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?
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You’re in luck, sort of.

The bad news for underwater artifact-hunters is that unless the body of water is completely surrounded by private land, you’ll probably have to get permits from, comply with the regulations of, and possibly split the loot with, some government or other. Even if it is on private land, some environmental laws may still restrict what you can do. The good news (for both hunters and their opponents) is that now it’s well settled which governments have jurisdiction where. This issue was hotly contested between the coastal states and the federal government in the two-decade U.S. v. Florida series of cases.

I’ve prepared a diagram* that shows the types and extents of underwater government jurisdiction in the United States. Click the thumbnail image below to enlarge it:

*All clip-art used by permission of Jupiter Images (subscription when the images were downloaded, + non-commercial use).