How a Society Treats Women and Girls May Be the Best Off-the-Cuff Indicator of its Ethical Worth ─ a Minor Rumination on the Morality of Accepting or Forcing Cultural Change

© 2010 Peter Free

 

08 November 2010

 

Stating the obvious ─ some cultures are not very good to human beings

 

The repression of women may be the world’s most widespread and damaging evil.  Examples of the tendency to abuse mothers, sisters, and daughters surface every day.  Abusing women arguably affects the world’s politico-cultural climate in ways that make international violence and the spread of disease more likely.

 

In this, I am not a moral relativist.  Some cultures are legitimately called backward and ethically distasteful.

 

One of our nation’s geopolitical strategy problems lies in deciding how far we Americans should go in combating other cultures’ generalized crimes against the human potential.

 

That question motivated a good deal of President George W. Bush’s foreign and military policy.  Though I opposed many of his administration’s proclivities, mainly because they were not achievable and were often counterproductive, I fully supported his sense of America’s worth as a beacon.

 

The United States and Western Europe, flawed though they are, have something to teach regressive societies in regard to freeing women and girls from outmoded cultural norms.

 

When people from those backward cultures immigrate to the developed West, the question of the limits of their freedom to remain backward and dissimilar arises.

 

An example of why this matters ─ suicide by burning, Afghan women’s desperate way out from repression

 

Alissa Rubin, writing in The New York Times, reported on Afghan women attempting suicide by burning themselves, so as to escape Afghanistan’s repressive complex of cultures.

 

Women’s lack of education (at the insistence of men) leaves them unaware that death by flames is lingering and horrible.

 

Outside of slavery, it is difficult to think of a more horrific example of oppression than one in which women are chattel and deliberately kept ignorant, so that they cannot even escape their spirits’ prisons via an efficient death.

 

Citation

 

Alissa J. Rubin, For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out, New York Times (07 November 2010)

 

A less extreme example of female subjugation from close to home

 

The difference between the backward world and our own is not as great as might appear.

 

A few weeks I was invited to a fundamentalist Christian wedding in one of America’s major protestant denominations.  I was taken aback by the pastor’s very lengthy explanation to the bride that God insisted upon women’s subjugation to men.  The principles were so blatantly sexist and experientially unjustified that they sounded as if they came from the first decade of the Nineteenth Century.

 

During the pastor’s marriage lecture, some of the congregation’s women looked around.  As if to see if some of their sisters were also not buying the nonsense.

 

It remains an indicator of women’s subordinate social power that these women were unable to consciously rise and collectively grab their male colleagues by the throats, so as to pound some sense into them.

 

A sense of superiority, whether based on sex or culture, presents obvious ethical and intellectual problems

 

That being so, what is our own culture to do, when faced with the deadly, soul-destroying subjugation of women by repressive societies and backward religions?

 

In not succumbing to moral relativism, we are probably in danger of slopping over into the fundamentalist behaviors we criticize.

 

So, how does one deal in humane progress-making fashion with human beings who are determined to oppress others?

 

An Oklahoma example of one small method of resistance to repression

In November 2010, Oklahoma overwhelmingly passed a state constitutional amendment that prohibits its courts from considering Islamic Sharia and international law in decision-making.

The Oklahoma measure was immediately, reflexively, and superficially criticized by politically “liberal” proponents of the virtues of diversity.

Most criticisms missed the point.  The point is that Oklahomans like freedom the way Anglo-Saxon law has described it.

 

They do not want to be in the position of having the prevailing culture gradually overwhelmed by people who are unwilling to live according to historically provable American paradigms.  They don’t want to follow in the footsteps of European countries that are currently and ineffectively dealing with apparently un-assimilable, destabilizing minorities.

 

In the case of Sharia law, most Oklahomans deplore the repressive way it treats women in the Islamic world.  Anticipating a possible future problem here, they treated Sharia with proactive efficiency.  They put their consensus into the historical record in the form of an amendment to Oklahoma’s most enduring vision, the state’s constitution.

 

That is not madness.  Nor is it bigotry.

 

Though I voted against the amendment, the only part of it that bothered me was its proscription of the use of international law ─ which, based on my experience as an attorney, is sometimes useful to judges in areas not clearly addressed by American precedent.

 

Generally speaking, diversity is not of value, unless it is subsumed by larger national commonalities

 

I was not troubled by Oklahoma’s proscription of Sharia law because, although diversity has its laudable place, people who argue that the dominant society needs to roll over and submerge itself to accommodate the whims and traditions of newly arrived peoples are courting national suicide.

 

When the United States abandons its previous adherence to the idea of assimilation, in favor of the idea of a forming a loose federation of mutually antagonistic insular foreign cultures, it will have lost its way.  And its melting pot heritage.

The immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma amendment’s passage

Predictably, the Executive Director on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma immediately filed suit.

In response, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the measure’s enforcement on 8 November.  The restraining order lasts through 22 November, so that a hearing can be held.

According to Tim Talley of the Associated Press, claimant Muneer Awad argued that the Oklahoma amendment “stigmatizes” Islam.

It apparently has not occurred to Mr. Awad that decentralized Islam has done a pretty good job of stigmatizing itself over the last few decades.  Were Islam’s record on peace, human rights, and women not so explosively and visibly poor, Oklahomans would not have acted as they did.

For what it is worth, “stimatization,” in this context, is not a valid legal claim.  In fairness to Mr. Awad, his argument was probably mischaracterized.

A small example that demonstrates why Oklahoma’s anti-Sharia instinct may be correct

 

It is not a crime to acculturate people to the American paradigm, especially insofar as it makes reasonable distinctions between what is humane and what is not.

 

When I was a street cop, our jurisdiction mandated that we arrest men who were physically abusing their wives.  I saw benefits to this intervention, even when the abuser was from a non-American culture in which wife-abuse was explicitly accepted as a valid expression of male dominance.

 

Though culture shock (in the form of handcuffs and an immediate trip to jail) may not have been fair to the foreign-born miscreant, who didn’t know better, American culture had something vitally important to offer regarding his wife’s potential to become more freely human.

 

With a little help from the police and the courts, some of these men learned not to maltreat women.  At least while they stayed in our jurisdiction.  Wives had their eyes opened to another way of doing things.

 

Living the example may be all that we can effectively do

 

In a fragmented and violent world, enforcing our evolving rules of freedom-enhancing conduct upon ourselves may be the best and most ethically defensible thing that we can do.

 

Just don’t let me catch someone so oppressing his wife that she has to burn herself to death to escape.  That sentiment illustrates the problem with rational self-restraint.  It often fails in the face of what is called evil.

 

The only thing that keeps us from lashing wildly out against oppressors is a sense of humility.  And the knowledge that violence begets more of the same.

 

Violence, to be justified, needs to be constructively remedial.  That’s a tall order.

 

The application of violence calls for wisdom in its initiation.  Yet wisdom, by definition, is in short supply.

 

So people burn.  And we burn, either watching or aiding them.