Afghanistan is not a nation in the sense of having a government, an army, a seat at the U.N., embassies, ambassadors, a constitution, etc. What Pakistan is is a large piece of mostly empty desert land in Asia that contains a large number of primitive, pre-industrial tribes comprised of uneducated and quarrelsome people who would rather kill each other than cooperate to form a society. They treat their women worse than their livestock and get highly offended when outsiders tell them that they shouldn't. Trying to impose a modern western mindset to dealing with them is about as effective as a fart in a windstorm. Just quarantine the region for the protection of the civilized world and be done with it.

I'm straight, divorced, and never getting married again, so it wouldn't be any skin off my nose. I'd love to hear the wailing of hypocritical right wingers squirming in agony if this passed. Why, just think of poor Newt Gingrich. Sarah would dump Todd faster than a jackrabbit on a date if this were about to become law. Oh, the humanity! Nothing would do as much to destroy the institution of marriage as outlawing divorce.

She never goes away completely and she keeps popping back up to be a pain in the rear. Also, looking at her makes me not want to have sex.

You forgot one:

- no uppity women or minorities

People in some parts of the world have always been, are currently, and always will be savages. (As a side note, there is a high correlation between primitve religious fervor and savagery.) No amount of foreign aid, NGO work, "nation building", air strikes, or attempting to teach them the benefits of wiping after shitting will ever change that fact. We should stop trying. Instead, we should (1) develop renewable sources of energy so that we don't need all the oil they always seem to be squatting over, (2) stop the export of weapons to them, (3) stop the import of opium from them, (4) blow up any suspected bio-nuke weapons facilities the North Koreans always seem eager to help them build, and (5) prohibit them from immigrating to the civilized world where they always seem to set up parallel societies in order to carry on their customary abuse of women and animals while enjoying big screen tvs and Internet porn that they don't have back home in Diarrheastan.

Of course, everything is relative. I was thinking of Afghanistan (and Texas) when I wrote the above. Northern Europeans and Japanese would not be completely unjustified in having similar thoughts about us.

Religion is nothing but made up superstitions used to control large numbers of people for the benefit of a few. Religion stands in the way of human progress on every front from science to education to public health to saving the human species from destroying its environment through overpopulation and overutilization of resources. Religion institutionalizes corruption and cronyism. Religion is at the root of most wars. All religions are bad, some are worse than others. Of the world's five biggest religion, currently islam is the most troublesome with christianity a somewhat distant second, followed by judaism and hinduism. Buddhism being the least problematic.

All religions should be officially discouraged or at least ignored, taxed, prohibited from interferring in politics, education (the concept of religious education is laughably oxymoronic), business, law, etc.

I applaud the Swiss for taking this brave step. I encourage them to take the next step and ban construction of similar structures by christians, etc. As for tearing down existing ones, well I guess that would depend on whether they can pay their taxes or not.

That said, I'm completely surprised that you're a southern girl, Heather. A member, like me, of the cracker diaspora. Well, you learn something new every day I suppose. Where 'bouts did y'all grow up?

Joan,

It's time to face the truth. This ongoing website redesign sucks so bad that it's killing Salon.com. It's too busy, too hard to navigate, too hard to find what you're interested in, several feature are missing or broken, and it's just plain buggy. Even if most of the bugs are eventually fixed, that's not going to solve the other problems. Couple these things with the declining quality and relevance of the writing and you're not going to be around much longer. The money you spent on the website redesign could have been much better spent hiring and/or retaining better writers and other contributors.

I used to come here many times a day to keep up with the news and discussions. Since this redesign abomination has been crammed down our throats, I've cut way back on how often I come here and I've started looking for another "home" on the internet. I'm sure I'm not alone.

I hope you get your shit together soon before it's too late because I'll miss Salon.com when it's gone.