Gul Meena
Gul Meena of Pakistan was a 12-year-old girl when her family married her off to a 60-year-old man who beat her regularly. When she tearfully complained to her family, she was beaten again and sent back to her husband. When she couldn’t take it any longer, she attempted suicide several times. Later, she met a young Afghani man who gave her the courage to run away. She packed up her few belongings and escaped with him across the border into Afghanistan.
Days later, her older brother tracked them down. He hacked Gul Meena’s friend to death with an axe and after 15 strokes, assumed he had killed his sister as well. Miraculously she survived, but with horrible scars and deficits.
It is now politically correct and fashionable to suggest that we must not judge other societies against our own. This perspective suggests a moral equivalence between value systems that are merely different from ours.
This is nonsense.
Violence against women is not an equivalent value. It is a crime. Sending a young teenager away to be raped and beaten by a sadist old enough to be her grandfather is not a value. It is a crime. Any society that condones these practices is morally inferior. A “tradition” of not giving women education or allowing them to exercise their free will is not a “value.” It is a moral failing. And it is despicable.
And this is not only about the “primitive” civilizations of the Middle East and beyond. We have been writing a lot about the Amanda Knox murder trial in Italy. The action of the Italian high court in ordering a new trial for two people who are clearly and demonstrably innocent shows that the Italian system of justice is inferior to ours. Yes, the American system makes mistakes, and we have not been reticent to point out those failings. But our appeals courts don’t have to reverse half of the convictions as the Italian courts do. And you may not like what our Supreme Court decides, but they don’t often do stupid things as the Italian Court of Cassation has just done.
When our system goes wrong, we need to admit it and try to make it better. But let’s not delude ourselves in the spirit of tolerance and liberality. Our values are not always “equal.” In many cases, they are a lot better.
And we should be proud of that.
Horrifying that in 2013 that this sort of thing still happens. Nothing can possibly be more perverted, sadistic, and downright evil. This is utter madness, fueled by deep rooted misogyny and protected by freedom of religion.
I pray she makes a full recovery and the repercussions against her brother and family are severe indeed, but I fear they will not be.
Thank you both for this truthful and candid post. I believe media is largely responsible for the misplaced “political correctness” in its attempt not to alienate or insult any demographic. That is where we get our information, and they sometimes tell us to be tolerant simply by their omission of carrying many such stories to the public. They tacitly tell us it’s not important enough to be talked about.
Wherever the blame lies, there are women everywhere cringing at the “tolerance” they see given to their abusers, outright criminals taking the rights and lives of others. We go to war for a handful of reasons, but it’s never been to free the women, and maybe it should be.
For decades, I have sung the praises of John Douglas as being the most important “feminist” on the planet in many ways, and I now add Mark Olshaker to that short list. Many thanks.
Dallas, TX
I am both moved and honored by your comments, and inspired to try to live up to them.
The moral equivalence argument stems from a misunderstanding of situation ethics. I am old enough to have heard Joseph Fletcher give a lecture. He most assuredly did not say that every society gets to choose for itself what their ethics will be. He, like every ethics philosopher from Aristotle and Kant believed in certain absolute rules. He just believed that there had to be priorities and that situations could affect those priorities. The one absolute rule for Fletcher was the Golden Rule. The problems arises when people don’t their own rules, and the Golden Rules is an essential rule of Islam.
Joe, this reminds me of the story about Rabbi Hillel who, when asked to summarize the Torah to a non-Jew, replied, “Do not do unto your neighbor that which you would not have him do unto you. This is the whole law; all the rest is commentary.”
Thanks.
This is a wonderful post. There are terrible problems with racism and sexism in this country. But it’s simply not the same as this. I think that justifying buying and selling human beings that can be raped, beaten or killed at a whim by saying it’s “their culture” is sexist in the extreme. We’d never justify that sort of behavior if it were based on race.
Lovely post.
Thanks, Chris. Much appreciated.