What happens when god doesn’t run errands…

It would be extremely easy to poke fun at the utterly idiotic and opportunistic letter that three Christian MPs, Gary Streeter, Gavin Shuker and Tim Farron, have sent to the Advertising Standards Authority in an effort to persuade/pressure them to overturn a recent ruling on the contents of […]

Lansley – Full of Shit As Usual

I’ll hold back on making a detailed commentary on the latest development in the Tory Party’s ongoing war an abortion rights, but I cannot let this empty-headed comment from Andrew Lansley pass without comment. “The rules in the Abortion Act are there for a reason – to ensure […]

ECHR, Same-sex Marriages and The Daily Telegraph

It’s been widely observed that, since it was taken over by Barclay Brothers, The Daily Telegraph has noticeably shifted downmarket and has come to resemble a broadsheet version of the Daily Mail. What perhaps a little less obvious is that The Telegraph’s religious outlook has shifted at the […]

Myths about myths about rape conviction rates

As regular visitors to the Ministry will know, I written a couple of posts on the thorny subject of rape statistics in the last 18 months, one looking primarily at prevalence and under-reporting, the other at data relating to the overall performance of the criminal justice system, which […]

When ‘Rape Humour’ can be justified

For a while, I’ve been pondering over writing a post on the subject of rape humour and when it can and cannot be justified. I got as far as digging out a rather good paper on humour during the Holocaust, which goes some way to illustrating some of […]

The Return of the Infanticide Debate

It’s not often that a paper in a medical ethics journal manages to generate a major shitstorm but a new paper by Alberto Giubilini (Monash University) and Francesca Minerva (University of Melbourne) has managed to do precisely that and the clue to understanding why is probably obvious from […]