| Subject: Shades of Grey |
Author:
Mark7
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Date Posted: 00:52:01 08/11/01 Sat
In reply to:
JeffF
's message, "Re: Religious State and the Law" on 11:30:20 08/09/01 Thu
I agree with you, and the thread in question, that killing a woman for not veiling herself when in public is way above a $200 fine for exposing nude on a Florida beach.
I also agree that most Islamic countries are very tough in enforcing morality on women. Most people adhering to those customs will tell you they are just doing their duty in enforcing morality as they know it.
However, if I remember correclty, morality does come from the one and only same God in the Bible, and since it is not a subjective idea that can be changed rightly or wrongly by peoples around the world, one may say they are just receiving God's message. By the way, Turkey is much more secular than some Arab countries (G. Bush's senior friends and allies, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia come to my mind).
Every morality around the world includes gender provisions. These gender provisions are definitions and prescriptions of how men and women should act as men or women, and every culture has means of moral enforcement of these rules.
As I said before, it is easy to see the abnormal gender moral definitions of different cultures, than to see our own gender biass.
We have expectations from both men and women. One thing I noticed when first in the US was that many American women do not wear panties. That seemed kinky in the beginning.
Many European women do not wear bras under their shirts, and that would be scandalous in the US.
Killing women is an extreme form of enforcing gender morality. Thousands of women die every year because of it.
Let me give you an equally deadly example of gender biass in our culture:
The military draft. Although not practiced anymore, it is technically still legal.
Millions of men in the Western civilized Europe and the US have died, and many still die, because they are expected to play their gender role in war, regardless of weather they agree or not with the war itself, or with their own capability to carry it on.
Many other men are scarred for life because of physical and emotional trauma associated with forceful military service.
I would bet that 10 times more men had died this century because they were expected as men to serve in the military, than women had died because they were expected to be chaste and act the part their societies have assigned them as women.
Most people would find my post and associations absurd. Of course they died, silly, they were men, they were supposed to be drafted, and die heroes for their countries.
Step back from your culture, and pretend to be an alien from Mars, where there are no genders and people reproduce from stemcells.
You will find that the military draft is a more extreme version of enforcing gender definition, then any other on Earth if you judge by the number of involuntary lives lost.
I don't mean to take away from the thread, just to add a spin to it, that I am sure not many people thought about.
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