America is not so terribly different from Afghanistan.
We are seeing a backlash against the modern, diverse, women-empowered, gender flexible cosmopolitan sensibilities.
News and commentary worry about the future state of women in Afghanistan. They will be pulled from schools, returned to the authority of their fathers and brothers, be pushed into forced marriages, returned to being servile baby-makers under the thumb of conservative religious-legal authority. Self-empowered moral scolds--religious vigilantes--will beat and possibly kill women who presume equality and agency.
Afghan men of moral conviction can once again punish people. Women of childbearing age hold a special place in society. Their reproduction can be controlled, indeed commandeered. The Hindustan Times Click reports:
The Taliban, fighting with Afghanistan forces to take control of a large part of the war-torn country, has issued a statement ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45, reports have said. According to reports, the Taliban has promised for them to be married to their fighters and taken to Pakistan's Waziristan, where they will be converted to Islam and reintegrated.
Seen from their point of view, this is re-establishing Afghan greatness. It is submission to God's will, making a more godly country by suppressing modern immorality and empowering everyday citizens to carry out this work. I do not doubt that the Taliban feels fully justified, having won the power to do this after a 20-year war, and with the support of fundamentalist Muslims .
Meanwhile, in Texas.
The Texas legislature figured out a way to ban abortion. It was cleverly done. The law circumvents legal protections for women. If this were a Texas government ban on abortions, enforced by police, the law would trigger constitutional protections of "due process of law" and "equal protection." America is free in part because law and tradition have established there are things the government cannot do.
The mechanism for banning abortion is a bounty paid to citizen complainants who allege that someone assisted an abortion. That person gets a $10,000 award, plus attorney fees. If the complaint is found groundless, there is no cost or consequence. The result is a free-range of potential debilitating lawsuits by citizens against citizens. Citizen vigilantes can do what government cannot.
Who can be sued? Anyone involved in the abortion--the doctor, a clinic and its employees, a spouse, a therapist, someone who drives her to the bus station to travel to Oklahoma--anyone except the woman herself, who might be a sympathetic victim. Vigilante threats work.
I do not doubt that Texas legislators act out of belief that they are doing the godly and moral act--protecting the unborn. They are empowering citizens to carry out the important work of creating public morality. They have power won at the ballot box and no doubt feel fully justified in doing this.
My readers who are appalled by both the Taliban and Texas need to recognize that this is a popular movement, or at least a popular-enough movement. The Taliban entered Kabul to cheering crowds. Not everybody cheered, but enough did. In Texas there is vigorous opposition to the abortion law, but the legislators are aware that enough of the right voters are delighted--the Republican segment of the electorate, especially Evangelical Christians.
Worldwide, there is a backlash against Enlightenment liberalism. People oppose this secular, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic world in which women have equality and agency, and religion is a matter of choice. This modern world is not God-centered, with truth revealed in ancient texts. It is secular and scientific.
Texas is not the Taliban. Texas wants to restore a more godly polity by empowering citizens to stop the immorality of women seeking abortions and independent agency over their own reproduction. By contrast, the Taliban wants to restore a more godly polity by empowering citizens to stop the immorality of women seeking abortions and independent agency over their own reproduction.
See the difference? Hint: there isn't any.
12 comments:
Your final paragraph appears to be an error in editing. Many may miss the profound sarcasm implied. Yes, fear of The Enlightenment in Europe was very much on the minds of New Englanders after our Revolutionary War. After all, most of the colonists in New England came to the New World to escape the repression of their religious views. Those views are a feature of what many envision for America... the patriarchy as laid down in the Bible. They are true believers and Christen soldiers. It is not a new wrinkle or something that given time will diminish. It is now and has always been a feature of the Republican Party implied of expressed.
We are seeing a backlash against the modern, diverse, women-empowered, gender flexible cosmopolitan sensibilities.
Rural people notice that rule by those with “cosmopolitan sensibilities“ at best offers them nothing or (at worst) heedlessly destroys their local economies. If the urban elites cared more about their rural compatriots, we wouldn’t be seeing this kind of backlash.
Trump supporters, “yellow vests” in France, Brexit: all examples of the same basic phenomenon. That doesn’t mean that the rural folks are correct in their policy proposals, or that I totally support those proposals (especially in the case of the Taliban). But there’s a good reason for rural alienation from “cosmopolitan sensibilities.“
Agree with Mr Trigoboff.
Here is the best long story I’ve read in a long time, about the best in rural America.
Agencies failed, individuals and a community succeeded.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/oregon-town-wildfire-beachie-creek-riverside-megafires/619817/
Some Republican-oriented commenters plagiarize their comments. I consider it a form of theft. I delete the. Please respect private property and refrain from plagiarizing.
Peter Sage
Thanks, Sally.
Rural folks often tend to be self-reliant. They need to be, in that environment.
