Thursday, February 25, 2010

A Fundamental Question of Rights

While respecting people's values is important, to what extent should specific cultural values that go against fundamental rights (in our view) be respected? This arises constantly in Planning (full of relativists - though I am not one), where people discuss the idea of protecting specific ethnic values on the basis of giving people equal rights to protect their culture. My question is, to what extent should we compromise? I am consistently frustrated by colleagues that suggest illegitimate cultural traditions should be respected (most famously, female circumcision). Furthermore, cultural groups that do not respect women have no right to continue so to do once they arrive in this country, in my mind. Nevertheless, we fail completely to reach their enclaves if we outwardly attempt to change them. This arises in planning as a conflict because we frequently have to conduct outreach to minority immigrant (and even some natural-born Americans of European descent) in order to give them representative input into the planning process. When this occurs, we end up with large numbers of men at a meeting, or even one or two people who claim to have the mandate to speak for the group (which I suppose they may). We are skeptical of claims of authority in this culture, and I believe rightly so. I believe that if we can break through the discriminatory, sexist, or racist cultural values of some groups, we could obtain an actually representative opinion of the community. We are prevented in doing so, however, because we have to "respect" them to get any input at all. I dislike the idea of having to co-opt bad cultural values through small inroads (such as through the public education system), but I know few other ways of succeeding. This is a question of Truth vs Tolerance. In the end, we are forced to be tolerant of intolerance and pretend not to recognize the universality of certain fundamental rights just to be able to spread Truth.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Terrorist Double-Standards

I was reading an article in the Washington Post about the recent terrorist attack on the IRS building in Austin, and it had a number of Tea Party types basically saying that, while what Stacks did was wrong, he is representative of the anger at the government the American people feel. Even a Texas candidate for governor said this. What is really frustrating to me about all of this is that the guy flew an airplane into a building, killed a father of six, and got called a hero by his own daughter (who lives in Norway, the most Socialist western country!), and it is said that his anger is understandable by people who call themselves patriots. I wonder when people will realize that they receive huge benefits from this system. Also, I would really like to survey all the TEA party people to see just how many of them are on government programs or pay very few taxes...