Why are liberals excusing religious abuses?

[Thomas Paine]

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents
Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?
By SUSAN JACOBY
August 19, 2010

I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. And I find myself in a lonely place in relation to many liberals, political and religious, because I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights.

The latest example of the Left’s blind spot on this issue is the antagonism of so many liberal reviewers toward Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent memoir, Nomad. The Somali-born Hirsi Ali immigrated to the United States in 2006 after her close friend, the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist. Hirsi Ali still needs bodyguards because of frequent death threats.

She was educated as a child in Muslim schools, subjected to genital mutilation, and broke with her family when she refused to consent to an arranged marriage. She first settled in Holland, where she worked as a Somali-Dutch interpreter, and her convictions about violence in many (though not, she emphasizes, all) Muslim families are rooted in her work with immigrants as well as her own upbringing. Yet Nicholas D. Kristof, reviewing Nomad for the New York Times Book Review, writes that “I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: 'I love you.'"

I was startled by this patronizing comment, because I admire Kristof for being one of the few male columnists who writes frequently about violence against women. Somehow, “I love you” isn’t the first thing that would come to mind if I were being held down by female relatives while my clitoris was maimed or if my father told me I had to marry a stranger.

As a journalist, I have heard many similar observations from professors of religious and multicultural studies. Some have even suggested that dissidents like Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie have exaggerated the threats against them in order to promote their books. Such slanderous statements are invariably followed by, “This is off the record, you understand.”

I do not agree with everything Hirsi Ali has to say — about Islam or the United States — but I strongly agree with the essential point she makes in Nomad:

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.

It is understandable that American liberals, and particularly religious liberals, are wary of anyone who makes negative public judgments about other faiths. There is a long history of disrespect for various minority cultures and religions in America, although the Constitution and the First Amendment — products of Enlightenment secularism and Enlightenment-influenced religion — have (usually) stopped the disrespect from turning into bloodshed..

But it is one thing to recognize the legal right of all Americans to believe whatever they want and quite another to maintain that all belief systems are compatible with democracy. In a free society, religion should be no more immune to criticism than atheism, and the First Amendment does not give anyone carte blanche to violate secular law in the name of faith. This crucial distinction applies to all religions, not only to Islam.

In Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Jehovah’s Witness for violating state labor laws by requiring children to distribute religious literature at night. The Court declared: “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable diseases, or the latter to ill health or death. . . . Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow [that] they are free . . . to make martyrs of their children.”

In recent decades, state and federal courts have cited Prince in taking a much harder line against parents who deny standard, life-saving medical treatment to their children out of religious conviction. Similarly, polygamous religious sects do not have the right to force their minor daughters into “celestial marriage.” And parents may not physically abuse their children because their religion sanctions corporal punishment.

Furthermore, the fact that some traditional religious and cultural practices are technically legal does not make them right. An 80-year-old friend of mine — a woman of forceful intellect who used to teach Renaissance history — now lives in a Florida retirement community where many of the part-time staff are teenaged children of recent Afghan immigrants. When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women — a high school senior — weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. “Oh, madam professor,” the girl replied, “my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted.”

My friend replied gently, “You know, Yasmin, you don’t have to marry anyone in this country because your parents say so. There are organizations to help girls like you think these things through. There are college scholarships. I can give you the names of people to talk to.” Another resident of this community sharply reproved my friend, saying, “We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family,”

Wrong. This type of “interference” — telling a troubled young woman that she has choices other than an arranged marriage — is exactly what a true liberal ought to be doing. The idea that someone should ignore the tears of a 17-year-old who says she is being pushed to give up her education is utterly perverse.

Finally, it is a politically strategic error as well as a form of moral blindness for liberals to push people like Hirsi Ali into the eager arms of the political Right. She is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and that alone is enough to make her a pariah to many liberals. Her thinking has clearly been influenced by the narrow prism of her colleagues — she is under the mistaken impression, for example, that most American feminists are indifferent to universal human rights — but liberals ought to be asking themselves why they never reached out to her.

AEI was, in fact, the only American think tank to offer Hirsi Ali a job when she needed one badly. Several years ago, I made repeated inquiries at the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress about this issue and was stonewalled by their press aides. Panderers to the multicultural gods, in foundations and academia, often assert that religiously sanctioned violence against women and other human rights violations are matters of “tribe and culture, not religion.” But what is more central than religion to most of the world's cultures?

This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. More important, reflexive liberal multiculturalism fails every child being denied, in the name of faith and family, full access to the promise of this nation.

Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason.

LINK:
http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/co...ts-discontents

[T-Rock]

Have you noticed in the news lately how the liberals tag “phobia” at the end of the un-named word to shut down and discredit anyone who dares criticize the truth about Islam? I suppose they think by tagging a derogatory label on anyone who dares reject Islam's radical ideology which oppresses gays, women, and stifles free speech will shut down any legitimate criticism of Islam from the outset…how retarded…LOL…the only people I think who have an inkling of a right to be Islamophobic are Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rifqa Bary, Salmon Rushdie, or that Muslim girl who starred in Harry Potter…Afshan Azad.

