A Sword that Cuts Both Ways

I'd actually like to start by calling out my own faith: Christians in Belgium and France, where have you been on this burqa thing?

It's no longer news, but there was what I think was an astonishing lack of outcry from religious communities the world over when, a couple of months ago, wearing a burqa in Belgium became punishable with jail time. (Though given less attention, that detail also appears here.) Not saying anything inflammatory, not coercing someone to wear one, but merely appearing in public with one. And feminists of my acquaintance, take note: the focus of the law is not on determining whose fault the burqa-wearing is and punishing the coercer. The focus of the law is not on upholding those women who want to bring charges against husbands who want to force them to cover themselves. No, the focus of the law is on punishing women who wear burqas. Whether they choose to or not, and no matter whose fault it is.

And by the way, some of them do choose to - we read about that when I took a course in Alfred on Judaism and Islam. Some Muslim women do it as a way of expressing their faith, and though I think this happens more often in mostly-Muslim countries than mostly-non-Muslim, some even do it - how's this for a reason the Western world can get behind? - because they want to get an education. They see being less visible as a way of deterring male attention, since they've made a conscious decision that being in a relationship is not something they want to do while they're getting said education (in part because getting married often leads to the end of said schooling), so they're using the burqa as a tool for self-defense. In other words, as we all should know by the time we're adults, things in and of themselves are not bad. The way things are used is what's good or bad. Almost all objects are swords that cut both ways: when I went through violence prevention-and-management training at BCC, we had to look at a typical office and find the objects that could, if we were being attacked and were truly in danger, be used as weapons. Staplers and keyboards could be used to hit someone with. Markers could be jammed into someone's eye. If you want to hurt someone and have enough creativity, you can probably do it.

Which is not to say that I think that everyone should, for example, be able to have guns because people kill people and guns don't. But I also don't think they should be banned. I think that (as there currently is) there should be a process for determining who should be trusted with one in Situations A, B, and C and who shouldn't. So while I'm against their total absence from society (can't you think of a situation in which you want a police officer to be armed, not just carrying a nightstick?), I am absolutely for their limitation. Similarly, if you have a reason to worry about men in your community forcing their women to dress in ways they don't want to dress - in essence forcing a certain brand of Islam on someone who doesn't want to be that brand thereof - then you should pass laws that make it easy for those women to bring charges against said men. You should make it easier to shelter women who want to wear whatever they want to wear. But even though I understand that clothing can send a message (after all, I don't want high schoolers wearing t-shirts with misogynistic slogans into elementary schools), I think that if there are other possible interpretations and uses than a misogynistic one (and with a burqa, there are), you shouldn't outlaw the burqa. That should be your very last resort.

But, importantly, you also should not assume that no woman "really wants" to practice an Islam that forces her to cover herself when she would prefer to show her face. From what it sounds like, Belgium simply believes that either women secretly don't want to wear it, or that their being okay with it is a sign that they've been brainwashed. There appears to be no middle ground wherein a Muslim woman of the burqa-wearing groups, though she would prefer to show her face, believes in Allah in such a way that she believes that covering up is what's most pleasing to him. And in the West, because we associate that with things like women acquiescing to abuse, we - perhaps understandably - find that intensely distasteful. But whether you're male or female, is there really nothing in your own life comparable to that? Is there really nothing you do, even though you think it's stupid, because you believe that someone wiser than you wants you to do it? Haven't you ever been a skeptical child of a good parent, or student of a good teacher? Again, I'm not suggesting that a woman who doesn't want to wear one should be made to wear one. Absolutely not. But I am suggesting that we do no favor to women by assuming that every one of them who doesn't hate the burqa should be saved from herself, by legal force if necessary.

But in Belgium, the government has pronounced that wearing one even by choice is worth fines or jailing. And though Amnesty International protested, I heard precious little protest from non-Muslim religious groups. We have, as I am about to point out, our own freedom-of-religious-expression problems to worry about. But that doesn't excuse us from our failure to ask, and ask loudly, where political-correctness lines should be drawn in the lives of people with whom we disagree. World citizens may have a right to be protected from danger. But they do not have a right to be protected from feeling offended. If we as religious groups cherish the right to say and do things that we believe are right, even in the face of the rest of the world's feeling of offense, then we need to make sure that everybody has that right. Otherwise, again, that sword cuts both ways: if we want to stand by and watch burqas get outlawed, then if anyone ever comes for things - not actions - that we Christians or Jews or Buddhists hold dear, then we will have nothing to say. We will have had it coming.

