all you want, but the truth is, the religion of Islam does it a lot better and a lot more often. What is more important – fighting with your own gender or laughing in the face of some misguided, pigheaded douchebags? The most powerful weapon against religious superstition is disbelief and skepticism, and that can often stem from mockery and derision. By taking this to a laughable extreme, it only makes Sedighi’s ignorant beliefs all the more ridiculous. As most of the people reading this are probably not Muslims, it may be easy to laugh at something as stupid as “women showing skin causes earthquakes,” but the fact that nuns still can’t pass out a silly little wafer at mass shows that the dominant religion in America isn’t much more open-minded when you think about it. Showing some cleavage today isn’t going to change the world (If that were true, porn would have established world peace about ten minutes after the internet went public.), but it’s a very pleasant “fuck you” to oppressive and sexist beliefs.

A lot of my friends are atheists and agnostics, but many are not. Of those that are not, I was amazed at how many of them wished me a happy “Zombie Jesus Day” this past Easter. Something like that may seem childish or silly, but it actually says a lot about the ever-developing perceptions of these ancient stories under a post-modern scientific lens. The resurrection is arguably the most important aspect of Christianity, yet here they were mocking it, laughing at the very idea of their savior rising from the dead to save them. The rejection of the dogmatic trappings of organized religion and the pondering of deeper, more abstract ideas of god, the universe, and the afterlife are never a bad thing, and can only lead to more rational and realistic thinking. They may be followers in name, sure, but in their minds (and they may not even know it), they’ve moved on to bigger and better ideas. And when a whole bunch of short skirts and low tops don’t cause a massive earthquake across the country, it may encourage a few Muslims to wonder why Allah didn’t put his foot down on April 26th.