Author: Ophelia Benson

So ‘faith schools’ want ‘exemption from new equality laws in order to carry on teaching that homosexuality is a sin’ do they. That’s interesting.

At the moment, many faith schools make children aware of different sexual practices, but underline that anything other than heterosexuality is a sin. In a submission to the unit, the CofE said that it would not wish to discriminate against pupils or parents on grounds of sexual orientation in the context of admissions or in disciplinary procedures. But it insisted that schools should be free to teach that homosexuality is at odds with the Bible.

Thus we see why the realm of education, if it is to be real education, has to be secular. It’s like politics in that way. Because ‘education’ has to mean teaching things that there is good reason to believe are at least approximately true. That means public, sharable reasons have to be given for them, or capable of being given for them. (Yes, even in literature classes. That’s why our teachers always asked for more evidence – quotations – on our papers and exams, remember? They were teaching us to back up our claims.) ‘Teaching’ that homosexuality is a sin doesn’t fit that description. It’s meaningless except in religious terms, hence it’s not teachable except within a religion, hence it’s not education properly understood. Claims that are based purely on faith and nothing else aren’t really education. It’s deceptive advertising to call them education.

But what about morals and values, ‘faith’ fans will squeak. Yes but even morals and values require something more than ‘because god’ if you’re going to teach them to everyone. And if you’re not what is the point? What is the point of parochial group morality? Good morality should be universal and crap morality should be done away with. If ‘because god’ is all you have, you can’t call that education, because it isn’t. Even religious people admit this, often defensively – they often say ‘yes but we do give reasons, we don’t just say “because God said so” and leave it at that’ – but then ‘because God’ is superfluous. It’s one or the other, and either way it’s out of place in education. ‘Because god’ is either superfluous because there are other (public, valid, groundable) reasons, or wrong and bad because there aren’t. There is no moral truth-claim that can adduce no secular public reasons but is nevertheless valid and convincing. Demands for the right to teach false and discriminatory nonsense make a mockery of the word ‘teach.’

Jean Drèze notes an important fact that’s worth keeping in mind:

Sen is praised as a “feminist economist” but it is not very clear what “feminist” actually stands for (except for a general concern with gender issues) and why Sen qualifies. A notable exception is Martha Nussbaum’s bold assessment. Taking issue with the notion that freedom is always a desirable social goal, she points out that “gender justice cannot be successfully pursued without limiting male freedom”.

Fer sher. And that’s one reason there is so much Faisal Bodiesque blather about keeping families intact and dealing with problems within the community, cluttering up the place – because improvement of the lot of women (whether you call it justice, or freedom, or capabilities, or all those and more) brings with it some disimprovement of the lot of men. Men have less ability to demand services of their female relatives, and to tell them what to do, and to shut them up. They also have less ability to control how women who are not their relatives dress, behave, think, write, and travel. There’s also some (considerable) gain, for men who can value it: they get to live around women who are more worth living around as opposed to women who are like angry sheep. But not all men want that; lots of men prefer the angry sheep. Who cares what the sheep thinks, after all? We don’t talk to our mutton or our sweaters, do we.

Go, Sunny.

…annoying cultural traditions have a distinct knack of clinging on through generations. It would be no exaggeration to say that thousands of young British Asian women are forced into marriage every year…I have seen well educated and well adjusted friends slowly become nervous wrecks as their parents pile on the pressure…last week the Home Office decided a specific law to ban forced marriages was not needed. To put it mildly, the decision was not only a travesty but an unbelievably stupid fudge…Yet once again Labour has fallen victim to an army of Asian apologetics who prefer this muddle and like to pretend that the practice is very rare. Complete rubbish.

Go on.

For example, Pragna Patel from the Southall Black Sisters, is quoted as saying on Radio 4: “We don’t see the need for criminalisation of forced marriage, which is yet another way of stereotyping and criminalising entire communities at a time when there is heightened racism in this country.” When a women’s rights group is more worried about stereotyping than the well-being of thousands of women, alarm bells should be ringing within their offices.

Yeah. It’s also quite an odd idea that forced marriage should not be criminalized. It’s not as if it’s a trivial thing. It’s not like forcing a woman to sit next to someone she doesn’t like at dinner, or like forcing her to stay home for an evening when the relatives are coming over. It’s deciding the entire shape of her life; it’s handing her over to someone who will have authority over her (clearly people who think forced marriage is appropriate for girls are not going to think an egalitarian marriage is a swell idea) for the rest of her life (or his) without allowing her the right of refusal. What if she has other plans? What if she wants to go to graduate school and become a physicist or an historian? What if she wants to become a journalist and work on the foreign desk, spending a few years in Africa maybe, then a few years in Latin America or Asia? What if she wants to become a musician, or a surgeon, or a computer scientist? What if she simply wants to shape her own life rather than having her parents shape her life? Well, she doesn’t get to. So, what is that? It’s slavery, or else imprisonment. Slavery and unlawful imprisonment are both crimes, so why should forced marriage not be a crime? Because it’s okay if it’s your parents who do it to you? I don’t think so.

