Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Religious Freedom

It has long been suggested by godless people like myself that religious freedom these days has been perverted into meaning that religious organisations are entitled to discriminated against people of other or no faiths. It also seems to have become a free-for-all for religious groupings to go after women's reproductive interests, gay people, as well as anything else that their respective ideology fancies discriminating against.

Well, a good South African friend of mine has drawn my attention to this article in the Washington Post. It's about a formerly Muslim person's legal right (or otherwise) to change her prejudices toward Christianity. The Malaysian woman in question has decided that she's now a Christian. While that religion's institutional representatives are also suitably misogynistic, they're arguably not as bad as organised Islam. The Malaysian courts now have to decide whether the woman may still be judged by Sharia Islamic courts or by the civil courts of the country. The Malaysian Constitution prohibits Muslims from swapping that ideology for another ideology..

Ethical Progress on the Abortion Care Frontiers on the African Continent

The Supreme Court of the United States of America has overridden 50 years of legal precedent and reversed constitutional protections [i] fo...