Cosmopolitan urban folks tend to depend on institutions instead. That works well for them when the institutions are functional. It works less well with those institutions fail, as we currently see in the Portland area with regard to homelessness and crime, or the anarchist/Antifa takeover of the Red House.
The really toxic thing is when urban areas use their population-based electoral power to create rules that prevent and defeat rural self-reliance. They attempt to steamroll rural culture and impose their urban values, heedless of the consequences to those rural people. It’s no wonder that eventually the rural people rise up and rebel, at which point the clueless urban people call them names instead of attempting to understand and empathize with their different perspective.
This is why I support the electoral college and the structure of the Senate. It’s the only chance those rural people have.
Texas is ready to establish a dress code for women with no jeans, no skirts above the knee. The Texas governor is ready to sign it, saying it will make it so much easier for women to dress. Yes republicans are ready for the tyranny of vaccine but women must be told how to dress. Texas and the Taliban are aligned.
NOT coming from a anti-choice position personally, but I will take up Mr. Sage's final-paragraph challenge as worded, as if from the perspective of the Texan religionists. There are multiple distinctions, but here's the biggest.
The focus of the Taliban and Muslim fundamentalists is on controlling women for the sake of controlling women. The focus of abortion opponents in the States, however, is to prevent what they view as the murder of already-existing children.
I enjoy Low Dudgeon’s comments.
I believe control of women is central in both cases. It is dressed up in both cases with an excuse. Control of women’s reproduction is deeply primate behavior. Gorillas do it. A gorilla male keeps a harem of a half dozen females and fights off batchelors until he loses. Then the newcomer kills the infants, the females go into heat and the cycle continues. Chimpanzees fight for dominance for the one really important thing—mating rights. Females are promiscuous, though, so it is a constant battle. The Bible is all about kinship and property. Who is in what “line.” Who your daddy? St. Paul opened the religion to Gentiles, but women were to keep silent. The Abrahamic relionsa codified patriarchy. It is custom and the sacred legitimizing instinct.
And from a Darwinian, secular viewpoint, it is sound game theory. A male works to achieve a mate and an heir. He wants to know the kid he is sacrificing for is his. It would be odd not to. From a game theory point of view the hard thing to explain would be why a male would bust his hump for someone else’s child. (Answer: to please his mate, who had the baby by an earlier relationship, but now gives him heirs via her.)
The Taliban want women in their place because it secures the role of the sexes—as tradition requires. Evangelicals, too, understand a natural order of things, men lead, women submit. A good man is considerate of the woman, but the man leads. The poor little fetus worry is a con job and excuse. A ploy. If it were really all about the very least of these, the fertilized egg, evangelical social policies would be all about free prenatal care, early childhood education, universal health care, and now vaccinations to protect the vulnerable with voters-morbidites.
Is there any question that if Stormy Daniels had said to Trump that she got pregnant and asked him if he would give her $1,000 to get an abortion, or sould he prefer she has e the baby and give him the gift of s other child, that Trump would have been certain she had an abortion. His life with Tiffany was complicated enough, and then baby Baron, and the three older ones. A little bastard-embarrassment would be a disaster for him. Trump cares about abortion as a political point, not as a way to protect Stormy Daniel’s “accident.”
And wouldn’t the pro life GOP congressmen do the same? Of course. A Pennsylvania congressman did just that, and resigned when found out.
Abortion worry is lip service excuse for the deeply human primate desire to know who your kids are.
Geez, bathing in testosterone around here...
It goes deeper. Religious zealots have a fundamental insecurity that God might not love them, life being nasty, brutish and short, so the possibility of abortion, or more succinctly their mother's, is terrifying.
Sharia Christians. These Texans in the state legislature don’t look like back woods hillbillies standing against the secular humanists of the enlightened urban culture. These are politicians taking up the cloak of the Southern Baptists, pretending that they have to religiously protect a fertilized egg from certain death just to gather votes . They would never pass the offering plate in a Sunday service to pay for the birth and care of knocked up teen’s child. They would rather call harlot and stone the mother.
My mother had more than several illegal abortions for , I am sure , economic reasons during the depression. My wife’s aunt died from a botched illegal abortion during the war in England, Women will not return to coat hangers. The Republicans will find the wrath of women will find them and tear their party to pieces. Every woman knows one woman who has had an abortion. Let them throw the first stone. Will they?
Incest? Rape? Teen mothers? So many men cannot afford to pay for a birth of their own child or the raising of their child without free lunch programs and SNAP. The abortion haters want the government to pick up the tab of raising their children and thus all of us must sacrifice for the Sharia Christians.
No. These laws are not about protecting a fetus.
These laws are designed to control women by keeping them undereducated and underpaid.
Why is it that conservatives are against regulations to protect health and safety, yet think a woman's body needs more regulation?
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