Equal Rights Quotes
Sometimes falsely attributed to Jordan B. Peterson (even though he credits Solzhenitsyn).
Jefferson had just won a bitter, partisan election, and this was his attempt to reach out to the Federalist minority whose newspapers had been predicting that a Jefferson victory would bring a tyranny of the majority.
Although Jabotinsky believed that the Arabs would have to be defeated militarily—see {604497}—he and the other Zionist leaders assumed that the eventual state would have Arab citizens. From this beginning, the principle of equal rights and participation in the politics and public affairs of the Jewish state was in the design. See {587034} as to how this manifested itself. The rights possessed by the Arab minority of Israel exceeds not only those of Jews in any Arab nation, and exceeds those of any minority in an Arab state. And because Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs of Israel possess more political rights than do Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. The number of Arab political parties in Israel is larger than that of most Arab nations where opposition parties are rarely permitted.
Gloria Jean Watkins
Jinnah was a modern Islamist who saw the role of females in a modern context. He, like the Indian Hindu leaders were in a sense products of the West and Western government and education. He would be very surprised that in his Pakistan men can murder their female relatives who they believe have dishonored the family, or that women would not be educated in the Madrassas, or that authorities could sentence a female relative of a man deemed guilty of seduction to be gang raped, but that is what happens in modern Pakistan. Jinnah and many of the early leaders believed that their new government could modernize Islam but the control and influence went the other way. Pakistan became a religiously dominated autocracy rather than the democracy that Jinnah foresaw.
What made this quotation very dramatic was that the state of Virginia, under the previous administration dominated by religious fundamentalists had passed a law banning same sex marriage. Several private Virginia citizens had sued the State in Federal Court, asserting that their Constitutional rights were violated by the ban. The Attorney general normally defends the state in any court proceeding. However, Herring agreed with the plaintiffs on the case, that the Virginia law was unconstitutional, so he and the State entered the case on the side of the plaintiffs and against the state law. His reference to the right side of history was related to the fact that as late as 1964 Virginia had a law prohibiting interracial marriage which they enforced and the Supreme Court invalidated. Thus, on marriage, Virginia had a track record of being on the wrong side of history and the law.
