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”
Rex
From what I’ve read, treatment of cancers affecting men is twice as effective as for those affecting women. Meaning that funds spend on men’s health deliver greater positive results. Yet male healthcare funding is always lower than women’s healthcare, and does not recieve the minimum’s it should for basic levels of treatment and research. It’s got nothing to do with how successfully women have campaigned for those funds. You make it sounds as if women earned a greater share of healthcare funding (contributed to more greatly by men) as if it’s not something those in need should just have by right. Men have a right to equal healthcare funding as women. It is gender discrimination to do otherwise. Breast cancer recieves absolutely enormous amounts of money, compared to all other types of cancer, regardless of the fact it kills fewer women each year than testicular and prostate cancer kills men. Even if we put aside gender bias arguments, the deadliest cancers are still not recieveing the greatest amounts of funding and there is only one reason for that – sexual discrimination in favour of females.
Re your cooking analogy, not that there’s much point in exploring it further but you claim I don’t place any value on the work done in preparing the food. I did not say that. I did say it was arguably less pleasant and more restrictive to earn the funds to pay for food, than it was experience shopping for food and preparing it. Do you disagree? Are women getting a rough deal when they spend their partners money on food they will eat and the man expects something in return for that ie cooking it?
I ended up in a similar situation with a flatmate once when I was completely broke. He worked 12 hour shifts, came home too exhausted to shop or cook. He got sick of eating takeaways. So he gave me money and his travel card and I did his shopping for him. In return I didn’t have to walk for miles to the big stores like I usually did, and he let me have a couple of coins to spend on items for myself, because I always got good bargains and specials and saved him money. Finally I cooked meals for him, and naturally he shared them with me. I made enough for 3 servings, and the third I put in the fridge for him for his work lunch the next day. He was just my flatmate, and straight. But we fell into that relationship because I was poor and had time on my hands and he was exhausted from work he hated and it made life easier for him. It’s called ‘mutual benefit’. Lots of animals in nature fall into these relationships, humans are no different, except that women nowadays seem to feel they are getting a raw deal because other women tell them they are and rile them up. I was perfectly happy helping my flatmate. It benefitted me greatly, made my life easier and it was satisfying knowing that I was helping him out too.
Stay at home wives and girlfriends have become ungrateful for the easier lives they’ve lead since the mid part of the 20th century onwards. Devices do half the work they used to in the home, which freed them up to spend more time persuing personal interests. Unfortunately it’s meant some have far too much time to think and listen to misandrist lesbians and man-haters telling them how ‘oppressed’ they are. My Brazilian friend told me, that when women get upset about this in Brazil they joke that they need to be given more dishes to wash. It’s a sexist dig on one level yes, but on another it’s a reminder that women aren’t pulling nearly as much weight maintaining the home and raising the kids as our recent ancestors used to do. I think many are unhappy not cos they are oppressed but because they are simply bored and maybe men need to start expecting more from them again.
Why do men take less days off sick? Many reasons.. society expects them to work hard to provide for their families, and they desire this within themselves as well. Some are pressured by their female partners to earn more money. In some lines of work, those who work the hardest stand out from the crowd and their careers progress. I love how you make out that they are using women by ‘relying’ on them to take the time off hahaha… that’s like what I said about being oppressed by not having to do dish washing, cos a machine is doing it for you and you’re bored. Once again you appear to be suggesting that women don’t enjoy this time off work? I contend that they do.. more than that they love it and expect it now. I used to work with clock watching women. They were packing their bags at 10 minutes to knock off time… a full hour earlier than the rest of us cos.. oh I have to go pick up the kids. Nice one. So that’s 5 hours less work than I had to do per day… and of course someone has to do that extra 5 hours work she didn’t bother her ass to do.. but in the same time frame and for no extra cash… so I ended up working harder so she could enjoy an hour off from work earlier each day. Not fair of course but every woman on staff felt it was perfectly acceptable and reasonable for her to take that time, cos of her kids. Come on.. an hour? Her kids went to school nearby.. are we really to believe it took her an entire hour to drive a few streets away to collect her kids and get them home? Of course not… she used the time to go shopping usually from what I understand. While I was at work, finishing the tasks she hadn’t bothered to do during the day.
Ideal system? There is no ‘ideal’ system, because we all have different lives. I won’t have kids, but some of my friends do. Some have great family relationships where grandmothers can provide child care and assistance around the home.. others don’t have those bonds, or their relations live far away, have health issues or have passed. So there cannot be an ideal except to say that mutual benefit relationships will develop where there is a need for them, and society should see those for what they are in their entirety. Instead, feminists moan that women are oppressed if they do housework and stay at home from work. In an ideal world, they’d just shut up moaning and appreciate that for many couples, that kind of relationship suits them fine.
Rex
Men are people too and we shouldn’t have our voices drowned out by women.
You linked to a blog on a difficult subject. The woman ‘hates men’ because they don’t find her equally as attractive as she was before when she still had breasts. That’s not their problem. That is her problem. Yes it hurts and it is unfair. But the fact is, unless you are raised to a disfigured parent, or enjoyed a strong relationship with someone before disfigurement, then it can be very hard to find someone accepting of your scars. That is not ‘their problem’ and something they need to work on. It’s just life, and you have to deal with it yourself.
