Reply #10: Treat women's rights as seriously as we treat racism? [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Recall all the pressure that was put on South Africa to end apartheid?

Years ago, I read a newspaper column about the lack of women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and the columnist asked how the world would respond if those same restrictions were applied, not to women, but to a minority race.

How would the world respond if, say, a country required racial minority people of both sexes to veil their faces in public, if it didn't allow racial minority people to attend schools with the majority population or to drive or to travel without the permission of a majority population "master" or to ride the same buses as the majority population or marry without the permission of their majority population "master" and to have their "master" allowed to kill them for violating those restrictions?

That sounds a lot like the restrictions that apartheid-era South Africa actually placed on its black residents, and the world was rightly outraged, but when Saudi Arabia or Taliban-era Afghanistan places the same restrictions on the female half of its population, that's "culture."

The key is not whether a standard of human rights is "Western" but whether the people in the dominant roles would like being put under the same restrictions that they impose on the people in the subordinate roles. South African whites would not have liked being told that they were forbidden to work in certain occupations. Saudi men would not like being confined to their houses unless they had specific permission from a female relative to leave and were required to wear a heavy black veil.

I've always thought that an apt punishment for the Taliban leaders would be to force them to live the rest of their lives under the same restrictions that they imposed on the female half of the Afghan population: virtual house arrest.