Rod Dreher's Blog, page 594

Alberta, Mon Amour

Hey, I’m in the Canadian Rockies tonight, drinking beer with Lutherans. I love me some Canadian Lutherans. They’re the good kind, the ones who actually believe. Talking to some after I got here, I am all filled in on the ridiculous situation orthodox Christians are facing in Canada, thanks to the March Of Progress. I heard good things about Calgary’s Catholic bishop, Fred Henry, who, I am told, is no friend of progressives. “He tells them to go pound sand,” said one Lutheran pastor, appreciatively.

On the long flight up from Houston, I transcribed more of my interviews with the Norcia monks, and was once again excited about the Benedict Option book (it has been a long slog through bronchial infection and the Enlightenment). I can’t wait to commit their words to the printed page. I’m going to be sharing some of what they said tomorrow with the audience here. I’ve got to tell you, this stuff is plain Christianity, but solid gold. Just you wait. Encountering their words again made me want to be back in Norcia for another week, just listening and being with them.

Unfortunately for me, I was waiting for compline tonight, and suddenly BOOM, the fact that I got up at five a.m. to drive to the New Orleans airport caught up with me all at once. I made my excuses, then retired to my room. More tomorrow. Did I tell you how much I like this crowd of Canadian Lutherans?

Death Of White Working-Class Culture

A reader sends in this op-ed from a teacher, writing in The Guardian about the death of white working-class culture for British kids. The author, a white man, was raised working class, and focuses on a new think tank report showing that white working-class youth are at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to educational achievement. The writer blames Thatcherism for breaking the unions in the 1980s. Excerpts:

It is simply that a specific part of their [white working class] culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers; the outright hoodlums operating in plain sight as the cops concentrated on breaking strikes.

We thought we could ride the punches. But the great discovery of the modern right was that you only have to do this once. Suppress paternalism and solidarity for one generation and you create multigenerational ignorance and poverty. Convert Labour to the idea that wealth will trickle down, and to attacks on the undeserving poor, and you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it.

More:

Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story.

And what the most successful Chinese, Indian and white Irish children probably have – although you would need more research than offered here to give this assertion rigour – is a clear and compelling story.

In my first week at university, myself and a few other working-class kids on our course were quizzed by our middle-class peers: “You must be exceptionally bright to get here, against these odds,” was the theme. We were incredulous. We had been headed for university since we picked up Ladybird books. Without solidarity and knowledge, we are just scum, is the lesson trade unionism and social democracy taught the working-class kids of the 1960s; and Methodism and Catholicism taught the same.

To put right the injustice revealed by the CentreForum report requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

If these metrics are right, the present school system is failing to boost social mobility among white working-class kids. But educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.

Read the whole thing.

 

I am not in a position to comment knowledgeably on the writer’s pinning this on Thatcherism. The trade unions had brought Britain to an economic standstill by the late 1970s, and that’s the kind of thing Thatcher was elected to stop. I find it hard to believe that all would be well if Britain had been governed by Old Labour instead of the Tories during the 1980s, or New Labour in the 1990s. But I’m willing to hear that case.

That said, just as in this country the Trump campaign has forced many of us to reconsider the destructive social effects of free trade deals — so popular with Republicans and Clinton Democrats — on the white working class in the US, it’s worth considering the social effect of neoliberal economics on the British white working class. Whatever the validity of this left-wing author’s take on Thatcherism, I’m less interested in that than in his contention that the white working class lost a narrative that gave them pride and helped them make sense of their lives in a constructive way. Economic liberals tend to say that there’s nothing wrong with the working class (of whatever race) that high-paying jobs wouldn’t fix. Maybe. But how do you give a “tribe” back its story, its myth?

You know what this sounds like? Native Americans, their worldview shattered by being conquered by alien Euro-American culture, sinking into chronic despair.

(Readers, please be patient with my approving comments today. I’m traveling to the Canadian Rockies to hang out with Lutheran pastors for the week, and talk Benedict Option.)

How To Mainstream Something

Says the reader who forwarded this story to me, “Oh my, it’s over”:

When Abby Scott of Monaca was 2, she told her parents she was a boy. As she grew, she disdained playing with Barbie and learned to play football.

For the past two years, the 8-year-old has refused to wear dresses or to let her mother do her long, curly hair, which has now been cut short. When a family member mentioned getting married someday, she said she would be wearing a tuxedo.

“She doesn’t want to do anything girly,” said her mother, Sara Markustic.

And that’s just fine by Ms. Markustic and Abby’s father, James Scott, who, like the rest of Abby’s family, and mostly all of her classmates, teachers, teammates, friends and neighbors respect that Abby is a gender-fluid child, who identifies most of the time with being a boy. And when Abby is identifying as a boy — such as when she plays football or is wrestling — she prefers to be known as Adam.

Abby’s gender-fluid story will be featured tonight at 10 on “Friday Night Tykes: Steel Country,” Esquire Network’s reality series about football in Beaver County. Adam is a lineman for the Monaca Little Indians, playing in a league with boys who are years older.

