Over at Painting Fakes, my fellow blogger, friend and relative Ted has suggested a satirical rendition of a very long debate on abortion between various members of my family and a person whom I know only through Facebook, Jereth Kok. The thread threatens to reach 500 posts, which it would easily have achieved, as Ted observes, had it not been censored by its owner.
While I am prepared to consider such a satirical evaluation of the manner of the debate as evidence of the exhaustion readers feel in engaging with such a debate, I suspect also that the debate appears to him to be intractable and therefore not worth engagement beyond agreement to disagree.
If this is the motive for the satire, then I am saddened that Ted has thrown in the towel so easily on an issue that must surely be close to his heart. I have be both enlightened and delighted in his series on Jesus and his mission because it diverges from the traditional position on Christ and presents someone more likely to rebuke the tired conservatism of the time with radical ethical positions (such as his rejection of the patriarchal Jewish cultural attitude towards women's infidelity) than someone pontificating on the need for doctrinal purity.
The need for the revolution in regard to the rights of women continues today just as ever. Despite the significant progress made in the liberation of women from traditional roles, the attitudinal basis for the enslavement of women continues, mostly as a preserve of neo-conservatives, given to shrill and hysterical comparisons of women choices and activities with all manner of unsavory events and conditions.
Two recent events in my life convince me that the struggles for women's rights continues. The recent 'slut walk' in several capital cities highlights that women who exercise their right to be as sexually obvious as they wish must still face both the palpable danger of rape and the scorn of men.
Closer to me, however, was the condemnation of a fellow professional for dressing up 'too sexily' and the unauthorised publication of images of her in a local newspaper. This, one week before a pedophile with 20 convictions had his image suppressed to 'prevent harm coming to him'. So incensed was I by the hypocrisy of the paper and the readers, some prominent members of the local community, who expressed their horror at my colleagues harmless antics, that I engaged in a campaign the nature of which I will not reveal in this blog. My Facebook profile has been of a burka covered person ever since. After all, only under Sharia Law could a woman be more shabbily treated.
Needless to say, the final liberation of women from the last shackles of social bondage is something close to my heart. I certainly will not resile for one moment in facing neo-conservatives; those who yearn for a return to 'proper Christian values' (which are neither) of the woman as the servant of men in a good marriage. For this reason, the most vocal and irrational of the neo-conservative combatants, Jereth, was given no quarter, nor a lot of respect, since his views represented either a statement of the bleeding obvious or simply a regurgitation of neo-conservative orthodoxy.
If we are serious about opposition to the imposition of slavery on women a la Sharia Law, as many of my relatives purport to be, then we cannot sit on the fence and agree to disagree.
While I am prepared to consider such a satirical evaluation of the manner of the debate as evidence of the exhaustion readers feel in engaging with such a debate, I suspect also that the debate appears to him to be intractable and therefore not worth engagement beyond agreement to disagree.
If this is the motive for the satire, then I am saddened that Ted has thrown in the towel so easily on an issue that must surely be close to his heart. I have be both enlightened and delighted in his series on Jesus and his mission because it diverges from the traditional position on Christ and presents someone more likely to rebuke the tired conservatism of the time with radical ethical positions (such as his rejection of the patriarchal Jewish cultural attitude towards women's infidelity) than someone pontificating on the need for doctrinal purity.
The need for the revolution in regard to the rights of women continues today just as ever. Despite the significant progress made in the liberation of women from traditional roles, the attitudinal basis for the enslavement of women continues, mostly as a preserve of neo-conservatives, given to shrill and hysterical comparisons of women choices and activities with all manner of unsavory events and conditions.
Two recent events in my life convince me that the struggles for women's rights continues. The recent 'slut walk' in several capital cities highlights that women who exercise their right to be as sexually obvious as they wish must still face both the palpable danger of rape and the scorn of men.
Closer to me, however, was the condemnation of a fellow professional for dressing up 'too sexily' and the unauthorised publication of images of her in a local newspaper. This, one week before a pedophile with 20 convictions had his image suppressed to 'prevent harm coming to him'. So incensed was I by the hypocrisy of the paper and the readers, some prominent members of the local community, who expressed their horror at my colleagues harmless antics, that I engaged in a campaign the nature of which I will not reveal in this blog. My Facebook profile has been of a burka covered person ever since. After all, only under Sharia Law could a woman be more shabbily treated.
Needless to say, the final liberation of women from the last shackles of social bondage is something close to my heart. I certainly will not resile for one moment in facing neo-conservatives; those who yearn for a return to 'proper Christian values' (which are neither) of the woman as the servant of men in a good marriage. For this reason, the most vocal and irrational of the neo-conservative combatants, Jereth, was given no quarter, nor a lot of respect, since his views represented either a statement of the bleeding obvious or simply a regurgitation of neo-conservative orthodoxy.
If we are serious about opposition to the imposition of slavery on women a la Sharia Law, as many of my relatives purport to be, then we cannot sit on the fence and agree to disagree.
