Human Rights – Page 2 – Feminism and Religion

The Patriarchy Strikes Back by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I suppose no one is all that surprised but it is still stunning how quickly certain politicians are rushing to pull back women’s rights. It’s become a race to regulate women’s bodies of with draconian and cruel laws.

Each law is more extreme than the next. In South Carolina it has even been proposed to make abortion a crime subject to the death penalty.

Commentators say the bill isn’t going anywhere. But it was still proposed. It is now in the eco-system of abortion politics. It is being imagined and that opens up all possibilities of where it can go from here. We never thought, after all, that Roe would be overturned.

PATRIARCHY’S OFFSPRING by Esther Nelson

Elvis Presley (1935 – 1977) popularized the song “In the Ghetto” written by Mac Davis in 1969. The following TikTok video, featuring an artist with whom I am not familiar, is better—in my opinion—than any other rendition I’ve heard. Such depth! Such raw passion! Such strength! Such vulnerability!

https://www.facebook.com/100064420368301/videos/1352885832113207/

Here are the lyrics:

As the snow flies
On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’
A poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto…

Into the HEaRt of De-Criminalizing Indigenous Worldviews by Margot Van Sluytman

In prisons in Canada and around the world, a large percentage of criminalized people, who are more often than not, victimized people, Indigenous people make up significant percentages. In a recent *talk I gave, accompanying Indigenous Elder and Artist Philip Cote, we addressed what happens when colonial narratives and patriarchal narratives collide. The result is that our worldviews are shattered. When our worldviews, which are our foundational way of meaning-making, are dismissed, denied, and in the case of
cultural genocide: decimated, our heart health fails. Our bodies, our minds, our souls become disconnected become dissociated. Become imprisoned. Imprisoned in the figurative sense and eventually over time, in the literal sense.

Women’s March in CA 1/22/23 by Marie Cartier

WOMENS MARCH, Long Beach, California on the 50th anniversary of the passing of Roe v Wade,
January 22, 2023

Women, Life, Freedom زن زندگی آزادی : Let’s talk about the protests in Iran by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

Trigger Warning: This post deals with violence towards women, violence towards humans, and egregious abuses of power.

Women, Life, Freedom; Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī; زن زندگی آزادی has become one of the main slogans for an incredibly important and crucial global protest that is taking place right now. For over 2 months, life and death protests are taking place in Iran. The protests are focusing on the perpetual degradation of human rights with women bearing a large brunt. Many have declared the current state affairs as gender apartheid. We need to be talking more about what is happening with the people of Iran and how best to support them. The protests were started after the brutal murder of a woman due to a portion of her hair being visible outside of her hijab.

The Gift of Hospitality by Carolyn Lee Boyd

The Earth’s abundant gifts of hospitality

Hospitality is the way of Nature. Every spring, the Earth provides us with warmth, beauty, water, and nourishment. In winter, the Earth offers tools to heat and shelter ourselves. When we are sick, medicine is as close as the forest and meadow. She has welcomed a variety of life forms as the environment changes over our planet’s many geologic ages. Living beings have always been the wanderer in need knocking at Earth’s door and She always gives Her all to us.

This welcoming attitude has been reflected in customs of offering strangers food, water, and shelter in ancient and contemporary cultures and religions around the world, including goddess reverence. We see the influence of hospitality in the many goddess temples that welcomed and, for living traditions, still welcome, anyone in need of healing. These include those of the Egyptian Neith, the Italian Angitia, Idemili of the Nnobi Igbo people, the Yoruba Oshun, and others. We also see it in stories of women caring for one another like that of the Greek Maenads, ecstatic women worshippers who were unable to return home after attending rites and fell asleep in a town along the way. During the night, the town’s women silently encircled them, holding hands, for their protection.

The Uses of Color On Screen by Freia Serafina

We have to thank a woman named Natalie M. Kalmus for her contributions to the development of color on screen. Being a woman and the executive head of the Technicolor art department in the 1930’s was nothing short of extraordinary, and, in 1935 she released a document titled Color Consciousness in which she explored color theory and the use of color on screen. And, while this was illuminating and groundbreaking at a time, we also have some serious problems with the document that need to be re-examined from an anti-racist and feminist perspective.

