Danusha V. Goska

Women, the Taliban, and Us

This is Danusha Goska.

In one of the strange twists of history, Adolf Hitler contributed to the birth of the Civil Rights movement. Nazism forced America to confront racism in its ugliest form. We declared, and rightly so, that American democracy is superior to fascism. In making this declaration, we were forced to confront our own racist sins, however relatively minor they may have been. The American military, for example, was segregated. And lynching terrorized American citizens.

Today America declares its superiority over a religious system practiced by the Taliban that beat women for the crime of laughing in public, that threatened to tear out the fingernails of women who wore nail polish, that denied education to girls.

I agree with Americans and my fellow inheritors of the Judeo-Christian tradition who argue that we have developed a more egalitarian worldview. At the same time, as in the war against Nazism, we may be inspired to self-examination.

Women still cannot serve as clergy in the Catholic church. Women are disproportionately represented among America's poor. Each day in the United States, about four women are killed by an intimate male partner; every 18 seconds, an American woman is beaten in her own home. One of George Bush's first acts as president was to deny funding to agencies that provide birth control information. Let us not brag because we practice a more mild misogyny than our enemy the Taliban, but let our pride come from our continued struggle toward a truly equal status for all Americans.

For Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.

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