Dominic Raab is no more keen on the Equality Act than he is on the Human Rights Act
Esher and Walton MP Dominic Raab has just been made justice minister alongside Michael Gove.
Raab is a longtime critic of the Human Rights Act – this appointment looks like David Cameron’s way of saying he is serious about scrapping it. In January 2014 Raab voted to allow human rights grounds to be used to prevent a foreign criminal being deported only in cases where there would be a breach of right to life or the right not to be tortured.
In 2013, he voted to remove the duty on the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to work to support the development of a society in which people’s ability to achieve their potential is not limited by prejudice or discrimination.
And in 2013 he also voted against making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of caste.
Raab also took an unusual stance on gender equality in 2011, when he expressed his fears that ‘from the cradle to the grave, men are getting a raw deal’. He attacked the ‘obnoxious bigotry’ of feminists and complained that men work longer hours than women (no mention of pay gap etc).
“While we have some of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the world, we are blind to some of the most flagrant discrimination – against men.”
Seeming to have fallen at the first hurdle – assuming that feminism is anti-men – Raab also suggested that men start ‘burning their briefs’, presumably as a long- overdue retaliation against the feminists of the sixties (who did not, in fact, burn their bras.)
Raab’s diatribe continued:
“Britain’s not perfect, and we will never eradicate all human prejudice.”
This is especially true when we do not understand that prejudice. Another interesting choice from David Cameron.
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
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398 Responses to “He thinks feminists are ‘obnoxious bigots’: meet the new justice minister”
cyberspice
“In this case I think women have got it right and we should be spending a bit more time enjoying our children and our lives and having some balance.”
Yes. If women get give the chance to do those roles then guys can stay behind and look after the kids.
cyberspice
I find your comments problematic because you have valid point of views and justify them with bullshit. Glass ceilings exist however that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be more support for men in their 40s and 50s. If you just concentrated on the issues I’d probably totally agree with you but right now seem to be trying to discredit statistically provable concepts to support your valid grievances.
Rex Duis
Hi Cyberspice… well thanks for admitting you are not a straight woman. It does mean as I said that you are in a minority group and therefore not representative of normal women (if we take ‘normal’ to mean the majority of straight women).
Since we’re being honest here, I happen to be gay. And unlike you it doesn’t bug me when people wrongly assume I’m straight. It happens all the time, both online and in person. You need to develop a thicker skin if you’re bothered by peoples false assumptions.
Re the different waves of Feminism… are you saying that the 3rd wave is contradicting the second wave? And did anyone send women educated in 2nd wave feminism an updated memo? I doubt it. It’s like the so-called ‘Healthy Food Pyramid’ I learned at school in the 90’s. It’s not the one we were teaching kids when I worked in schools a couple of years back. I’ve not once seen anything printed anywhere targetting my demographic to let us know that what they taught us is out of date. So there’s a very good chance that a lot of people identifying themselves as feminists have quite different ideas of what it means to be a feminist and what feminism is about. Which rather renders the label next to useless.
I don’t agree that there is a ‘general thing that women are lesser than men’. I think it’s largely feminism itself which reminds women of that constantly. I have started asking my female friends for their opinions on the subject since getting involved online with forums and debates and stuff more and they often tell me that they wouldn’t call themselves a feminist and that they resent the implication that they need some sort of movement to give them a voice. They feel perfectly capable of speaking their own minds and making choices in their lives unaided by the ‘Matriarchy’. And because the women in my life have always largely been that way, I’ve never looked at them as being helpless or in need.
You complain about taxation on womens sanitary products, I will need to look into that further and find out why razors aren’t taxed. I use don’t razors, so I have no idea how much they cost and wasn’t aware they aren’t taxed. I will point out though that most pharmacies and supermarkets do have large sections dedicated to ‘feminine hygiene’ while men rarely get a section devoted to them. But guys don’t complain about it. Here’s a UK example of sexism going the other way. I can’t buy oral pill to treat thrush in a chemist unless I confirm that my girlfriend has it. If you are a man, you have to see a GP to confirm you need the medication… unless you lie and tell them your GF has thrush, in which they will issue it. How wrong is that? And what about male circumcision still being legal in the UK exactly 30 years after the rarely practiced FGM was banned? There’s plenty to talk about on both sides, and it’s all valid. Why don’t we work together on those shared inequities in health care even if we couldn’t agree on anything else, to ensure that our system doesn’t treat its patients differently based on gender or sexuality?
You keep saying that the balance leans in favour of men, but I see it leaning the other way, as men account for greater numbers of deaths per year, violent assault, murder, rape and suicide. To me, those problems are the biggest things we should be tackling and instead we’re complaining about much smaller issues like should womens healthcare be tax free.
A good example was the SistersUncut protest march in Southwark a couple of weeks ago which I accidentally stumbled into on my way home. They complained that women were being affected unfairly by cuts to their services because shelters for DV were being shut down. Yet they failed to appreciate that from my perspective they were privildged to have them in the first place, since men only have 8 shelters in the whole of the UK so I heard, yet we account for 40% of domestic violence victims (and many Dads have kids they want to protect from abusive women).
There’s no perspective here. And the emphasis always comes back to women being worse off. I just don’t think that’s true and worse, it’s hurting women unnecessarily and making them afraid when they need not be. It’s divisive. I became anti-feminist a couple of years ago when I signed the Child Eyes campaign to protect kids from sexual images on magazines by putting them above eye height. When I went to the Facebook page to show my support I was horrified at the open misandry being revelled in on the page. When I rightly spoke up against it I got streams of abuse hurled at me, private messages threatening me, then they blocked me from the page. It was quite a shock.
For me, it just came out of nowhere. I mean I went there to support them, I signed in favour of their cause, but they were so openly aggressive and horrible to men they actually were willing to drive away a supporter rathe than bite their tongues. What the hell does that say about the feminist movement when that is the response ordinary people see? So, I’m not an MRA. I’m just a normal guy who naively tried to support a good cause and realised what poison and hate was lying so close under the surface and now I stand against that, just as I stood against the little ones seeing porn at eye height. Feminists created me, I didn’t lean either way on gender issues before that.
Rex Duis
I became anti-feminist after seeing the Child Eyes Facebook page after I signed the petition. There were women there waaaay off topic, which was should sexual images and nudity be at the eye height of small children. Instead women there were going off on rants about men being disgusting sexual beasts, mocking their boyfriends and husbands for watching porn, talking about going through their emails and phones and finding porn and dirty pics and stuff.
They seemed to feel entitled to own another human being sexuality and that even masturbating was offensive to them because he’s my man and I own him. It was just vile and hateful and nasty and I was shocked and outraged. I spoke up politely about it, and streams of abuse hurled at me. One woman who apparently had some uni degree in a Humanities subject and worked as an HR manager at a company, privately messaged me hateful things, then blocked me so I couldn’t respond. I sent my response, along with her quoted comments to the manager of the company she worked for instead.
After that I began to see how thin the pretence of gender equality and equity is and that it is a veiled cover for pure black hatred from a nasty rotten core of women (and a few men) whose toxic influence ripples outwards throught the movement. We need to expose and eliminate these nasty vicious people which is why I push for people who are fair and decent and naively think they are supporting equality by claiming to be a Feminist, to adopt a new label and support egalitarianism or human rights movements instead. That’s the only way to filter out the genuine folk from the nasty hate mongers whose bias towards gender would become all too clear in a forum which doesn’t differentiate between gender and focuses instead on our shared humanity.
Lucian Vâlsan
Women voted long before feminists even came to existence, cupcake.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Women-voted-75-years-before-they-were-legally-allowed-to-in-1918.html