You Think Our Lawyers Are Bad?

This is really a story about the foolish hanging-on of arranged marriages more than it is about bad lawyers (although it's about bad lawyers, too). It's from India, a land where many misogynistic traditions that should have died hang on tenaciously in the face of modernization.

LUCKNOW (Reuters) - Lawyers tied a young man to a tree and beat him outside a court in India for refusing to marry one of their relatives, an official said on Wednesday.

They rounded on the victim when he arrived at a court in the Taj Mahal town of Agra to settle a dispute over marrying the niece of one of the lawyers.

Indian TV channels showed the abusive lawyers tearing off the man's shirt, tying him to a tree trunk and cutting bald patches into his hair. The 22-year-old victim was then beaten up.

Now we know this story would have never made the international wire if the perpetrators hadn't been lawyers -- we love to laugh at/feel disgusted by lawyers. We have to wonder how many similar cases of violent outfall from planned marriages come and go without our notice.

The Hindus aren't the misogynists the Muslims are, but besides forced marriages, they abort or kill their pre-born/new-born daughters, burn widows with their husbands and subjugate women in many ways -- which you'll recognize the next time you see an Indian couple walking, the man several steps ahead of the woman.

This is just another example of the incredible energy and potential wasted by cultures that insist on keeping women from reaching their natural potential. I've read two outstanding thoughts on this topic today, thanks to the Watcher.

The first, linked above, is from Pat Santy (Dr. Sanity), writing broadly (please, no pun) on how Islam treats women:

We frequently joke about men's preoccupation with sex and female body parts in the West, but our fascination with "T&A" is nothing when you consider that the Muslim world is literally consumed by female sexuality and with their fear of it. It is ironic that both Muslim men and women are under the mistaken impression that Western society is oversexualized compared to them, when in fact, it is practically impossible to be more obsessed with sexual matters than they are in Muslim communities.

The second was from Kobayashi Maru, in a post about climate change; specifically, about a brilliant 15 year-old Australian girl who developed a model that accurately predicted the end of Australia's drought while at the same time disproving much global warming dogma:

In much of the Islamic world (to put it mildly), a 15-year-old female would not have access to the kind of intellectual cultivation, encouragement or freedom this young woman obviously has.

Wow. I've gone all the way from some Hindu planned marriages to Islam's fear of, hatred of and destruction of women. Sickness knows no bounds.