When in Rome, how about remembering you are a Roman?

What are you up to this summer?
Island hopping? A beach holiday? A cricket tour? Watching Wimbledon? Whisking your underage offspring out to southeast Asia to marry them off to someone they've never met?
I'm only asking because, if that's your plan, the authorities are onto you.
Apparently teachers, doctors and the police have been given guidelines to help them 'identify and tackle the problem of forced marriage' now that forced marriage season is upon us. That's right, summer holiday is peak time for children to be taken to south Asia and forced to marry, says the British government. That makes sense, doesn't it? You don't want the sudden end of innocence and trust to mess with the underage bride's education.

But obviously this is no laughing matter.

According to recent figures released by the National Centre for Social Research more than 5,000 people are at risk of forced marriage each year. In Britain. The research is trying to stay neutral – to avoid accusations of Islamophobia – but the fact is that the vast majority of those 5,000 'people' are girls born to Muslim families of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. That said, the research also has to stay neutral because their data is shaky and hard to obtain. For instance. The Centre believes that between 5,000 and 8,000 cases of forced marriage were reported in England in 2008 alone.
First thought: fucking hell that's a lot.
Second thought: if these forced marriages are reported, how can you be estimating in the first place, surely it's a hard number. Plus how on earth can you have a margin of error of this magnitude? 3,000 incidents is hardly a case of 'give or take a couple'.

Why on earth can we not count these incidents properly?
Part of it is because the people dealing with these incidents don't always understand what they are up against. And part of it is that those dealing with these issues, well, they'd rather they didn't have to.

The research found that there is a distinct lack of understanding among statutory service providers making the problem harder to spot. When is a marriage a forced marriage? Who needs to report it to make it real? If the bride bows her head and goes along with it yet her cousins call the authorities, is the marriage consensual? If the wedding takes place in another country, is it still our problem?
And isn't it altogether easier to put all this unpleasantness in the 'ethnic' box, plead 'cultural sensitivities' and let the whole thing carry on in that grey space of 'cultural practices' in which coexistence flirts with the ghetto?

Although schools have been instructed to be on alert, many are reluctant to look into this issue for fear of being accused of being disrespectful towards other cultures. Is that a true fear? Is that an excuse used by school staffers who do not want to have to deal with this? Is it a convenient shield for fathers who want to determine their children's fate in a country whose legislation does not permit it? And who should back down first in what starts as a conversation over a small girl's future and before you know it becomes a grand debate over multiculturalism? Well. That depends. On whether you care more about the epistemology of the question or the little girl.

Let me put it another way: Whose problem is it that underage girls are being married off against their will and before the legal age of consent?
If you ask me, I'd say this problem, like all others, belongs to those who cause it and those who can solve it. Those who cause it don't want to fix it on this occasion. And those who can solve it wash their hands on grounds of culture.
The government spokesmen are trying very hard to be firm in their opposition to forced marriages whilst not dismissing any religion or culture, coming up with the following gem in the process ' there is no culture, and there is no religion in which forced marriage […] is acceptable'.
I'll give you the religion bit, Mr spokesman, with the caveat that no religion embraces forced marriage in its pure doctrinal form. Because all religions have at some point condoned and many have embraced forced marriages in practice. And although I salute this commitment to wooliness, I'm afraid there are numerous cultures in which forced marriages are acceptable by default, because familial hierarchy means that daughters in particular (but also children in general) are not equipped with independent judgment or volition and decisions are to be made by the head of the household, family, clan or tribe for the good of all.
That's cultural. Not how we do things here. But how things are done elsewhere. Culture.
Culture is not all jingly anklets, lantern festivals and pinning money on the bride, you see.
Culture entails prohibitions and imperatives, duties and invisible lines of command. Every culture.
And in some cultural settings it is acceptable to marry off underage girls to people their families have chosen for them. In fact, in many cultural settings from South America to Africa and from Eastern Europe through Asia, this is hardly shocking. Not here. But elsewhere. The difference is that here 770 girls have already reached out to the Forced Marriage Unit this year. And it is feared that many more are too scared of their parents to pick up the phone, go to the police, speak to a teacher – in short, too scared to use the legal framework that exists and is on their side. They are here. And yet they are not.

But those who call, what do you think they say on the phone? Please sir can you protect me without antagonising my dad and insulting my culture? If not, forget about it and thanks for trying.
Or do you think they may be saying the exact opposite: I was born here and I was raised here and I used to think I belonged here. So if I am one of yours, regardless of creed and colour, why are you not making sure your laws apply to me when I need them most?

All I'm saying is their dads have forgotten about the old adage 'when in Rome'. Despite the laws and the discourse of freedom, their dads have forgotten to act like the Romans would.
What about the Romans?

Remind me again – who did you say are the good guys?

Ah the Cold War. We knew who the villains were, we slept soundly in the knowledge we were with the good guys and James Bond movies had blissfully uncomplicated plotlines. Ok so that last bit hasn’t changed. But everything else has.

Now did I actually sleep soundly thanks to the Cold War?
No, not really.
I personally lived in constant fear of nuclear annihilation and could not possibly figure out why that terror of a man, Reagan, was supposed to be the good guy ahead of cuddly, smiley Gorbachev. But I was barely 10 when perestroika started so I am obviously nothing to go by here.

Still the fact remains: those who thought they knew where they stood with the cold war can say that no more. Sure, the Arabs are today’s bad guys. And they fit into the civilisational ‘us vs them’ battle over liberty and ‘our way of life’ (as well as banal questions of military supremacy and global power).
But not all Arabs are bad, now are they? Some are friends. But how do you tell them apart? And then, of course, those who are foe are not alone, are they? So many other bad guys to keep an eye on. Plus, this new generation of bad guy is very mobile. You don’t know where to point your missiles any more.
Add to that the fact that there are all sorts of allies we don’t really like all that much and you have a right headache in your struggle to safeguard freedom and the way of life we were talking about.

Take China for instance. Now that’s a good subject for someone interested in freedom, fairness, justice and democracy. A trading partner, of course. So we try not to bug them too much. Although, if truth be told, we are not too fond of them. Or their human rights record. Or their tendency to execute people en masse (and then sell their bodies to the West to be used in art exhibitions of dubious taste. Yes, yes it’s the Bodies exhibition I am talking about and, yes, I am squeamish). And now China has created an ever more degrading, even less controlled and monitored and even more outrageous way of killing off its own people: the mobile execution vehicle, the death-mobile, a van that can come to you and administer lethal injection in your own location. Trivialising life and death and laughing in the face of UN representatives speaking of China’s ‘improving human rights record’.

But stop press for a moment.
Have you thought that China’s record may well be improving, not out of any concerted effort to democratise, liberalise or play nice but simply because everybody else’s record is deteriorating at the speed of light?
I’m sure you all read the articles earlier this week – the CIA waterboarded two suspects 266 times during interrogations. Now 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and alleged terror commander Abu Zubaydah are bad guys. But that used to mean that they were prone to do things we wouldn’t do, us being the good guys. Thieves are bad because stealing is wrong, murderers are bad because life is sacred, rapists are evil because violation and violence is a sin, a crime and an abomination. So we are the good guys, not because we are victims of badness but because we wouldn’t do what bad guys do. Right?

Then explain torture to me, will you?
And before you tell me that Obama – blessed be his name – has banned waterboarding, let me tell you that it was happening till 2 months ago and, as Obama has not instructed a wide-spread inquest and purging of the CIA, waterboarding will stop but torture won’t.
Because 266 instances of waterboarding on 2 people says one thing and one thing alone: it happened a lot. And that, in turn, tells us an awful lot of things about how the CIA go about interrogating bad guys. And none of those things are good.

Now if you are of the ‘an eye for an eye’ school, you obviously disagree with me. Especially as we have now seen memos outlining how medical experts prevented waterboarding from causing severe mental or physical harm to the subject. So it’s not even an eye for an eye as we keep them alive.

Is that the measure of our humanity, then? Ensuring the pain doesn’t kill the suspect?
When did ‘who we are’ stop mattering?
Because who you are is measured half against what you do with you life and half against what you refuse to do. So, no, torture is not ok. Even if you have the worst of villains sitting across the interrogation table from you. And it’s not ok for three reasons:

1. What if you are wrong? What if hours, days, years from now you find that the guy who looked so evidently guilty on paper actually wasn’t? What if?

2. Revenge is not what our legal system is based on. Revenge is a bad motive and a bad reason for action. Revenge leads to the dark side.

3. If who you are entails a capacity and drive for violence, inflicting fear and pain on a defenceless – however horrible – human being, then you too my friend are one of the bad guys. Not as bad, perhaps, but bad all the same.

And making waterboarding illegal far from solves the problem
Because, don’t tell me that, when not using waterboarding, the CIA just had stern chats with their charges? And don’t tell me that, since Obama is not prosecuting any officials (not those who devised the policies, not those who carried out the interrogations, not those who failed to stop them) there will be a real change in how the supposed good guys interrogate the suspected bad guys?

And before you tell me that all’s fair in love and war, tell me how turning into what you are fighting against helps protect what you are fighting for?

Some fear that taking techniques off the table will make the enemies even more daring. More daring than what? What’s more daring than a suicide bomber?

And while experts debate whether torture ‘works’, whether accurate confessions are exacted through the medium of pain and the associated panic simulated drowning would cause, I maintain that this is not the point.
As a citizen, as a person, as an one-time ‘expert’ I refuse the ulta-right dismissal of the anti-torture argument as naïve and stand by my original proposition: humanity and morality cannot be fully separated. If you stand against the bad guys, don’t be a bad guy. If, in fighting a war, you compromise what you are striving to protect, you are your own worse enemy. And if you are fighting for freedom and democracy, well, then you can’t agree with Obama’s decision not to prosecute.

The point is that good is as good does. And no matter what desperate times call for, whatever popular wisdom absolutions you can think up, the fact remains: good guys should act like good guys, all the time, under any circumstances.
Even when doing so is difficult.
Particularly when doing so is difficult.

A rant for a rant: on Hitchens and gay adoption

Today’s rant is courtesy of Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday. And before you ask, no of course I don’t read it. The article – or rather an article denouncing the article – was forwarded to me by a friend. And then I did my research. And now I’m going to rant. Because Hitchens said what he said and because he’s not alone in believing it.

Hitchens claims that ‘the Thought Police’ forces him to ‘wave [his] little rainbow flag as the "Gay Pride" parade passes by.' It seems that he inhabits a different universe to me. Of course what do I know? I am heterosexual and may have missed the revolution of tolerance and open-mindedness that has swept Hitchens with it. Only you and I both know I have not missed the revolution because there hasn’t been one. There has been change in attitudes, but not enough of it and I have friends whose sexual preferences (a private matter if there ever was one) still cause problems at work and on the street. Insurance premiums remain higher for gay men even if they are in stable, long-term relationships and gay men and women still don’t have the universal right to protect their relationships via marriage – which, apart from a cake and confetti, actually means that everything they build together belongs to them equally and they can make medical decisions for each other, as partners should be able to.
Go wave your little flag at that Mr Hitchens.

But back to the point.
Hitchens’ gripe is that two Edinburgh children were taken away from a heroine-addict mother and put in the care of a childless couple in a stable long-term relationship and not in the care of grandparents that were deemed by social services to be too old and too ill. I don’t know if the assessment is fair. And neither does Mr Hitchens. But he goes out on a limb on this one and says the kids would be better off with their grandparents. Why? You guessed it. Because the couple that took them in is gay.

What’s his problem with homosexuality, you ask?
Well. First of all, homosexuals ‘tyranise’ him. Yes you do. ‘We show tolerance to “gays” and get tyranny in return’ he claims, because the entire gay community (in quotation marks, always, because he doesn’t like the cheeriness of the word ‘gay’ – his words, not mine) wants all of us to know what they do in their bedrooms. As I said, he inhabits a different universe to me.

But there is more. Hitchens continues:
‘We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual couples are just as good at bringing up children as the children's own grandparents. Better, in fact.’
No, Mr Hitchens.
First of all, you are not forced to say any of those things and you are not actually saying them. Secondly, the question of ‘good’, ‘bad’ and fair is one that interests you and you alone. The rest of us just want to get on with life. And homosexuality is a fact of life. Has been for a few thousand years and does not need to be assessed as good or bad to be real. By you, least of all.

But yes we would like you to accept that heterosexual and homosexual couples are equal in all ways before the law. And as common law marriage is a bit of a sham, we would like people who spend their lives together to be able to get protection before the law and be married if they wish to be.
As for bringing up children, well, I wouldn’t say gay couples are better. I would say they are just as good. Because parenthood is about personal commitment, not sexual preference. A stable home is about love, care, attention, safety. What your parents do in their bedroom does not affect how they love you, as their child. With more and more cases of child abandonment, abuse, neglect and violence every day, I’d say we need to grab hold of love and stability where we find it and entrust children to people who can care for them, whatever their colour, creed, football team or sexual preference.

And, yes Mr Hitchens, I know several gay parents.
Do you?

Liberalism 101

A woman in the US of A is running the risk of having her children taken away by social services because they have Nazi-inspired names including ‘Adolf Hitler’ and ‘Aryan Nation’. That’s a middle name. In case you were wondering.
Cruel? Absolutely.
Distasteful? Totally.
Worthy of social services intervention? I’d say no.
Of course there may be more to this than the parents’ poor taste and horrendous political affiliations. Although so far there doesn’t seem to be. And if those children were taken away because their mum has Nazi sympathies, then we have a problem. Because freedom is not faring well, when it only applies to those who agree with us.

Of course the concern is valid – in a liberal democracy, can you allow the expression of views the logical conclusion of which would be the dissolution of the very foundation of the freedoms you so cherish? I’d love to say no. But if you silence those who would silence you, you are no better than they are.

Still, it’s a tough call to make.
But choice is what freedom is about. The choices you are allowed to make because you are free. And the choices you must make in order to be free.
And obviously none of this is simple. And it all got a whole-lot more complicated post 9/11 when we were told we could either be safe or free. Freedoms, we were told, had to be curtailed for our own good. More surveillance, longer periods of detention for those arrested on suspicion of threatening our lives or way of life, new legislation, more monitoring. Freedom of expression is now a heavily qualified proposition. In the name of security: our safety and the protection of our way of life.
And many of us accepted limits to freedom in the name of security – because what good is freedom to a dead guy?

Even though our freedoms were secured by many who died demanding or defending them.
Even though security and freedom do not have to be mutually exclusive, unless we make them so.
Even though our way of life was meant to be all about freedom in the first place.

Wasn’t the right to have unpopular opinions part of what we used to stand for? Part of what we used to fight for?
Freedom was never meant to come in one size, one shape and one flavour.
Freedom was never meant to make life easier. It was meant to make life better.
Freedom was never meant to be restricted to those we like. That was the whole point: freedom was meant to make us bigger than the bad guys.
As I was saying, liberalism for beginners. But maybe it’s time we went back to basics.

Theories of relativity

I live in a relative world. I do. So do you, even though you’d rather you didn’t.
So does a student of mine who, years ago, told me he’d pray for me. Why? Because I said that ‘legitimate’ government is peculiar to its time and place. It has always been so and our beloved modern, territorial nation-state is not the final destination of humanity’s political evolution.
I didn’t think I was being particularly clever with that one.
Religious fundamentalism, racism, eugenics (to name but a few now-distasteful sets of beliefs) have been at the core of government legitimacy across both time and space. Yes, in Enlightened Europe too.
In fact, today’s western liberal ‘standards’ are very new. But we like them – our new-found liberty, equality, fair-mindedness. We like them and we want to share them with the rest of the world, because we believe they are fundamentally good, esentially valid and universally desirable. Not to mention objectively cool.
Yet attempts at exporting said values have exposed the fact that universalism still eludes the human race. My truth and your truth can be worlds apart.

So the student was shocked and would pray. I am not joking and neither was he. And I don’t mind. You never know when a prayer may come in handy with the ‘whatever from high atop the thing’. The sad truth, however, is that I’d love to have a few absolutes to hold onto. Even more so than the student who, all else failing, still has prayer. But universality eludes me.

First of all there is the practical side of things.
Our shared humanity should make us all equal. But in reality, this equality is crushed by those who don’t believe in it – states, groups, people. And if some of us agree this should not be the case, those who go off and do it anyway, obviously disagree. So universality is shot to pieces.

Then there is the theoretical side of things.
Could universality exist in the first place?
I’d say yes and use Rawl’s veil of ignorance as exhibit A. If you could de-contextualise yourself, you could build a value-neutral system that respects human fundamentals. So what are they?
Well, since you cannot de-contextualise yourself you can’t determine this. You can only create a wish list.
Life. Freedom of thought, worship and opinion. Dignity.
I like this list. It’s not my ideal-world list. My ideal-world list is much longer, excruciatingly detailed and set to music. It’s my ‘let’s keep this real’ list, but real it ain’t. Because many disagree with me. Others would quite rightly want to know how I define freedom (freedom from? freedom to?) and what exactly dignity means before they commit. But leaving others out of it for a moment, the problem is I disagree with it myself some of the time.
I believe in freedom of expression. I do.
I believe in your right to believe in things I don’t and reject the things I believe in. I believe in your right to reject my life and lead a life I don’t want for myself.
But there is a type of belief that I am not comfortable with. It’s the sort of belief that doesn’t simply reject an opinion or way of life in favour of another, but rejects it as wrong, non-viable, misguided and evil.

I believe in freedom of expression.
But what about the bad guys? What about racist, homophobic, religiously-blinkered, morally superior beliefs that see their truth as the only truth and according to which everyone disagreeing should repent, reform or die?
What about the people whose opinions fundamentally entail a rejection of mine? Not a criticism but a fundamental rejection of both the validity of my opinions and my right to hold them?

Well, in principle they have a right to think what they think. In practice, I want to shake them really, really hard. So universality dies in my own head a million times over as, obviously, I believe in what I believe in and I believe in it strongly. Apart from when I don’t.
But I will prevail over my own tastes. Because I’m sure my opinions are distasteful to many, some of whom would still defend my right to hold them. Even if many others wouldn’t. Maybe that’s the main difference between those of us who wish for universality and those who couldn’t care less.

Still, it all boils down to the same thing sadly. Because even though you wish life was sacred no matter what and some freedoms were guaranteed irrespective of context, there is no place on earth where that is the case.
Cultural relativity, power differentials, religion, family, tribal justice, court justice or a chance encounter with individual violence and the sanctity of life and freedom are shattered in one blow.

And of course there is the argument of cultural imperialism. At the end of the day, how is saying ‘this is right because it’s how I do it’ different to my friend’s assessment of his tastes as ‘objectively cool’.
Whose right is bigger and whose truth is better?

Relativity reigns supreme. But you do draw the line somewhere. Or you should.
Because even if I grudgingly acknowledge your right to deny the holocaust, I will not acknowledge your right to act on this belief. Life, surely, is where universal values converge.
Of course that is not the case. Because there are murderers out there, capital punishment, honour killings, wars. People and states the world over fail to respect the inalienability of human life. Without that, discussing fundamental rights and freedoms may well be putting the cart before the horse.

So I live in a relative world.
Not of my choosing. Nor of my making.
I’d like to live in a world where human life is inalienable. Where freedom of thought, expression, movement and access were unfettered. Where dignity – however you understand it – is a fundamental. I’d like to live in a world where rights don’t collide. There's no end to the things I'd like.
But seriously.
I’d settle for a world where life is sacred. Always and unconditionally. Even if you are a bad guy.