Which religions discriminate against women

The study shows that there are ongoing debates within the religious communities towards maintaining or changing the discriminatory features of religious and tribal family laws. Despite the fact that most Sudanese elite women deem their current "rights status" as discriminatory, they do not demand a secular law on women's civil rights. They promote "changing from within" by reinterpreting and transforming the religious and tribal laws in a more gender equal direction.

Home Publications. CMI Report Sudan Brief Oct UN resolutions. Human rights in the wider UN. Human rights in a reformed UN. UN agencies and programmes: supporting implementation. Human Rights Up Front.

Human rights financing. In focus: human rights and religion. Religion-based reservations to the human rights conventions. Istanbul Process. The Inside Track. HRC Session Reports. GA 3C Session Reports. Human Rights Resolutions Portal. Human Rights Voting Portal. Rough guides to human rights. A rough guide to the Human Rights Council.

A rough guide to the human rights Treaty Bodies. A rough guide to human rights in the wider UN system. A rough guide to the regional human rights systems. Impact OSS.

About us. Who we are. Why a human rights think tank? Our values. Our mission. Currently in Sri Lanka there is a vicious campaign being waged against Muslims by devout Buddhists, who have successfully sold many westerners the idea that theirs is a religion of peace and love, despite the recent history of Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Cambodia. Neither party wishes to discuss this because it might undermine their pathetic attempts to persuade us that no one in Sri Lanka has reason to fear persecution.

But religion is not equivalent to race: it is deeply racist — and unacceptable — to assume common characteristics to people based on their racial origins, which is unfortunately the language often used in discussing asylum seekers. Religion, however, is a set of beliefs that people can either reject or accept, and in a democratic society it should be acceptable to point to it as the basis of a great deal of prejudice and discrimination.

What is unacceptable is that people like Abbott ignore the behaviours of his own religion and concentrate on attacking Muslims because this plays well in the current political environment. Very few politicians are brave enough to ask whether there are basic contradictions between the values of an open democratic society and those of almost all fundamentalist religions, in which I include the Catholic Church and many of the fast growing evangelical Christian denominations.

As soon as religions start trying to impose their views on non-believers they have crossed the line that makes a truly democratic and liberal society possible, but while this is seized upon where Muslims are concerned it is largely ignored when Christians do the same.

Defenders of Abbott will presumably claim that Australia is a majority Christian country, and in terms of nominal affiliation this is probably still true. A woman can never be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

In the case of Judaism, the common starting point of all sects is that the sexes were created differently. Man is seen as endowed with the intellectual capacity to come closer to his creator through study and prayer. Woman, imbued with natural modesty and intuitive understanding, is assigned the task of imitating God's work by procreating. However valued a woman is in the domestic sphere, her role is seen as essentially supportive.

Jewish men begin each day with the ritualized prayer thanking God "for not having made me a women". In orthodox Judaism, women can never be rabbis, nor can they mingle with men at prayer in the synagogue.