A double standard of self-determination
by David Atkins
I don't like to pick on already discriminated-against tiny minority populations--even if they are intensely conservative--but this situation provides some food for thought:
The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.
Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”
By cooperating with the police, and speaking out about his son’s abuse, Mr. Jungreis, 38, found himself at the painful forefront of an issue roiling his insular Hasidic community. There have been glimmers of change as a small number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, taking on longstanding religious and cultural norms, have begun to report child sexual abuse accusations against members of their own communities. But those who come forward often encounter intense intimidation from their neighbors and from rabbinical authorities, aimed at pressuring them to drop their cases.
Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.
First off, I'd like you to imagine for a moment that this were a Muslim community under discussion. How much freakout would we be seeing among the right-wing? After all, the only thing "Shari'a Law" means in the context of a Western society is that communities such as this be free to arbitrate their own business, especially when it comes to minor offenses.
But more importantly, this issue highlights the ever-present unbridgeable divide between liberalism and multiculturalism. There is a universal law of liberalism that says that children have a right to grow up free of sexual and physical abuse. What happens when that principle rubs up against communities that expressly wish to reserve the right to sexually and physically abuse children? What happens when that principle rubs up against communities that practice arranged marriage of children to far older people? What happens, for that matter, when any principle of liberalism rubs up against a culturally distinct minority community that doesn't share those values?
The easy and simplistic answer is to look dogmatically at the law book. But most intelligent folks would point out that not all laws are remotely equally enforced. Where should prosecutorial discretion be applied, then, and on whom?
Should the U.S. government intervene in this Orthodox community to prevent this behavior? Did it do the right thing to intervene in David Koresh's affairs, even though he wasn't harming anyone outside his compound? What about the fundamentalist polygamist Mormons supposedly minding their own business in the Utah desert? What if a state were to secede in order to defend entrenched principles of discrimination? Should the U.S. government fight to keep that state in the fold and enforce non-discrimination and broadly liberal values? What if barbaric actions are happening just outside our borders? Should we not intervene to protect the principle of borders arbitrarily drawn centuries ago?
I don't really have a big problem with these questions myself, as I champion ecumenical liberal values--enforced by state intervention if necessary--over multicultural self-determination. That philosophy has its own challenges, of course, and is often met with accusations of authoritarianism (I would counter, using very similar arguments to those gated community wealthy who demand to know by what right the fascist government imposes a punitive tax rate.) But for many others, these are far thornier questions.
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