Religion and Women's Rights

So this is a hot button topic if I ever saw one.  And I know a lot of you are thinking that this is an easy answer: NO!  But it's not that simple; rather, I don't think it is.  This was one of my major class' more interesting Saturday debates and I really feel it's worth bringing up despite my personal disinterest in women's rights.  It's not that I don't think they're important, I do, but going to an all-girls school I hear way too much about being an empowered, modern woman to feel passionately about it.  That said, let the debate begin!

This house believes that religion and women's rights are necessarily incompatible.

Proposition:  Look at the world stage.  I personally can barely read an email update from Amnesty International without hearing about some religiously driven women's rights violation.  Fundamentalist groups most definitely use women as scapegoats and demons in their rhetoric.  Additionally, a number of religious traditions do write against allowing women to enter the clergy/hierarchy of established faith or undergo certain rituals or occupy certain positions in society.  To many it seems clear that religion and women's rights are incompatible to say the least.  With the Abrahamic religions rife with women's rights violations and restrictions and even religions like Hinduism (notoriously tolerant of differences in belief) which bans women from entering the priesthood or learning Sanskrit as they are "unclean", it seems clear that established religion is against and incompatible with women's rights.

Opposition:  Just because fundamentalists in all religions take scriptures to be anti-women's rights doesn't mean that they actually are.  Islam, which of late has gotten a bad rap regarding women's rights, was shockingly progressive in the age it was founded.  For the first time women could inherit property and receive an education.  In many tribal religions, women are revered as healers and spiritualists.  While the Abrahamic religions do place prohibitions on women, it is not necessarily true across all religious traditions that women are relegated to second class citizens.  Hinduism reveres certain aspects of the female persona through goddesses like Kali; she is portrayed as a powerful and necessary woman.  It is true that scriptures have been reinterpreted of late to the disadvantage of women; but that does not mean that women's rights and religion are necessarily antithetical nor does it mean that in the original context of the religion's foundation that it was not progressive regarding women's rights.

I can't wait to read the comments on this one.