When you put the emphasis on justice you start to talk about groups and collectives. You are a member of groups all the time but really you are an individual. Ok so you want to protect the culture and religion of this collective. And this collective is saying if we don't practice our religion the way we did back at home we feel deprived we feel persecuted we don't feel at home and that has all kinds of psychological effect on the entire group.
But what about the individual girl who is removed from school. What about the individual girl who is forced into a marriage, consistently raped. She can't reach out to her parents because they put her in that situation and her husband thinks he has a right. What about that situation? What about the individual right to say I don't want to do this I want to do something else and you're forcing this individual into doing that. Constitutions in liberal countries are all about recognizing THAT individual freedom and aspiring to protect that as much as possible.
And so what I tell my left wing friends and i have a lot of them because a lot of them have good intentions because they are progressive and they want to stand up for the poor and down trodden is ...take them back to that unit they can empathize with. If you are gay and on the left on the one hand you belong to a movement, you're fighting for the right in America to marry, but on the other hand you also fighting for the right of some minority a collective to do whatever they want to the individual members. Shouldn't you be thinking about the right of the individual members? Those who can't voice their wishes? And those who if they do have to deal with consequences so dire and I'm not talking about death and threats. I'm talking about your father looking you in the eye and telling you you are no longer my daughter I disown you. You cannot show up in the mosque, you are not invited so you are shunned. Think of the psychological impact of that on the individual who chooses to have a lifestyle that is not in sync with a 7th century lifestyle.
Here's the irony, it used to be the left that would take up the defense of the weak and now unfortunately we live in a time when it's the left that has decided to define weak units as groups not individuals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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