
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 6, 1995                   TAG: 9509060142
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WOMEN'S RIGHTS

"THE GREATEST threat to the family in my lifetime." That's how James Dobson, an evangelical leader and head of "Focus on the Family," describes the United Nations Conference on Women.

Which family is he talking about?

Is he talking about families in Peru, Kashmir, Haiti and Somalia, where governments allow soldiers to rape women as a technique of political repression? Or families in Russia and Kuwait, where women employees are raped and beaten in the companies where they work, without any official reprisal?

Is he talking about families in Islamic countries, where women not wearing veils have been killed by religious extremists? Or families across much of the Third World, where women suffer serious disease because they were subjected to painful genital circumcision?

Is he referring to families in Brazil and Sri Lanka, where mothers, wives and sisters have been killed for asking questions about children, husbands or brothers who have "disappeared." Or families in several Asian nations where local officials and border guards traffic in women and girls and force them into prostitution? Or families in Bosnia, where rape is an instrument of ethnic cleansing?

These are some of the violations of women's rights detailed in recent Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports on worldwide abuses. They're among the crimes and injustices to which the Beijing conference on women is trying to call attention.

Dobson calls the session "the most radical, atheistic and anti-family crusade in the history of the world." He says its agenda "is Satan's trump card if I have ever seen it."

Feminism, though, comes in many forms. For example, the speaker who opened the conference, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, is a religious woman (dressed traditionally, with her hair covered) whose speech affirmed a dual commitment to work and motherhood.

As for the purposes of the conference - highlighting the need to end violence against women, reduce female poverty and increase women's access to education and health care - these seem neither satanic nor "anti-family."

So why do Dobson and his followers feel so threatened?

by CNB