I have a hard time understanding liberals and their hypocrisy. It seems as long as the practitioners of the religion of peace are perceived as America-hating radicals, the left will always support them, with no shame whatsoever. So much for liberals championing the cause of equality.

I wonder why Muslims have Hebrewphobia, maybe it’s some sort of Zionist Conspiracy

[steel71]

The left are political prostitutes. They are brainwashed into only criticizing ideologies and institutions that established and maintained western civilization.
The Frankfurt School was the spearhead of this plague...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...5369495797236#

[Saoirse]

I have had conversations with a few of my liberal friends (yeah, I admit it, I have some liberal friends) regarding religion, human rights and ideologies. They will sit there all day long and agree that it is the right of every human to be treated with respect and dignity and then when it starts to flow into the religious or ideology aspect, their eyeballs start to glaze, they sweat a little and start to get a little shrill as they explain that is nobody's right to interfere with another's cultural upbringing. I look at them will amazement in my eyes and sadness in my heart and ask "how can you NOT interfere when that culture violates the very tenents of human rights and dignity". I honestly do not think they HEAR themselves when they spout out the "party line" of liberalism that has been spoonfed into their indoctrinated college brains. I wonder how long a person has to be out of college before they wake up and see the world without their PC liberal rose-colored glasses?? Meanwhile, they will sit there and "poo poo" and "tsk tsk" at how retched the world is but will do nothing to stop it...unless a whale is being killed. <sigh>

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Thomas Paine

SUSAN JACOBY

Before agreeing too strongly with Ms. Jacoby's editorial, one might want to take a look at her book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.

Just my $0.02.

[Green Light]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

Before agreeing too strongly with Ms. Jacoby's editorial, one might want to take a look at her book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History.

Just my $0.02.

Could you give us a synopsis?

[alright4u]

Originally Posted by steel71

The left are political prostitutes. They are brainwashed into only criticizing ideologies and institutions that established and maintained western civilization.
The Frankfurt School was the spearhead of this plague...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...5369495797236#

This damn country had a work ethic called the protestant/puritan work ethic..

My ole man used to say-" there is no damn free lunch." That man, who served in three wars, was a fool to the damn left. He was my role model. Now, no free pizza might be understood these days? SAD AS HELL.

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Green Light

Could you give us a synopsis?

She takes the left and the right to task for their long standing positions on the Hiss case. She rakes the latter because the right essentially gives Chambers a pass. In her view, giving Chambers a pass sacrifices intellectual integrity for the sake of making a broader political argument about American liberalism that she finds specious and disingenuous.

[greenberetTFS]

Originally Posted by alright4u

This damn country had a work ethic called the protestant/puritan work ethic..

My ole man used to say-" there is no damn free lunch." That man, who served in three wars, was a fool to the damn left. He was my role model. Now, no free pizza might be understood these days? SAD AS HELL.

Excellent post,where and when did this country start going down hill?................

Big Teddy

[alright4u]

Originally Posted by Thomas Paine

Multiculturalism and Its Discontents
Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?
By SUSAN JACOBY
August 19, 2010

I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. And I find myself in a lonely place in relation to many liberals, political and religious, because I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights.

The latest example of the Left’s blind spot on this issue is the antagonism of so many liberal reviewers toward Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent memoir, Nomad. The Somali-born Hirsi Ali immigrated to the United States in 2006 after her close friend, the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist. Hirsi Ali still needs bodyguards because of frequent death threats.

She was educated as a child in Muslim schools, subjected to genital mutilation, and broke with her family when she refused to consent to an arranged marriage. She first settled in Holland, where she worked as a Somali-Dutch interpreter, and her convictions about violence in many (though not, she emphasizes, all) Muslim families are rooted in her work with immigrants as well as her own upbringing. Yet Nicholas D. Kristof, reviewing Nomad for the New York Times Book Review, writes that “I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: 'I love you.'"

I was startled by this patronizing comment, because I admire Kristof for being one of the few male columnists who writes frequently about violence against women. Somehow, “I love you” isn’t the first thing that would come to mind if I were being held down by female relatives while my clitoris was maimed or if my father told me I had to marry a stranger.

As a journalist, I have heard many similar observations from professors of religious and multicultural studies. Some have even suggested that dissidents like Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie have exaggerated the threats against them in order to promote their books. Such slanderous statements are invariably followed by, “This is off the record, you understand.”

I do not agree with everything Hirsi Ali has to say — about Islam or the United States — but I strongly agree with the essential point she makes in Nomad:

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love. . . . The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.

It is understandable that American liberals, and particularly religious liberals, are wary of anyone who makes negative public judgments about other faiths. There is a long history of disrespect for various minority cultures and religions in America, although the Constitution and the First Amendment — products of Enlightenment secularism and Enlightenment-influenced religion — have (usually) stopped the disrespect from turning into bloodshed..

