A mile in her shoes... or a month in her veil

Sian Reid teaches sociology at Carleton University here in Ottawa. She started teaching this semester fully veiled, wearing a niqab, hijab, and abaya. After three weeks, she went back to the clothes she ordinarily wears.

It sounds to me like a fascinating experiment. It's easy to talk about women who choose to wear hijab, or to go fully veiled, but it must be a very different experience to actually be a veiled woman. I'm not surprised to hear that she had some unpleasant experiences interacting with the world at large, although I am disappointed in my fellow Ottawa residents.

What's perhaps most interesting is that this is an article about an issue intimately associated with immigrants, with Muslim women, with "foreigners". And yet it's an article that could only be written about a white woman whose "milky skin" and "long red hair" are repeatedly pointed out in the article. This is an experience countless women live every day -- I would have loved for the journalist to have interviewed a few of them.

The article mentions that some of her students were concerned that the experiment might be seen as disrespectful to Muslim women. It doesn't strike me as particularly disrespectful -- but I'd love to know what several Muslim women thought.

It's a shame that this kind of "immigrant experience" can seemingly only be communicated to the rest of us through someone taking on a temporary identity that isn't hers.

Religion, the HPV vaccine, and the squick factor

The Catholic school boards' fretting about the HPV vaccine might seem to suggest some of the perils associated with publically-funded religious schools. The vaccine's a sensible public-health measure, right? Religion's interfering with the public good. That's a bad thing.

Except people see this vaccine as being about teenagers having sex.

It's not, of course. Or at least, not entirely. The whole point of the vaccine is that, for it to be effective, you have to be vaccinated before you're exposed to the virus -- ideally, before you're having sex. So a girl vaccinated at 13 or whatever will be protected when she's 18 or so and getting involved in her first sexual relationship. Or when she's married at 25. Or whenever she becomes sexually active. But people have an incredibly strong squick factor when it comes to my daughter having sex, and I think it kind of short-circuits the logic centers. I seriously doubt any girl who wasn't going to have sex is suddenly going to run out and become promiscuous just 'cause she's protected from cervical cancer. Let me assure you that cervical cancer is the last thing on the mind of any girl contemplating her first sexual relationship. It's not going to be a deciding factor. I'm not sure why that's so hard to get.

So I don't think anyone's associating the Catholic boards' jitters with John Tory opening the religious-schools can of worms. Which is a shame, because they should. If a religiously-run school can impede one public health measure, what about others? We're bound to have Jehovah's Witnesses schools receiving public funds while preventing kids from being vaccinated for all kinds of things. And that's just the first example that came to mind.

Full disclosure: I went to a catholic school. And as you can probably tell, the indoctrination didn't stick. Heck, it didn't stick at the time. We used to joke about being the school with the highest birth rate in the city.

But just because I don't think it's always effective doesn't mean I think publically-funded religious education should be accepted. School should be about school. Religion should be separate. And I know that it's not, now. Lots of schools, especially in smaller towns, are de facto protestant. That's not good either. Nor do we need to avoid mentioning religion -- we just need to avoid endorsing it.

Church and State, right? It shouldn't be so hard.

Polygamy and Feminism

This may be the very definition of "can of worms". Here I go anyway...

The question of polygamy is not an easy one to resolve, particularly, I think, for feminists. Or at least for people like me, who believe simultaneously that people should generally be free to make whatever romantic/sexual/matrimonial choices they want and that women should have just as much freedom, power, and agency as men.

In Canada at least, polygamy is largely discussed as a religious issue, almost always in relation to Bountiful, B.C. Bountiful is a "Mormon"* community in British Columbia headed by a couple of authoritarian patriarchs named Winston Blackmore and Jim Oler. Plural marriage is practiced extensively; the leading men of the community have multiple wives, many of whom are "married" when they are very young to much older men. Religiously-linked polygamy is also often discussed in relation to Islam. As this Vancouver Sun article makes clear, the two categories of religious polygamy are related, or at least are seen to be.

You'll notice that we're talking pretty much exclusively about poygyny (one man with multiple wives). Polyandry (one woman with multiple husbands) doesn't seem to come up much in the discourse. Maybe if it did, we'd be better able to separate the polygamy issue from the women's rights issue.

Because it seems to me that the problem with religiously-based polygamy is not the multiple marriages in and of themselves. If more than two people want to devote their lives to each other, how does that hurt anyone, after all? The issue is with the way polygamy is practices in sects like Bountiful, and is perceived to be practiced in Islam. The issue is with girls and women being raised in a tightly-controlled patriarchal environment, and offered no choice in the matter. The issue is with marrying girls off at such a young age that it's perilously close to child abuse. The issue is with the control, the power. It's not the marriages per se.

Similarly, I don't think there's anything inherently evil with multiple Muslim women marrying a single man, if that's what they want, and everyone's happy with the arrangement. The issue is with force, coercion, and disempowerment of the women. That's what we need to address -- not the marriages themselves.

Having said that, I don't know what the best way to deal with something like Bountiful is. I would like to believe that we could lay charges on the basis of child abuse and unlawful confinement, or something that addresses what strikes me as the real problem. I've no doubt, however, that Blackmore and Oler are clever, devious men, and that they're staying within the letter of the law to avoid providing any grounds for such charges, leaving only the polygamy charge. They're gambling -- and I'm sure they're right -- that the polygamy charge won't stand up to a Charter challenge. If all we can charge them with is polygamy, they're going to get away with it, and they're going to be free to continue their repressive, abusive little cult.

I don't believe polygamy should be illegal. I believe that, if people want to spend their lives together, they should be allowed to make vows to support that, no matter how many of them (or what combination of sexes) there are. I would love for multiple marriages that are loving, egalitarian, and functional to be out in the open. It's just the abuse that I want to see stop. And we're not going to stop the abuse by focusing on polygamy, which is ultimately a symptom, not a cause.

* very important to note: they're not part of the mainstream LDS Church; Mainstream Mormons disavowed polygamy quite some time ago. Bountiful's more of a breakaway cult using the Mormon name for legitimacy.

Anglicans will not bless same-sex unions

This is disappointing.

It's particularly disappointing given that some Anglican churches have already been performing the blessings. If they're required to stop now, it would be a sad step backwards.

I think it's worth noting that it wasn't ordinary Anglicans, or even ordinary priests, who voted against the idea of blessing same-sex unions (not even marriages, mind you) -- it was the bishops, the folks at the top of the church power structure. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that, but it is suggestive. I suppose at the very least it suggests that if they have the vote again in a few years, the outcome might be a different one. (Never hurts to be optimistic, right?)