Saudi Arabia to Head a UN Human Rights Council Panel

Remember my friendly alien from outer space?  The one who tries to make sense of earth-people values and norms and customs?

Suppose I told this alien (possibly of no biological sex or of what's called race in loose human parlance) that human rights are supposed to be something earth's countries, or at least some of them, really care about.  How, then, would I explain this piece of news?

Last week’s announcement that Saudi Arabia — easily one of the world’s most brutally repressive regimes — was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. That reaction was triggered for obvious reasons. Not only has Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days), and not only is it serially flogging dissidents, but it is reaching new levels of tyrannical depravity as it is about to behead and then crucify the 21-year-old son of a prominent regime critic, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was convicted at the age of 17 of engaging in demonstrations against the government.

Then there's of course the obvious problem of women's rights, or rather, lack of such rights in Saudi Arabia.  Greenwald doesn't mention that part.  Maybe because it's too obvious. 

Greenwald's piece continues by linking to an interview with a US State Department spokesperson, Mark Toner.  You should read the interview.  I bet you don't know whether to cry or to laugh.  That is, if you actually care about human rights.

If you only care about oil, well, then the interview is pretty understandable.  You have to say something to defend this bizarre choice, to hide the fact that the powerful defend those who have something material they want.

I feel sorry for the job Mr. Toner had there.  But this particular farce puts into rather clear light the question how much human rights, including women's rights, actually matter in the top games those powerful boys (and a few gals) play with our lives.

The Pope Speaks. Echidne Whines.

If you didn't watch Pope Francis' speech to the US Congress you can read it here.  It looks like* the lefties and liberals liked it, the righties and conservatives, not so much.  There wasn't enough on the control of the vaginas or the defense of traditional marriage (with male dominance) for the latter, while the former liked the references to caring for the poor, accepting immigrants,  and the need to fight climate change.

I liked the caring tone of the speech (perhaps because that was missing in the speeches of the last few Popes and because religions in my view should be caring), and you must be a brand new reader here if you don't know that my views on income inequality, wars and climate change agree with what Francis said.

On the other hand, my eagle eye did not miss the quick references to what the conservatives wanted to hear, about the sanctity of human life (to be read as opposition to abortion though Francis segued from that to urging a global ban on capital punishment) and the  reference to the importance of "family" (a word which means very different things to different ears in the audience, one of those meanings being opposition to same-sex marriages**).

Still, the Pope honored three men and one woman as examples of great Americans!  Girls got included!

That reference was to Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

One aspect of the speech looks problematic to me.  That is Francis' plea for people to combat climate change, when it is combined with his church's anti-contraception stance.

That's because all people on earth ultimately want the western standards of living.  To achieve those without destroying the planet in the process requires global commitment to smaller family sizes.***

It's a bizarre feeling to write about the three big Guy Religions (Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent,  Judaism) for someone like me, because once you have seen the missing women in many religious hierarchies (which decide religious women's proper roles, their right to use contraception etc) you can't stop seeing them.

But if you point out that omission you sound whiny, right?  Why can't Echidne rejoice over this Pope?  Why can't she be content with all the good words that come out of his mouth? ****

My answer to that one I have learned from women's history:  If you don't demand your rights you won't get them, ever.  So someone needs to keep up the whining.



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*  Based on surfing in various places, not on proper research.

** And the link between women's roles and the family.  The Catholic Church is as big on motherhood as the American fundamentalists and much of Islam (check the Iranian constitution, for example).  Those references to "motherhood" mean more than urging women to give birth.  They also mean that women should focus on the family and that when women's rights and their family duties clash it is the latter which should win. ---  As an aside, it is almost always family vs. women's rights in these religious debates, not family vs. men's rights, because the traditional view of family places women firmly and almost entirely in only that context.

***  The alternative ways to save the environment are simply not practical:  Most people will not accept a minimal lifestyle just so that there could be both a healthy globe and more people.  The idea that rich countries should cut back their consumption to much lower levels will not fly politically, the idea that poor countries should just stay consuming little will not fly politically, either, not to even mention the ethical problems in that.

The only realistic approach to me seems to be to cut back on the overall global population.  If we don't do it through birth control, then it will happen through resource wars (Syria began that way).  And yes, I'm aware that the global population growth rate may have slowed down.  But the population numbers which can be sustained in a world where everyone has a good standard of living and where the environment is also taken care of is probably lower than whatever the current numbers might be.

The Catholic Church's anti-contraception stance makes keeping the planet healthy much harder.

**** Or I guess I could just pack up my bags and surrender to the view that the Guy Religions just don't believe that women and men should have equal rights.

Speed Posts 9/23/15: On Upward Income Redistribution, Women's Leisure Time and the Dalai Lama

1.  Economics geeks and nerds should read this article  about the possible role of government regulation in enabling rent capture and how that might fit into the income inequality puzzle in the United States.  I'm not agreeing with everything in the piece, but it has some food for further thought.

2.  A piece about leisure time and women with family obligations from Australia.  It makes the point that leisure for women in that position comes in tiny driplets, not really amenable to being used for rest, recreation or creativity, and suggests a few correctives.  It made me think about how much of this is about control, both at home and at work.  If your employer at work won't give you a firm schedule beforehand you will have very little control over some parts of your life.  How to organize for childcare when you don't know if you are working?

