UN body adopts women's rights declaration

A United Nations policy-making body has agreed upon a declaration urging an end to violence against women and girls despite concerns from conservative Muslim countries and the Vatican about references to women's sexual and reproductive rights.Conservative Muslim and Roman Catholic countries and more liberal nations on Friday night reached a consensus on a compromise document to loud applause at the end of a contentious two-week meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan, along with Honduras and the Vatican, expressed reservations about the declaration, but did not block adoption of the 18-page text.

While the declaration of the commission, created in 1946 for the advancement of women, is non-binding, diplomats and rights activists say it carries enough global weight to pressure countries to improve the lives of women and girls.
"People worldwide expected action, and we didn't fail them. Yes, we did it," Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and head of UN Women, which supports the commission, told delegates on Friday after two weeks on negotiations on the text.

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Ray410 said:

It's interesting that the new cool loon thing is that whenever Muslim brutality is cited, the Muslims are referred to as "Conservative." Yet, the Liberals have made the Muslims their new favorites and the Liberals forbid anything negative being said about Islam.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are arming themselves.

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Muddy Creek said:

The fundamentalists Islamic leaders are as barbaric on their definition of a woman's place as the born again evangelical fundamentalists here are. The republican have declared war on women voting down equal pay for equal jobs and voting down the VAWA the first three times it was presented. So, don't go handing over the Muslim=Democratic connection. OUr history of the republican party anti-women stand and their religious support from the born again evangelical fundamentalists don't support it.

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Ray410 said:

Absolute nonsense. The braying loons always seek insane equivalencies where none exists. Why even post such silliness?

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How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs."

Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

Ill. lawmakers target practice of jailing debtors
Welcome to debtors' prison: What's in your wallet can land you in jail

Under the law, debtors aren't arrested for nonpayment, but rather for failing to respond to court hearings, pay legal fines, or otherwise showing "contempt of court" in connection with a creditor lawsuit. That loophole has lawmakers in the Illinois House of Representatives concerned enough to pass a bill in March that would make it illegal to send residents of the state to jail if they can't pay a debt. The measure awaits action in the senate.

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Right-wing media are claiming that a Republican "war on women" is "phony" and "invented" by the left to distract attention from issues such as the economy and gas prices. But Republicans throughout the country have indeed pushed a plethora of legislation during the past few years that would result in limiting women's reproductive rights, access to health care access, and access to equal pay; moreover, right-wing media themselves launched a bullying campaign against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke after she testified in favor of expanded contraception coverage.

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Yet Shirer avoids using words like “feminist” or “career woman” to describe herself. She is an evangelical Bible teacher who makes her living by guiding thousands of women through the study of Scripture in her books, videos and weekend conferences — in which she stresses that in a biblical home and church, the man is the head and the woman must submit. She steers women away from the “feminist activists” who tell women to “do your own thing, make your own decisions and never let a man slow you down,” as she puts it. “Satan will do everything in his power to get us to take the lead in our homes,” she wrote in her book “A Jewel in His Crown: Rediscovering Your Value as a Woman of Excellence.” “He wants to make us resent our husband’s position of authority so that we will begin to usurp it. . . . Women need to pray for God to renew a spirit of submission in their hearts.”

Shirer and many conservative Christians believe that the Bible defines gender as a divinely ordained set of desires and duties inherent in each man and woman since the Garden of Eden. Gender is not an act or a choice, but a nonnegotiable gift. To these Christians, the story of Adam and Eve’s creation granted man authority over woman, and they understand the New Testament teachings of Paul and his comrades — in particular, that wives should submit to their husbands — not as cultural relics of the first century but as universal teachings that Christians apply today.

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"Wives should submit to their husbands in everything," writes Paul to the Ephesians about how they should order their domestic lives. Mary Slessor, 19th century Scottish missionary and early feminist wrote in her Bible next to this text, "Nay, nay, Paul laddie. This will na do." Mary Slessor was right. Religious women need to challenge such religious justifications of domestic violence. Their lives can depend on it.

The primary connection between religion and domestic violence is religiously sanctioned subordination of women. Submission itself is institutionalized violence--a structure of unequal power that puts women in a vulnerable position in the home. The front door of such a "religious" home becomes a doorway to violence.

Mary Potter Engel, a Christian theologian and novelist, has called this the "Just Battering" tradition. She models her analysis of the Christian justification of violence against wives on the Just War tradition. Just War principles start with "Right Authority." In the "Christian home," ideologies of "submission" mean that only the husband has authority. This makes physical abuse of women "just" in the same way that political authorities can claim a war is "just" if it is authorized by them.

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Graffias said:

And, of course, nothing needs to be done to stop violence against men, because that's natural.

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Muddy Creek said:

Jailed for $280: The return of debtors' prisons - CBS News



Republican "War On Women" Is Not A Left-Wing Invention | Research | Media Matters for America



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14evangelicals-t.html?pagewanted=all



On Faith Panelists Blog: God's Batterers: When Religion Subordinates Women, Violence Follows - Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite



Not really. There's no rubbish to the evangelicals pushing to stop a woman's right to birth control and abortion, either. Those opposing these rights are white men in the church and their submissive wives nodding.

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Ray410 said:

And you find that to be equivalent to having your daughter stoned to death because she was raped?

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Graffias said:

And, of course, nothing needs to be done to stop violence against men, because that's natural.

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