This world.

The reader, who lives in western Pennsylvania,  writes:

Helps to understand where this area is. One of the towns on this show is Aliquippa, one of the hardest of the hard scrabble mill towns, and the basis of the 1983 Tom Cruise football movie, All the Right Moves:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Right_Moves_(film)

In 1983, football in Aliquippa was a stand in for manliness in a way that was probably to hard headed and dysfunctional.

But now, in this same area… This.

Decline and fall.

Any bets on where this is going next? Friend of mine’s kid goes to a high school where there’s a senior girl who insists that she’s a wolf, and demands that everyone treat her as a wolf. Because it would be bigoted not to, I guess.

The Porn Catastrophe

Time magazine’s cover story this week is about what ubiquitous hardcore pornography is doing to men. I can’t link to it because it’s a subscribers-only piece, but Southern Baptist pastor Denny Burk has a detailed (but not NSFW) rundown of what it reports. The gist of it is that porn is changing the brains of young men, who have been watching it from a young age, such that they are impotent with actual women. Burk, quoting the article:

A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic—more prone to permanent change—than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.

More Burk:

But it is precisely here that the picture gets really dark. Pornography has been a ubiquitous fixture in their lives for the better part of a decade. Two dates are important to remember in this discussion. In 2007, broadband internet reaches over 50% of American households. In 2013, smartphone ownership exceeds 50% of the population. That means that at some point around 2007, more Americans than not had access not simply to still images but to free video images of people engaged in sex acts. By 2013, more Americans than not had access to video porn at any time and at any place through their smartphone.

The average age that a young man first encounters pornography is 11-13 years old. That means that countless young men have spent the better part of the last decade with access to moving porn. For many of them, everything they have learned about sex has come from pornography. Their sexual preferences have been shaped by this content.

One more bit from Burk:

One of the most striking aspects of Luscombe’s article, however, is the complete absence of a moral framework. The big debate is whether or not porn use is a “public health crisis.” In other words, the main problem with porn is that keeps men from fornicating with lots of women. That is why the title of the article is “Porn and the Threat to Virility.”

We are at a place in our culture in which sexual morality has been reduced to consent. And that is why Luscombe’s article—even after narrating the devastating consequences of porn use—cannot bring itself to condemn pornography as a moral evil. And that is what is so sad about this article. It documents a real problem in our culture, but it has very little to offer by way of remedy.

I am not being hyperbolic when I call porn use a civilizational calamity. The sexual revolution promised us more sex and more pleasure. It has actually delivered to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure. It has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life. It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting. This means that it has given us a generation of young men completely unprepared for marriage and for fatherhood.

Read the whole thing. It’s a very, very important piece.

There you see the attack on the family, down to the neuroscientific level. Brilliantly evil. Think about what you might be setting your son up for by giving him a smartphone. A junior high school principal said to me recently that she invited a specialist in porn addiction to give a talk at her school about this, but parents balked, saying their kids didn’t even know what that was.

Fools.

This is not simply a matter of getting a smartphone out of your kid’s hands. Remember my telling you about the family I know who removed their kids from a school because fifth grade boys in her son’s class were watching hardcore porn on smartphones their parents gave them? The boys were building a pornified culture of boyhood. Fifth graders.

How much do you know about the porn habits of your teenage or adolescent son and his friends? It’s important to find out.

This civilization of ours has a death wish. You see it more and more with each passing day.

Transitioning Public Schools

Carl Trueman posts a letter he sent to his local Pennsylvania public school system, objecting to its plans to renovate its policies to make them more transgender-friendly. Excerpts:

While the issues it raises are clearly pressing, and while the welfare of all students, regardless of identity, has to be a priority, the proposed policy is conceptually incoherent. On the one hand, it asserts that a student’s asserted gender identity has to be accepted, and must not be questioned or disregarded by staff. Moreover, the only exception is if staff have a “credible basis” for believing the student is “improperly” asserting a gender identity, vague and undefined terms that are open to abuse. Yet, the policy also claims that a student’s transgender status may constitute confidential medical information that should not be disclosed to parents or others, suggesting it is a medical condition. Which is it?

Further, is the school really saying that it has the right, duty, and indeed the competence to hide a child’s identity from its parents? This is a breathtaking assertion of authority—to claim that the school has a greater right relative to a child’s identity than the parents who have raised him or her. It also creates a dangerous precedent: so long as the school district in its infinite wisdom decides that something is part of a child’s core identity, it grants to itself the right to exclude parents. This is remarkably open-ended and adversarial, pitting the school district against parents and scarcely conducive to cultivating co-operative school-parent relationships which are surely to be desired in a rounded education.

This is shocking. The school probably has to get parental permission to give a Tylenol to their kid, but it reserves the right to hide from parents whether or not their child is presenting himself as transgender at school? Really? (Yes, really; check the policy out for yourself.)

