The SGP is a party in the Netherlands that is of strict Christian Reformed persuasion, and as such by its statute prohibits women to be full members of the party or put themselves up for election.
Political parties are eligible to receive state subsidies for covering operation costs. For the SGP, that amounts to 1.1 million euro per year.
Yesterday, the Dutch court ruled that since the Netherlands committed itself to an international treaty to prevent discrimination against women, these subsidies should no longer be given to the SGP, per immediately.
The ramification of this verdict is that women’s rights come before freedom of religion. It is expected that the SGP will appeal, partly because of this ramification.
I do recognise that it is a complex issue. As membership is voluntary and you assume that the women involved agree with the party’s statutes, you could say that they are following a mutually accepted agreement.
However, if that is the case, I think they shouldn’t worry about it being in their statutes. If everyone is happy with the way it runs, then the women simply don’t put themselves up for election, and nobody votes for them when they do. This way, there is a much better guarantee that there isn’t active discrimination going on.
My first reaction, to be honest, was ‘woohoo!’. Discrimination of women and fundamentalist religion (I’ve long recognised that this form of Christianity is, including the threats they pose to general health because they refuse vaccins and such) don’t generally bode well for human rights.
I don’t see any problem with basic human rights trumping “religious freedom”. If the state subsidizes the party, then it has to play by the state’s rules. Can the party keep it’s rules against women if it doesn’t take money from the state?
Not to be rude or anything, but we Americans get a lot of grief about being backward, that the Dutch are so progressive, yada yada, yayda, but I can’t imagine a political party in the US that didn’t allow women to be “full members”. Is this unique to the Netherlands, or does one find it in other places in Europe.
Well, if we had a true multi-party system, it’s not hard to imagine a polticial party comprised primarily, say, of fundamentalist Christians or Muslims, that would at least wish to prohibit women as members. Such wishes might run afoul of the U.S. Constitution, but it seems possible.
(I grew up in a fundmentalist evangelical “Christian” church, and women were not allowed to be church elders, to speak in front of the congregation on Biblical topics, to lead congregational prayer or Adult Bible studies, etc. The church disinvited a speaker, whom the church leadership had appreciated and respected greatly on previous speaking occasions–because he begun doing his speaker tours with a woman. I remember many members of this church–which by the way remains one of the largest churches in Reno, NV–strongly advocating that women should have no place in politics. I can’t tell you how glad I am to be free of this church!)
The unequal status of women, especially when mandated (pun unintended) by religion, is little better than apartheid. Even separate but equal would be a step forward. Supremacists were not reticent in invoking God’s Word and the “natural order” in defending their twisted beliefs (all, if not most, cash based). They still aren’t.
Who believes that the end of slavery and apartheid (officially, at any rate) ended freedom of religion? Who could conceive of a political party other than the Taliban advocating male supremacy and receiving public money, including cash from half the public it seeks to subjugate? Obviously, the Dutch. The SGP sounds like some paleolithic remnant of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church and the National Party, its members foaming at the mouth as they lose even more control over their ugly little lives and their wives. The next thing women will want is to learn to read, walk unaccompanied in the streets, equal pay for equal work, then the vote! God’s retribution upon you, yay, upon the seventh generation of the seventh generation!
Not yanking away the cash trough speaks more loudly than yanking it. An attack on freedom of religion? Jesus H.
That it takes the Netherlands the embarrassment of otherwise breaching an international treaty to kill this odious law is worthy of a thread in the pit.
On the other side of the coin, here in Canada we have a boy who religiously insists on wearing a scarf encasing a knife on his head while playing in a sanctioned soccer tournament. The referee who insisted on refusing to let him play has been roundly criticized in the media.
That’s hardly the ramification of the verdict. Freedom of religion means that you can believe whatever you want, it doesn’t mean the government has to pay you to believe it.
If the party was declared illegal, it was involuntarily disbanded, its members were incarcerated, the church was broken up and no longer allowed to meet because of their beliefs about women… but that’s not happening, is it?
True, but your freedom of religion is not absolute. It doesn’t give you the right to infringe on the rights of others.
For example, your religion may teach that you have to go out and kill ten people before you die in order to get to Heaven. Does that give you the right to commit murder?
No, but in principle, political parties have a right to state subsidies. That the SGP has to forego this right as above, does seem to indicate that women’s rights come before religion here.
As for some of the comments on the Netherlands, Knorf has it right. That is not to say that I think this shouldn’t have been done a lot earlier … But it is partly because of these ramifications that politicians have shied away from dealing with it.
(for the record, I don’t think that’s an excuse though for doing it so late, and that’s why I posted it. I know I give a lot of criticism on American and global issues. But don’t forget that membership of this party is voluntary, and this is a country where women can marry each other and have children, too )
There are one or two other scandals here that you could see in a larger philosophical context (one of them coming to a close after four years) and I will post on them later also)
This demonstrates why government subsidies for political parties are a bad idea. The government must choose between; on the one hand, providing funds to people for the propagation of any views whatsoever, no matter how distasteful; and on the other hand, choosing which political views are and are not acceptable.
Remember we are speaking across an ocean, and meanings do not always map exactly. If it is conditional upon meeting a test (of need, of equal rights, etc.), then to Americans it’s not a “right” but a benefit or even a privilege. In the USA, conversely, such a party would likely make it a point of pride to NOT accept federal money, in order to retain autonomy.
Possibly. The only actual US example I know of is the Libertarian Party’s rejection of federal campaign funds, but in that case there is a direct ideological conflict between the core principles of the party and the very existence of the funding program. There isn’t any such opposition in this case; the issues of sexism and government funding are orthogonal to one another.
Since few third parties in the US ever get to the point where they’d qualify for the funds in the first place, the data is rather sparse.
In this case, we are also talking about a party that only holds 2 seats in Parliament. Although I do not think its impossible for them to raise the money - there are often affluent people among the very religious - the subsidies make up most of their year budget (I think 1.1 million out of a total year budget of 1.4 million), so they may also consider changing their statutes.
In effect, this could mean the end of the party as we know it, because ideological discussions alone could mean a split in the party. Ultimately I think they will just change their statutes, but probably not before seeing this go to the highest court.
But there IS a tradition in the US of institutions that won’t toe the federal line for religious reasons (e.g. Bob Jones University) foregoing federal funding rather than changing their doctrines.
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