I agree with your comments, Mr. Gargan, that the issues raised in this report are not to be labelled women's issues. They are issues for all of our society to deal with. Our society will have dignity only if all the members of that society are accorded respect. To the extent that we do not do so, our society is in ill health. With those remarks, I do agree. However, I disagree with what I detect to be, and what I would respectfully refer to as denial in some of your comments. There are issues within society that affect women that do not affect men. The question of domestic violence is one that I will refer to. When a man walks down the street he does not walk down the street with the same amount of fear that a woman does. When a man gets into his car at night, he does not check the back seat to see if anyone is there waiting to attack him. That is a different reality for men than it is for women. Our lives are fundamentally different in how violence affects us. To say that we should not point out that these issues especially affect women is to deny the existence of them. With those comments, I most strongly disagree.
I do agree that labelling things as women's issues detracts from the credibility of those issues. That is not a problem of women; that is a problem of how society treats women's credibility. Rather than asking women not to address these issues as women's issues, we should start teaching society that women do have credibility. Something that is a women's issue is an important issue to society as a whole. After all, for the last thousand years, we have treated issues that are important to men as issues of credibility within our society.