More from Carl Trueman’s protest letter to his local school board:

Under this policy, students must be allowed to participate in PE classes, intramural sports, and (to the extent consistent with PIAA regulations) interscholastic athletics consistent with their asserted gender identity. This approach is clearly going to have a detrimental effect on girls’/women’s competitions and in the long run will put those women who are born such and identify as such at a permanent competitive disadvantage (as indicated by the recent incoherent attempt to produce fair and consistent regulations for transgender Olympic competition while safeguarding competitiveness). My son, for example, ran track for the University of Pennsylvania where he was a moderately good middle distance runner. Were he to identify as a woman, he would currently hold the world mile record. This is a policy which is really very detrimental to women and the future of women’s sports.

Read the whole thing. The policy also gives transgenders access to the locker room of their choice.

This is so radical as to have been unthinkable only the day before yesterday. And yet it’s happening in a quiet, old-fashioned Philadelphia suburb. I used to live right next to it. Gay is one thing, but transgender? Is it really the case that parents, especially parents of girls, don’t object? Do they agree with these policies, or do they just not care to complain? Feminists don’t care that biological males with greater body strength are putting biological women at a distinct disadvantage in athletic competition?

Are we really adopting policies so radical to accommodate only 0.03 percent of the population? Yes, we are. And here’s the thing: the Springfield Township School Board may well be against all this, but the U.S. Government, under the way the Obama Administration has decided to apply Title IX, is not giving them a choice. 

I’m not exactly clear on the extent to which the feds are enforcing Title IX against public schools. I know the Department of Education has said that it considers transgenders protected under Title IX, and that this includes giving trans kids access to the locker room of their choice. But I don’t know the extent of this rule, and whether it now applies to athletics Please enlighten me. This could well be the Springfield Township school board’s idea of both conforming to federal demands, and/or getting out ahead of what they know is coming.

Just so you know, this is what you get now when you elect Democrats to national office.

 

A Note Of Thanks

Readers, I just received the March traffic report for this here blog. We set an all-time record, by a long shot. Thank you!

Christianity = Jim Crow, Apartheid

In North Carolina freakout news:

Lionsgate and the A+E network say they won’t film TV shows and movies in North Carolina if the state doesn’t repeal its new LGBT law.

Along with Fox, Miramax and The Weinstein Company, the entertainment producers have voiced opposition to House Bill 2, which replaces local ordinances with a statewide nondiscrimination law that doesn’t include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories.

A production coordinator for Lionsgate told the Associated Press that the company is canceling plans to shoot a comedy show in Charlotte and will instead film in Canada. The production would have involved hiring about 100 workers in North Carolina.

Lionsgate is scheduled to film a remake of the movie “Dirty Dancing” in the Asheville area in the coming months, and it has received a $4 million grant from the N.C. Department of Commerce, which is part of Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration. McCrory signed the bill and has actively defended it.

Lionsgate did not respond to inquiries about Dirty Dancing on Friday.

There’s plenty more. Hollywood is really sticking the shiv in. More:

North Carolina is also losing some conference business from the law. ACPA-College Student Educators International announced Friday that it has canceled a June conference in Charlotte. The Holiday Inn that was hosting the event agreed to move it to one of its hotels in another state.

“The current social and political climate in North Carolina cannot provide a hospitable environment for our members who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender,” executive director Cynthia Love said.

Right. LGBTs have not been treated hospitably in North Carolina, ever. The only difference between now and when that conference was booked is that a local transgender bathroom access law that was not on the books when the conference was scheduled has been revoked by the state. ACPA was willing to come to Charlotte before it had a transgender bathroom policy. And I can understand ACPA’s objections to the state’s housing and employment laws, but that has nothing to do with people coming to town for a conference. Cynthia Love is full of it.

The Obama Administration is making noises like it’s going to cut off billions in federal dollars for schools, highways. And worst of all … no Broadway musicals from a certain composer:

“In the 1970s, I, along with many other writers and artists, participated in a similar action against apartheid in South Africa, and as you know, this eventually proved to be very effective.

“If you are in agreement, you may want to join me in refusing to license our properties to, or permit productions of our work by, theaters and organizations in North Carolina until this heinous legislation is repealed.

“Thank you for considering this.”

[Stephen] Schwartz’s work includes “Pippin,” “Godspell,” “Wicked,” “Working” and “The Magic Show.”

North Carolina is apartheid South Africa?! Oh, get over yourself. These people have worked themselves into a moral panic. It’s like the entire state is the Oberlin campus.

CNN asked Paul Stam, a North Carolina Republican lawmaker behind the bill to address aspects of it, and put the same questions to Candis Cox, a transgender activist:

Stam: “The law did not change the policy on discrimination an appreciable extent between two weeks ago and today. What they’re really complaining about is that we have not become like the 17 other states that have put in special rights for them. … We’re trying to protect the reasonable expectations of privacy of 99.9% of our citizens, who think when they’re going into a restroom or a changing room or a locker room, that they will be private.”

