In drawing attention to Samaira Nazir, a twenty-five-year-old graduate who was brutally stabbed to death for wanting to marry a lower caste Afghan man rather than a suitor in Pakistan, Allison Pearson uses her Daily Mail column this week to make a robust case for outlawing forced marriages in Britain. It’s curious that the argument even needs to be advanced, that there could possibly not be a consensus, but as Pearson points out, our government is scared.
‘To find the real reason for this shameful abandonment of vulnerable young people, we need only look at the government consultation paper. It suggested a criminal offence of forced marriage “would disproportionately impact on black and ethnic communities and might be misinterpreted as an attack on those communities.” Misinterpreted? I don’t think so. You would be absolutely right if you saw a law against forced marriage as an attack on practices among certain groups which the majority culture finds cruel, offensive and plain wrong.’Pandering to people’s prejudices, permitting the illegal to flourish for fear of offending the perpetrators, or their coreligionists, allowing the minority to hold the majority to ransom. You may well wonder what’s going on. This is the legacy of multiculturalism.
‘Slavery? Under-age sex? We can live with that, just as long as we don’t offend fanatical Muslims and potentially trigger another wave of attacks. Yet it is precisely because authorities have allowed communities, living according to their own laws and speaking their own languages, to get away without integrating into mainstream society that we found ourselves in this mess in the first place. It’s a bitter irony, but in the quest for tolerance our country has found itself in the bizarre position of being able to value every point of view except our own.’
Well said. It’s as good a reason for picking up a copy of the Daily Mail as you’re ever likely to get: a defence of liberty and tolerance, a defence of the individual against cruelty, a defence against the exploitation of women, a defence of our values. If we cannot distinguish between right and wrong, if we say that all cultures are of an equivalent value, if we cannot make ethical judgements because of the dictatorship of relativism, then how can we provide a safe haven for the oppressed? Why would people be beating on our doors if they didn’t think they could receive asylum here?