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5 - From Private Prejudice to Public Policy

How Religious Conservatives Are Regaining Control over Women’s Bodies through Religious Exemptions

from Part III - The Decline of Liberalism, the Rise of Populism, and the Rights of Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2025

Gila Stopler
Affiliation:
College of Law and Business, Israel
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Summary

This chapter claims that in the new millennium, religious conservatives succeed in their struggles to control women’s bodies and to turn their private prejudices into public policy through the misappropriation of human rights and by gaining unwarranted religious exemptions. By allegedly demanding the protection of their own rights to religious liberty, conscientious objection, equality, and multicultural accommodations, religious conservatives are reversing the progress in women’s rights and using liberal rights and concepts as a weapon against women. The chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the separation between religion and the state cannot protect women’s rights against the religious conservative attack. It compares the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in the USA, where religion is separated from the state, to the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in Israel, where there is no separation between religion and the state, and shows that despite the very different religion–state relations, the religious conservative attack in the USA and Israel is similar in both method and success.

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Type
Chapter
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Women's Rights in Liberal States
Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights
, pp. 139 - 185
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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