Today, on what Sweden regards as the International Day of Women (March 8), Sweden's biggest daily Dagens Nyheter reports that the President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, defends honor killings of women.
On November 26, six women were found murdered outside Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and three days later the body of a seventh woman was found. Ramzan Kadyrov's initial reaction was to condemn the murders. Now, according to the Swedish newspaper, Kadyrov has made a moral and political U-turn in an effort to strengthen islamist values in Chechnya. The newspaper reports that Kadyrov now says that the slaughtered women deserved their fate, because they were immoral. The Chechnyan President now wants to give men the right to kill wives and daughters whose morals they disapprove of. Such killings, far from being crimes, should be seen as acts of honor, like the word honor killings suggests they are.
You may have heard that the Pakistani government has reached a truce with militant Talibans in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. One price the government may have to pay for this truce is that girls in the Swat Valley will not be allowed to go to school at all.
Yesterday I wrote about an archbishop in Brazil who excommunicated doctors who performed an abortion on a raped 9-year-old pregnant with twins, but as far as can be gleaned from articles reporting the case, the Archbishop said little if anything about the man who had impregnated the child.
Clearly the last case, the one about the girl in Brazil, is by far the least serious. That is also the only case that involves Christianity. The other two cases are about Islam.
All three cases show, in my opinion, that religions that claim the right to pass moral and religious judgements on others find it easy to pass judgement on girls and women. However, it is so much more unusual that the same religions pass judgement on men for treating women badly.
I remember a documentary I saw about fifteen years ago about two German priests who had come to live and work in a village in some part of South America. The priests, who were as kindly as they were devout, were worried about the fact that so many of the villagers were living in sin. Almost all of the adults were into sexual relationships, and they had children, but they were not married to their sex partners. The priests talked a lot with the villagers, particularly with the women, and tried to persuade them to get married.
Finally a woman explained to the priests why she herself would never get married. In her village, she said, men routinely beat up women, but when a woman has been beaten up badly enough by a man, she will leave him. Alternatively, if she knows that he is going to beat her half to death, she may be able to stop him by telling him that she will leave him if he keeps beating her. The men take such a threat seriously, she explained, because they know that the woman will stick by her word.
But, the woman said, what could she do if she was married? The Catholic Church forbids divorce. The men in her village knew very well that the Church forbids divorce. If a woman gets married, then she can do nothing to stop her husband from beating her. She can't defend herself at all, because the Church says she belongs to her husband.
And, I might add, the Catholic Church so rarely tells men not to beat up their wives. Men's violence against women has rarely been seen as a serious problem by the Church.
The two priests in the documentary told the reporters about the conversation they had had with the woman who explained why she would not get married. The priests looked quite shaken. Why, they said, had the Church never done anything to protect women from the violence of men? Why did the Church force women to live in sin because it would say or do nothing to stop men from terrorizing women? Why did the Church force women to choose between saving their mortal bodies, by staying unmarried, and saving their immortal souls, by getting married and thereby getting beaten up and maybe killed?
Too often religions which claim the right to pass judgement on other people condemn and punish women, but they will not condemn or punish men who terrorize or kill women.
By far the worst crimes against women committed in the name of religion happen in the Muslim world, because fundamentalist Islam will go so very much further than Christianity when it comes to men's right to brutalize, terrorize and murder women. That, however, doesn't make it all right for churches here in the west to condemn women's sexual sins and say nothing about rapists and wife-beaters.
Ann