Cox: “This law affects us because it puts us in danger, and it’s open discrimination. It’s no different than the Jim Crow laws that we had here in the South. There are many Americans who are alive today and were alive with some of those laws before we passed the Civil Rights bill. This law is literally the same thing. And if we didn’t find that acceptable, this is not acceptable. It doesn’t matter who it’s towards. Discrimination is not acceptable.”

Because Candis Cox cannot legally use the ladies room owing to the fact that she’s a biological man, North Carolina is a Jim Crow state? The hysteria is jaw-dropping. But it works.

Here’s a piece from the Charlotte Observer explaining what the new North Carolina law does. It overturns local ordinances allowing transgenders access to the toilet of their choice. It does not grant LGBTs protection against being fired for being LGBT, but they never had that in NC, nor do they have it under federal law (is the United States an apartheid nation? A Jim Crow nation?).

Can’t you see this kind of thing coalescing into a national movement of activists, sympathetic politicians, and corporations, to bully any state that passes any RFRA, no matter how mild, into backing down? This movement is premised on the idea that orthodox Christianity is so evil that a state that makes a law showing any respect whatsoever for one of its now-controversial teachings must be treated like a pariah, and made to suffer culturally and economically. I told you they would do this kind of thing. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility: It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you bigots are going to deserve it.

It’s not going to stop here. These bullies know their power, and they aren’t going to tolerate any deviation. Once they get all the religious liberty laws overturned, they’re going to turn on religious schools and other institutions that don’t line up with LGBT orthodoxy. You are a fool if you think it will not.

The other day I wrote to “Prof. Kingsfield,” a professor at an elite law school who is deeply closeted as a Christian, to ask him what he thought about lawyer Andrew Beckwith’s e-mail concerning how law schools and the legal profession are mainstreaming the overturning of all sexual norms. He replied:

The writer’s take is spot-on.  The assaults on anti-polygamy laws are already underway, and adult incest is not too far behind.  Not sure about bestiality or pedophilia.

The dispiriting thing is that the same people who understand how changes to one part of a fragile ecosystem can poison the whole cycle of life can’t see the same thing at work with our kids and the complex ecosystem that forms their worldviews and senses of self.  Look: churches themselves will always have the First Amendment right to teach and preach.  The law can’t force us to change our beliefs, though the world can berate and belittle us.  But the law can make it difficult to transmit those beliefs to our children and posterity.  Even though we can teach the truth, if we don’t have schools that are free to hire like-minded teachers, exclude teachers who do not live out the teachings of the church, distinguish the sexes in the bathrooms, etc., our kids will grow up confused relativists.  That’s why battles over school choice, homeschooling, religious liberty in hiring and firing teachers and admitting students, etc. are crucial, maybe the heart of the coming legal fights. And as your Fifth Columnist post shows, far too many churches themselves are riven even if nominally orthodox in their paper doctrines.

What we have to do, as part of the Ben Op, is find ways to band together: consolidate into healthy congregations and parishes; channel our donations to healthy schools and charities, and be ready for the termination of governmental support and even tax exemptions; and build strong families, friendships, and communities.  The law can only do so much in America to penalize these things directly (though it will make entering various professions and businesses increasingly hard).  But the barriers to education and formation, coupled with the lukewarmness of so many people in the pews and the many clergy and faithful who will increasingly flout church teachings, will become harder.

Above all, there’s one thing that your discussion hasn’t focused on thus far.  We have to stop caring about what the world and the media think.  They will call us bigoted no matter how loving, winsome, and fair-minded we are–see the actual Ryan Anderson vs the caricature of him, or the actual Doug Laycock vs. the activists’ efforts to subpoena his email and phone records.  We have to figure out how not to care.  And that will require far more withdrawal from mainstream media than most people can stomach. 

Is there a way to develop alternative media, or might it be healthier for all of us to treat withdrawal as a kind of dieting or fasting?  All I know is that ingesting the New York Times’ worldview over a long period of time gradually builds toxins if one is not primarily exposed to other outlets.  I think it means reading a lot more older books and fewer modern ones, and finding healthy examples of flourishing Ben Op communities, from the G.K. Chesterton scuola to the monasteries both here and abroad, as in Norcia.  This also does involve the local church just being what it is called to be–but remarkably few people seem to realize how much more they should be than most are.

We also have to remind ourselves that what we are facing directly doesn’t even deserve the name persecution compared to what happened under the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or Communism.  We musn’t wallow in pity or feel sorry for ourselves, or lash out in pointless rage.  But the threat is more insidious because the opposition isn’t head-on or violent.  It is the seductive lie that tolerance of vice is supremely good, and judgmentalism is the supreme evil.  If we are not discerning about the lines between good and evil, virtue and sin, and cannot speak boldly at least within our communities about them, we are lost in a generation or two.

This is real. It’s happening right now.

