Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - Moral Equivalence, Gender Specific Edition
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
We're losing to clowns. Very primitive, irony-challenged clowns.
Annoying moral equivalence variation #542 is about gender. Both the Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition (and, for that matter, the Jewish tradition) marginalize women. The conclusion of feminists, then, is that the problem of sexual marginalization is a problem of religion - and that more so, the conditions of gendered slavery that women throughout the Muslim world face requires a non-religious solution. We're not fans of faith-based organizations for a few reasons, but this miserable excuse for thinking is not one of them... Of course a woman is better off being in a fundamentalist Catholic household than a fundamentalist Muslim household. Of course that's true. How far gone into pedantry and banality do you have to be for that to cease to be a self-evident truth? Answer: as far as the Guardian's Karen Anderson (actually, she's probably way farther than you have to be - she's kind of a lost cause we thinkg).
Not to brag, but we want to point out that we were way, way out in front of this 'the Pope is not pleased with Islam' thing - and for the right reasons:
Not to give away the ending, but it's going to have a lot to do with how the media's new definition of "intolerant" seems eerily similar to "opposing violent, unassimilated, and primitive populations of immigrants in the heartland of Old Europe". More closely than many of the rest of us, Pope Benedict has been watching his native country descending into this for years now, and identifying the source of the problem as a religious one (rather than an ethnic, or social, or educational one) is why he's been branded intolerant: In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe?
People should not be allowed to say 'the problem isn't any particular religion, it's religious extremism itself' in anything but a sarcastic way. The effects of religious extremism differ to such a degree between different religions that it's perverse not to recognize those differences as differences in kind. You sometimes hear conservative commentators describe political Islam as a medieval religion (9-12th century-ish). And you sometimes hear liberal commentators decry Pope Benedict's conservative theological commitments and compare him to the Taliban (or you see people like the NYT editors take snide potshots at him that don't have to be defended because they're not explicit).
Listen, this is easy: the most extreme form of actually existing 9th-century style political Catholicism said that killing your daughter was bad. The most extreme form of actually existing 9th-century style political Islam says that killing your daughter is required to keep your honor. This is not a difficult concept. First graders could get this concept.
This concept can be metaphorically and actually illustrated with the pictures above from this week's protests. The question must be asked: are these women existence more or less ironic than having Muslims threaten to kill the Pope because he suggested that Islamic societies merge defenses of faith with violence? We think more, because irony requires a certain kind of freshness that's simply lacking from the "kill people who criticize you for killing people" modus operandi.