*

It is, says Monday's Supreme Court ruling, legal for colleges to insist that non-Christian students be allowed to be voting members of "officially-recognized" Christian campus groups, assuming the college decides to impose an open-membership policy. In other words, there are to be no exceptions on the basis of belief, particularly if that belief is offensive to the rest of the college.

It's like this: on some college campuses there's a group for Christian law students, and though all students in the college are permitted to attend the meetings, if you want to vote on policy, you have to sign on to a "statement of faith" - that is, a list of things that comprise that particular group's definition of what being a Christian legal student means. One of those items, however, is that you can't be a practicing gay or lesbian student. So, says the Supreme Court, if your college wants to, it can force you to accept such a student as a voting member.

Let me say that this is less clearly insulting to personal freedom than outlawing burqas. I understand that banning a gay student from officership looks like civil rights discrimination, the equivalent of a country club outlawing black members. And I understand that, not having been part of a Christian fellowship, many people assume that leadership should work much like leadership in any other group: there's a vote, there's a democracy, one non-Christian kid on a Christian fellowship's e-board wouldn't overturn a decision except in a case of a group so split that nothing's clear anyway, and if there're multiple non-Christians, it must be because they got voted in.

And in many cases, that may well be how it would work. But here's why it's still a problem.

In groups that aren't based around an identity, a wide latitude of positions on side matters is and should be permissible: you'd never think to require that a National Hockey League team be made up of political liberals, history professors, or even people who college-majored in physical-fitness education, because there's no logical connection between the NHL and those things. You make it onto an NHL team based on possession of a specific skill set, whatever other skill sets, beliefs, or traits you happen to have or not have.

In some cases, however, identity becomes important. If you're on a hockey team in the Olympics, that becomes a question not just of skill but also of identity: if you're the U.S. team, then, according to expectations that everyone's agreed on beforehand, the competition will judge each country's ability to produce good hockey players; ergo, you don't have a U.S. hockey team full of guys who've spent their lives in Canada. If they love the States and want to go get U.S. citizenship, then great. But if not, it doesn't matter how great they are as people or players: they can't be on our hockey team.

And a Christian fellowship - like College Democrats or College Republicans - is a group united by a shared identity. It's a group that exists to do things in a Christian way. We're not saying that non-Christians can't come to the meetings any more than the College Democrats would say that Sarah Palin isn't welcome at their meetings. But I think it's entirely fair to expect that a group full of Christians should have a space to say, "Okay, we as Christians need to decide what we, as a Christian body, want to do in this situation." In other words, if Sarah Palin (assuming, in this theoretical example, that she's a college student) makes a habit of coming to the College Democrats meetings, she should get the chance, during open discussion time before a vote, to raise as many objections as she wants to the College Democrats' proposal to send two thousand dollars of their budget money to, say, a Democratic candidate's presidential campaign. But she does not get to vote against it, because she is not a Democrat. If she doesn't like it, that'll have to be her problem. If she's not a Democrat, it's fair to deny her permission to help determine the Democratic response to Event X, no matter how many meetings she comes to.

And how does one decide who is and isn't a Democrat, as defined by College Democrats? Well, if College Democrats cared about defining that - and if Sarah Palin's coming to their meetings, then I think they absolutely should be able to define it - then they would draw up a statement of positions one would have to hold in order to be a Democrat. If you're on board with those positions, great. If not, you may be a Republican, or an independent, or a Green Party type, and you might want to look elsewhere or create your own club. The school should then give you money, which you can send to the candidate of your own collective choice.

And so, similarly, it should be fair for a Christian campus group - or any religious group - to say who is and is not, for the purposes of their particular fellowship, in line with their teachings. We need it for the same reasons that College Democrats needs to not have Sarah Palin trying to derail their efforts to endorse the candidate of their choice. If you don't like the prevailing definition of "Christian," then rather than force the group to change its definition, you should need to start your own group. If you're a college and you believe that by our very existence as ourselves we're discriminating against someone's civil rights, then you need to revoke our charter (though beware: Islam and orthodox Judaism also, like Christianity, forbid the practice of non-celibate homosexuality. Are you going to revoke their fellowships' charters, too?). But if you're letting us keep our charter, then you're giving us the entitlement to let us determine whom we allow to shape our policy. You are absolutely welcome to require that we let everyone see what we're doing. But are you sure you want to require that we let everyone have a say in what we're doing?

Because that sword cuts both ways. What will you do when Sarah Palin wants to be on the College Democrats' e-board, or even just vote for who's on e-board, especially if she insists that she's a Democrat despite clear indication that, according to the College Democrats' statement of what makes a Democrat, she's not? Do you require them to give her a vote? If you don't, what is the difference? While I understand that Christians legislating their beliefs onto a public college is unreasonable, is it really unreasonable to let them legislate their beliefs among themselves?