Fifth Columnists In Churches

A reader writes:

I’m a daily reader of your blog and I appreciate your perspective and all you do to awaken the orthodox or would-be orthodox Christians of this nation from their complacent slumber. For the record, I’m a cradle Catholic in my early forties who, like most Catholics of my generation wandered far from the truth along a winding, rocky path during my younger adult years. After many dead ends though, and after becoming a husband and a father, I have come to embrace fully the teachings of my church as has my wife. With regard to the Benedict Option, if you’re the preacher, we are among the choir. We are fully awake to the reality around us and ahead of us. While some readers may think you alarmist, as many of my friends and even my own parents and siblings surely think me, I believe the situation facing Christians in this country is every bit as dire as you argue. As such, I cannot wait to read your book on the subject.

The dire need for such a book was brought home again for my wife and me just last night when we read a post on a local moms group Facebook page castigating the Religious Education Program (REP), a voluntary program for kids who attend public schools, at our parish for having the unmitigated gall to actually teach the high school aged students in the program the truth about God’s design for marriage and human sexuality as understood in Catholic doctrine. The screed, posted by the mother of a student enrolled in the program, was about what you’d expect; highly emotive but lacking in anything resembling a rational argument or any understanding of Catholic teaching. The post accused the parish and the program of spreading hate, teaching young people that gay individuals should be treated with scorn and rejection and even threatening the well being of any REP student who might be questioning his or her sexuality. In short, the post, without ever acknowledging that the parish was simply teaching what the church believes, grossly mischaracterized the church’s understanding of marriage and sexuality and dismissed it as pure hate. This from a Catholic woman whose children are enrolled in religious education and who presumably belongs to the parish. She concluded her post by encouraging everyone who read the post to send their complaints to the Director of Religious Education, whose name and contact information she provided.

A lengthy discussion ensued in the comments which ran about 60% against the parish and the program and 40% supportive of it, which frankly was a more favorable spread than I would have expected. The most galling, though sadly unsurprising aspect of much of the discussion, was the apparent shock of so many self-professed Catholic mothers that the religious education program at a Catholic parish would actually teach Catholic doctrine. The most humorous of the comments sarcastically pointed out the ridiculousness of the expressed shock and the voluntary nature of the program and indeed the very faith.

You’ve written a lot about how we, as orthodox Christians in this country, are living in occupied territory, but it strikes me that even our own institutions are occupied territory in many cases. As we move forward with our own Benedict Options and try to build durable communities of faith and learning and shared values, we will need to face the reality that many of our co-religionists don’t even share those values, to say nothing of the legions of cultural secularists who stand against us and what we hold most dear. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a virus that has infected my church for certain and most if not all the other Christian churches I would suspect.

I pray that our REP Director, our instructors and our pastor will stand strong in the face of this current complaint, but I know this is only the beginning. Next time, it will be louder and angrier, and the time after that, who knows. At what point, does the angry mob go to the bishop? And when they do, will the bishop stand up for the truth of the faith? Sadly, I have my doubts as to the doctrinal fidelity and mettle of my current bishop, though I never cease to pray for him. And when does the mob go to the civil authorities? When do the figurative torches and pitch forks become literal? And of all this, just from within the church, the fifth column as it were.

Another Benedict, Benedict XVI, envisioned a smaller church, but one that was more committed and more devout. What he spoke about, just as Christ did, was the separating of the wheat and the chaff, and Benedict was widely ridiculed for saying so, even by many Catholics. This perspective has become passé in the field hospital of the Francis era (why can’t I help but think of Hawkeye Pierce every time I hear that metaphor used), but I believe that Pope Benedict was on to something, something his namesake surely knew as well. Please pray for my church and my parish and I will pray for yours.

 

I bet you readers from all churches have some stories.

Islam, Honor Killing, & Immigration

The case of the young Muslim woman who has decided to return to her home country and enter into a forced marriage is much on my mind this morning. I have learned more about the situation — more than I can reveal here — and I must caution everyone against judging her. This world from which she comes, and this culture in which she is enmeshed, is so far from anything we Americans know and understand. It is evil, straight up.

Some of you, in the comments on other posts, have said this is the fault of Islam. There can be no doubt that the overwhelming majority of honor killings in the world today are carried out by Muslims, against Muslims. I wonder how fair it is to blame the religion, though. Seriously, I wonder. One of this blog’s readers, a Muslim, wrote me privately to offer assistance to the endangered Muslim woman, and to say:

I am disgusted and profoundly saddened by the situation that you describe. These ‘honor killings’ are abominable and wholly contrary to the spirit as well as the letter of Islamic Law.

I will take him at his word. As outrageous as the situation with the honor killings and the threats of violence against women who violate the patriarch’s sense of honor by defying his will, we must be fair to Islam, and not blame the religion for what may be a cultural phenomenon.

Granted, that may be a distinction without a difference to women facing this kind of thing. Imagine that you were a Jew in Tsarist Russia, and Orthodox Christians pillaged your village. If a peaceful Orthodox Christian came up to you and said, “I am so sorry; pogroms is contrary to the spirit and the letter of Christianity,” that Christian would be telling the truth, but it wouldn’t matter much. You would still fear Christians, and associate them and their religion with violence.

