While all of us are distracted by the events in Iran, we would do well to pray for the citizens of that great civilisation that have fallen under the thumb of the existing mullahs. Whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is really in charge or is the puppet of others, the form of Islam to which Iranians are forced to submit is criminal in its human rights abuses. Throwing it off, though, runs the standard risk of allowing the pendulum to swing wildly in another wrong direction, but such is human nature.
Kathleen Parker has an interesting essay in the Washington Post that shines a light on the implications for women and it leaves the door open to this exact possibility (which, unfortunately, she doesn't see as problematic).
Beneath the surface of news blasts covering Iran's tainted elections, riots, protester deaths and government crackdowns, a subtext of women's rights is emerging. It is a subtext only to the extent that women's oppression isn't often acknowledged directly -- not even by the leader of the free world. But human rights are at the core of what is occurring now.
A government that oppresses its people can only sustain itself with violence, as the world is witnessing yet again as thousands take to Iran's streets. And, in Iran as elsewhere in the Muslim world, violence against women -- as well as against homosexuals and others considered inferior according to the mullahs' masculinist standards -- isn't only permitted but justified with religious doctrine.
You see, the standard problem with "masculinist standards" (MS) is that they are fought with "feminist standards" (FS) and neither of these are healthy (using shorthand for brevity). Since MS are grounded on power, mysogyny, bullying tactics and insensitivity to the other, those pushing back with FS employ the same arsenal, but simply exchange a "grrl flag" on the top of the hill for the discarded "boy flag."
[A previous illustration of this was the plea by Pope John Paul II to the communist east. He begged them, in their rush to throw off the yoke of their oppression, not to embrace the hedonism and materialism of the west, which was simply another lie -- and yet they didn't listen.]
The existing morality police are horrific bullies, and the oppression of women under Islam is ubiquitous, but scrambling for free sexual expression and homosexual rights is simply a different misguided path that we would beg these women to avoid. The fundamental lie that we attribute to the prophet Mohammad is founded in the marriage bond -- which makes women the property of the men in their lives. Wrong and bad. Only when men and women embrace each other as equals, in a bond that indicates mutual respect and protects the inherent good of each will society prosper.
We don't need one more corner of the globe that castrates its morality police so that it can run full bore down the path of the sexual revolution. The existing MS has installed the former, but a different MS could just as well love the folly of the latter. Neither honour the dignity of the human person, serve the authentic needs of women or create the fabric necessary to a culture of life. We must pray that the feminists who put their trust in a FS have a change of heart and come to see chastity before marriage, and the mutual and exclusive gift of self within marriage as the bedrock of the new Iran.
[No assumptions can be made about this woman's motives. God grant her peace.]
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