A few years ago, my wife and I were on a vacation in Turkey. Among the things we did was cruise from Antalya up the Turkish coast on a Gulet. One of the crew members befriended us and after several days confided that he was an Alawi. We didn’t know what that was and asked him to explain. He was very circumspect and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Promise me you won’t tell any of the other crew,” he said. He made it sound like he was a member of a persecuted sect, and after I returned home, I found out that he was.

Alawites sometimes and in some places are called Alawi, Alouite or Bektashi. There are as many as fifteen million of them in Turkey but no one knows for certain because, like the crew member, many try to keep their identities secret and they tend to blend with the majority population both in appearance and language.  There are also significant populations of Alawis in Iraq, Iran and, of course, Syria.

This group has traditionally been the object of hate-crimes. For example, in 1978, over a hundred Alawites were massacred in Turkey during a seven-day rampage that included bombings and rapes committed by a mob of Sunni extremists. In the 1990s, an Alawi conference was torched and a tea house frequented by Alawis was machine-gunned.

According to John Shindeldecker, author of Turkish Alevis Today, (1996) “there are a wide variety of beliefs and practices held by those those who call themselves Alevis.” An expert on this group, Shindeldecker finds it difficult to easily pigeonhole them. What seems to be true though is they tend to be secular and progressive in their thinking and practices. They appear to be very nonsectarian when it comes to their view of God. Most, apparently don’t believe in a jealous or vengeful God who consigns people to hell for not believing in strict religious dogma. It would be very unlikely to find an Alawi who believed that martyrdom would bring the martyr to a paradise with seventy-two virgins. Thus they are not likely candidates for religion-based terrorism.

Culturally, Alawi men and women worship together. Alevis believe in monogamy. Women are not required to veil themselves. They can dress in western clothes, can obtain the education they want and are not restricted from any occupation.

It is easy to see why the Alawite population of Syria is terrified by the possibility that the Majority Sunni rebels will set up an Islamic state. Their beliefs and practices are offensive to the current crop of jihadi zealots and they stand to become the victims of severe repression if not a holocaust. So we ought to be clear, especially those beating the drums to arm the rebels. If America does enable the rebels and contribute to an Islamist victory we will have to take responsibility for something akin to a massive pogrom against people with whom we have a lot in common.

In 1929 Pope Pius XI made a deal with Mussolini called the Lateran Accords. Mussolini recognized the Vatican as a sovereign state and paid it the equivalent of a billion dollars in today’s money. Recently, English journalists have reported that a lot of Church property in London was purchased with this Mussolini money.

In 1933, Pius XI and his foreign minister, who later became Pius XII, made a deal with Hitler called the Concordat, which essentially legitimized NAZISM and put the stamp of approval on the Hitler regime for German and Austrian Catholics.

Francisco Franco, the fascist ruler of Spain was so confident that he had the support of the Vatican that he notified Pope Pius XI of his intended rebellion against the Spanish Republic a month before he started the Spanish Civil War. Once it began Pius XI made a public statement in Franco’s support, blessing “all those who have taken the difficult and dangerous task to defend and reinstate the honor of God and Religion,” and pronouncing everyone who supported the Spanish Republic a Bolshevik.

So, what’s new here? What’s the big surprise? Why all the shock that Francis I is in lockstep and goosestep with his fascist Vatican predecessors?

In the March 12 NYT is a photo of an ex-cop at a Utah gun show. He’s wielding an assault rifle with a 100 round banana clip. A 100 rounds must double the weight of the weapon. No way can it be fired from a prone position. It looks impossible for the average Joe to get a steady aim. Hunting is out. Target shooting is out. The only thing you can do with it is shoot from the hip and keep pulling the trigger until your index finger freezes up. Self-defense? Against what? The zombie army?

