By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Reading about the shush-the-victim philosophy that’s reigned within some ultra-orthodox Jewish sects in New York, I’ve been impelled to think more broadly about religious tolerance in the U.S.—and the glaring exception, which is Islam.
The U.S. has a history of accommodating dissenting sects, many of which have been given the legal space to live in virtually self-governing enclaves where women’s rights, to cite a common aberration, are systematically abused and where science dare not contradict the sect’s interpretation of scripture, be it Biblical or from texts of equivalent age or sanctity. Christian and Jewish sects have thrived in this atmosphere.
Consider the Amish, Again
The Amish are a non-controversial case in point. Their horse-drawn buggies, almost invisible at night, needn’t carry lights or license plates. Picture a two lane highway with no street lamps and black buggies with no headlights or taillights. Would you like to be driving along that road after dark?
Other exemptions from state and local laws have also helped the Amish to preserve their pre-modern way of life. Long before home schooling became legally accessible to other families, Amish parents were allowed to opt out of the public education system, lest their children be contaminated with alien ideas. They also didn’t have to vaccinate their kids.
To this day the Amish live in a time-warp cocoon, rigorously enforcing internal conformity to keep change at bay. Should any members of the community be so misguided as to reveal doubts, ask awkward questions or act out of sync, the Amish have a social-purification device. This is called shunning, a form of social death. Parents, siblings, spouse—none of them may speak to the offender, who has little choice but to move away. Do not underestimate the agony involved in this process.
Mormons and Christian Scientists
Mormons, who profess a heretical form of Christianity, have also been able to perpetuate their hermetic traditions (traditions so totally shielded from public view that Anne Romney’s non-Mormon parents were barred from the wedding when their daughter married Mitt, leading me to wonder if this cruelty ever pricks Anne’s conscience). Yet Mormons have multiplied mightily thanks to high birth rates and vigorous, wholly legal proselytization. Of course, there was a price to pay for tolerance. Polygamy had to be renounced. Even so, at this moment, in several states of the U.S., some Mormons are practicing polygamy. Living largely in close-mouthed, remote enclaves, they are mostly left in peace, unless it can be proven that seriously underage girls are being forced into marriage.
The Line that Can't Be Crossed
So there are some lines that can’t be crossed when it comes to freedom of religion in the U.S. To a very large extent those lines have to do with how children are treated. Christian Scientists and adherents of other heterodox sects may not deny life-saving medical care to their children, even if parents and other adults are religiously obliged to let themselves die for lack of it.
In recent years both the Catholic Church and some ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects have learned that any right to self-governance in the name of religious freedom ends when children are sexually abused by adults. Molesting children is bad enough, but the horror is compounded when authority figures connive to protect the institution’s reputation through elaborate evasions or cover ups. The Catholic church is still reeling from a severe loss of public respect and from huge financial losses due to law suits as a result of its globally-applied policy of protecting priestly abusers rather than victims. Meanwhile, American Catholic politicians who dare to support birth control are threatened with excommunication.
Justifiable indignation was registered in the wake of credible reports of child abuse within some ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York. Among the abusers and those who worked to hide the abuse: rabbis. One hopes that these over-privileged ultra-religious sects will never again enjoy the freedom from secular purview that was common before investigators also revealed that it wasn’t the abusers who were threatened with expulsion from the sacred circle but the parents of the abused children. They’d be tossed out of the sect if they dared to tarnish its image by appealing to non-Jewish authorities for redress.
Reading these accounts of child abuse in highly patriarchal religious communities, I’ve begun to wonder if the subordination of women that’s found in Catholicism and Jewish orthodoxy has anything causal to do with child abuse. In fact, the more I read and hear of Jewish ultra-orthodoxy the less difference I see between that form of Judaism and the form of Islam that was imposed on Afghanistan by Muslim extremists. Catholic hierarchs, ultra-orthodox rabbis, Taliban, literalist evangelical preachers—all of them are for constraining women and would force everyone to live strictly according to their narrow interpretation of the relevant Holy Book or Books, if they could—and all too many of them don’t even practice the puritanism they preach, it seems.
So Why the Discrimination?
Frankly, I wouldn’t willingly live under any of those dispensations, and to all of them I would say the law of the land is the law of the land. No exceptions. But that’s not the question here. The topic here is fairness. Equal treatment. As things now stand, conservative Muslims in America don’t get the tender regard for what I’ll politely call eccentric social customs that conservative members of non-Muslim sects get. Not only is that wrong, it doesn’t make sense, if you consider the retrograde, misogynist practices we are already condoning.