The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

World

Schlafly: Married Women Can’t Get Raped

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Some of you may be familiar with Phyllis Schlafly, the arch nemesis of the feminist movement. To put it mildly her views on the role of women are controversial in many circles.

At a recent speech at Bates College she asserted that married women cannot be raped by their husbands.

At one point, Schlafly also contended that married women cannot be sexually assaulted by their husbands.

“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape,” she said.

This is not a view that I subscribe to. I think that a married couple has certain obligations and that one of them is to help their spouse with their sexual needs but not at the expense of one being completely subjugated to the other. Just to be clear the scope of obligations relative to needs is going to be subjective and based upon an agreement between the spouses.

I wonder how many other people (read women) subscribe to her point of view. I know that there is an audience for it, but how large is it.

On a side note but related to this I think that the biggest impediment to electing a female president will be other women, but that is a post for a different day.

Learn Yiddish In Thailand

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I thought that this was kind of interesting.

BANGKOK – A new Yiddish program will soon be launched at the Goethe-Institut in Thailand.

Thai students who have successfully completed an advanced German course will be offered the opportunity to learn Ashkenazi language at the institute, which is situated beside the German Embassy in Bangkok.

Net Perra, a student at Ramkhamhaeng University in Bankok, has shown interest in the new course.

“Jews are a wise people,” Perra said, “You have to learn their language and their culture in order to understand them.”

In addition to learning Yiddish, Perra and the other students enrolled in the course will also learn basic concepts of Jewish history and culture. Trips to local kosher restaurants and a visit to the Chabad center in Bangkok are part of the program’s curriculum.

Peter Adowalt, an instructor at the institute, assembled the curriculum after completing his research on Jewish communities in Bangkok, Berlin, and Munich in collaboration with a Muslim instructor at the institute’s Cairo branch.

“Yiddish is very close to German,” Adowalt said, “I chose it to demonstrate to students how a people with no nation for generations developed a language of its own.”