We Can Work It Out - Politics & Philosophy | Page 71 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Of course I don’t think that of you, @Dark Overlord, I was merely pointing out that maybe that opinion wasn’t fully thought through.

You make the point that you were talking about reverse discrimination but that is what fighting discrimination against one group inevitably leads to.

Men for many years, centuries, have held the power and codified the law. As women have gained a bigger political voice, they have started to object to how those laws treat and affect them, feeling discriminated against.

In the case of MR, married women felt they were being discriminated against because it wasn’t recognised as a crime but was instead a man’s conjugal rights that the woman had agreed to in the marriage contract. When the idea that was put forward by brave campaigning women that the marriage contract did not offer a blanket agreement to sex on demand, and that a married woman could say no, there were many men who objected and still do – as shown by the amount of States in the US that refuse to treat rape equally, not discriminating between someone who is married to the offender, met them in a bar that night and agreed to a lift home, or were dragged down an alley by a complete stranger.

There are, unfortunately, men who believed, and still believe, that making MR a criminal offence discriminated against their view of their conjugal rights. Reverse discrimination at its most basic, supporting the victim rather than the perpetrator, switching from ignoring MR to making it a crime, where men who believe (and there are too many) raping the wife is their right start finding themselves in a cell with Big Frank.

Some religious/political views are best driven underground. Brunei recently tried to bring in stoning to death for gay sex, which they cited Islamic religious texts for. Saudi Arabia didn’t allow women to go out, drive, or travel without permission of a male relative. Your religious views should never supersede someone else’s civil rights.

I was illustrating the extremes of where the religious/political voice can take a society, @Beatlebug, when exempted from discrimination law. Appalled as I was by Brunei attempting to bring in stoning, they backed down in the face of international protest, I’m as equally appalled by the male servitude women in many Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, have been forced to live because of beliefs.

Reasonably sure you would feel oppressed if you lived in a society where your every action was dictated by, and needed the permission of, the male head of the family. And this is nothing to do with Islamic cultures really, because it’s easy to find Christian cultures as oppressive but we don’t consider them the other. Many of the most oppressive laws against same-sex relationships, including the death penalty, are found in African countries with strong Christian beliefs that are often stoked up by financial support from evangelical Right Wing American groups.

My mother always used to say on theft when I was caught taking a few pence from her purse, as kids are wont to do, you take 1p or a million pounds, you’re still a thief. You discriminate against people’s sexuality and call for them to be stoned, or you believe your 50-year-old daughter can’t leave the house without her 10-year-old brother’s permission, you’re oppressing people’s rights.

It should never be about the scale of the bigoted response, but always about having your choices about you and your life taken away by others.

For me, @Dark Overlord, at the extremes of any system of belief, whether it be religious/spiritual or political, people will always find something to support their own prejudices, based on ideologies (often) from hundreds of years ago – and often ignoring that it wasn’t the message of the founder of those beliefs.

After all, if we take Christianity as an example, given I have spent my life in a so-called Christian society, and though now have rejected the religious texts as nothing more than interesting historical and philosophical documents.

What were the teachings of Jesus Christ, which should be the most important words in the book?

To turn the other cheek, to love your neighbour as yourself, to love your enemies, to not condemn and do harm unless you are completely free of wrongdoing.

Too many Christians do not follow the teachings of Christ, but instead find excuses for their prejudices in those early founders of the Church whose distortions of his teachings fill much of the New Testament, or reach back into the Old Testament – a set of beliefs which Christ stated he had come to overturn.

There’s too many who preach distortions – inciting hatred, division and prejudice; all twisting and distorting the thoughts, observations and beliefs of some of histories great philosophers to enrich themselves, both politically and financially.

“It’s the Word of God !” for me, I’m sorry, is not enough of an excuse as the Word of God is too often a pick and mix even among those who follow the same God .

The law should apply equally to all, otherwise it is not a law.