Frankly, I was amazed that they found someone fool enough to allow himself to be photographed within a city block of this abomination, much less actually holding it. How far do we have to go to satisfy the cranks and crackpots that lurk in the moldy, dark corners of our society, disguising themselves as patriotic defenders of the Constitution? Why stop at 100 round clips? Why not a thousand round clip that resembles the horn of a long horned sheep? It can curl over the shooter’s shoulder, down his back and up between his legs like the giant dick he is.

The Constitution is supposed to deal with rights, not fantasies. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court has unleashed a storm of delusional troopers raring to take the Second Amendment down the slippery slope of absurdity. No other right articulated in our Bill of Rights has been bent out of shape as much as the right to bear arms. You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater but you can fire into a crowded theater according to these guys. Do we need to wait until some seventeen year-old miscreant disarms his 4’11” high school English teacher and shoots up her class before we can come to grips with the fact that the more guns there are in society, the more people who shouldn’t have them will get a hold of them?

I think that responsible gun owners ought to see this craziness as an existential threat to the right to bear arms. If a few bozos can take hostage our Constitution just so they can play cartoon Rambo with clips the military doesn’t even standard issue to its infantry, we are all in deep shit.

But the same pathology is true on the other side of the ideological aisle as well. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reported a series of gun control proposals wending their way through the Democratic-controlled legislature. And for the record, I am a life-long Democrat and gun owner. I endorse a ban on magazines that hold more than ten rounds. I believe that gun purchases should be limited to no more than one every three months. I favor background checks on all gun purchasers. I do not oppose gun registration. But some of the proposals that I saw in the paper today seem utterly stupid and do nothing to address the gun problems we actually face.

First and foremost, there is a problem with handguns. Most of the shooting deaths I read about in the paper or hear about in the news, far and away, involve handguns. Handguns should tightly regulated to keep them out of the wrong hands. They should be registered. Owners should be required to keep them in their immediate physical possession, stored in locked compartments or to have trigger locks. They should be required to report a missing or stolen handgun within twenty-four hours of discovery, or bear legal responsibility for its misuse. Possession of a handgun by someone other than the registered owner should be a crime.

Having said that, we should not go to extremes. If someone feels the need for home/self defense, I don’t think the legislature should second-guess that decision across the board. Many people live in dangerous locations. Some people have violent enemies. Each case is different. When I was a lawyer, I had an adversary threaten to shoot me and my whole family. I had a client whose husband threatened to shoot her. The police actually advised her to arm herself. I think it’s presumptuous to deny threatened people, once properly trained, their right to self-defense. Yes, I know guns can be stolen or used against the owner, or picked up by a youngster who shoots his friend while at play. Bad things can happen with guns. They do with cars, knives and many other things. All we can to is try to make sure people act responsibly and hold them accountable when they don’t.

The handgun proposal pending in the legislature requires the owner of a handgun to go to some sort of class in proficiency and handgun safety every year. This does not insure proficiency or safety. If a person has a constitutional right to keep a handgun in their home, you can’t deprive them of that right by forcing them to pass a test. Some states tried that with voting rights and eventually the law rejected their tactic.  Nor will this law prevent the misuse of the gun. It doesn’t really address the problem.

This proposed law is also a backdoor effort to impose an expense on handgun ownership knowing that it is in lieu of a tax. In the process, it creates a boondoggle akin to the private remedial auto schools we now have when you get a moving violation. The intent is to saddle the owner of a handgun, who has a lawful right to keep it in his/her home according to the Supreme Court, with a cost of hundreds of dollars per year. It’s the same kind of BS logic that anti-abortion lawmakers use to force women to pay for an unwanted sonogram and then to listen to the fetus. It will result in making handguns available only to the competent test-taker with sufficient money. Sadly, it has class, and probably racial overtones.

A second absurd proposal is to call all long guns with removable magazines assault weapons. What about .22s? Can anyone credibly argue that a .22 caliber rim-fire rifle with a five or ten round removable magazine is an assault weapon? It stands the meaning of the words “assault weapon” on their ear.

