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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
While I have no desire to justify any unequal separation of people in the public services, I don't think you can draw a direct comparison between gender and racial segregation.
Women and men are different in a lot more of a substantial way than black and white people. Having separate toilets for white and black people wouldn't make any sense whereas there's some reasoning behind different toilets for different genders. (Although, having said that, in my favourite night club they have unisex toilets which greatly improves the atmosphere / socialising / etc). In a very different way, women only carriages in Japan are one (albeit unsatisfactory) solution to a problem there. I believe the idea has been raised of having a similar thing on certain late night tubes so women feel more safe using public transport. And even now some people will give up their seat to a woman, even if she is not pregnant, holding shopping, elderly, etc.
The point is, I can think of numerous ways I'd personal think it justified to treat a woman slightly differently from a man, but none for someone who was of a different race.
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I don't believe that this is a situation justifying segregation. What makes Jewish women inferior to Jewish men? There's absolutely nothing to justify forcing them to sit at the back of the bus, it's not as if they're going to corrupt the men with their very presence.
Where one party (A) enforces segregation on the other (B) then B is automatically inferior to A. There's no way of escaping that.
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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Segregation is the symptom of the wider problem of patriarchy within the (frankly totally nuts) orthodox Jewish communities (the ones who throw stones at ambulances if they dare work on Yom Kippur).
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Exactly. Their position within Judaism isn't too far from Wahhabists in Islam - not exactly encouraged, but not sidelined either.
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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
Anyway, Jewish women deserve some of the blame for all this. A whole bunch of them buy into a religion founded on a text which explicitly grants them an inferior status. No-one likes an Uncle Tom (or an Aunt Tovah).
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Yes, and while we're at it let's blame all Islamic women for following their religion too.