Many of the respondents felt naming and shaming of coercive parents would lead to communities being “unfairly labelled” and creating a negative stereotype. Such daft responses are not surprising once you consider that most of those opposed were middle-aged men considered to be our “community representatives”…It is racism of the worse kind – a tacit acceptance that vigorously affording them the same protection as other women is not necessary because of their colour or culture.

Yup. See (as I have said several times in the past) Susan Moller Okin’s Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?. Clearly, yes, it is.

If you think it’s not, check out the comment (at 10:26 p.m.) of FaisalB – would that be Faisal Bodi?

Another article betraying your thirst to gain secular liberal acceptance. Where’s imprisoning parents going to get anyone? The whole idea behind the government’s culturally and religiously sensitive approach to the subject is to try and keep families intact during times of severe stress. Only in the most extreme cases should external assistance be offered. Even then it should be applied in such a way as to try and maintain the integrity of the family.

Secular liberal bad, culturally and religiously sensitve good, keeping families intact (at the expense of the coerced girl or woman) good, integrity of the family (but not the girl or woman) good. Yes, multiculturalism sucks for women. Next question?

Scott has a very apropos column this week. Well, apropos from my point of view anyway – and in a very real sense, is not my point of view the only one that matters? Of course it is. And from that point of view Scott’s column reads like a sly follow-up to his column last week, the one in which he interviewed some bore who co-wrote a book about truth. Some of the commenters on that column, as you may or may not remember, rolled up their sleeves and got to work casting doubt on the whole idea of truth by breaking out the capital letters and the incredulous modifiers (certain, absolute) and the fleering quotation marks (“truth,” “real,” “get it right,” “wrong,” “right,” “evidence,” “fact”) by way of argument – I mean “argument.” So it was very amusing (however shocking) to see Scott brazenly and without a scare-quote in sight write a whole piece on Wikipedia and questions of accuracy, reliability, expertise, accountability, trustworthiness, and similar naïvely unsophisticated and decidedly prepostmodern stuff.

You could really get the impression from reading that piece that there is such a thing as a difference between an accurate encyclopaedia entry and an inaccurate one, that a false one is different from a true one, that experts know more about the subjects they know more about than non-experts do, that not all data-wells are equally reliable, and similar dominating power-ridden hegemonic unFoucauldian ideas. Scary, isn’t it. Looky here.

With Wikipedia, only a very modest level of control is exercised by administrators. The result is a wiki-based reference tool that is open to writers putting forward truth, falsehood, and all the shades of gray in between. In other words, each entry is just as trustworthy as whoever last worked on it. And because items are unsigned, the very notion of accountability is digitized out of existence.

Oh god. I feel faint. The room is swimming, the walls are shimmering, I have spreckles before my eyes. He said truth. And falsehood. Without any quotation marks. As if he meant them just straight, just the way one might say right or wrong instead of (the “correct” way) “right” or “wrong” (cf. Violet’s comments for a good example to follow). That’s scary stuff. Bad things happen to people who say “truth” and “falsehood” straight like that. And then, as if that’s not enough, he goes on ahead and talks about whether each entry is “trustworthy” or not (only without the scare quotes). What kind of mad power trip is he on? And what’s with the accountability thing? What’s he going to do, bust people who put in “lies” or “mistakes” or “fairy tales” or “self-promoting bullshit”?

And it gets, if possible, even worse.

Basic cognitive literacy includes the ability to evaluate the strengths and the limitations of any source of information…Wikipedia is by no means a definitive reference work, but it’s not necessarily the worst place to start.

Ohhhh…I feel my lunch coming back on me. Basic cognitive literacy? The ability to evaluate? The limitations? Wikipedia’s not definitive? As a reference work? Where’s this guy been? Has the whole second half of the twentieth century passed him by? Doesn’t he ever read a book? Like, oh, Foucault’s History of Sexuality for instance? Doesn’t he know how oppressive and dominant all those words are? Doesn’t he know about power-knowledge and knowledge-power? What’s his problem?

Consider a recent discussion between a reference librarian and a staff member working for an important policy-making arm of the U.S. government. The librarian asked what information sources the staffer relied on most often for her work. Without hesitation, she answered: “Google and Wikipedia.” In fact, she seldom used anything else. Coming from a junior-high student, this would be disappointing. From someone in a position of power, it is well beyond worrisome…Sure, we want our students, readers, and fellow citizens to become more astute in their use of the available tools for learning about the world. (Hope springs eternal!)

There again. Same thing. Hierarchy. Judgmentalism. Elitism. Wanting people to become more astute, for christ’s sake! And babbling about learning about the world – what kind of disgusting elitist crap is that?

And yet, oddly, in spite of all that heresy and stuck in the 1940s-ness, Violet hasn’t turned up to sprinkle some soothing scare quotes around. Maybe she turned so sick and faint from reading just the first few paragraphs that she couldn’t go on. That would be sad.