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
To reach hundreds of thousands of new readers and to make the biggest impact we can in the next general election, we need to grow our donor base substantially.
That's why in 2024, we are seeking to generate 150 additional regular donors to support Left Foot Forward's work.
We still need another 124 people to donate to hit the target. You can help. Donate today.
398 Responses to “He thinks feminists are ‘obnoxious bigots’: meet the new justice minister”
mickey667
Grow a pair mate
Mekyle
Some people cant math. I’m glad you can.
karen straughan
“No need to beat on our efforts with FGM, a different cultural matter.”
Somehow I doubt the slightly “different” cultural context matters a whole lot to the baby being cut.
Every time a feminist insists that FGM is “much much worse” than MGM, or “a completely different thing” from MGM, or “just not the same” as MGM, they undermine the efforts of people advocating genital integrity for boys.
This leads to idiots like Featherstone saying absurdities about FGM such as [paraphrasing], “If it was boys’ genitals we were cutting, the practice would have ended long ago,” as an MP in a country where cutting half the skin and nerves off a baby boy’s penis is perfectly legal and practiced every day.
The reason she can say something like that with a perfectly straight face is because of the constant rhetoric, much of it coming from feminists, that FGM and MGM are fundamentally different.
When I was being interviewed by Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, he essentially said, “well, but you’ve gotta admit that it’s different, that the purpose of FGM is to suppress women.”
He’s too young to know about the many, many painful devices parents could purchase as recently as the 1920s and strap onto their sons’ penises to prevent “self-abuse”, and to inflict pain whenever they got an erection–to suppress male sexuality and male sexual desire. He’s too young to know that suppression of male sexuality, particularly masturbation, is the reason circumcision was introduced into non-Jewish populations in the US in the late 1800s, and he has no clue that the man who popularized the practice (Dr. John Harvey Kellogg) also recommended clitoridectomy to “cure” hypersexuality and masturbation in girls.
And most of society is too young and blind to history to realize that global history is rife with even more severe forms of genital mutilation in boys and men–castrati, eunuchs, penile subincision and worse. Heck, you can actually listen to a phonographic recording of the last singer to be castrated in the UK, that’s how recently we were willing to remove the testicles from boys so they could better *entertain* us. And you can read about religious sects in certain parts of the world who have resorted to kidnapping boys and castrating them to maintain their numbers, for lack of willing volunteers.
But yeah, it’s different, because context or something.
j.d.troughton
That’s unfortunately not how multiculturalism works, at all. Theoretical ideals do not seem anti-men to me, harassment, violence, ostracization, discrimination, ignorance, and neglect seem anti-men to me.
j.d.troughton
Any feminist illiterature I’ve attempted to read I’ve not managed to get through the first chapter of. It’s like trying to get through White Supremacist writing “just to see their perspective”, it’s distasteful and eerie and sad beyond being bearable.