Friday, 9 March 2018

Religiously assaulting women

What I read

In "The Trump Administration’s Backward Attitude Toward Birth Control", the Editorial Board of The New York Times argues that President Trump is wrong both to threaten to reduce federal funding for contraceptives and to require parental guardians to exercise control in the sex lives of children without regard to their privacy (2018). The New York Times says that this backward policy in favour of abstinence and other birth control options favoured by the religious will undo the progress women have made towards equality since the mid-1960s, harming both their health and ability to choose the course of their own lives. 

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My response 

This was actually not my first choice of news story to blog, but I didn't want to grab too many from the BBC News that others might be interested in blogging. And I thought a bit of variety wouldn't hurt. The decisive factor is at the end of the article, where The New York Times (NYT) has added one of its notices advising that they corrected my source after publication. As I've already mentioned in an earlier blog, the best of writers do make mistakes, and no one would argue that the Editorial Board of the NYT are not very careful professional writers. 

Although I don't much like Trump, he is nonetheless the properly elected president of the United States, and as the choice of the American people, he must be accepted and respected in the job he has been given. But that does not mean his mistakes should be ignored, or that he should not be mocked for his bad decisions. In a healthy state, the government and national leaders should be subject to critical assessment by the people. This is the only way corruption and worse abuses can be discovered, spoken and then perhaps corrected. When the press or citizens are not allowed to investigate powerful or respected people, it means that those people are not truly known, and any good public image might be totally false, concealing a lot of rottenness. 

The particular corruption here seems to me to be moral corruption by religion. Religions often claim to care about good morals, but interfering with a woman's right to decide how she lives her own life, particularly whether to have children or not, is bad morals, so when religions, the Christian religion in the case of America, interfere in such decisions by having politicians change the law to force others to follow their religious teachings, that shows the religion to be morally bad. We see same thing in Saudi Arabia where Islam is used to suppress women, and also non-Muslims. Throughout history, there are plenty of examples of religion being used in this way by its believers, who thereby prove their religion is a bad thing. At least in the United States, religion cannot be given as a reason for making up law. 

Of course, religion also connects with our topic in Unit 1 of  Skillful, since it is often an important part of a person's identity. I know that for me the Catholic version of Christianity that I grew up with was very important in making me who I was, and probably still am. My family went to mass every Sunday and on holy days. I went to Catholic schools. My friends and everyone I knew were members of the same religion until I got to university and found a bit more variety, and some escape from my family's religion. The religion certainly provided a strong sense of identity, of belonging to a group, but it was also very restricting, with a lot of bad moral teachings, such as the idea that homosexuality is evil. 

I'm not American, but one thing I like about the US Constitution, which has been the supreme law of the United States since 1789, is that its First Amendment prohibits the government making up any law for or against any religion. Religion is left as a personal matter for people to believe or not as they wish. 
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My question

Is the US Constitution right? Should religion be ignored when making up laws to govern a nation?  
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Reference

1 comment:

  1. The relevant definition for the adverb in my revised title is 1.1 in the Oxford Dictionaries entry.

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