Should we be concerned with the treatment of women by Religious Groups & in some cases Countries?

In cerntain Countries a husband can get away with murdering his wife for disrespect. These women are supressed and the men of these countries find our treatment of women a discrace and become inraged(some times to there death) for our desires for equality and change. Women Can not have an education, show there faces or have eye contact with strangers.. How do the changes begin or should there be a change or concern?

Or should I continue to think local/small, like keep pushing for Gay marriage rights(Dont take this wrong I am for this). But our concerns of rights in country seem so trivial when compared to other countries....

While women's rights are lacking in certain areas of the world, it is not our job to secure them for them. Women fought for them here, and won, but they didn't always even have the right to vote. Best to let them handle it locally, as the world becomes more connected with the sharing of ideas and information it is bound to happen. Continue fighting for rights in your local area, that is where you have a real interest / say in what goes on.

I agree with you about some religions' and countries' treatment of women. Unfortunately when you cite examples it's often dismissed as "Islamophobia."

Can you imagine if the PC movement had been around in the 1930s? Whenever people criticized Hitler he could have just accused them of "Naziphobia."

And yes, the comparison is apt. Read the Koran. It reads a lot like the Mein Kampf.

if you are a victim of this, you should leave. get out of there.

politically incorrect for us to insist a muslim man cant beat his wife...as far as i am concerned..sooner or later islam will either have to mkove forward and denounce the violent tendencies they have...or else the rest of the world will have to decimate it....as long as they insist that they are superior and their job is to be intolerant towards "infidels"...we will be at war with them...it would be nice to leave it to locals..but thats precisely whats wrong with islam, they have no central leader who denounces these inhumane treatments of others, there are too many imams and ayatolahs who have their own followings...islam has not moved forward in its interpretations of the quran since muhamed, they consider it the perfect word of god...thats their mistake, if it was the perfect word of god, it wouldnt have been delivered by a man...it would have come right from god, on earth......

Except if you look at it from this angle. The Us has given Millions upon billions of dollars to aide other countries in their crisis, but don't you think that there are people in our own country that could have benefitted from this money. I mean our homeless rate is increasing, barely anything was done about Katrina victims, we have batered women that have no place to go right here in our cities on our streets. When you look at it that way there needs to be an internal healing before we should be healing the world, not that sending help to Africa was wrong by any means.

Countries such as Pakistan that have "honor killings" have a great cultural problem to overcome. Contrary to popular belief, honor killings and the suppression of women is not Islam and is not condoned in the Qur'an. There is an interesting article about the practice online at National Geographic (see citation). In part, it reads:

In India, for example, more than 5,000 brides die annually because their dowries are considered insufficient, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Crimes of passion, which are treated extremely leniently in Latin America, are the same thing with a different name, some rights advocates say.

"In countries where Islam is practiced, they're called honor killings, but dowry deaths and so-called crimes of passion have a similar dynamic in that the women are killed by male family members and the crimes are perceived as excusable or understandable," said Widney Brown, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. snip

There is nothing in the Koran, the book of basic Islamic teachings, that permits or sanctions honor killings. However, the view of women as property with no rights of their own is deeply rooted in Islamic culture, Tahira Shahid Khan, a professor specializing in women's issues at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, wrote in Chained to Custom, a review of honor killings published in 1999.

"Women are considered the property of the males in their family irrespective of their class, ethnic, or religious group. The owner of the property has the right to decide its fate. The concept of ownership has turned women into a commodity which can be exchanged, bought and sold."

The article goes on to say that countries often lack political will to stop the practice. The UN is treating it as a human rights issue.

YES!!! We should be concerned. Way too many people think its OK for religion to = hate and violence!!!

But you completely forgot about what still goes on in the U S A. It is illegal but it still goes on. And I am not putting down main stream Mormons/LDS's. I am talking about renegade FLDS groups marrying 12 yr olds. Marrying 5 and 6, 12 yr old girls at a time. Forcing them to have one baby every year. WTF at home, with no medical professionals and no epidurals allowed. Deciding who young girls can and cannot marry or even associate with and depriving them of education and using violence to keep them in submission.

YES WE SHOULD ALL BE VERY CONCERNED ANYTIME "MY RELIGION = YOUR PAIN"

I am not an atheist by the way. I have been baptized Freewill Baptist, confirmed Catholic and confirmed Episcopal. You guess where I am right now???

You are so right. We are so concerned with trivialities here when there are women (men and children in some cases too) being beaten, raped, killed, and generally controlled and treated as slaves on a daily basis. This is probably the main reason I support our presence in the middle east. The arab nations are some of the worst offenders. Liberating them and allowing women to see something different is an important step in helping solve the problem.