Indian village bans cell phones for unwed women
[...]
The Lank village council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange forbidden elopements.
Last month, 34 couples eloped in Muzaffarnagar district, where Lank is located in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said. Among the couples who eloped, eight honor killings have been reported in the last month, police said.
59 comments
That's what they got from this??? People are killing family members for falling in love with the wrong person, and their response is to yet further decrease the freedom of women based on the vague notion that one possible use, out of all the other possible uses, of that freedom just might, they imagine, make it easier for women to live their lives without the prior approval of murderous fucking vigilantes?
This whole paranoid, ultra-conservative, ultra-authoritarian mindset creeps me the fuck out. "Oh no, our children are showing strength of character, self-determination and independent thought! We gotta fucking kill them! "
Right now, within some Islamic communities, a sick, twisted real life version of Romeo and Juliet is being far too regularly played out
Oh its Uttar Pradesh. They are like a black hole of development only superseded by Bihar.
Every so often you find "Child killed by Witches" as an actual crime. Its batshit insane and its nearly impossible to do anything about it.
"The Lank village council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange forbidden elopements."
Don't you people have something else to be doing rather than trying to play Morality Police? You know, like running the fucking village ?
"Last month, 34 couples eloped in Muzaffarnagar district, where Lank is located in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said. Among the couples who eloped, eight honor killings have been reported in the last month, police said."
And you guys did your job and rounded up all of those responsible on charges of murder, right? Right[/]? And don't give me that, "it's tradition!" bullshit as an excuse, either.
This sounds like a reaction to the "honour killings". They probably don't want people to die, so they instituted this law.
There must have been better ways, though.
Boy, are some people sexually repressed!
Please tell me that the police actually did something about these honor killings. Otherwise, my faith in humanity will fall way past zero and wrap around negative infinity.
This just proves that as long as there is religion in the world, there can be no peace on Earth. Please do not misinterpret me as saying that non-fundamentalist members of religions are part of the problem or are impeding world peace or anything, because they are not, and we do not want to alienate them, but simply that for as long as there are holy books and doctrines considered inviolate and unquestionable, there exist some people (who would not be diagnosed with psychopathy, by the way) who will throw their morals out the window to perpetuate the evils done in said books and doctrines. That is simply the way things are.
This is a remote poverty stricken village in India. Marriages are fobidden between members of the same clan.
Presumably inbreeding is the reason the gods forbade this. However their followers don't believe in letting the gods solve these problems and are dead set on doing their job for them. Like most religious people throughout the ages, they use murder as their tool of piety.
If the cell-phone ban is a tool to reduce the numbers of deaths from religious fanatics as they grudgingly move to the 21st century, I'm not too fazed by it. The older generation will die out, and by doing so free the next. Free it to commit its own follies, admittedly.
This sounds like an excellent place to elope from.
@Canadiest:
> Right now, within some Islamic communities, a sick, twisted real life version of Romeo and Juliet is being far too regularly played out
Yes, in those as well, but this example is almost certainly from a Hindu community. The crucial element is not religion but the backwoods, peasant culture that has existed, mostly unchallenged, for so long.
It is particularly horrifying that so many so-called honour killings involve the deaths of women at the hands of their male relatives, men who supposedly love their sisters and daughters but feel compelled to kill them, deaths often delivered in brutal and unmerciful ways.
Oh my gosh! Young men and women are doing something that pisses us off! Let's forbid the women from doing this (to hell with the men, they can do what they want), and if that doesn't work, KILL THEM ALL!
You people make me sick. And "honor killing" is an oxymoron.
Puritanism: The horrible, terrifying, suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
This is beyond scary. I cannot imagine trying to be with someone I love, only to be beaten to death by people who supposedly love me.
That isn't love. It's paranoid, irrational fear and ignorance.
I love the fact that there is a problem which affects everyone and is not caused solely by women, yet it is only the women who are required to change their behavior.
Oh, wait, did I say "love"? I meant "am filled with rage because of".
It also annoys me that in the US, we sometimes seem to have the same idea: too many sexual assaults happening on campus? Let's institute a curfew for all female students!
What a bunch of Uttar Pradesh.
To be fair to the village, it does seem to have at least vaguely good intentions to stop honour killings, even if it is using a cruel, sexist, and most of all stupid and ill conceived idea to do it.
Honour killings are a horrifying mark of a thoroughly backwards and inane country though.
Why not ban cell phones for unwed men instead?
Oh, that's right. Can't curtail freedom for anything with a penis, they might actually have lives to live.
@Saccharissa
I'm not sure that's a very good analogy. See, in that case, the curfew is instituted to protect the women (the most likely victim of sexual assault) on the reasoning that, if there are fewer potential victims during high-risk times of day (or night, as it were), there will be fewer victims, period.
Slightly misogynistic, yes, and there's that old saw from Ben Franklin, but not near the same level of banning cell phones because dem wimmin dun wanna murri who we tell dem to.
@ 1231085
Both cases utterly fail to address the actual cause of the problem, which is not cell phones nor is it women walking at night. (I don't think that there's an actual problem in the OP anyway, not with the eloping part, anyway, but that's not the issue here). Both also target women even though both sexes are involved-- the university could institute a curfew for men so they're not out raping, rather than for women so they aren't out getting raped, for instance. (Aren't university students (this is a university, right?) adults, anyway? They're really old enough to "protect" themselves without such institutionalized constraints.)
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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