All People Are Equal, But Some People Are More Equal Than Others

I've recently moved from a country where, in a lot of communities, women are not allowed to step outside the house, except to go to the community well or hand pump to get water, and are expected to make it the business of their lives to raise a family and maintain the house, to another country, where women are commonly seen doing just about anything that a man would do, from driving a bus to managing her own company.

I recently found out, that, even in this country, there are certain Christian sects where the women don't work, and they bear like eighteen children, and the kids don't get much of an education. And to add to that, these people vacation only in those regions which are inhabited by their own people, so that the kids are not exposed to the outside world, until the time that they have, perhaps, six children of their own, and too many family responsibilities to think about getting themselves a real education. Apparently there's a reality show on Discovery Channel about these people, and my aunt watched it a few times, and she told me about it.

It was rather strange for me to discover that such communities still survive in this day and age, even in this country. How do they even manage to do it? I mean, you would need to keep your kids away from all kinds of mass media in order to pull off something like that. You would need to live in a neighbourhood which has only people from your sect, and send your kids to a school with the same restriction.

What is more interesting is, once you actually know that there is a more free, more open world out there, why would you still want to continue to live the way you do and keep your kids in the dark, the way your parents kept you? I mean, people spend their lives and die fighting for equal rights, and then there are those people who have equal rights and actually want to be left behind! Why they would do that, continues to puzzle me.