One thing I've noticed is that civil liberties and personal freedoms have as much a tendency to promote deep conservatism as they do liberalism.
For example, the Archbishop of Canterbury has recently advocated allowing British Muslims to live under Sharia law. (I know. I can't even be bothered explaining how depressing that thought is, for a whole host of reasons too horrible to catalogue here and which the reader is probably well aware of. Suffice to say: I fear my my country's future.) This is ostensibly a drive for religious and cultural freedom - allowing people to live the way they want to live, according to their customs - but it can only lead to the highly illiberal situation wherein each ethnic or minority group maintains its own culture, legal system, language and genetic purity without any form of crossover with other groups. Separate law regimes are the first step to complete societal fragmentation.
It's also profoundly undemocratic. The point of democracy is that, basically, decisions are determined by the wishes of the majority. If we're going to have a democracy in Britain at all, then we ought to take it seriously enough to go for it 100%, and that means having a democratically determined universally applicable legal system too.
So a superficially wishy-washy liberal stance ends up being anything but.
Friday, 8 February 2008
Muslims and TVs
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3 comments:
If I ever end up as President of the US, I hope you're the PM of the UK!
I wanted to give Rowan Williams the benefit of the doubt that his statements had been taken out of context or blown out of proportion - then I looked into it and just couldn't.
The law evolves, but to say (essentially) that "the system should be people can choose which rules they want to abide by" is just an invitation to disaster...
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