The problem with the "ladies"

Do you remember the famous saying by which began Martin Niemöller "First they came for the Jews...." The moral is that evil targets the weak and the vulnerable and works its way up the food chain. By safeguarding the rights of the weakest of us we safeguard all our rights. By humanizing the least of us we reaffirm what makes humanity precious. This week there has been talk of banning women from praying near the Kaaba. I am not a believer, but I can see how religious women would become upset by this exclusion. The rationale was simple: there was overcrowding which was causing a public safety problem, and excluding women would ameliorate that issue. Note that the exclusion of women was not something sanctified by some explicit and conscious diminishment of women from their equality before god, rather, it was an offhand, almost banal, expression of the way that ...