Posted by Wymark on 7/13/2009, 12:44 am, in reply to "Re: Homophobia, theirs and ours."
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but anyone suggesting the West has no right to differentiate itself from, say, the Islamic world, on such matters is a cultural and (expressing it more precisely) a moral relativist.
'The Islamic world', or countries with majority muslim populations, is overwhelmingly situated in the 'third/developing world' though. These countries have differing levels of social freedom (and in some of them, like Saudi and the other Gulf states, the space for progressive, democratic activism is deliberately closed down by U.S./U.K. backed despots), and some are at a different stage of development than the U.S./U.K./France, for example, are. Let's not forget that homosexuality was a punishable offence in this country until forty years ago, that women were enfranchised less than a hundred years ago, that it was possible for a man accused of raping his wife to successfully defend himself on the grounds that it's *not possible* for a man to rape his wife until twenty years ago (because she's his sexual property), etc. And the country still has huge problems with sexist violence and homophobia. That's not being a relativist. That's just recognising that patriarchy and misogyny are to be found all over the world, and that some countries are further down the road to eradicating them than others.
The problem as I see it is patriarchy, not 'Islam', as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of British muslims 'accept the right of women as equal citizens' (p.2).
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