Then She Set Off the Jollity Klaxon
July 30, 2014
Meanwhile, in where-to-go-on-that-foreign-holiday news:
One of the most senior members of the Turkish government sparked an outcry on Tuesday, after declaring that women should not laugh loudly in public. The deputy prime minister, Bülent Arinc, one of the co-founders of the ruling Islamic Justice and Development party (AKP), made the comment while lamenting the moral decline of modern society. “A man should be moral but women should be moral as well, they should know what is decent and what is not decent,” Arinc said in a speech on Monday, in the western Bursa region for the Bayram holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. “She should not laugh loudly in front of all the world and should preserve her decency at all times,” he added.
Mr Arinc also shares his wisdom on other matters.
He denounced the excessive use of cars, saying that if even the “river Nile was filled with petrol” there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Arinc also slammed the excessive use of mobile phones in Turkish society, with women “spending hours on the phone to swap recipes.”
An equally pious Guardian reader adds this,
Right up there with… keeping [women] barefoot and pregnant, oh wait, that’s only in America.
Any forcibly barefoot American women are welcome to respond.