Gender equity making strides worldwide, if not in U.S. right now

Progress in cultural wars is made in baby steps

There was bound to be a backlash to the ‘Me Too’ movement, and the struggle over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is clearly part of that culture war. ‘Me Too’ is going to lose this battle unless there is some new and horrendous revelation of Kavanaugh’s past behaviour in the next few days, and lots of people in the U.S. and elsewhere see this as evidence that the war itself is being lost.

That is not necessarily so even in the United States. It is certainly not so in the wider world, where the supreme court of the world’s biggest democracy, India, has just followed up its landmark decision in early September to decriminalize homosexuality with another judgment decriminalizing adultery.

Many people deplore adultery, but as Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously said half a century ago, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation ... What’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.” But adultery was still a criminal offence in India until last week — and a very peculiar offence, because only men could be convicted of it.

The law dated from the time when Britain ruled India, and reflected the Victorian belief that a married woman was her husband’s property. For another man to have sex with a man’s wife was therefore a violation of the husband’s property rights, and the violator should be punished by the law — whereas the woman was presumed to be unable to make her own decisions, and was therefore not legally culpable.

The Indian court’s judgment went straight to the heart of the matter. “It is time to say that the husband is not the master,” said Chief Justice Dipak Misra. “Legal subordination of one sex over another is wrong in itself.” Adultery, he ruled, will no longer be a criminal offence.

On Friday the same court declared that Indian temples have no right to exclude women “of menstruating age” on the specious grounds that they are unclean. “Religion cannot be the cover to deny women the right to worship. To treat women as children of a lesser God is to blink at constitutional morality,” said Chief Justice Misra.

Now, it’s true that Misra was in a rush to get these cases settled before he reached 65, the legally mandated retirement age for judges. (He turned 65 on Tuesday.) It’s also true that there are those on the Supreme Court who do not agree with his liberalization of India’s laws on sexual matters and gender equality. But there seems to be popular support among the educated public for his reforms, and the cases continue.

There are places where these legal principles are still not accepted: many Muslim countries reject them (including Indonesia, where they are drafting laws to prohibit all sex outside the institution of marriage), and many countries in Africa. But nevertheless the example is spreading.

There really is a culture war, raging simultaneously across all the continents. It is rarely fought with as much tribal ferocity as it is in the U.S., but important issues are at stake everywhere. If Judge Kavanaugh joins the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, abortion could once again become illegal in the United States.

But in cultural matters progress often takes the form of two steps forward, one step back. It may feel more like one step forward, two steps back in the United States at the moment, but that is just a snapshot of a moment in time.

Trudeau once told me that his reason for entering politics was “to civilize the law,” and in most parts of the world that project is still making progress. It is very unlikely that the United States will turn out to be a permanent defector from that enterprise, either.