I’m willing to stipulate that unborn women have a right to not be sold into marriages against their wills, and a right to not be forced carry a pregnancy to term against their wills.
Now that’s just crazy talk! There are icky old men out there panting for their fetal brides, and who are we to say them nay?
I also have to say that someday I expect some fundie scientist to figure out how to make sure all female babies are actually born pregnant. I will probably go ahead and kill that guy.
There is a somewhat more eloquent (minus the bombing random innocent people to oblivion part) version of the OPs rant by Sam Harris in a TED talk titled ‘Science can answer moral questions’
I’m not sure if I’m reading this right, but are you saying:
that any man who gets a woman pregnant is only doing it to ‘keep her in line’, and not out of a genuine shared desire for children?
and
that any woman who has children has given up on making social, financial, or political contributions to society?
Look, I am firmly pro-choice (and female), and I would love to see abortions freely available for anyone who chose them anywhere in the world. But I don’t think the attitude, seemingly held by many fervent pro-choicers and feminists, that choosing to have children is keeping womankind in the dark ages is helpful. If you want women to have choice, you have to accept that some women are going to choose to get married and have children, and even to stay at home while their husband works. It is obviously ideal when women can attain an education, hold positions of power, etc. (which is possible even with children), and I’d love to see that be possible all over the world, but not everyone wants those things. If the final goal of your brand of feminism is that all women should be eschewing traditional roles, then it is restrictive in its own way. Forcing everyone into making the choice you feel is right is just the same as them having no choice at all.
Evidentally, there aren’t those rights in Afghanistan for women. Obviously, you think there should be, and that it’s wrong to maim genitals, force someone to submit to rape, etc, but when you say that basic human rights are “real”, what do you mean? Do you mean anything beyond just that you have moral objections to those practices?
You’re really asserting people don’t have inherent natural rights over their own body? Were slaves rights being violated even though the government allowed it?
You really think woman don’t have a right to protection from what this thread is about?
I’m asserting that people don’t have inherent natural rights at all. “Rights” are a moral construct and people have the rights that the society says they have. The woman in the thread you linked to has the power to go to the Spanish police and get the person who did that to her arrested, and if he’s convicted, he’ll be sent to prison. I think that’s a good thing, and I think that its bad that the women in Afghanistan can’t do that, but I’m not going to pretend that that’s anything other than my subjective moral viewpoint.
So when you say, “Were slaves rights being violated even though the government allowed it?”, I don’t know how to answer that question. What’s the difference between me saying “yes” and “no”?
Many years ago I opened a thread similar to this one where I called a culture that practiced the atrocities the OP mentioned “sub-human”, and I caught a shitful of grief from the SDDB community. So find that thread in the archives and you can consider all the posters who piled on me as “defenders of cultural relativism”.
How should I know what thread you’re referring to? What were the “practices,” and what was the content and context of those responses?
My guess is no one was defending whatever the particular practice was, but your generalization of all people of a similar culture (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it was Muslims), and the racially charged nature of a word like “sub-human” being applied to an ethnicity.
Am I close? If not, you’ll have to link the thread.
You are close. I called the people who desecrated American soldier corpses “sub-humans”, and got threatened by a mod who’s name I will not mention. I’m surprised the OP hasn’t been likewise theatened.
So, it appears people cannot vent here in the pit without inviting debate; I stopped trying after ranting about the Egyptian who was going to be beheaded for sorcery in Saudi Arabia, and again, the cultural apologists appeared. But I had/have no desire to debate my opinion. If I wanted to do that I would have opened a GD thread.
Maybe the OP would have been better off in GD.