Kalmus tells us how and when to use color given that particular color’s moral and psychological associations. She tells us that different colors evoke emotional reactions from the audience because these colors paint a realistic worldview. This presents a problem because, if, as Kalmus suggests, the usage of color and its associations represent a realistic worldview then the worldview Kalmus presents is an inherently racist one. Kalmus writes that black “… has a distinctly negative and destructive aspect. Black instinctively recalls night, fear, darkness, crime. It suggests funerals, mourning. It is impenetrable, comfortless, secretive.” In stark contrast to the color black, Kalmus writes that white “… reflects the greatest amount of light, it emanates a luminosity which symbolizes spirit. White represents purity, cleanliness, peace, marriage… White uplifts and ennobles, while black lowers and renders more base and evil any color.” To put it simply: black is evil and white is good. What does any of this have to do with spirituality? Well, the way we think and feel about color and how characters are depicted on screen taps into our psychological understanding of how “good” or “bad” a color is. This trickles over into our magical and spiritual practices with the notions of “Black Magic” vs. “White Magic.” We often associate someone who practices black magic as someone who works with dark or evil forces, and white magic with someone who practices magic for the good of others.

From the Archives: Preserving the Complete History: Remembering Japanese Internment Camps

This was originally posted on May 28, 2017

A couple of months ago I did a day trip to visit the historical site of one of the 10 internment camps which were formed due to Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942. Manzanar Relocation Camp is located between the Sierra Nevadas and the Owens Valley. Manzanar held over 11,070 Japanese Americans from 1942–1945. EO 9066 forced 120,000 American citizens to leave everything and become in all accounts prisoners; two-thirds of those were native-born American citizens. This executive order largely focused on people living on the West Coast of the United States to eliminate the possible threat of a secondary attack. They were relocated far inland and the majority of the camps were outside of the West Coast. While this was done in the 1940s, our current climate is looming to make it seem like there are forces in this world that are attempting to perform different forms of subjugation and confinement.

Manzanar, in the middle of nowhere California (and I mean nowhere—it takes over three hours to drive the more than 230 miles from Los Angeles and it is not directly accessible from Central California), is divided by the great Sierra Nevadas. This is one of the things that struck me when I arrived at Manzanar—the stark beauty and ruggedness of the mountains, the immense flat lines of the valley, and the complete isolation. Due to being so close to the Nevadas and the desert valley conditions, the weather can be extreme. Many of the detainees documented the harshness of the weather conditions, from the high winds to the stark cold at night, and the barely adequate buildings to shelter them from it.

From the Archives: Rape is Not a Political Platform – Rape is a Violent Crime! By Michele Stopera Freyhauf

Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade. They tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted August 23, 2012. You can visit it here to see the original comments.

Just when you think you have heard it all, here we go again – another politician with “open mouth-insert foot” syndrome. Discussing his zero-tolerance policy for abortion, Missouri Representative Todd Akin made the following statement last Sunday about pregnancies that result from rape:

“from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

From the Archives:“Vaginas are Everywhere!”: The Power of the Female Reproductive System by John Erickson

Moderator’s note: This marvelous FAR site has been running for 10 years and has had more than 3,600 posts in that time. There are so many treasures that have been posted in this decade that they tend to get lost in the archives. We are beginning this column so that we can all revisit some of these gems. Today’s blogpost was originally posted June 19, 2012. You can visit it to see the original comments here.

I have a beautiful picture of vagina hanging on my wall. However, for the longest time it was in the back of my closet, with a plastic bag covering it. I wasn’t ashamed of it but my ex-boyfriend, like most gay men, refused to have it on the wall where he could see it. He is now long gone; the vagina is now out and proud.

I bid on the picture one fall during a showing of the Vagina Monologues at Claremont School of Theology. One of my best friends was in the show and I had always loved its powerful message. I walked out of the theatre, waiting for my friend, and there it was: the picture of the vagina. I found myself caught up in its beauty. Its gaze had mesmerized me. The outlying layers of red, the contours of its shape, they all began to mold into a figure before my eyes. While I have never thought of myself as a religious person, I realized that at that moment I was no longer looking the old photo but rather I was staring at the outline of the Virgin Mary. At that moment, I realized that I had to have the picture.