Free Republic

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Hide your children. This is what the progressive left's idea of women's empowerment looks like: For the past two weeks, radical feminists from the group Code Pink have paraded across the fruited plain in giant female reproductive organ costumes. The goal is "respect" for women's bodies and women's abortion rights. It's part of the coordinated campaign to fight the right's purported "war on women." The Vagina Puppets' Democratic Party sympathizers, from professional birth control freeloader Sandra Fluke to first lady Michelle Obama, dog-whistled the same messages of "choice" and "freedom" from the convention stage. "We are ......

Anne-Marie Slaughter's eye-catching Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," is being greeted with a certain reverse snobbery. We've been reminded that the choices and challenges of women with advanced degrees are hardly typical and not the sort of thing that should divert us from the problems of the middle class. Perhaps. But there are millions of women in the upper middle class and the culture they create and reflect affects everyone. Besides, Slaughter deserves some credit for honesty. As she recounts in the piece, when she mentioned to a friend that she was considering writing that women...

Egyptian beats pregnant wife to death for not voting for Mursi Sunday, 24 June 2012 An Egyptian plumber has been accused of beating his pregnant wife to death because she did not vote for Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Mursi. (File photo)   By YASMIN HELAL  AL ARABIYA An Egyptian plumber in Alexandria beat his pregnant wife to death upon learning that she had not voted for Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Mursi, reported the Egyptian daily al-Wafd on Sunday. According to police reports, the initial argument between the couple who was not named escalated into violence, despite her pleas....

May 11, 2012 (YouthDefence) - I am a young, independent woman. I can vote, go to college, drive a car, even run for President if I want (once I’m over 35)! I can do anything that my male colleagues can do. But there is one thing that I can become that’s denied to my male friends…a mother. Motherhood is the most amazing thing that a woman can do in this world. Just think about it: we can nurture and protect another human life. Every single person in the world had a mother; we all spent nine months in the comfort...

The blind Chinese human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from house arrest on April 22 and may be under the protection of the U.S. Embassy, was initially detained for exposing the massive abuse of Chinese women under China’s one-child policy. His documentation of forced sterilizations and abortions landed him in jail for four years, followed by a year and a half of house arrest. His daring escape has now triggered renewed attacks on organizations engaged in helping Chinese women keep and feed their infants. Since April 28, the Family Planning Commission of Susong County in China’s Anhui province has been...

ACHXOY-MARTAN, Chechnya — Chechnya's government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule. In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property...

Hillary, our dear friend. A few days ago, you expressed your deep concern about harm to the status of women in Israel, which you said reminds you of the events in Iran. The truth is you surprised us. Really. We did not think that in the midst of a range of international disputes, along with the reversal of the Arab Spring that now turns out to be winter, Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and other real and tangible threats, you would still manage to find time to deal with the status of women. But we certainly agree with you –...

The woman of Afghanistan are facing a crisis which threatens to roll back many of the advances in equality and human rights that the West promised after the fall of the Taliban. Brothels in Kabul continue to service NATO officials and contractors, burkas are once again becoming the norm, and Afghan women continued to be legally viewed as mere property of their families and husbands, with criminal penalties for failing to act as property. As one of her supporters, this author expected more from First Lady Michelle Obama. While she has won praise for her excellent fashion sense and her...

When Shehlla Khan's husband became ill, it fell on her to take their three children to the pool. But for Khan, who is Muslim, the task was difficult. The Columbia resident said she was concerned about people watching her swim in the conservative, cover-all dress required by Islamic dress codes, and thinking: "What's wrong? Why can't you take it off?" So Khan, 39, brought the issue up with members of her Dar Al-Taqwa mosque in Ellicott City. The mosque, along with members of a faith-based county group, People Acting Together in Howard, met with the Columbia Association to create a...

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