It’s no different that trying to find love if you were born ugly, except you have the added pain of having known how people treated you before. Don’t dare say this is an issue with men. It’s a human issue. And you can say ‘oh woe the world is so superficial these days’, but the fact is, most animals by nature are designed to find cripples, wounded, disfigured and scarred or deformed creatures less appealing. I know it sounds callous to speak that way of human beings, but it doesn’t change nature. On an animal level we are repelled by this. This woman sadly has chosen to A make this an issue about men and B an issue about the sexual value for male pleasure of breasts. It is neither of those things. It’s about being disfigured and incomplete, and especially with a part of the body considered sexual, it is naturally going to impact peoples love life and attractiveness to others. You can’t blame other people for that. It’s not thir fault or their problem.
Men earn more money because they work longer and harder generally than women in identical professions, and in general men tend to be more proactive in negotiate higher pay and perks and tend to work in jobs which earn higher financial rewards. So they pay more in taxes and women get the benefit. If men contributed the same amount in tax as women, and received a 50% share of healthcare and unexmployed and other benefits, then there would be a huge shortfall, with women suffering the most. It would however force women to do more work that paid money and work longer hours and try harder to find jobs that pay better wages, including doing very unpleasant jobs, technically demanding and physically dangerous, none of which generally appeals to most average women. So men take the risk, earn the money and women take it. Fair? Not really and especially not when Feminists whine so loud about oppression and inequality. Be grateful that more men don’t feel the way I do yet or women will really begin to suffer as more and more guys object to subsidising the cost of the other genders living all the while getting it loudly in the ear for privilege.
I don’t have to choose any system. Who said we had only 2 choices. Neither is agreeable. But a move towards a fairer system would be a step forward for both genders.
fmf
i linked to a blog about breast cancer and how campaigns based around boobs can actually be **harmful** to people who suffer from this cancer and lose them. numbers do not *ever* tell you the *whole* picture. Not accepting the “disfigurement” is partially re-enforced by a breasts-first cancer campaign attitude, rather than one based on human lives that are being saved.
if a male cancer campaign about …idk, testicular cancer, was based around saving (incredibly attractive) testicles, and they saved lots more lives because they got lots of funding for saving the testicles, but many people who survived felt alienated because they lost one or both of their testicals as opposed to the *goal* of the campaign, I think that would be grounds to say the campaign isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for the real male sufferers of the cancer it’s meant to be about.
so you don’t believe women would ever work more to make up the shortfall if men worked less, because of the risk? so work inequality would always exist, unless we were prepared to live with less output, and because of human nature, we need to divide the fruits of output 50/50, and this will favour women, because they naturally don’t work as much, and if men caught onto this, they would work less, and everyone’s quality of life would go down.
there are slight flaws in your argument.
1.a) https://internationalwimcommunityportal.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/press-release-wim-stock-imagery-campaign-9-july-2014.pdf
1.b) http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/gender-equality-mining-industry
1.c) http://www.wgea.gov.au/media-releases/calls-more-women-mining-construction-utilities
2.a) http://www.ciob.org/sites/default/files/CIOB%20research%20-%20The%20Changing%20Role%20of%20Women%20in%20the%20Construction%20Workforce.pdf
2.b) http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/30/women-working-construction-industry-housing-boom-rise
3. http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/few-good-women-gender-inclusion-united-states-military/
4. http://www.cityandguilds.com/news/February-2014/gender-equality-in-the-garage#.VdI-n5cpCTQ
I can’t even find data on who makes up the bulk of professional cleaners, and nurses, which obviously, involving significant amounts of human filth and dirt from toilets and sick and elderly people) would be majority male, wouldn’t you expect? …oh wait….
fmf
Sorrry can you bullet point this it’s too long for me.
Rex
Do you see the irony in your comments on breast cancer awareness. How you said, that wouldn’t happen if it were a male campaign… how would we know? We don’t get many campaigns, unlike breast cancer…. Cock in a Sock was started as a fun antidote to that for example. A great way to raise funds and destigmatise the (‘incredibly attractive’) testicle or prostate checking.
Are you suggesting that men should work less so that women can work more? That women only work less because men are preventing them? I think I already said that is not the case. Women choose to work less in many cases because they have different priorities in life. They also choose jobs which entail significantly fewer physical risks than men, right across the board in all sectors. This is not because men won’t allow them to do dangerous jobs. Women are averse to doing them. No shame in that. It makes good sense! Only, let’s not denigrate men when they do it ay. They should be respected for taking the risk, so that women and children don’t have to.
Could you summarise all the links you shared. I don’t have time to read them all. I looked at one at random, Hard Hat revolution. Not a good argumet for your case, but an excellent one demonstrating mine. A woman is quoted saying: ““There’s a reason why a lot of women don’t want to [work on site]. It’s physically demanding. A lot more women could do it but why would you stand out in the rain for 12 hours a day?”. Indeed why would they.
The article proceeds to boast about increasing numbers of women in construction, but hits a snag when it points out that “Women account for 286,000 of a construction workforce of 2.1m. In manual roles, though, that percentage falls to just 1.3%, barely changed from 1.2% in 1999.”
In other words, the women in construction work in non-manual, office roles. Just like everyone expects they will. Because they actively resist demanding physical labour.. which is an absolutely vital component of any civilisation. Without manual labour, nothing happens. Men’s work is essential.
Re nurses and cleaners – The majority will be female. But those are the only jobs women will get their hands dirty for willingly. As I said, women prefer human focused, caring roles. So again not a good argument. Can you think of a great many other jobs that women actively seek out, where they get their hands dirty or take physical risks doing?…….