Considering its roots and its base, the DUP has no shortage of women politicians, even if they do tend to be married to the more prominent male ones.
The Dutch ChristenUnie is also morally and socially very conservative, economically leftish, patriotic, and staunchly Protestant. Like all other members of Cameron's new Group at Strasbourg, it is incongruously lined up with Cameron's party and is far too good for him.
Also with one MEP, however, and also an expression of the small but very strong conservative Calvinist "pillar" in Dutch society, is the SGP, which forbids female candidates. Their one MEP sits in the Group dominated by UKIP.
So the European Union subjects us to the legislative will of a party which forbids women candidates, a fact which should be contrasted with the number of women (including their MEP) even in the party founded by and for Ian Paisley. This man from the SGP votes on the laws to which we are subject.
I yield to no one in my opposition to Turkish accession. But even that country's ruling Islamist AKP has women MPs.
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What will the SGP make of candidate Palin/Bachmann?
ReplyDeleteAbout as much as anyone else.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, Bachmann is a Lutheran of the Wisconsin Synod variety, which believes the Pope to be the Antichrist and that women should have no role whatever in governing the Church, not even the sort of ad hoc thing that goes on of necessity in the Catholic Church at parochial level, such as doing the finances or whatever.
Mind you, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster certainly doesn't allow women elders, but it has no problem with women politicians (why, Mrs Paisley is now Lady Paisley in her own right). Clearly, nor has the Wisconsin Synod.
Palin, meanwhile, seems to have moved from Pentecostal to the fundamentalist side of more classically Evangelical, having grown up in the Wasilla Assembly of God but being now a member of Wasilla Bible Church. Rather like at least one of Paisley's closest ecclesiastical, rather than political, lieutenants.
That's still a long, long way from the electoral base of the SGP, of course. Or from at least the traditional and still-dominant electoral base of the ChristenUnie, either.