Thursday 11 June 2015

Congratulations, you are a Feminist!

It irritates me greatly when women (and others say), I don’t believe in feminism. The fact is that virtually everybody you meet is a feminist. If you believe that women should be treated equally both culturally and before the law - you are a feminist. Feminism is one of the foundations of our society. To say, “I'm not a feminist,” is untrue, offensive and stupid - unless you are a bigot that believes that men, or women, are superior. Which I guess puts you in the “stupid” category.

You hear the same thing about liberalism - or “the left.” The stupid thing is if you believe in democracy, equality before the law, the rule of law, the separation of church and state, freedom of religion and free markets, you are a liberal - whether you like it or not. So all the things that the so-called right-wing believe in today were once positions held by the radical left. The right and left wing of our political parties are closer together now than they ever have been - so close in fact that somebody from the 17 hundreds wouldn't recognise any difference between the two.

Back then the right wing believed that there were varying qualities of humans. There were those that were born with the qualities of leadership. Only those who inherited titles had rights. Then only people who own land could vote. Eventually the idea of liberalism formed and we ended up with the system we have today, but I do not believe this means that we cannot make the system even better.

The major problem with the world today, besides global warming, is hypocrisy. There are now many peaceful western nations that continue to prop up hideous regimes. You don’t hear anything about the way women are treated in countries such as Saudi Arabia. They don’t have any of the values that make the Western democracies such great places to live. I'm not saying we should invade the Middle East and convert them - that has never worked in the past and only makes the situation even worse than it already is. But we need to stop accepting that the people in power these few countries can continue abusing their people. This is the real cause of terrorism in my opinion. We also need to be wary and protect the rights that our ancestors won for us.

Arabs, Muslims and others see what goes on in the Middle East. They see how Western nations continue to supply state of the art weaponry to countries that do not respect any of our values - this includes Israel. Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza do not have any rights that are respected. They can be stopped, searched and imprisoned at any time. They can’t vote even though they are occupied by Israel - they are non-citizens in their own country.

Many of those on the right continue to support Israel even though they do not represent the liberal values they supposedly believe.

Many of the colonies that went on to form the United States of America were founded by people fleeing religious persecution. The Bill of Rights was drafted to protect people from all sorts of government interference in their lives, protecting them from things like religious persecution and inequality. Yet today in Israel people are being unfairly treated simply because they belong to the wrong religion.

So feminists, liberals stop using those labels as a slur because they describe you - all of us for that matter (unless you have joined Islamic State).

1 comment:

hizzer