The non-religious world often tells us not to force our views on everyone else. "Go do that in your own spaces," it says, "and leave us to do our stuff in ours." But a university administration telling us that a religious fellowship can't limit its voting eligibility is essentially saying, "This is only your space to the degree that we say it is."

Belgium is saying that, too. A Muslim woman's wardrobe there, and a campus religious group's policies here: both may now permissibly become public space, at the mercy of majority rule.

_
Endnote: In researching this, I tried to use mostly mainstream sites, not specialized ones, because I wanted to make sure I could link mainstream ones. For Part 1, the sources I used for research were largely British - BBC, Daily Mail, etc. For Part 2, they were things like CNN, Washington Post, Cato Institute, and Christianity Today. If you've read Cal Thomas's recent column on the issue I discussed in Part 2, it may sound a little confusing as to what's really going on. I actually think he miscommunicates - he says that the ruling states that "a public university is not required to subsidize campus groups it considers discriminatory," and works from there, but not only was the phrasing not like that in any of my sources (the focus of the debate has seemed to be on voting and membership rights, though I imagine funding would come into that if CLI were to refuse to comply), but honestly, his thesis as stated doesn't sound like news to me. My purpose was really mainly to argue against Hastings's policy and the Court's interpretation thereof - the impracticality of an open-member mandate, and the need for exceptions for all identity-based organizations. If Thomas is right and this is about whether a college must provide a charter and funding to anyone it thinks is discriminatory, then that's a different argument, and I would have written a different piece. But I think he and I are arguing two different things.

Also, because I didn't want to link to an overtly-Christian site in this piece, I didn't read Christianity Today's article until after the fact. If I had, I would have seen that basically the whole world had already used the College Democrats example. So don't look here for originality! My apologies to the Supreme Court justice who'd already tried to explain it on those grounds.

So the Last Three Weeks Went Fast, Huh?

Hi there! So guess what: summer has, as it sometimes does, more or less swallowed me up. (Really, though, you could say that about my whole life year-round since grad school, so why do I mention it now?) Things've been going well, though busily. Still trying to even begin to know where to start with my course overhaul; I've been slogging through my new textbook, a bit concerned at its errors and slight stiffness of instructional tone. My fault, though - I had five choices, and this's the one I picked.

Since many of my friends here have ties to another country (most of them because they've once lived in said other country), the World Cup is a bigger deal around here than I've ever known it to be before. We have, however, the complication of being young and fairly poor and therefore lacking cable, so we've had to get creative about our viewing. There are plenty of places to watch the games online, but tomorrow we're getting up early enough to be at Crepe Heaven, run by a Bosnian couple who're following the Cup and agreed to open 90 minutes early just for us (I hope they're willing to cook early as well, because I cannot think of a breakfast I would rather have tomorrow morning than a sweet crepe), by 7:30. That's right, we are starting our day with Germany-Serbia. It's going to be a good day for soccer, though: the US plays the 10 AM game, and England goes up against Algeria in the afternoon (though I probably won't have time to watch that).

On Saturday, the games will not be nearly as interesting, which is fine with me, because I will be too busy eating Dinosaur Barbeque and seeing family at my brother's graduation party to care about soccer anyway.

In other news, I've moved. As much as I liked living on the West Side (not to mention paying less rent) and got along all right with my housemates, six unrelated people in one house is just too many, especially when my housemates had a bunch of people over every alternate night, so I missed things like cleanliness and refrigerator space and being able to use the living room past sundown. So I moved in with Carrie, who was looking for a renter, and so far (it's been about two weeks) it's been great. Since it's Carrie's house and therefore her choice as to whether she wants a housemate, we're going to try it out for the summer. If it works out, I'll be there basically until further notice, and if it doesn't, I may well end up moving back to the old place this fall, since it sounds like there'll probably be rooms open. We'll see how it all shakes out.

In other other news, I'm going to be in Jodi's wedding this August. There are seven of us bridesmaids, and we all got to pick our own dress style (though they all have to be the same color and length and come from David's Bridal). It was just like senior prom: I ended up buying the first dress I tried on (though, like senior prom, that wasn't the only one I tried). Those of you who're Jodi's Facebook friends can see pictures of everyone's styles on her page if that strikes your fancy. Now, to get it altered and find some cherry-colored shoes to go with it!

Actually, right now I'm going to go eat soup and then go pump up my practically-flat tire. That's not quite as exciting, now is it?