Free Republic

Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider. This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action. What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more. That's an appealing argument to many, but one that would...

"Women's activist Mavis Leno and CNN Muslim producer dialogue in Dallas," by Dina Malki for the Examiner, October 24: At the 26th annual Dallas Women’s Foundation’s luncheon, Mavis Leno, wife of talk show's comedian Jay Leno, shared with the audience accounts about her journey into activism to help empower Afghani women and girls under the Taliban regime.... When asked about the role of Islam in the status of women in Afghanistan, Leno confirmed that “the Quran is more liberal with women than the Bible.”

Women are to be allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia. K ing Abdullah bin Abdulaziz announced the change yesterday and also said women would be allowed to run in elections. However, the new law will not come into force until 2015. In a speech, the king said the move was in accordance with sharia law.

A Look at the Burqua: Simple Yet Controversial, Repressive Yet Expressive, Modest Yet So Revealing.

Population: The vice president gives a thumbs up to Beijing's policy of sustainable growth through forced population control. This is no gaffe. The White House endorses this policy. Just ask the president's science adviser. We are used to the "mouth that roared" putting his foot in it. But Vice President Joe Biden's remarks at Sichuan University in China clearly embrace the progressive belief that people are a plague on the Earth — not its greatest resource. "Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you're...

<p>CANNES, France (AP) — In a remote village in North Africa, women use the only weapon they have — sex — and go on a "love strike" that challenges traditional gender roles.</p> <p>Director Radu Mihaileanu says he sees the fictional gender revolt depicted in his new movie "The Source" as crucial to the success of popular uprisings that have toppled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt this year and still smolder across the Arab world.</p>

Freedom of speech and women's rights just took a major hit in Denmark earlier today when the public prosecutor found Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish (and International) Free Press Society, guilty of "hate speech" under section 266b of the Danish penal code. Hedegaard's crime was to note "the great number of family rapes in areas dominated by Muslim culture in Denmark." ...

Women advocates, both liberal and conservative, are frustrated by the media’s fascination with the narrative that for the first time in American history, women, not men, were supposedly key in pushing for the use of military force against a foreign government. Reports highlight that the three-woman diplomatic team of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the Office of Multilateral and Human Rights Director Samantha Power pushed the male-dominated administration to take military action against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. Many women are not impressed, believing that it is somewhat sexist and condescending to be surprised that a...

In the America I grew up in, I was raised to respect women and protect them. In that regards, there was certainly nothing unusual about my upbringing. My father and mother stubbornly drilled those concepts into my stubborn head. I was taught to open the door for a woman. While sitting on a bus or in a doctor’s waiting room, I was instructed to give up my seat to a woman. It is a practice I continue today.

The UN has quietly made way for Iran to join the global body's Commission on the Status of Women Friday, just days after very publicly suspending Libya from its Human Rights Council. The Islamic Republic — which last year sentenced a supposedly adulterous woman to death by stoning and deploys police to harass women not deemed to be sufficiently covered — became one of the commission's 45 members as part of a group of 11 incoming countries. As many countries left the commission at the close of its 55th session on Friday, opening those slots for the new members, each...

Afghan women's shelters face new rules Published: Feb. 10, 2011 at 10:22 PM ArticleListenComments (0) KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- The Afghan government is considering new rules that would require women to get permission from a government committee to live in a shelter. Women would also have to be examined to make sure they are virgins before they could enter shelters, The New York Times reported Thursday

Making the rounds on YouTube these days is a film of a group of manly looking women preparing for and conducting a "flash dance" in a Philadelphia food store. The crew of ladies, dressed in tight black clothes and sequined accessories, arrives at The Fresh Grocer supermarket, breaks into a preplanned chant ordering shoppers not to buy Sabra and Tribe hummus and telling them to oppose Israeli "apartheid" and support "Palestine." From their attire and attitude, it is fairly clear that the participants in the video would congratulate themselves on their commitment to the downtrodden, the wretched of the earth...

Excuse me people, I'm going to talk with strong words about women's issues. I realized that violent is not only coming from men but also coming from women themselves like mother to her daughter , or sister to her sister..but the worse one is that coming from the other gender (male), the problem here in our community especially in those closed-minded societies; that woman is a piece of furniture & if she will ask for her rights they would be judge her as a bad person, that she wouldn't obey to manly societies!!! [...] When I talked to women who...

Referring to the anonymizing invisibility of the burqa, Sihem Habchi, president of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) declares: I’m Muslim and I can’t accept that because I’m a woman I have to disappear. She was commenting about the fact that the French have banned the Mohammedan custom of making women wear bags over their heads. We can expect leftists all over the world to rise up in outrage over this assault on a woman’s basic freedom to be forced to wear a bag over her head. Most particularly, we can expect establishment femisogynists to rush to the defence of Muslim...

I believe humans have rights & this is who I am first and I am Iraqi second. We should treat other people by humanity in first place. I respect what others believe, their cultures, societies but I will take what is good for my believes & traditions. This is what they call to be "open minded", always we live in close boxes never accept others, even don't listen to them, I learned to "Think outside the box!". I'm tired of living in fears, fears from tomorrow, from others re-actions on this & that. I'm tired of living in fear's tornado,...

Another day and I'm sitting here without anything to do. I'm searching for a good channel to watch but as usual, nothing really captures my interest. Sadly, television is the only entertainment women really have and nothing good is on. It's 120 degrees outside and I'm thankful for the few hours of power a day we get so I feel cool (Baghdad only averaged 5 hours of power per household for the entire month of July.) But our lives are so drab and boring, even monotonous. All the luxuries of the west are missing in our democracy. The movie theaters,...

When women’s rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar flew out of Saudi Arabia last week for a holiday in Italy with her family, she was hoping for a brief respite from what she describes as the ‘gender apartheid kingdom.’ As she left, her husband received an automated SMS text message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that his wife, legally considered his ‘dependant’ under Saudi Arabia’s strict gendered guardianship system, had left the country. “I am an adult woman that has been earning my own income for over a decade now but according to the Saudi government, I am a...

The United Nations has elected Iran to the Commission on the Status of Women. According to their own website, the Commission is "dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.” If so, Iran would seem beyond just a curious choice as a member. Current legal code in Iran actually defines the sexes as unequal. Men’s rights are codified as superior to women. According to Nobel Peace Laureate Shrin Ebadi, the first women judge in Iran before the 1979 revolution and imposition of the current Islamic law, "The criminal laws adopted after the revolution unfortunately took away a woman's human...

Tim Pawlenty, the pro-life Minnesota governor and potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is drawing cheers and jeers from pro-life and pro-abortion groups for declaring April as a month to help women negatively affected by their abortions. As LifeNews.com first reported two weeks ago, Pawlenty and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both declared April as Abortion Recovery/Awareness Month. Lisa Dudley, Director of Operation Outcry, a group that helps women who regret their abortions speak out, told LifeNews.com at the time that Pawlenty's move showed he has an "understanding of the consequences of abortion" and a " willingness to protect women and the...

From the day the founding Fathers risked their liberty and life by signing the Declaration of Independence, there has been those who have wanted to sink this great ship called the United States of America. Well 143 years later the good ship America took a torpedo hit that at the time seemed like just another glancing blow. What many still consider the greatest step forward in equality for the sexes, was more then just a glancing blow however. It was in fact a deadly strike that entered the very heart of the ship and has been smoldering since. The...