I tend to be somewhat critical of the crude generalizations of populations one likely has little knowledge of and so characterizes broad groups by very few abstractions. The lack of nuance being an issue of not really having much content/knowledge about a group and so makes it easy to reduce many to simple determinations. I mean even the abstract generalization of Islam is so abstract as to implicitly erase distinctions between many populations as if the Muslims in South Ease Asia are the same as in the Middle East that are the same across class and so on.
For example, the emphasis on child marriage, a point could be made whether child marriage as a problem is essential to Islam or is it a broader problem which one simply ties to something inessential.
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1224&context=yjlh/A second pair of contrasting cases echoes these findings and yields additional observations. In May 1998, a sixteen-year-old in Utah, forced by her father to marry her thirty-two-year-old uncle as his fifteenth wife, called 911 for help." The uncle, David Kingston, was charged with incest and sexual conduct with a minor, both third degree felonies,56 and received a ten-year jail sentence. Her father, John Daniel Kingston, the leader of a large polygamist clan, pled guilty to felony child abuse for beating her into unconsciousness when she tried to run away. In Utah-as in Texas-parental consent or a court order allow marriage at an age younger than eighteen. 9 Until May 1999, marriages were only prohibited when the male or female was under fourteen years of age.' Since that time, the age of consent has been raised to sixteen, but fifteen-year-olds may still marry with parental consent and authorization from a judge.61 Before the law was amended, every year about 800 girls aged fourteen through seventeen were reported to marry in Utah.62
Rumors of coerced arranged marriages and children sold by their parents had led to repeated attempts to enact legislation that would outlaw marriages of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. A bill was withdrawn in 1997 under pressure from legislators who believed child marriage prevents teen promiscuity.63 Legislators also expressed concern that such legislation would be unfairly aimed at the state's polygamists.' While the practice of plural marriage was renounced by the Mormon Church in 1890, it has persisted among religious splinter groups65 and has not been prosecuted by the state for several decades.' The Governor of Utah, a descendent of polygamists, refused to condemn polygamy at a news conference, suggesting that it may be protected as a religious freedom.67 His comments were quickly condemned by an organization of women who have abandoned polygamous relationships. They denounce the practice as abusive toward women and children, both inherently and as it is practiced.' Subsequently, the Women's Religious Liberties Union (WRLU) was founded by a woman in a polygamous relationship who asserted that polygamy appropriately channels men's sexuality. The WRLU called for a repeal of the state law banning plural marriage.69
The months after the sixteen-year-old's phone call led to a "raft of questions" about "Utah's dirty little secret."'7 Allegations included evidence of large-scale welfare fraud by women in plural marriages claiming to be single mothers, rampant incest and child abuse, and girls as young as ten forced into arranged marriages. The media described the polygamists as a community of people who live as "societal ciphers," with no birth certificates or driver's licenses, who do not pay taxes or vote."
There has been a discourse of condemnation surrounding both the Kingston case and polygamous Mormon splinter groups more generally.' Historically, Mormons have been subjected to a campaign against polygamy couched in terms of national morality and even national survival,73 rhetoric not unlike that directed against communities of color today. But the current discourse does not include accusations that Mormons, with their failure to assimilate, their failure to Americanize, threaten longstanding American values.74 No one asserts that statewide acceptance of these diverse cultural practices is symptomatic of multiculturalism run amok. Nor does anyone characterize this as a collision between multiculturalism and feminism.75
In my state, New Mexico, I believe the age of consent used to be as young as 14 until few decades ago. Which lead to some weird court cases at later dates where previous relationships became illegal but may have been viewed by a Judge as unproblematic due to a lack of charges or conviction although there was a history of what is now criminal.
The implicit framing of them as degenerate cultures who all agree to such standards whilst we're treated as a hegemonic whole that is enlightened in contrast is a crude manner of thinking about a country.
The supposed attention given to harm done to women can't be accepted purely at face value, in that I thinkthere is reason to be critical of some attempts to mark crude impressions of progressive views around women as basis of attack on another culture. Which in itself isn't to be simply dismissed either, just that many use it as a means to legitimize problematic interventions.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=164968I guess its easy to make generalizations about groups more so when there isn't actually a specific group of people we talk about as identifaible in their laws, or practices. For which we would still need to show the validity of the generalization less we for example generalize the case of people in Utah to all American's views and values as a whole. A nation which is the size of Europe and just as diverse.
But don't mistake my knee jerk hesitation to accept crudeness as a wholesale acceptance and denial of wrong doings and wrongs of such standards.
As I don't subscribe to a
cultural relativism as I retain the notion of moral progress, but such progress isn't derived from the extra-mundane God but in challenging and changing the actual conditions of life. Which is why places like Afghanistan can show pictures of women at universities and what seem rather western fashion with skirts, high heels, because the state of the country was different to when religious reactionaries were provided support and able to establish power.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/womens-rights-afghanistan-historyThe moral progress has regressed because the state of the society had lost a lot of the infrastructure and ways of living that allowed such norms to prevail.
So yeah, damn the reactionaries those that played a part in destroying a nation, resulting in a significant cultural regress.
And in such a regression, progressive forces should be supported without presuming the benevolence of many state actors that wish to intervene, especially if with military action.
Rather groups that arise within a country with a critical voice of the way of living become the means of change, not as external to society but part of it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdfThis concept of critical voice is thus the fifth in a series of determinations of advantage: wealth, functioning, capability, voice and finally, critical voice. Critical voice is the capacity of a person living “inside” a society to form views available from a position “outside” that society:
“... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society.” (Sen 2002a, p. 476-77.)
Critical agency is thus “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.” The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be “critical voice.” This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But “critical voice” does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society.
It is the freedom to not simply choose within set coordinates, but to change the very coordinates of choice and this comes from a criticism from the status quo of every day living.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics