Rethinking the appeasing Archbishop

From Williams

In such schemes,
both jurisdictional stakeholders may need to examine the way they operate; a communal/religious
nomos, to borrow Shachar’s vocabulary, has to think through the risks of alienating its people by
inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law, and a universalist Enlightenment
system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a
minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity. Hence ‘transformative
accommodation’: both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we
avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies.

Sorry, this just won't fly. First, there is no indication that the "Islamic community" wants to have a 'transformative encounter'. Rather, they won't to set up a parallel system of law in certain areas. Second, there is no indication that the indigenous community of Britain, whose legal system is rooted in 1500 years of Anglo-Saxon law, wishes to be transformed by an alien community with shallow roots in England. Finally, while I certainly agree that certain exceptions are wise -- Amish allowing to pull their kids out of school after 8 grades , for example -- those exceptions are exactly that, exceptions granted by the state. They are not parallel systems of law set up to rival (in some cases) the host country's law.

And once again, without the West's idiotic immigration policies, yes in the UK, Germany, France as well as the US, this wouldn't even be an issue and Williams could get back to thinking how to boost Church attendance.

Charles, I wish to reassure you that Wiccans who perform ritual skyclad do so in the privacy of their homes, or far enough out in the sticks that no one who hasn't followed them there will know of it... and the drunken dance in the backyard is for sure a misdemeanor in most juristictions, so calling the police might very well be appropriate... but I ask you, if she really is 600 lbs., if she's running around she's also 11 feet tall; drunk or not, no police officer is gonna want to tangle with her. ;-D

Volokh has also commented on this, noting that three US states already have legal precedents upholding the right of private citizens to voluntarily settle differences in Sharia courts.

Williams is certainly no moderate, but he is not a spineless liberal either.

The bad link should go here:

http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/2008/02/archbishops-regensburg.html

Forestwalker, thanks for the link. Hm. Having read Smith's piece, I'm not impressed with it in and of itself. Benedict was making sense and was misunderstood (or maybe understood too well!) by the radical Islamic world. Williams, in my opinion, was not making great sense and was nevertheless understood and judged to be wrong by many thoughtful folks -- including many of the denizens of this blog -- although certainly there's been a lot of knee-jerking.

Also, I'm quite serious when I say this: Smith's got a link to something about An Inconvenient Truth, and, while global warming may be a serious issue, taking that film seriously makes me wonder about his judgment.

Fair enough Iraneous. He's not a politico but a philosopher and theologian, part of the radical orthodoxy cohort (the assumptions about the state in this little piece seem to lean heavily on William Cavanaugh's work).

Link fixed. Sorry for the mistake.

You know, watching the smoke and flame of this firestorm over the past 24 hours or so, but not having the combination of time and interest to go read what Williams actually said, I was still pretty sure that whatever he said was not nearly so psycho-dhimmi as the immediate reaction indicated.

Thoughtful article by Williams, but, I agree with Rod that it is difficult prose.

"As long as ALL involved parties are FULLY informed and OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL accept the judgement, I see no societal harm."

Who are the parties involved? There are unborn generations that are not consenting, though they will inherit the choices of their predecessors. Do they get a "choice"? Who, in their right mind, would want one's father's erotic affections shared contemporaneously by a half dozen women, only of which is one's mother?

Every generation must live with the framework of assumptions they've inherited, the understanding of human nature that is taken for granted, and the idea of freedom and truth passed on to them. The reason why cultures exist is because none of us is fully informed, our judgments are always partial, and we typically define "harm" so narrowly that we convince ourselves that what we want is identical to the Good.

Maggie Gallagher is right: politics and law, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If the questions of who and what we are are the nature of the good life are answered with wildly different and contrary ways, there is no civilization left. There is simply a modus vivendi or a tyranny. This is why the promise of tolerance--on matters of fundamental truths--can never, ever be sustained. This is why Catholic Charities could no longer live consistently in a legal regime in which that regime instructed its citizens in its laws and policies that the views of Catholic Charities are not tolerable, because they are at base bigoted and irrational. A regime of tolerance would not use the coercive arm of the state to punish those who disagree with its understanding of marriage, children, etc., if it were really a regime of tolerance. But it's not such a regime. It is a government of laws, one that cannot compromise when it announces that institutions so fundamental to the sustaining of civilization--marriage, family, children, community--must mean one thing rather than another. Those who choose to buck that understanding, e.g., Catholic Charities, will be punished, and severely so. For the agents of tolerance are not really tolerant, and those who claim to cringe at slurs--e.g., fag, queer, homo--issue them without thought or hesitation: homophobe, bigot, intolerant, fundamentalist, etc.

Poor Rowan Williams: he thinks that by allowing oppression and torture between consenting adults that he will be spared. But little does he know that they when he places in the law permitting others to freely diminish their own humanity, he diminish his own humanity be default. If my dignity is contingent upon my will, then I am not intrinsically valuable. I have master at the cost of becoming a slave. The Enlightenment is complete. Feel better now.

Dang, Dr. Beckwith, that final paragraph is spot on.

I'm sure you all know my views on Islam by now, so I'll keep quiet about them for the moment.

Leaving Islam aside, I do think that there are interesting and important issues surrounding the conflict between religious (or non-religious moral) values and the prevailing civil law. I would like to say that people should be free to agree, as individuals, to settle their disputes according to the law of their choice. There are difficulties with this, however:

1. How much coercion is placed on individuals who wish to opt out of the subsidiary system? Muslims who tried to opt out would, of course, be executed/murdered. However, there are pressures even with other groups - in a case in London about 15 years ago, a teenage boy babysitter raped some small children, and the family was ostracised and harassed by other Orthodox Jews for reporting this to the police rather than the Beth Din.

2. To what extent is common/secular law values-neutral? I think some pro-gay laws now seem to verge on being nomocratic, i.e. trying to impose one particular view of right conduct. I heard about an elderly man, admittedly a foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist, who was beaten up for carrying an anti-gay placard, but it was then him that was charged. There is also the case of hotels (even B&B places - just family homes letting a couple of rooms) being prosecuted for refusing to put up gay couples - this really does seem extraordinary - they are not saying that they don't allow known gays, but that they don't allow specific activities (sharing a bed). These types of laws seem to be at least open to the charge of constituting "secular Sharia", rather than neutral common law.

et al.

"Or, they represent the common values of the people who elect legislators and vote in elections. The desire for conservative Christians to exempt themselves from the state's common values when it comes to acceptable discrimination constitutes a "Christian Sharia" where the rule of law is viewed not to apply to people's whose valuea are outside the common values."

I do think this is debatable. However, the B&B places in question were not refusing to admit gays, but refusing to permit specific activities (bed-sharing). Hotels, restaurants, etc., can make all sorts of rules about permitted activities: eg. some impose dress codes; some forbid drinking alcohol in the bedrooms. When looking for a room as a student in London, a Muslim family told me they only let rooms to men who agreed to have no unrelated female visitors - that seems a legitimate restriction to impose, and is analogous to not allowing two men to share a bed, whereas I think if the family had said something about not letting rooms to fornicators, analogous to not letting gays stay in a hotel at all, that would have been unacceptable. Some pro-gay legislation strikes me as having gone beyond what can be seen as acceptable in a society that only tenuously shares common values, especially about sexual matters.

The wiccan incident really happened near where I live and everyone had a good laugh at her expense. It even made that evening news.

As a society we cut people a lot of slack for their beliefs because it is a way of ensuring civil peace and not clogging the courts. Also because we really believe that people, for the most part, have the right to organize their lives as they see fit. But it gets messy at times because no law code can hope to cover every circumstance.

If the Muslims want to handle minor disputes among themselves, that should be no problem. If they think they can start killing each other, or anyone else, then we must make it abundantly clear to them that we won't let them do that, by imprisoning them and taking their children away to raise as atheists. Remember that Paul wrote rather scathingly of Christians who resorted to civil courts to settle disputes among themselves, so there is lots of precedent.