Save domestic violence!
Barry Duke at the Freethinker reports:
The Croatian Government voted on Friday to ratify the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, widely known as the Istanbul Convention– and thousands, egged on by the Catholic Church, gathered to protest, saying the move would pave the way to same-sex marriage and will give rights to transgender people.
Because…families can’t beat up family members? So they want to preserve and protect domestic violence? I have to wonder what life is like in their families.
The Convention, agreed in 2011, has now been ratified by 29 countries, including 18 European Union member states. The treaty aims to be an instrument in combating domestic violence against women, protecting victims and prosecuting accused offenders. Among the forms of violence it seeks to counter are marital rape, stalking, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
But if you think it’s God’s Will that men are superior to women and allowed to dominate and exploit them, then laws banning marital rape, stalking, forced marriage and female genital mutilation are blasphemous, I guess.
The Catholic Church in Croatia, to which nearly 90 percent of the country’s 4.2 million people belong, labeled the convention a “heresy.”
It is the official doctrine or dogma or policy of the Catholic church, spelled out in many papal letters, that women and men are Different, and that while women are very very very very nice and lovely and all that, they are Different, and subordinate. Recent letters lean heavily on the Different part, so as not to have to keep saying Inferior, but of course that’s what they mean.
It’s a disgrace that only 29 countries have signed the treaty.
If God really wanted to save domestic violence, wouldn’t He show up to do it Himself?
The Catholic Church in Croatia has a history that makes Ireland look bright and healthy. The fascist state that Mussolini and Hitler propped up during the war engaged in a genocide as bad as anything in the 20th century. There were several death-camps under the direct command of priests. In the aftermath of the war, it was Croatian Franciscans who operated the ‘rat-line’ for Nazis escaping to South America.
It’s a matter of property rights – what makes the Council of Europe think that they have the right to dictate how a man can treat *his* wife or *his* daughters?