Reuters reported that a woman in Pakistan was gang-raped, by village jury order, “to atone for her brother’s alleged affair with a girl from a different tribe.”
How the fuck does a society, no matter how small, get so twisted that this could ever be considered acceptable? There is no defense for this. None. It’s good that the Pakistani Supreme Court has become involved, and I’ll for damn sure follow the story to see if justice is even remotely served. Humanity is endlessly disappointing, to say the least.
If this is what I suspect it is there was already another pit thread about it (mentioning gang-raping your sister in the title) and it was mentioned that there was not a society per se which endoresed this, but rather a small group of individuals ala Jonestown.
Oh-- I didn’t see the other Pit thread, but I’ve been mostly offline recently. Anyway, I wasn’t condemning Pakistani society as a whole, just the village’s particular one. Hence my, “no matter how small” comment: they are their own society. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a group of people under the sway of a particularly charismatic/psychotic cult leader, ala Jonestown. This is a whole village that acted in accordance to the directives of village leaders. To me, it’s by far a different animal from Heaven’s Gate or Branch Davidian or what have you. Cults I can comprehend. Rape under the guise of lawfulness I can’t.
I find citing Jones himself for Jonestown to miss the point, though… charismatic leader or no, what we have is a small group of decidedly wierd individuals doing things the rest of us find to be beyond reproach.
Well, given your disdain for moral relativism I guess so.
You are very much mistaken. Under Islamic law rape is not “the woman’s fault” and in fact rape is considered to be very wrong in which all rapists are to be executed.
I remember from a course I took on religious/cultural law the prof saying something about the odd restrictions placed on a woman’s role in society.
Basically: If the woman was raped she was in a place she shouldn’t be, like not in the home and not near her male relatives. And she would suffer the punishment for adultery, aka stoning.
Or it could have been if a married woman was raped she was guilty of adultery.
One of those two.
Now the problem is I can’t remember if it was a RELIGIOUS dohicky, or a cultural one. But I do remember it being from a group of people in the middle east or western asia, both places with large muslim populations. And I also vaguely remember stoning being a punishment for quite a lot of things in the middle east.
And I was also trying to indelicately point out that it could either be islamic law, or it could be cultural law in a muslim population.
I was just throwing out another odd tidbit of justice from the more or less same geographical region (we had a great debate about it. Nothing like english lawyers to argue about punishment)
Well, talking about the bible after a lynching wouldn’t particularly bother me. I don’t buy into that either. We’ll have to have saudidope some day. I suspect it’ll be a bit quieter than most though.
The problem being that, under Sharia law, a woman’s word is inherently less reliable than a man’s. If a man rapes a woman without any witnesses, and the woman publicly accuses him of rape, his word is taken over hers that it was consensual, and she’s just confessed to adultery, for which the penalty is death.
This is The Prophet’s haddith:
Underlining is mine. Since two women equal one man, where testimony is concerned, the testimony of a woman who is raped is equal to half that of the man who raped her.
[if the originally posted by Mohammed joke is offensive to you, Efrem, I’ll email a mod and ask them to change it]
This whole situation is just awful. I know I’m viewing this from a 21st Century Western perspective, but I don’t care what someone has done, it does not justify raping innocent folks who’ve committed no crime and who have no legal redress or even means to physically defend themselves against mob rule, and in the case of these poor women and the boy who’ve been raped, they were subjected to mob rule. IMHO the folks who stood back and watched it happen are just as guilty as the actual rapists, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves! I’m just floored by the fact that no one moved to help these poor women who had committed no crime and the 11 year old boy who had not been convicted of any crime and that it was possibly because they themselves were afraid of having the crowd punish them for trying to come to the aid of innocent people. Or, if the crowd didn’t help because they believed that these women and the boy deserved to be punished, then that’s even more fucked up. Them folks need to step back and take a good look at themselves and the culture of terror and repression they are perpetuating because something ain’t addin’ up right. How can anyone live in peace, spread love, and have any kind of community that can progress if men can just terrorize women, children, and generally folks who are of lesser status whenever they want to under the so-called “auspices” of tribal law? I detest killing and violence, but I kind of wish in this case that rather than executing the rapists, they’d castrate them and put them in jail for life, leaving them plenty of time to ponder the error of their ways.
And another thing. I am just tired of seeing folks just coming up with these random numbers to justify the erroneous assumption that men are superior to women. Why is it that it takes the word of 2 women to equal the word of 1 man?! I mean if folks are going to go all hog wild assigning crazy numbers and shit, why isn’t it that it takes the word of 5 women to equal that of 1 man, or what about 3.7 women to equal 1 man? What’s so special about the number 2? Or why isn’t it that it’d take the word of 5 men to equal the word of one woman, or 3.7 men to equal that of 1 woman, or even the word of 2 men to equal the word of 1 woman? All of this makes about as much sense as saying that enslaved African Americans were 3/5 human. I’m still trying to figure out where that particular number came from. [sniff] What is going on with all these random numbers that folks are just throwing around? I know I can’t count, but even to me this just doesn’t make any damn sense at all, and I don’t care if Mohammed, Buddha, God, Jesus Christ, the Supreme Court, or Joe Blow on the street is credited with saying it. There’s no empirical evidence nor justification within the bounds of reason for folks believing that mess, and it just hurts my logical sensibilities and frightens the hell out of me to think that so many folks do believe it. :mad:
Been a while since history class, but IIRC the 3/5 compromise was negotiated. States with a lot of slaves wanted the slaves to count toward congressional representation, and the non-slave states wanted to only count free people, as slaves were "property", not people. I think it was just used to determine reps in Congress.
I know I can’t count, but even to me this just doesn’t make any damn sense at all, and I don’t care if Mohammed, Buddha, God, Jesus Christ, the Supreme Court, or Joe Blow on the street is credited with saying it. There’s no empirical evidence nor justification within the bounds of reason for folks believing that mess, and it just hurts my logical sensibilities and frightens the hell out of me to think that so many folks do believe it. :mad: