Dystopia is Contagious

I must stop reading dystopic novels. I first read The Handmaid's Tale back in high school, and I thought, meh, how paranoid. I reread it before the election last year and had nightmares. It's all so plausible, now...the environmental toxins that leave most women barren, the religious fundamentalists who dress women in burquas and say "Our big mistake was teaching them how to read." For a while now, I've been reading Christian Fundamentalist websites. And they are freaky. They are the American Taliban, and they are uncompromising, anti-Enlightenment, pro-Apocalypse and willing to do whatever it takes. God brooks no compromise, people. We have to understand: this is an entirely different way of apprehending the world. I feel that the Dark Ages exerts some indefinable pull on them all: back to when women were chattel, the husband was the uncontested head of the household, educating women was considered a waste, and so forth.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that religion has got to go. I took a class on Radical Islam last year and, good lefty that I am, was deeply troubled by what I read. It seems clear to me that true Islam--Islam that follows precisely the words of the Koran--is not compatible with feminism. The position, status and role of women is laid out quite clearly, and, interestingly enough, bears no small resemblance to the conception of women that Christian fundamentalists have. How nice. Perhaps if all of the male fundies get together, we will finally have world peace! After all, they may not be able to agree on the name of God, but they can agree that women should be kept in their place, properly attired and veiled.

As a matter of fact, yesterday I saw, for the first time, a fully veiled woman in Harris Teeter. Of course I have seen women wearing head scarves; I've had Muslim women in my classes. This, though, was a woman in full burqua, with her face covered, so that only her eyes and hands were visible. Women in full burquas have always disturbed me on a deep level, and it is part of the reason I've long been skeptical about the whole "it's their culture, we must respect it" line. I can't imagine a world in which women's faces are not to be seen. It makes them less than fully human. It makes them like ghosts; it makes them indistinguishable from one another, it signals fully their subordination. The part that disturbs me the most, I think, is that I fear that men would not miss women, if we were to go back; that there would be in some way relief on their part about having, once again, clearly defined roles. That on some level many men do feel superior to women, and resent their loss of status.

I've read many of the intellectual anti-Enlightenment articles, and their arguments are often fair. I'm just not sure, these days, what else we have besides a hope for reason and rationality, for discussion, debate and, yes, even science. We are taught from a very early age that religious tolerance is our duty as citizens. We are reaching the point where that will not work any further. We cannot tolerate the intolerable. We cannot have our lives dictated by beliefs that, when examined coolly, have no rational basis. I don't organize my life based on the Code of Hammurabi. Wht makes the Bible any different?