Egyptian Scribbles: Tolerance versus Blind Acceptance of Discriminatory Customs

Wednesday 21 November 2007

Tolerance versus Blind Acceptance of Discriminatory Customs

I liked this statement that I read today on the UN website entitled “Étude sur la liberté de religion ou de conviction et la condition de la femme au regard de la religion et des traditions”

"Not all traditions are equally valid, and those which run counter to human rights must be combated. It is essential to distinguish between tolerance, which is necessary, and blind acceptance of customs which may involve degrading treatment or blatant violations of human rights. In order to ensure that freedom of religion does not undermine women's rights, it is vital that the right to difference which that freedom implies should not be interpreted as a right to indifference to the status of women. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Where, after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home”."
http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/religion/III1.htm

2 comments:

Unknown said...: No post for a while. What's going on.
I hope everything is OK on your side? Please give a sign of life.; 27 November 2007 at 09:26
Geoffrey Kruse-Safford said...: I am sorry to have discovered so late that you read and liked something I wrote many months ago. I am honored! If you've forgotten, it was on women's sexuality and men's fear of it.

BTW, is there a reason you haven't posted in over a month? Do hope you are well.

I shall check back sometime, hope you are well.; 23 December 2007 at 20:03

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."