Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Up Yours: This Says It All

Egyptian Virginity Tests, America's Shaming Wand and Trudeau's Satire - Forbes:

'via Blog this'


.....relies, the West’s current recognition of rape as a crime against the woman raped represents a change of mind-set from Authority/Purity (The Bible Says So/the Body is Impure) to Autonomy – that people have an absolute right to their bodies, which may not be treated as a common resource to be negotiated among other interested parties.
Pinker explains,
Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husbands and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman’s ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing.
This is the principle that the Egyptian civilian court followed in ruling that men’s interest in protecting themselves against potentially false charges of sexual assault could not justify their imposition of “virginity tests” upon women apprehended by them.
The virginity tests at issue in Egypt’s courts have outraged the human rights community because they violate a woman’s bodily autonomy to shame her for speaking out against the government (Limbaugh) or to protect the interests of others (those Texas citizens whose moral or religious code requires an impregnated woman to carry her pregnancy to term whether she chooses to or not).
Fourth Amendment Rights Particular to Women
In 1781, our founding fathers included in the Bill of Rights protection for men’s“persons, houses, papers, and effects” against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Nearly 200 years later, the Supreme Court found that women, too, have Fourth Amendment rights. In particular, the government could not prohibit women (or their husbands) from acquiring and using contraceptives nor invade women’s wombs.
Call that principle autonomy or call it bodily integrity. Call it privacy or call it liberty. When the government seeks to exert control over it – over us – it justly deserves ridicule.
And the American public deserves access to that ridicule whether daily newspaper editors deem it to be “over the top” or not.

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