What about rifles with removable five round magazines? There happen to be many such rifles that are bolt action, not semi-automatic. What about those? Bolt action rifles are not what we’ve seen in misuse in Tucson, Aurora or Newtown. When’s the last time anybody has seen a multiple murder, much less a mass murder by someone using a bolt-action rifle? (Probably, the Texas Tower sniper back in the ’60s.)

There are also some guns that are semi-automatic but have small removable magazines. I am thinking of the Ruger Mini-14, a popular gun among rural folks. Again, this is not a weapon of choice by a mass murderer.

So, as I read the reports of these legal proposals, I am wondering why our legislators are spending their energy trying to fix things that are not broken. I come to the conclusion that they are relying on the ignorance of their constituents or some people’s visceral animosity to firearms of all kinds. Many people in California would prefer to ban all firearms. I can understand their feelings but the current state of the law is not with them and attempting to achieve that result by imposition of incremental absurdities is both disingenuous and counterproductive.

“‘No one can dispute that if a woman remains firmly opposed to the act upon her, no violation of a woman is her fault as long as she cannot avoid it without sinning. But because a woman’s lust may be gratified during such an act, the woman will experience shame, even though she is pure of spirit and truly modest, because such an act cannot be experienced without some sensual pleasure, and people will believe that she gave her consent.’”  St. Augustine, City of God.

In The Flight of the Sorceress, Hypatia lectures on this dogma, as expounded by St. Augustine. When I wrote it, I had a premonition that the political debate on this issue would come to pass. A significant portion of our country is advocating a return to Dark Ages thinking. They may not like it characterized this way, but St. Augustine, Pope Innocent I and attendees at the Council of Nicaea (322 A.D.) would be comfortable with Todd Akin’s thinking and vice versa.

Although it is fictionalized, the big picture is not made up. We have a thousand-year Dark Ages to show for it. During which, according to estimates, six million women were accused of witchcraft or sorcery and either burned or stoned to death. It was a millennium of ignorance, superstition and cruel human oppression.  The knowledge of agriculture, engineering, manufacture and trade remained stagnant. Literally nothing of significance created in the arts or discovered in the sciences was permitted to flourish. And presiding over it all was an omnipotent religious organization.

Today, we have another toppled empire in Russia and a neo-Czar, Putin, an heir to the Caesars. During his reign he has crushed all organized political opposition and jailed every serious challenger to his power, accusing them of the corruption that he has enabled and from which he profits. But in this latest gambit involving three women, Pussy Riot, his regime had revealed the next page in his game plan to restore Russia to its former imperialist stature. It is now state heresy to lampoon the Russian Orthodox Church. No sarcasm permitted. No ridicule. No hyperbole. Alles ist verboten. Heil Putin. Heil the Russian Othodox Church. Heil theocracy. Down with high steppin on the pulpit. It’s got to be hatred. An attempt to stir up the masses against this pillar of state power.

And so now Russia has announced to the world that it has joined the ranks of the theocracies, where blasphemy remains a crime and you could lose your head if you dissent from orthodoxy. Certainly a substantial portion of the peasantry will rally around this comfortably familiar custom and practice, but most of them were serfs until 1861, and as a practical matter, up until the present. Having a base of power among those you have deliberately cultivated to remain backward can bring limited success when it comes to retaining power, but it certainly is no prescription for restoration of an empire’s greatness. And so Pussy Riot has become a reincarnation of the Sorceress.

With a burgeoning population and an increasingly voracious upper class that can be in the tens of millions, it is likely that consumption has outstripped China’s resources. It is a land of rampant corruption as well, where environmental regulations, fishing season- and limits are overlooked for a payoff. So fished-out is a good bet.  And if so, that would explain the ever more heavy-handed rule of China’s despots. They’ve got a real 99% to worry about over there, more than a billion exploited, starving in the underclass, and a lot of reason to resort to repressive measures if they and their oligarchic cronies want to keep looting. We can think of these fishing incursions as mere greed or desperation. These incidents could be the tip of a massive iceberg, an indication that  the Chinese economic model is a paper tiger.