What are people to make of the way local Islamic authorities in the Dallas area reacted to the 2008 honor killing of two teenage girls by their Egyptian immigrant father? He shot them because they had boyfriends, then he disappeared. He has never been found. Here’s a link to a 45-minute Fox News documentary on the case. And here’s a link to a 4-minute clip from an independent documentary about the case; this clip details how Amina Said, one of the girls, came up with a plan to protect her boyfriend from her father’s murderous rage.  In this news story about the independent doc, we learn that Amina Said had been taken earlier by her father to his native Egypt, where he tried to compel her to marry an older man.

Anyway, here’s a bit from the Al-Arabiya story about the girls’ funeral at a local mosque (the largest one in Texas):

Dr. Yusuf Kavakci, head of the Richardson mosque, alternating between English and Arabic, told mourners that all living things are destined to die. Another imam talked about families being the most important thing in Islam and the need for parents to work to keep their families strong, the paper said.

On the day of the funeral, I spoke to a reporter who had been there (the honor killings were big news in Dallas, as you might imagine). The reporter was visibly shaken, saying that an imam — the unnamed one in the account above — had said the lesson from this double murder is that Muslim families must work harder to keep their daughters under control. Condemnation of Yaser Said for murdering his children was conspicuously absent.

From the imams. In a mosque. You can see why people would conclude  — fairly or not — from this sort of thing that Islam doesn’t have a problem with honor killings. Let me be clear: that could be an unfair judgment against Islam. But it is not an unfair judgment against particular Muslim communities.

The US Justice Department estimates that there are around 27 honor killings in the United States every year — a number that could actually be much higher. Excerpts:

“Cases of honor killings and/or violence in the U.S. are often unreported because of the shame it can cause to the victim and the victim’s family,” Farhana Qazi, a former U.S. government analyst and senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism, told FoxNews.com. “Also, because victims are often young women, they may feel that reporting the crime to authorities will draw too much attention to the family committing the crime.”

And:

For police who encounter apparent honor crimes, the investigation is typically treated as a regular crime or murder probe, usually under the umbrella of domestic violence. While both issues are tragic and problematic, experts say there are critical distinctions, and that honor violence requires a different approach.

Detective Chris Boughey, of Peoria, Ariz., calls Oct. 20, 2009, a day that “changed my life forever.” That was the day Iraqi immigrant Faleh Almaleki murdered his daughter, Noor Almaleki, by running her over with his vehicle for becoming “too Westernized.” Boughey was assigned as the lead investigator and has since dedicated his career to educating others and taking on similar cases in numerous other states — from Alaska and New York to California, Washington state and Pennsylvania.

In 2012, the mother, father and sister of 19-year-old Aiya Altameemi were charged with beating her because she refused an arranged marriage to an older man.

“In the Almaleki case, I learned very quickly that we would receive no assistance from the family,” Boughey said. “In fact, we received out-and-out defiance and resistance. Although we know they are involved, it can be very hard to prove in a court of law.”

Notice that the mother and the sister were also charged. (The father was later convicted and sentenced to 34 years; I don’t know what happened to the others.) See, that’s what this young woman I’ve been talking about here faces: a cultural system in which everyone is implicated in the abuse of women. The Muslim woman we’ve been talking about here has no faith that she will be safe anywhere in the US, because, she says, wherever there are Muslims, her family may be able to get to her. And note well, she herself is a Muslim who does not want to abandon the faith! If she defies her family and remains in this country, she may never again be able to worship in a mosque, out of a legitimate (I am told by someone in a position to know) fear that the underground network protecting the double murderer Said will also do her in.

Is this Islam’s fault? Strictly speaking, no. But there is no way to disentangle Islam from this situation. If a Muslim woman cannot worship God in a mosque anywhere in the United States because she’s afraid someone there will recognize her, rat her out to her family, and set her up to be murdered, then there’s a problem. Phyllis Chesler, in a 2010 study about honor killings worldwide in Middle East Quarterly magazine, writes:

In the non-immigrant West, serious domestic violence exists which includes incest, child abuse, marital rape, marital battering, marital stalking, and marital post-battering femicide. However, there is no cultural pattern of fathers specifically targeting or murdering their teenage or young adult daughters, nor do families of origin participate in planning, perpetrating, justifying, and valorizing such murders. Clearly, these characteristics define the classic honor killing of younger women and girls.

More:

At the time of the Hassan beheading, a coalition of domestic violence workers sent an (unpublished) letter to the Erie County district attorney’s office and to some media stating that this was not an honor killing, that honor killings had nothing to do with Islam, and that sensationalizing Muslim domestic violence was not only racist but also served to render invisible the much larger incidence of both domestic violence and domestic femicide. They have a point, but they also miss the point, namely, that apples are not oranges and that honor killings are not the same as Western domestic femicides.