A similar problem at home has to do with the on-call nature of parenting.  If only one parent is responsible for it then she or he will find great difficulty with finding longer chunks of leisure time.

The wider links are naturally to things like annual vacations in the US (required ones being rarer than hen's teeth), the expectation of increasingly long working hours for everyone, and what happens when all these clash with the traditional gendered beliefs about who is to care for the children and the home.

3.  The Dalai Lama and a joke about any female ever planning to reincarnate in his role:  She needs to be attractive.

Which makes me think of the oddness of all those earlier reincarnations happening pretty close to the place where the previous Dalai Lama died, and always suitably in boys whose parents would be OK with the honor they were accorded as having produced someone so important.  And also of the oddness of the Catholic Church on earth deciding who has become a saint, and how they know.

We Need to Make A Profit. On Daraprim.

Pyrimethamine, better known under its trade name of Daraprim, is a drug developed in the 1940s by Gertrude Elion, a Nobel Prize winning scientist. It is used to treat protozoal infections and also as an anti-malaria drug.

Until quite recently, the US price of Daraprim was quite low.  But that has changed:

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The former hedge fund manager referred to in that quote is Martin Shkreli.  He justifies the fifty-fold price increase by the need to turn a profit:

On Monday, Shkreli said: “We need to turn a profit on the drug.” He defended the decision by telling Bloomberg News that newer versions of the drug needed to be developed and his was the first company “to really focus on this product” for decades and that such research was extremely expensive.
He also promised: “If you cannot afford the drug we will give it away for free.” Shkreli also said the drug was currently underpriced.

This whole setup is confusing for several reasons.

Religions and Gender. More Critique.

1. Frances Kissling is an expert on the Catholic Church, and her thoughts on the Pope's statement about temporary clemency for women who have had abortions is well worth reading, because it has meat and gristle in it:

 The church, at its best, is not about punishment. But unfortunately, when it comes to women and sex, the church is rarely at its best. After all, there are only seven sins for which one might be automatically excommunicated—and ordinary murder of people, and even massacres, are not among them. Only abortion and an attempt to assassinate the pope might get you automatically excommunicated.

But the question of automatic excommunication is more complex than that.  Read Frances on the whole topic.

Elsewhere  I read that women in priesthood is permanently off the table, that god always intended priesthood to be reserved for men alone.  And the current Pope agrees:

 In reality, the letter offers false compassion. It’s one of many missteps this pope has made in what is, I’m sure, a sincere effort to understand and honor women. For instance, he has insisted that the subject of women priests is off the table. And while he speaks of putting more women in positions of power in the church, he rejected the idea of appointing women to head Vatican agencies as tokenism. He talks about the “feminine genius” of women who are kind, conciliatory and self-sacrificing, and he says we need a new theology of women (not persons)—but he does nothing about it.

2.  If the Catholic Church is problematic for women's equality, most mosques are worse.  Men and women are segregated inside the mosques, the spaces allocated for women look to be much smaller and placed so that it's hard to hear the imam (always a man), and conservative preachers tell women not to leave their homes even to go to mosque.  I first read stories about a proposed women's mosque in Bradford, UK last May.  The reason for the idea of a women's mosque:

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.

The title of the linked article is worth thinking about a bit more: 

This mosque is for WOMEN: Brit Muslims challenge sexism with UK’s first female-only mosque

Here we enter a fascinating world where defining sexism is hard.  If this mosque is supposed to be for the most traditional women believers what they probably already believe would by my definition be extremely sexist. 

For example, a belief in divinely ordered extreme sex segregation everywhere* creates big problems for women's equality, and a sex-segregated system of mosques wouldn't challenge that, at least in the first round.**  And I'm not at all sure that a traditional female believer would accept the idea that other women could lead prayers.

In any case, the August article on the women's mosque proposal seems to show a fairly watered down version, with only the mosque management being female and the sex-segregated prayer spaces more equally placed.

I wish to finish with an explanation of the title of this post:

It's short-hand for looking at the nasty underbellies of major religions which also do a lot of good, but which truly make gender equality incredibly difficult to achieve, because gender inequality is seen as divinely ordained, and the acceptable versions are those which were most common in Middle Eastern societies about two thousand years ago.

 


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*Based initially on what the Koran told Prophet Mohammed's wives to do, and that in a war camp.
**In the longer run it could allow for a different interpretation of the various holy texts.

This mosque is for WOMEN: Brit Muslims challenge sexism with UK’s first female-only mosque - See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf

Muslim Women’s Council boss Bana Gora says the mosque would be “run by women” and is in response to inadequate facilities in Islamic religious buildings dissuading females from attending.
The radical move, to be carried out in Bradford, promises to challenge traditions in the Muslim community and could provoke controversy.
Many traditional Muslim women living in Britain pray in their homes because they are dissuaded from attending mosques by conservative scholars.
- See more at: http://muslimglobalnews.com/breaking-news/this-mosque-is-for-women-brit-muslims-challenge-sexism-with-uks-first-female-only-mosque/#sthash.QQdckrD4.dpuf