Hear, hear
Every time police shrug their shoulders when a Muslim woman complains that she has been forced to marry against her will, every time a Western doctor tries not to notice the female circumcisions being carried out in his hospital, they are acting in the spirit of the archbishop of Canterbury. So is the social worker who dismisses the plight of an illiterate, house-bound woman, removed from her village and sent across the world to marry a man she’d never met, on the grounds that her religion prohibits interference. That’s why—if there is to be war between the British tabloids and the archbishop—I’m on the side of the Sun.
An article in Slate decrying the archbishop of Canterbury’s opinion that sharia law should be part of a “plural jurisdiction” in Britain.
And, Christopher Hitchens’ take:
What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing “blasphemy,” originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don’t have any blasphemy laws and let religious people’s feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn’t occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.
1 Comment