But it is one thing to recognize the legal right of all Americans to believe whatever they want and quite another to maintain that all belief systems are compatible with democracy. In a free society, religion should be no more immune to criticism than atheism, and the First Amendment does not give anyone carte blanche to violate secular law in the name of faith. This crucial distinction applies to all religions, not only to Islam.

In Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Jehovah’s Witness for violating state labor laws by requiring children to distribute religious literature at night. The Court declared: “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable diseases, or the latter to ill health or death. . . . Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow [that] they are free . . . to make martyrs of their children.”

In recent decades, state and federal courts have cited Prince in taking a much harder line against parents who deny standard, life-saving medical treatment to their children out of religious conviction. Similarly, polygamous religious sects do not have the right to force their minor daughters into “celestial marriage.” And parents may not physically abuse their children because their religion sanctions corporal punishment.

Furthermore, the fact that some traditional religious and cultural practices are technically legal does not make them right. An 80-year-old friend of mine — a woman of forceful intellect who used to teach Renaissance history — now lives in a Florida retirement community where many of the part-time staff are teenaged children of recent Afghan immigrants. When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women — a high school senior — weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. “Oh, madam professor,” the girl replied, “my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted.”

My friend replied gently, “You know, Yasmin, you don’t have to marry anyone in this country because your parents say so. There are organizations to help girls like you think these things through. There are college scholarships. I can give you the names of people to talk to.” Another resident of this community sharply reproved my friend, saying, “We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family,”

Wrong. This type of “interference” — telling a troubled young woman that she has choices other than an arranged marriage — is exactly what a true liberal ought to be doing. The idea that someone should ignore the tears of a 17-year-old who says she is being pushed to give up her education is utterly perverse.

Finally, it is a politically strategic error as well as a form of moral blindness for liberals to push people like Hirsi Ali into the eager arms of the political Right. She is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and that alone is enough to make her a pariah to many liberals. Her thinking has clearly been influenced by the narrow prism of her colleagues — she is under the mistaken impression, for example, that most American feminists are indifferent to universal human rights — but liberals ought to be asking themselves why they never reached out to her.

AEI was, in fact, the only American think tank to offer Hirsi Ali a job when she needed one badly. Several years ago, I made repeated inquiries at the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress about this issue and was stonewalled by their press aides. Panderers to the multicultural gods, in foundations and academia, often assert that religiously sanctioned violence against women and other human rights violations are matters of “tribe and culture, not religion.” But what is more central than religion to most of the world's cultures?

This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values. More important, reflexive liberal multiculturalism fails every child being denied, in the name of faith and family, full access to the promise of this nation.

Susan Jacoby is the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason.

LINK:
http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/co...ts-discontents

This women hits the left, the right, and then blames the right. Lady get head out of fanny.

[Crue]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

Have you noticed in the news lately how the liberals tag “phobia” at the end of the un-named word to shut down and discredit anyone who dares criticize the truth about Islam? I suppose they think by tagging a derogatory label on anyone who dares reject Islam's radical ideology which oppresses gays, women, and stifles free speech will shut down any legitimate criticism of Islam from the outset…how retarded…LOL…the only people I think who have an inkling of a right to be Islamophobic are Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rifqa Bary, Salmon Rushdie, or that Muslim girl who starred in Harry Potter…Afshan Azad.

I have a hard time understanding liberals and their hypocrisy. It seems as long as the practitioners of the religion of peace are perceived as America-hating radicals, the left will always support them, with no shame whatsoever. So much for liberals championing the cause of equality.

I wonder why Muslims have Hebrewphobia, maybe it’s some sort of Zionist Conspiracy

Mr. Krauthammer noticed the same thing also:

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2010

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."



-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays -- particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

[Richard]

IMO - "incumbents" (of whatever ilk) are going to be beaten badly in the fall elections and whoever is elected to fill their seats will be selected on pretty much the same criteria as before - the ability to fill the voters' minds with the idea that we have problems and their acceptance of that particular candidate's "answer" to fixing them.

Much like an Oprah or a Dr Phil or such, the ability to pretend to be genuinely interested in your audience {pause for a word from sponsors} while appearing to be doing something in their best interest is a critical skill level for a successful politician - always has been and I doubt it'll change anytime soon.

However, YMMV - and so it goes...

Richard's $.02

[Sypris]

But it is one thing to recognize the legal right of all Americans to believe whatever they want and quite another to maintain that all belief systems are compatible with democracy. In a free society, religion should be no more immune to criticism than atheism, and the First Amendment does not give anyone carte blanche to violate secular law in the name of faith. This crucial distinction applies to all religions, not only to Islam.

I like this. It kind of highlights a problem with what seems to be the mindest of even relatively liberal "average" Americans - they see it as freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion. Exceptions are made for all kinds of behaviour done on behalf of a God, any God, and blind eyes are turned. If one does the same kinds of things without such an excuse, one is a bad person, a freak, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.