One might argue that the stated murder motive of being “too Westernized” may, in a sense, overlap substantively with the stated and unstated motives involved in Western domestic femicide. In both instances, the woman is expected to live with male violence and to remain silent about it. She is not supposed to leave—or to leave with the children or any other male “property.” However, the need to keep a woman isolated, subordinate, fearful, and dependent through the use of violence does not reflect a Western cultural or religious value; rather, it reflects the individual, psychological pathology of the Western batterer-murderer. On the other hand, an honor killing reflects the culture’s values aimed at regulating female behavior—values that the family, including the victim’s family, is expected to enforce and uphold.

Further, such cultural, ethnic, or tribal values are not often condemned by the major religious and political leaders in developing Muslim countries or in immigrant communities in the West. On the contrary, such communities maintain an enforced silence on all matters of religious, cultural, or communal “sensitivity.”

 

What does this sound like? Child sexual abuse by priests is absolutely condemned by the teachings of Roman Catholic Christianity. But the conspiracy of silence by both clergy and laity was for a very long time part of Roman Catholic culture. Catholicism did not tell priests to molest children. But there was something about the way Catholicism was lives in this country that looked the other way, or otherwise failed to react justly, when it was happening. It happened too often, in too many places, for it to have been a fluke.

Now, keep in mind that there are over 3 million Muslims living in America. Let’s say that the actual number of honor killings of American Muslim women is four times the official estimate, meaning that 108 die yearly. That would be below the US average for intentional homicide, which is four per 100,000 people (= 132 murders for 3.3 million people). A single honor killing is too many, mind you, but the point here is that honor killing is almost certainly extremely uncommon among American Muslims.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem that needs to be addressed somehow, both by Muslims and by US law enforcement officials. The fact that priest sexual abuse of children was rare does not mean that it wasn’t, and isn’t, a very big deal. In today’s New York Times, novelist Mohammed Hanif writes from Karachi:

A few weeks ago, Pakistan’s largest province passed a new law called the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act. The law institutes radical measures that say a husband can’t beat his wife, and if he does he will face criminal charges and possibly even eviction from his home. It proposes setting up a hotline women can call to report abuse. In some cases, offenders will be required to wear a bracelet with a GPS monitor and will not be allowed to buy guns.

A coalition of more than 30 religious and political parties has declared the law un-Islamic, an attempt to secularize Pakistan and a clear and present threat to our most sacred institution: the family. They have threatened countrywide street protests if the government doesn’t back down.

Their logic goes like this: If you beat up a person on the street, it’s a criminal assault. If you bash someone in your bedroom, you’re protected by the sanctity of your home. If you kill a stranger, it’s murder. If you shoot your own sister, you’re defending your honor. I’m sure the nice folks campaigning against the bill don’t want to beat up their wives or murder their sisters, but they are fighting for their fellow men’s right to do just that.

It’s not only opposition parties that are against the bill: The government-appointed Council of Islamic Ideology has also declared it repugnant to our religion and culture.

When the country’s chief religious authorities, as well as 30 political parties, openly condemn as “un-Islamic” a law forbidding wife-beating, protests that Islam doesn’t allow honor killing sound hollow. As Phyllis Chesler wrote elsewhere, in an article comparing Muslim honor killings to Hindu ones:

Although Islam does not specifically endorse killing female family members, some honor killings involve allegations of adultery or apostasy, which are punishable by death under Shari’a (Islamic law). Thus, the belief that women who stray from the path can be rightly murdered is consistent with such Islamic teachings. The refusal of most Islamic authorities to unambiguously denounce the practice (as opposed to merely denying that Islam sanctions it) only encourages would-be honor killers.

How should the persistent reality of honor killing in these Muslim cultures affect immigration policies in Western countries, if at all? Is there any realistic way to screen out Muslim immigrants who support it? How should authorities respond meaningfully to honor killings among immigrants here, being neither cowed by political correctness nor too quick to blame all Muslims?

Thoughts? I would especially like to hear from Muslim readers (I know this blog has at least three.) Please, all readers, don’t use inflammatory language. I won’t post it. I want to have a real discussion about this.

UPDATE: A Muslim reader writes:

Hi Rod,

I’m a muslim.  My family is from Pakistan and I spent part of my childhood there before immigrating to the US, and I can state unequivocally that honor killings have no place in Islam.  Two sources guide the development of Islamic thought and jurisprudence governing social issues.  First and foremost is the Quran, which we understand to be the literal speech of God.  Second is the Sunnah…or the example of the Prophet (PBUH) which in many ways serves a model template for how the concepts and instructions revealed within the Quran should ideally be implemented in daily life.

So when we refer to the Quran and the Sunnah, we find:

There is nothing in the Quran that either explicitly or implicity authorizes the killing of a woman because she refuses to marry according to her family’s wishes.

There is nothing in the Sunnah that either explicitly or implicitly authorizes the killing of a woman because she refuses to marry according to her family’s wishes.

