Should Living Human Beings Ever Be Cultural Property?
You Bet Your Sweetgrass, Grave Doubts, Nihil Categorici Desuper|
My personal short answer would be “%*&#$, no!” But that would hardly an article make.
Valerie Voigt, a respected community religious leader and a good friend of many years, sent me a link to an article from the (UK) Sunday Independent by Johann Hari that begins,
“Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can’t back both. You have to choose.”
Facially, this is a very disturbing proposition for residents of the San Francisco Bay Area such as myself. Our pride is in decent treatment of all genders (”both” is too restrictive a term around here) and many cultures. Our reward is a diverse population marked by uncommon talent in many areas, and a myriad of interesting cuisines, events, and exhibits. The idea of moving somewhere that has never heard of tai chi or chai tea is too dreadful for many of us to contemplate. However, the rest of the article reveals that the “multiculturalism” of which Hari speaks is a new, different, and quite scary animal. To distinguish it clearly, I’ll give it a new name - “juridical multiculturalism” - as opposed to “social multiculturalism.”
Juridical multiculturalism is where a court decides that the laws of its jurisdiction apply differently to the instant parties, or may not even apply at all, because of the instant parties’ culture. Hari reports that German judges have been doling out probation or minimum sentences to husbands who brutally batter, and even murder, their wives and daughters when those men are Muslim, because it’s “part of their culture.” One female judge reportedly quoted the Quran verse allowing husbands to corporally punish their wives when denying a divorce to a battered Muslim wife. Hari also reports that Canada is at least considering creating shari’a (Muslim religous law) courts for settling Muslim family disputes, implying that these courts will also condone physical abuse of wives and daughters.
If all this is true, Muslim women in these Western countries are becoming cultural property - which, in some strains of the culture in question, equates to personal property of their husbands and fathers. Hari seems to suggest that the only solution is to jettison “multiculturalism” - most broadly interpreted as “all types of tolerance of different cultures” - from Western nations. As with any upsetting proposition, let’s get some background and do some reality-checking before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, shall we?
First of all, what’s really up in Germany? Is domestic violence, perhaps, allowed there in general, and did Hari just “cherry-pick” the Muslim cases? Normally, I would start by finding out what German statutes on domestic violence really say, but a couple of hours on this track proved extremely frustrating. I suppose I’ll just have to accept that I’m not going to teach myself legal German this afternoon and my budget doesn’t allow for professional translators or international legal database subscriptions. If any readers speak German, a Harvard Law website links to an untranslated, copy-protected, print-protected PDF of the relevant statute. If you can read it, please leave a comment telling me what it says.
Der Spiegel Online, which does offer English translations of its articles, fills in a few more facts: The Quran-quoting female judge only refused to “accelerate” the divorce; the wife will still be able to apply for a divorce if she can find an effective refuge, or survive future beatings, for another year (oh, that’s SO much better - NOT). The judge was taken off the case on conflict-of-interest grounds, and various politicians are demanding disciplinary action against her. And, apparently, judicial decisions that similarly treat people as cultural property have “become seldom in recent years - they’re not getting worse by the minute, as Hari might be implying.
In the Netherlands, Mohammed Bouyeri’s Muslim background did not shield him from receiving the maximum sentence (life imprisonment - the EU Constitution prohibits the death penalty) for the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri claimed to have been obeying “the law that comands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and His Prophet.” Van Gogh’s “insult” was the making of a documentary film critical of the treatment of some Islamic women, written by a Somali-born female member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi. (Bouyeri planned to kill her too, as he announced in a note that he attached to van Gogh’s shot, stabbed, and slashed body). On the other hand, as a non-Muslim man, van Gogh would be unlikely to have been adjudicated as Bouyeri’s cultural property anyway.
In the US, our two closest approaches to people-as-cultural-property are both in Indian law: the Indian Child Welfare Act, which makes a federally-recognized tribe a party in adoption proceedings for tribally enrolled or enrollable children, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which gives federally recognized tribes rights over remains that can be proven as those of tribal ancestors. Neither of these is that invasive. Dead folks are generally presumed to be finished with their bodies; even if they weren’t, they’d probably prefer that their descendants do something proper with them instead of leaving them as museum exhibits or construction-site rubbish. And in most cases, juvenile tribal citizens who have bonded with a non-tribal adoptive family are allowed to stay there, on condition that the tribe is allowed to be in the child’s life as a heritage resource.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees “equal protection under the laws” (although many, many decades passed before women and minorities actually got it. Sometimes they still don’t, although now the inequality occasionally cuts in the opposite direction as well). But, like the EU’s Constitution, ours guarantees freedom of religion too.
Monocultural theocracies are much easier to run than multicultural secular democracies. Countries with religious freedom always have to struggle with situations where someone’s religious practice runs afoul of governmental standards of human rights, criminal behavior, minimum education, or even food safety. That doesn’t mean, though, that we should throw in the towel and say, “OK, forget it - everybody has to start acting exactly like the religio-cultural majority at all times or move somewhere else.” Letting people take their own cultural holidays off from work, dress compatibly with their cultures, and have public cultural festivals is simply not equivalent to letting them beat and murder people because their God said they could (or “should,” or even “must.”)
Rhetoriticians at both extremes would like you to forget this, but there’s a whole huge continuum between “no tolerance of multiple cultures” and “courts will interpret all actions only in the context of the parties’ cultures.” A country can still be “free” if it says: These are the basic human rights on which those already living here have reached a consensus. If you bring your family here, you will have these rights, and so will your spouse and children. People who don’t like your culture aren’t allowed to assault you, but you’re not allowed to assault them either.
In short, your right to swing your fist ends where someone else’s nose begins. And around here, women, children, and people with other beliefs qualify as “someone else.” Take it or leave it.
