Sir, if a Confederate slave owner deigned to post on this site, I would never hope to "debate" with him. What I would hope to do is entrap, belittle, demoralize, and generally DEFEAT him through discourse. Despotism, terrorism, and inhumanity are not to be debated with. They are to be defeated, corrected, and reformed.

The fact that a belief, a custom, a habit, or a set of ideas has a long shelf life does NOT validate them as being free from inspection under the bright lights of modern thinking (meaning post-Renaissance thinking). Christianity, Judaism, fasting, circumcision, the levirate, polygyny, and sexism are all subject to the scrutiny of modern logical secular humanistic examination and judgement as to the objective value which such long-standing traditions represent for the human condition in general. Islam is equally as liable to be considered in this way, including customs and ideas about women needing to preserve their sanctity, chastity, and modesty by covering themselves.

I would submit to you that you have misidentified the injustice of Naziism. The wrongness of Naziism did not epitomize itself in the genocide of ethnic minorities. It epitomized itself in the idea that some individuals had different rights, privileges, or intrinsic predispositions or capacities because of their ethnic, biological, or "racial" identities. The idea that women have different rights, privileges, or intrinsic predispoisions and capacities, and thus can and should be treated with disempowering and disenfranchising institutions is analagous in this regard.

On the contrary, we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all humans are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, societies and cultural traditions are instituted among people, and that societies and cultural traditions must derive their just powers from the extent to which they can be objectively shown to contribute to the inalienable rights of the greatest possible good of humanity.

Teaching little girls that they are different from little boys, to the extent that their biologically-intrinsic inferiority, weakness, and dependency requires them to keep themselves covered is, in my opinion, suspect of a tradition which does NOT contribute to the inalienable rights of the greatest possible good of humans. When I have asked proponents of these traditions to explain, and legitimate these traditions, they have always referred to scriptures which are thousands of years old, and offered zero objective evidence that such traditions or ways of life contribute to the inalienable rights of the greatest possible good of humans in the contemporary globalizing context.

As the thread title indicates: on reason and reason only.

If it can be empirically, with impartial and objective evidence, shown to me that the customs under discussion IMPROVE the lives of those involved, then I will accept them as beneficient and time-honored. But until that time, I retain my tentative conclusion based on the available evidence which I have been able to bring to bear to address the hypothesis that these are in fact time-honored customs of injustice, inhumanity, bias, and evil.

It is in their essential nature as prejudice against one particular type of human being--females--that these customs epitomize wrongness of the same ilk as Naziism. Genocides do not materialize out of thin air, they grow out of firm beliefs that the victimized group is a sub-human which does not deserve the same rights.