Women and men are allowed to marry whom they wish provided they don’t marry simply to satisfy base sexual needs.  Of course, in patriarchal societies, with low literacy rates, a woman’s refusal to marry per her family’s choice can often be attributed to her obeying her base sexual desires.  However, even if this were so, Islam still does not sanction killing or murder for this…adultery is punishable by death…but marrying per your choice is a right granted to both men and women, just as ending a marriage amicably through divorce is a right granted to both men and women.

As I mentioned, my family is from Pakistan and also from India.  We are by any definition observant muslims, and in our family women have always married as they have wished.  They have married, divorced, and done so with Muslim men and non-Muslim men.  And that’s basically the experience I’ve observed with friends and acquaintances as well.

Honor killings are a cultural evil, and muslims in parts of the world where such things were part of the culture have creatively found ways to justify these sins as sanctioned by Islam.  I know when one reads that the religious establishment in Pakistan is condoning this evil, it can become difficult to figure out how to separate it from the religion, but the sad truth is this simply reflects how mediocre and limited their own understanding of their faith is.  Fact is, the vast overwhelming majority of them don’t understand Arabic…they’ve only read the Quran via translation and you miss a lot when you do that.  Beyond that, they have next to no understanding of Hadith (the Prophet’s traditions) and Sunnah (his mode of conduct and thought) which God lays in the Quran as a guide for Muslims to better understand and apply the message of Islam.  The on top of all these deficiencies they pile on the cultural baggage of chauvinistic, primitive, patriarchy, and…well…you see the results.

In 2013, Pew conducted a survey of the muslim world to explore muslim attitudes on a range of topics.  When asked about honor killings, support varied widely by region.  Check out page 89 for the full results.  Basically, a few places are real gung ho about honor killings, in some, opinion is split, and in others there is a wide support against the practice.  I view these findings as an indication of (a) how much Islam has tempered these barbaric tendencies within a culture or (b) how little such practices were condoned in the culture originally.

Bottom line is, there is no theological basis for this practice.

The Fate Of An Anonymous Muslim Woman

I heard tonight from my friend who has been trying to help the young Muslim woman in danger (the one I wrote about last night). If you missed that earlier post, the subject is a young woman from a Muslim country who is living in the United States. She is not an American citizen, but is here on a visa. Her family back home has demanded that she return and enter into a marriage against her will. And here in America, her family members have threatened to kill her if she doesn’t submit. My friend has been trying to help her escape this situation. I wrote last night on the blog to ask you readers for ideas on how to deliver this young woman, whose name I do not know, from her tormentors.

And you responded, both on this blog and (more often) in private e-mails to me, offering assistance. I passed on all that information to my friend, who warned me last night that the young woman was terrified of being killed by her family, but also terrified of what defying them would mean: being alone and penniless in a foreign country, with no guarantee that she would be granted asylum, and even if she were, no confidence that she would ever be able to feel safe from honor killing. The young woman faced an agonizing choice.

She has made a decision. My friend wrote to me, and asked me to post this for you all:

I spoke with the young lady at length. Please understand there are far more factors than Rod has been able to disclose here. After much consideration and prayer, the young lady feels the most responsible thing she can do is return home and submit to her culture. I truly wish I could give you the details which led to this decision because if you knew them, you would realize this is not the coward’s way out. This is a strong, courageous young woman choosing to give up her freedom to protect others.

I would like you to know she was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, encouragement, and love from complete strangers, and I lost count at how many times she said thank you. She asked if I would continue to pray for God to either change the options in the situation or send her a husband who sees her as God does and treats her with honor and respect.

I have to say in working with women in violent situations, I have seen many submit to their abusers. I have never seen one submit with more courage, strength, or honor than I am witnessing with this young lady. If it is possible to consider someone heroic for returning to a violent situation, then she is a hero.

Thank you for your hearts, generosity, and wondrous compassion. You are beautiful people.

I can tell you this: the country to which this poor woman is returning is an American ally, and a place where murders and other atrocities are common against women, non-Muslims, and Muslims who do not fit the majority’s idea of what a Muslim should believe. My heart is so hardened against that country and its ways now. If you can know the heart of a nation by the way they treat their weakest and most vulnerable, then this is a wretched people.

I know, I know. We are barbarians in our own very American way, as I point out almost every day in this space. Still, my God, at least we don’t do that to our women. Again, I don’t know the name of this poor woman, or the names of her immigrant relatives in this country who physically abused her (my friend saw the evidence) and who are terrorizing her into accepting a living death, but I hate that America granted citizenship to such monsters. We had better open our eyes to the sort of people we let into this country. Bastards like these men, with their cowardly code of honor killing, should stay abroad, macerating in their own filth.

I trust my friend, who knows far more facts than I do about this case, and who is herself a woman of great courage integrity, and a fighter, when she says that she stands by this young Muslim woman’s choice to sacrifice herself. But she does not leave for some weeks yet, and I will be praying for a miracle that delivers her from the fate her family has decreed for her. I am not yet giving up hope that she will ultimately take the underground railroad that many of you wrote to me offering to be a part of.

This gets to me. It really, really does.