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Welcome gentle readers. Today I ask of thee but a kernel of patience whilst I set up the topic at hand.
Teh Role of teh Female in the Religious Stuff.
Religion and Patriarchy actively conspire against the female half of humanity. We have to look no further than Christian Patriarchy over here and Islamic Fundamentalism over there to see the corrosive effects of religion on females (and everyone else). We’ve missed talking about a segment of the world religious community that, despite a different set of ooga-booga beliefs, shockingly manages to codify and practice misogyny with great aplomb.
Orthodox Judaism. And behold yet another goldmine of misogyny in which to revel in! (?) Let’s take a peek at a small sample of what we are talking about:
“During the 1970s feminist critics began to expose the absence of women’s voices within the male-dominated structures promoted by Judaism’s exclusively male-authored texts. Feminists also strove to reconstruct the lost voices of women, trying to recover evidence of women’s history and self-understanding that would allow a more diversified picture of the multiple Judaisms that have flourished throughout the Jewish past. While Judaism traditionally defines itself as a divinely revealed religion, its beliefs and practices have been interpreted and regulated almost exclusively by male authorities until the modern period. Feminist analysis has pointed out that men have created the legal systems articulated in the Mishnah, Talmud, and codes of Jewish law, and acted as supreme arbiters of its interpretation by reserving the rabbinate for men. Courts of Jewish law were historically run by male rabbis, and women were excluded as witnesses in most court cases. In rabbinic law, men may contract a marriage or divorce a wife, but women can neither acquire a husband nor divorce him. Women enter into rabbinic discourse as objects of discussion, when their ritual purity, sexual control, or marital status impinges upon men’s lives.
Many Jewish feminists have suggested that the insistence on overwhelmingly male imagery for God was a deliberate effort to strengthen the male-dominated institutional arrangements of Jewish life and undergird male authority over women in the religious and societal realms. As a result, feminist analysis views Jewish texts with suspicion for their collusion with societal patriarchy in silencing women’s voices, or, even worse, as creating patriarchal oppression and endowing it with the aura of divine sanction. At the same time, some feminists have culled biblical and rabbinic texts to find counter-patriarchal traditions that support principles of justice and equality, or voices of trickster women seeking to correct halakhic inequities (Pardes; Adler). Even as D. Setel argued that the prophet Hosea’s metaphor of Israel as God’s adulterous wife was pornographic, R. Adler noted that God’s reunion with the adulterous Israel, which violates Deuteronomic law (20:4) mandating a husband’s divorce of an adulterous wife, might be understood as a “constructive violation” of Jewish law – “the metaphor that preserves the covenant breaks the law” (Adler, 163–64).”
I gave up with the highlighting and bolding after the whole “objects of discussion” malarkey (lobe blown). Anyhow, now with a little background established we can talk about the Hunger Games.
What?
Ah, progressive religious thought in action.
In another unsurprisingly putrid religious offering, the devout offer a lovely pastiche illustrating the misogyny, pettiness, and insular sectarianism that makes religion so repugnant to the rationally inclined.
“A shy eight-year-old schoolgirl has unwittingly found herself on the front line of Israel’s latest religious war.
Naama Margolese is a ponytailed, bespectacled second-grader afraid of walking to her religious Jewish girls’ school for fear of ultra-Orthodox men who have spat on her and called her a “whore” for dressing “immodestly”.
After significant media attention to the young girl’s plight, thousands came out to protest on Tuesday evening against gender segregation and violence against women at a rally in Beit Shemesh, 30km to the west of Jerusalem.”
These lovely ultra-orthodox men of faith have taken to harassing 8 year old girls because their immodest dress. Bare arms apparently qualify as immodest dress. Of course the gender policing going on here is not new – most religions by default destroy a woman’s autonomy and rights. The neat little twist here is that this is happening in a supposedly secular democratic state.
“Naama’s persecution has drawn new attention to the simmering issue of religious coercion in Israel, and the increasing brazenness by vigilantes from the insular ultra-Orthodox community.
“When I walk to school in the morning I used to get a tummy ache because I was so scared … that they were going to stand and start yelling and spitting,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press news agency on Monday.
“They were scary. They don’t want us to go to the school.”
The new girls’ school that Naama attends in the city of Beit Shemesh is on the border between an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood and a community of modern Orthodox Jewish residents, many of them American immigrants.
The ultra-Orthodox consider the school an encroachment on their territory. Dozens of black-hatted men jeer and physically accost the girls almost daily, the students say. Televised images of Naama sobbing en route to school have shocked many Israelis, elicited statements of outrage from the country’s leadership and sparked a Facebook page with nearly 10,000 followers dedicated to “protecting little Naama”.
“Who’s afraid of an 8-year-old student?” Sunday’s main headline in the leading Yediot Ahronot daily said.”
Let me answer that for you. People so utterly screwed up on the stupid-shitty-ass Koolaid known as religion that they will verbally accost and spit on children because their magic book says so. Actions such as this are so obviously wrong, but the power of faith and religious wankitude allows the believers to soldier on in the face reality and ethical considerations.
“Beit Shemesh’s growing ultra-Orthodox population has erected street signs calling for the separation of sexes on the sidewalks, dispatched “modesty patrols” to enforce a chaste female appearance and hurled stones at offenders.
Walls of the neighbourhood are plastered with signs exhorting women to dress modestly in closed-necked, long-sleeved blouses and long skirts.”
Yep, take that you unseemly, unsightly, unworthy women…cover your shame. I’m thinking the Burka treatment is in order here, lets completely dehumanize women so we can completely strip them of their rights and membership in the human race.
“The Israel police are taking, and will take, action to arrest and stop those who spit, harass or raise a hand. This has no place in a free and democratic state,” he told his cabinet.
The abuse and segregation of women in Israel in ultra-Orthodox areas is nothing new, and critics accuse the government of turning a blind eye.
The ultra-Orthodox are perennial king-makers in Israeli coalition politics – two such parties serve as key members of Netanyahu’s coalition. They receive generous government subsidies, and police have traditionally been reluctant to enter their communities.”
Ah, the reason why the burning stupid remains. Women’s autonomy and rights can happily be thrown under the bus for political expediency. O how odious religion is when given political power and room to exist within a society. Here lies yet another shining example of why states MUST be secular and the boundaries between church and state must be clearly delineated.
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